[Spaceships] Weird Numbers

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

I've considered addressing this by using a scale for projectile damage that parallels beam damage. Basically, just decide on how much damage a gun should deal relative to an equal-sized beam, and multiply the beam damage accordingly. My (non-playtested, W-A-G) values for this were x1.5 damage for guns, x3 for missiles. An SM+9 Major Battery beam weapon deals a base of 4dx5, so an equal-sized cannon deals 6dx5, and a missile 6dx10. This does have the side effect that equal-caliber guns and missiles don't have the same base damage; a 20cm cannon is an SM+9 Major Battery, for 6dx5, while a 20cm missile is SM+5, for 6dx2. I think that's fine for Space Opera, and could be handwaved by projectiles being faster moving than missiles (not realistic, but matches the WWII-feel of fighters).

Something has to change, I think. Otherwise, you get the same weirdness with ST and Super-ST, where one is clearly superior to the other at a certain scale. At very high SMs, missiles and bullets become useless, and at very small SMs, beams become useless. Your solution at least allows both to remain equally valid through all scales.

[Lamech]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Something has to change, I think. Otherwise, you get the same weirdness with ST and Super-ST, where one is clearly superior to the other at a certain scale. At very high SMs, missiles and bullets become useless, and at very small SMs, beams become useless. Your solution at least allows both to remain equally valid through all scales.

The solution for spaceships is actually when you get to a higher scale you start launching missiles that are modeled as "spaceships". Consider the following ship
TL 9 Missile

Front Section
Armor*4
Fuel Tank*2
Middle section
Armor*4
Fuel Tank*3
Rear Section
Armor*2
HEDM Rocket*2
Fuel Tank*2
Control Room (run by AI)

Then proceed to ram the target. Every 20 second turn the ship gets .5 mps, with 4mps of fuel total. (Plus arguably if you ram a ship you count as "docked" with it for the purposes of explosion damage.) Even a tiny 5 SM missile could hit for 1000ish HP. You could also consider a bit of point defense, or other kind of launcher in the front section for extra fun.

[Mailanka]

For my smaller scale, I've been toying with just taking the weapons from UT and T&T2 and slapping them onto ships. I know their weights, so it isn't hard to find what size ship they would fit on, and you just drop a zero from the damage to find out how much damage they'd do in spaceship scale combat.

This has two benefits. The first is that the weapons scale exactly with ground weapons (as they ARE ground weapons), which suits my campaign just fine. Secondly, the weapons in T&T2 scale their damage up by a cube root, rather than a square root. The cruise missile, for example, with a HEMP round attached does about 100 d-scale damage (armor divisor 10), and if we extrapolate an HSML for a cruise missile, we find it's about a major battery for am SM+9 vessel, which has about 100 d-scale hitpoints, which is a highly satisfying result.