[Spaceships] DS-1 Orbital Battle Station

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

Even basing HP and damage on the square-root of mass/energy makes it too easy to destroy massive objects through attrition. Using the default cube-root calculations grossly exaggerates this effect. To even approach a reasonable damage amount, you'd need to total up the energy output of all beam weapons, and use that to determine the effective output. For example, 1000 x 1GJ beams deal 4dx5 dDam each, or 4dx5000 if they all hit (and don't even get me started on the Rapid Fire rules at this scale...) If used together, they should more reasonably deal damage comparable to a 1TJ beam - 2dx100, just 1% of the sum of their damages. It's barely better with square-root damage, 1000 x 6dx15 (6dx15,000) versus 6dx500, or 3.33% of the sum.

Firing literally hundreds of millions of shots per turn cranks this disconnect way past 11. Together they have an output of 126 TJ, or around 2dx500 dDam (6dx5000 w/ sqrt scale) but if tracked separately they deal 6dx110,000,000! I suppose this is a fundamental flaw in attrition-based damage systems, the "death by a thousand (or hundred-million) papercuts" dilemma.

BESM 2nd Edition tries to handle this issue, by giving large objects, such as moons and planets, a very high "DR" in addition to a not-too-high Hit Point total. That way it mostly becomes about being able to overcom the huge DR, in order to be able to do anything at all. Except of course that BESM weapons can be defined as having Armour Divisors, very much as in GURPS.

But it is an attempt at handling the issue, and the presence of DR (which is totally non-ablative) means that you are encouraged to use a few large weapons to do the job, instead of many small ones.