Is spaceship armor useless?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

My point is that TLx and TLx^ items don't really compare most of the time. Some of them are outrageously superior to mundane ones. E.g. reactionless drives (with power plants) are in all ways better than any other engine for purposes of achieving orbit.

I don't think TL#^ is supposed to be on par with non-superscience TL#, an I don't really know why you'd expect it to be.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

What would be nice is to have a variation of modules listed in the official PDFs such that picking some subset of them (without as much tweaking as is required now) would allow one to achieve the desired feel. Right now it just takes too much effort to make space-operatic spaceships. (Though I'm semi-ready to restart the discussion of houserules that make it possible.)

You need...hmm...definitely rules for Space Opera missiles that are not worthless but not nearly as powerful as current.

And for many settings, something that actually discourages making your capital ships as fast as your fighters...

I don't know what the large mass of module tweaks needed would be?

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Seems like I did. So, more power to the defence. Point taken.

Still, the combat devolves into a contest of saturation.

Hmmm. Crits normally mean that defence isn't possible, though I wonder if that applies to PD too.

I don't think crits skip PD.

I do think that if you follow the rules as I understand them, which is frankly rather difficult and probably not worthwhile, and don't vastly over-inflate gunnery skills, missiles in bulk overwhelm PD weapons.

However, if you use the auto-hit rule, I think VRF beams pretty much make missiles trivial to stop. Each mount can cancel at least 10 incoming missiles, more if the attacker's effective skill isn't at the stops. The only way you'd overwhelm a PD-laden craft is if you're using the tertiary minimum rule and the missile launchers are three or more sizes smaller than the ship's smallest batteries.

Originally Posted by apoc527

Honorverse, here we come. Seriously though, there's nothing unrealistic about this issue. If combat in space comes down to missiles, then naturally the tension between missile numbers and penetration aids and point defense and jammers/spoofers will overtake that of warhead vs. armor. I'm sure, on some level, it will be both, but the main thing when you don't have the Honorverse's impenetrable grav shield from your reactionless drives is point defense.

Defensive doctrine would evolve with the weapons. The enemy shoots missiles at you. You start doing everything in your power to make it so those missiles don't hit you. You can (1) dodge them, (2) confuse them, (3) outrun them, (4) destroy them, or (5) have armor sufficient to ignore them. If GURPS spaceships lacks rules for ECM/ECCM, jammers, decoys, etc, then those are all things to create to make an interesting missile-based space combat paradigm. Destroying them would also happen in stages--you might have a small craft screen tasked with destroying missiles. Then you'd have a countermissile stage, where you launch your own small missiles to take out the larger incoming ones. Any that get through the countermissiles are engaged with point-defense weapons (lasers and autocannon). Hopefully there are very few left to deal with, but it depends on the lethality of the missiles. If just one is enough to blow up a ship, then point defense is going to be HEAVILY favored because it's suicide not to.

In my opinion, to have any meaningful discussion about space combat tactics, you have to do a tremendous amount of world-building first. Cost matters, resources matter, laws may even matter. Technology is just the start! The Honorverse was exhaustively set up to create a desired style of space combat, and except for the reactionless grav engines, tries to be consistent with physics (ok, he also has FTL grav communicators, but in his defense, at the time he wrote about those, real physicists weren't sure how fast gravitons propagated).

Anyway, I'm not sure what my point is any longer, except that there's nothing wrong with wars of saturation!

Unfortunately, there is more than one thing wrong with such in Spaceships.

One thing is that such combat involves so many dice rolls it's simply not playable without automation. (It also requires some odd choices due to eccentricities of the rules and the problems of using standard Rapid Fire mechanics where they shouldn't be.)

Another is that there are rules for ECM/ECCM and maybe jammers, but they aren't very interesting and I think, though I haven't looked recently, they're not all that powerful.