[SS] Reigning in Projectile Damage

[The Rampant Gamer]

Originally Posted by Apache

Well, if you want to do a Space Opera game, and make beams more uber than projectiles, just have your space drive generate a super-powerful force field that pretty much stops projectiles in their tracks, regardless of relative velocity.

Or something like that, anyway.

Another thing to note is that the farther away you are, the easier it is to dodge/shoot down incoming projectiles (even if they're guided).

If you are trying to keep it 'realistic', just say everybody has Uber Point Defense Laser Batteries and call it a day.

Along these same lines, I've toyed with the idea of just saying "missiles and guns were left behind a long time ago. They never proved to be that useful in space, so beam weapons were all anyone focused on. So, would you prefer plasma, laser or particle beams on your ship?"

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by The Rampant Gamer

Along these same lines, I've toyed with the idea of just saying "missiles and guns were left behind a long time ago. They never proved to be that useful in space, so beam weapons were all anyone focused on. So, would you prefer plasma, laser or particle beams on your ship?"

Space Opera frequently still uses missiles and bombs, but they don't dominant the battlespace like the ones in GURPS have a tendency to do. I'm just trying to find a way to include projectile weapons in their niche, without overpowering beams or producing too-lethal battles.

So, is the consensus that fiddling with the damage tables is a Bad Idea? And if so, why?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

Space Opera frequently still uses missiles and bombs, but they don't dominant the battlespace like the ones in GURPS have a tendency to do. I'm just trying to find a way to include projectile weapons in their niche, without overpowering beams or producing too-lethal battles.

So, is the consensus that fiddling with the damage tables is a Bad Idea? And if so, why?

Well, if you don't mind blatantly flouting physics, I'd think it would be okay. The thing is that KK weapons really are that powerful so if you're paying lip service to reality you need a reason for people using your vastly-inferior substitute instead.

You might want to adjust the ammunition prices if you do throw physics out, as a million $ per ton of missile is probably a bit much to pay for munitions that just don't do the same job.

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Well, if you don't mind blatantly flouting physics, I'd think it would be okay. The thing is that KK weapons really are that powerful so if you're paying lip service to reality you need a reason for people using your vastly-inferior substitute instead.

While it's true that GURPS has a pretty good definition of the damage dealt by X calibre projectile, the SS rules have their own scaling progression for what size of gun is available to what ship. Notably, large ships seem to have disproportionately small projectiles (as discussed in a recent thread about missile battery capacity). Another way to achieve what I'm going for is to speed up the progression of calibre increases, and boost the damage of beam weapons (and starship DR/HP) to match. Yes, to make Space Opera battles work you typically need to make weapons unrealistically weak, or ships unrealistically strong; that seems to be a time-honored genre convention.

You might want to adjust the ammunition prices if you do throw physics out, as a million $ per ton of missile is probably a bit much to pay for munitions that just don't do the same job.

True, I'll need to reexamine the pricing too.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

While it's true that GURPS has a pretty good definition of the damage dealt by X calibre projectile, the SS rules have their own scaling progression for what size of gun is available to what ship. Notably, large ships seem to have disproportionately small projectiles (as discussed in a recent thread about missile battery capacity). Another way to achieve what I'm going for is to speed up the progression of calibre increases, and boost the damage of beam weapons (and starship DR/HP) to match. Yes, to make Space Opera battles work you typically need to make weapons unrealistically weak, or ships unrealistically strong; that seems to be a time-honored genre convention.

Beam weapons probably shouldn't scale up in energy faster than 1:1 with mass, which is what they already do. One of the pyramid articles looked at changing the relation between energy and damage, though, didn't it?

[jacobmuller]

I went with the Pyramid mods to boost beam damage, reduce explosive damage, increase armor and dHP. And the optional rule for damage control (halves damage).

As a houserule, I also use a form of advanced and experimental armor similar to the old Vehicles formats: it works really simply - Advanced lets you pay for and receive the dDR of the next SM; Experimental is SM+2.

These mods combine to make warships vastly tougher. Missiles are still lethal, just not one-hit-vaporises, except for civilians.

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by jacobmuller

I went with the Pyramid mods to boost beam damage, reduce explosive damage, increase armor and dHP. And the optional rule for damage control (halves damage).

As a houserule, I also use a form of advanced and experimental armor similar to the old Vehicles formats: it works really simply - Advanced lets you pay for and receive the dDR of the next SM; Experimental is SM+2.

These mods combine to make warships vastly tougher. Missiles are still lethal, just not one-hit-vaporises, except for civilians.

While I've read the Extreme Damage section closely, I haven't looked much at the alternate Beam Damage table. Let's see...

Okay, interesting. The alternate beam damage increases at the same scale as the alternate HP. Combining them means Major Battery beams inflict 70-80% of the firing ship's HP, pretty close to the original progression of 70-75% HP. While the higher HP totals does help large ships survive hits by small missiles, it actually makes large projectiles far less potent (relatively speaking) since their damage increases even slower in comparison to beams. However, that may not be a problem; missiles in Space Opera tend to be fired by tiny ships anyways, so perhaps big missiles are as useless as these numbers imply.

EDIT: Also, where are the optional Damage Control rules? In the same Pyramid issue (3/34)?

[jacobmuller]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

EDIT: Also, where are the optional Damage Control rules? In the same Pyramid issue (3/34)?

Spaceships#3 Warships and Pirates, pg35 Greater Survivability. I also use the Advanced Armour option, although it doesn't really do anything as I use the Pulse laser option (from UT) and most missiles use proximity.

The Spaceship options I use make published military vessels useless to me but the civilian ships are fine and most roleplaying happens in a civilian setting. The military gear is just background data, eg how powerful they can be as compared to civilian ships.

Sorry I'm slow to reply - different time-zone and inconstant linking.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

Space Opera frequently still uses missiles and bombs, but they don't dominant the battlespace like the ones in GURPS have a tendency to do. I'm just trying to find a way to include projectile weapons in their niche, without overpowering beams or producing too-lethal battles.

So, is the consensus that fiddling with the damage tables is a Bad Idea? And if so, why?

I'll object to the consensus. I think fiddling with the damage tables is definitely okay for a Space Operah.

What I find difficult is creating a situation similar to Élite, Star Wars and the like, where there's blasters that have the tactical niche of WWI/WWII wing-mounted machine guns, and missiles, whose launch (which normally happens several, maybe a dozen at most) times per flight, and results in a major OH S*** moment for the target.
Or Master of Orion, where a single bomber makes maybe 4 attacks runs, hitting with one bomb on each run, before returning to the hangar.
Or Homeworld, where bomber runs are similarly paced, and typically take a wing of bombers to take out a single system of the enemy capital ship.

Default GURPS missile combat is basically this:

• Get a bomber or heavy fighter (i.e. one armed primarily with lots and lots of missiles), or several.
• Go on an intercept course with the target.
• Launch no less than a dozen projectiles at the target.
• Lose the attack craft to point defence fire.
• Hopefully eject in time and watch as the target ship (might as well be a Death Star) is obliterated by the handful out of the hundred or so warheads out of those dozen missiles.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

So, is the consensus that fiddling with the damage tables is a Bad Idea? And if so, why?

I believe it to be a step in the wrong direction anyway.

First Guns. Guns are a non-issue as far as I'm concerned. I've never built a ship that carried guns and I don't think I ever would unless it was something like an Assualt Lander and the "guns" were intended to represent a weapon system for in-atmopshere work and possibly in character scale.

Of course, I pay a lot of attention to what range the action should start at logically and have never had a battle start when the ships were within Gun range.

There's practicaly no such thing as a ship that couldn't auto-dodge gunfire either. You'd have to be attacking at a flight time for the shells of less than 0.1 seconds or so.

Missiles are different. Missiles can be launched en masse on high speed attack runs and this is indeed a problem. I feel it calls for adjustment of the tech assumptions though rather than fiddling with game rules. Even modest Fast Pass velocities will swamp any table-fiddling anyway.

During playtest when I did a big Star Wars-like battle that involved Capital ships at TL11^ it was conducted entirely by X-ray lasers for reasons of range. Missiles could have ben launched but no ship would have lived long enough in actual combat to see its' missiles hit. You'd need something like SubWarp missiles to change that. No combat would have started at X-ray laser range but ended at Guns range.

So I don't see the problem you're trying to solve. Spaceships has a lot of component modules that would never be used with each other but are intended to cover all tech bases. For that reason it doesn't matter rhow incompatible modules balance against each other because they'll almost never (qualifier included jsut to alow for extreme possibilitieis) be used all at the same time.