View Single Post
Old 04-15-2018, 12:13 PM   #33
Michael Thayne
 
Michael Thayne's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2010
Default Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions

Continuing the "square root-based damage thread", my proposed HP progression above gives an SM+10 ship 1000 dHP. That means 100 dHP of penetrating damage disables a system, 500 dHP of penetrating damage destroys a system, and 6000 dHP of penetrating damage auto-kills the ship.

One option is to leave kinetic damage as-is. On this approach, a 16cm missile traveling at 10 mps will average 840 points of damage—usually destroying a system, but not instantly vaporizing the ship the way it does under RAW. OTOH if you want damage from kinetic weapons to be more-or-less consistent with ramming damage, there's a case for significantly nerfing small warheads. Under the second approach, a 16cm missile might have a base damage of, say, 11d. at 10 mps, that's an average damage of 385. Now you're just disabling a system, not destroying it. Either way, this is probably an improvement.

I don't know what to do here partly because I think RAW missile damage is slightly too high to make logical sense–especially not for proximity burst, which should probably halve effective caliber. It does look like there's a germ of a solution to the "large ships are underpowered" problem here, though.
Michael Thayne is offline   Reply With Quote