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Old 09-06-2015, 11:28 PM   #34
Mailanka
 
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Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands
Default Re: GURPS Starships line errata (and some observations)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
This is part of the really basic analysis. Big ships (and they don't have to be SM+15 really, because a 112cm missile is easy to stop with point defense) can carry enough armor to stand up to conventional missiles.

The 'oh, wait' for that is that they're not so much on standing up to 25 kt nukes.
It's as much a mistake to make everything available all at once in GURPS Spaceships as it is in GURPS Ultra-Tech. TL 9 soldiers can toss nukes at each other too, and none of their armor is going to stand up to that either.

If you want your combat paradigm to be about throwing nukes at each other, then you'll get a different game than if you don't allow people to throw nukes at each other. But you can get interesting gameplay out of either scenario.

The problem with the pre-designed spaceships isn't that they don't make full use of all possible elements, or that they don't use your preferred combat paradigm, but that they don't really make for interesting combat in their own paradigms. You don't expect X-wings to toss nukes at people, because that's not in-genre. You expect them to have blaster fights with tie-fighters. But if you follow the rules and you use the written design, you won't get those blaster fights. It comes down to missiles and point defense, and that's a problem.
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