[SS] Reigning in Projectile Damage

[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.