Spaceships 3 missiles in limited superscience TL10 setting
 

I have a question regarding spaceship missiles.

The table in Spaceships 3, page 36 gives stats for regular missiles - delta-V 10mps, acceleration 5G. This does work and seems more or less balanced, if ships are limited to non-superscience accelerations.

However, in a limited superscience setting, a ship with an High-Trust, Water-based Antimatter Plasma Torch (HTH2OAPT) drive with one fuel tank has an acceleration of 6G with 20 mps delta-V. Alternatively, 5G can be reached with five regular antimatter plasma torches, and one fuel tank providing 120mps delta-V.

In any case, a spaceship can outrun a regular missile, which seems weird. The only other RAW option are super missiles, with 500G and 500mps - somewhat extreme, in comparison with HTH2OAPT.

If one builds a missile using ship rules, with 6 HTH2OAPT, a little bit room for payload and electronics and fills the rest with fuel tanks (maybe 9) one gets 36G acceleration, and 180 Delta-V (this works regardless of size).

This seems somewhat better balanced, until you realize, that you can build a ship almost the same way, again negating missiles the advantage.

Thus, my question is, how can one stat missiles in a setting where Plasma Torch drives are common?

Re: Spaceships 3 missiles in limited superscience TL10 setting
 

The simplest answer to questions like this is "Just houserule it". Pick prices and weapon statistics that you think make sense, and just use them. If you're looking for a more RAW answer, I can't help you there, sorry.

Re: Spaceships 3 missiles in limited superscience TL10 setting
 

It depends on how much superscience you can tolerate. Chemical rockets are good for missiles because the reaction mass disposes of the waste heat. Superscience fusion drives produce a lot of waste heat, which may or may not matter depending on the setting. If it does matter, then having giant radiators on missiles would make them easier to hit, making them much less effective and much more massive (basically making them AKVs). If it does not matter, just increase the cost 10x and go for it.

Re: Spaceships 3 missiles in limited superscience TL10 setting
 

The simple way, to me, would be to assume that a drive only intended to a single use of a fairly short duration, like a missile's drive, can develop twice the thrust of one suited for a spaceship. Thus in this case missiles should have 10-12g acceleration.

As for delta-vee, a missile doesn't need more than a ship, it's just needs enough to catch the ship with its superior acceleration before the ship can apply enough delta-vee to get away (and even if the ship does, if it used so much fuel it can't continue its mission, you've still got a mission-kill). Whether one-use drives have less efficiency than spaceship drives is up to you.

Re: Spaceships 3 missiles in limited superscience TL10 setting
 

There's one option you might want to seriously consider.

Don't use missiles.

It's not actually unbelievable that the setting can't put an anti-matter containment vessel into a really small package. And many has been the thread complaining about how missiles are instakill hammers for your eggshell ships.So you might want to ask yourself if it's really a problem if for now, missiles are obsolete technology for your setting.

Re: Spaceships 3 missiles in limited superscience TL10 setting
 

I heartily endorse this suggestion. Missiles are a problem when you have ships with PCs in them, since they threaten instakill TPKs that PCs have little control to avoid. Perhaps the best course is not to bring torpedoes' performance up in proportion to ships, but to rationalise their being left behind. Minimum mass for fission reactors, minimum volume for fusion reactors, minimum mass for efficient antimatter storage — they might be lifelines.

Re: Spaceships 3 missiles in limited superscience TL10 setting
 

By way of modern example, torpedoes and air-to-air missiles have much less operational range than their targets, they just have higher acceleration.

Re: Spaceships 3 missiles in limited superscience TL10 setting
 

A simple minimum size of SM+8 for superscience fusion drives would prevent a lot of combat abuse by AKVs and missiles. With spacecraft having greater acceleration and endurance than AKVs and missiles, they would be relegated to attacking stations and ground targets. Space combat would occur with beam weapons.

Re: Spaceships 3 missiles in limited superscience TL10 setting
 

Not using missiles doesn't really work if you're trying to replicate a setting where (for example) ships only have missiles as weapons and cannons as point defense and last resort.

That said, I havent reached spaceships 3 yet, still working through 1 so I hadn't noticed a hard number for missile acceleration. I had assumed it was related to available engine tech.

Do missiles live long enough that you need to worry about acceleration and deltaV? Because as far as I've read through the rules, they just roll to hit, then get blasted by point defense or dodged or finally they either blow up with their target or are lost.

Re: Spaceships 3 missiles in limited superscience TL10 setting
 

Missiles have a few ways they can out-accelerate ships. First off, they don’t have squishy crew, so can actually have higher acceleration. Next up, while not RAW, I feel it should be possible to design vessels that dedicate more than 3/10ths of their mass to acceleration - a missile that has (say) a reaction drive that takes up 15 systems is going to outperform any manned ship, at least while the missile has reaction mass left. Finally, and also not RAW, is the suggestion of single-use reaction drives having better performance than the default reusable systems. A related option, from I think SS7, is to forgo the radiation shielding on a nuclear or antimatter drive system. This makes the vessel rather unsafe for passengers and reduces its HT, but IIRC doubles the acceleration (because you use the mass savings from leaving out the shielding to make the drive bigger).

Re: Spaceships 3 missiles in limited superscience TL10 setting
 

Yeah, I thought about a missile-and-beams setting, with smaller ships being faster, and I currently try to balance it all.

Edit: I think I like varyon's suggestion, I'll see what can be done with that.

Re: Spaceships 3 missiles in limited superscience TL10 setting
 

Unless in a Fast Pass situation and using detailed movement it is my experience that enemy ships do not live long enough for missiles to reach them.

Warp missiles are an obvious exception and Fast Passes are common enough that preparation for offense and defense during them is wise.

Otherwise though, 660 seconds is what big missiles need to reach their maximum range and that's 33 20 second Turns. If there are any other weaposn capable of those ranges the fight will be over before the missiels hit.

Re: Spaceships 3 missiles in limited superscience TL10 setting
 

It really depends on the level of protection. A TL 10 SM+14 dreadnought could easily have front Hardened DR 800, which ignores anything less than 300 GJ UV lasers and can shrug off 1 TJ UV lasers most of the time. A comparable spacecraft requires SM+14 spinal UV lasers to have a decent chance of punching through the front armor. Of course, particle beams are more dangerous, but they are capable of engaging in much shorter ranges than UV lasers.

In addition, there are accuracy concerns. Extreme range gives a -16 to hit, which means that a significant number of shots will miss, even with a spinal mount, especially since warships will often have defensive ECM. Also, spaceships can dodge attacks.

Re: Spaceships 3 missiles in limited superscience TL10 setting
 

Missiles have no maximum range in SS3. They can do arbitrarily long unpowered flights between an initial boost burn and a final attack burn.

(Meanwhile in the SS1 system they have a maximum range, but don't have any flight time.)