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.

[apoc527]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

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.

That's too bad, but my point wasn't so much that you could do the Honorverse thing with Spaceships as written, so much so that Spaceships has a kind of impossible task. There's SO MUCH that could go into designing a space combat paradigm, that you have to set some ground rules. Spaceships attempts to be a generic attempt at providing rules for a few kinds of spacecraft. At that, it succeeds. Does it provide perfectly compelling rules for any imaginable space combat paradigm? Of course not, but that's not really what it's for.

If I was going to try to create an Honorverse style GURPS game, you'd have to spend some time and energy houseruling the crud out of Spaceships to make it work. Moreover, I know of NO space combat systems that are actually playable in game for anything approaching fleet actions. I once used Alternity and its Warships supplement to design two fleets and pit them against each other. It took a friend and I the better part of a day to game that out and that was doing nothing but roll dice and move counters on a tactical hexmap.

Big space battles in RPGs are simply better left to narration, unfortunately, until we get GMs with nanocomputers in their heads who can do a crapload of math really fast!

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by apoc527

That's too bad, but my point wasn't so much that you could do the Honorverse thing with Spaceships as written, so much so that Spaceships has a kind of impossible task. There's SO MUCH that could go into designing a space combat paradigm, that you have to set some ground rules. Spaceships attempts to be a generic attempt at providing rules for a few kinds of spacecraft. At that, it succeeds. Does it provide perfectly compelling rules for any imaginable space combat paradigm? Of course not, but that's not really what it's for.

I'd only give it an 'almost', because it has some things that I see as fatal failures. The design part is okay, but the associated rules need major reconstruction in places.

Originally Posted by apoc527

If I was going to try to create an Honorverse style GURPS game, you'd have to spend some time and energy houseruling the crud out of Spaceships to make it work. Moreover, I know of NO space combat systems that are actually playable in game for anything approaching fleet actions. I once used Alternity and its Warships supplement to design two fleets and pit them against each other. It took a friend and I the better part of a day to game that out and that was doing nothing but roll dice and move counters on a tactical hexmap.

Big space battles in RPGs are simply better left to narration, unfortunately, until we get GMs with nanocomputers in their heads who can do a crapload of math really fast!

Yeah, the problem is that you don't need a fleet to have mind-shattering numbers of rolls. A duel between SM +7 ships using a mix of PD and missiles would suffice.

[apoc527]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I'd only give it an 'almost', because it has some things that I see as fatal failures. The design part is okay, but the associated rules need major reconstruction in places.

Yeah, the problem is that you don't need a fleet to have mind-shattering numbers of rolls. A duel between SM +7 ships using a mix of PD and missiles would suffice.

I have found that when you put more than about 8 weapons on a starship, things get out of hand unless you have convenient mechanics to "rapid fire" them. Alternity is really the only game system that I've used where I've actually gamed out space battles at the table with the players actually knowing the rules and engaging in the game while in space combat. It helped that I'd trained them in Warships rules separately, and basically forced them to learn it, but it was a struggle.

At one point, I had them in command of a light cruiser-sized vessel which had a main battery consisting of a tri-mounted fusion beam, a few secondary batteries and some tertiary batteries (I use these terms non-technically, as it was under Alternity's rules, not GURPS Spaceships). It actually went okay in combat, with each player getting to roll for something, be it piloting the ship or firing a weapon. It was a fair amount of rolling, but at least it was manageable.

You'd HAVE to find a way to leverage rapid fire rules, both with missile flights and point defense, to make such a GURPS game playable. Ultimately though, the best way to do this is to simply keep the numbers down. A ship with a couple main batteries, and a secondary battery should be fairly gameable. A ship with 30 point defense guns firing on 60 missiles could certainly be made gameable with functional space-based rapid fire rules. What I'd probably do is work out the effective skill and just multiply the total number of defending batteries by the percentage odds of making the roll to get the total number of missiles destroyed. For example, say there are 60 missiles and 30 VRF rapid fire guns. Say it works out that each gun needs a 12 to hit. 12 is about 65% hits, I think, so that layer of PD would eliminate 30x.65= 20 (I'll round up, why not) missiles. Only 40 to go...

[Xplo]

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

Download a more recent PDF. Or check the errata. Note that with the printed GURPS Spaceships book both the Book Errata and PDF Errata applies, and there are quite a few major changes made in the PDF errata not the least of which is the conventional warhead damage because it wasn't actually in decade scale in the original printing and PDF.

...

Silly me, I forgot all about errata! Boy, there's quite a lot of it, isn't there. O_o

Anyway. Yes. Dividing gun/missile damage by approximately 30 certainly does make a difference.

[Lamech]

A couple tricks for point defense:

1) Fire your point defense before proximity weapons detonate. If you use tactical combat you are allowed to fire on the salvos, and you should be able to in non-tactical combat as well.

2) Nukes make hilariously effective point defense. They wipe a whole hex of salvos. Nuke incoming nukes.

3) Tertiary very rapid fire. You can't rapid fire missiles

4) Only use some of your RoF against each attack. Good targetting AIs should have very high skills, and also have a nice technique for dividing fire. (Which actually doesn't seem to apply because "All targets must be specified before rolling to hit." does not apply to saving RoF with point defense.)

If you have point defense, it should more or less automagically wipe out the incoming missiles, even with proximity fuses. Guns can even the playing field a little, but you need to get close. Now what you could do is fire "heavy missiles" a.k.a. heavily armored ships that can tank point defense while ramming the target ship. Which answers the question: Armor is not useless, it is what lets you survive point defense!

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by apoc527

You'd HAVE to find a way to leverage rapid fire rules, both with missile flights and point defense, to make such a GURPS game playable. Ultimately though, the best way to do this is to simply keep the numbers down. A ship with a couple main batteries, and a secondary battery should be fairly gameable. A ship with 30 point defense guns firing on 60 missiles could certainly be made gameable with functional space-based rapid fire rules. What I'd probably do is work out the effective skill and just multiply the total number of defending batteries by the percentage odds of making the roll to get the total number of missiles destroyed. For example, say there are 60 missiles and 30 VRF rapid fire guns. Say it works out that each gun needs a 12 to hit. 12 is about 65% hits, I think, so that layer of PD would eliminate 30x.65= 20 (I'll round up, why not) missiles. Only 40 to go...

Yeah, you need rapid fire rules, and the ones in GURPS (and which Spaceships uses, but in ways that make it rules-legal to avoid using them) are totally inappropriate for the job.

You need rules something like what you say here, scoring all the attacks together...but you need to do the same for missiles! 60 missiles means 60 attack rolls! Plus you've got to change the PD rules so that you can actually use the collective hit count from the PD battery vs. the missile fragments.

...And then you run into the issue that instead of way too many rolls, you've suddenly got too few, because your missile/PD exchange was totally deterministic.

Originally Posted by Lamech

A couple tricks for point defense:

1) Fire your point defense before proximity weapons detonate. If you use tactical combat you are allowed to fire on the salvos, and you should be able to in non-tactical combat as well.

Then you only need one hit per missile instead of up to 10, on the other hand the range is less favorable. And there's no way you can get out of the splitting fire rules. Of course, none of that will be a problem if you're playing with ultra-high-skill gunnery AIs

Originally Posted by Lamech

2) Nukes make hilariously effective point defense. They wipe a whole hex of salvos. Nuke incoming nukes.

Okay, that's pretty cool. Though you'll probably nuke mostly conventional weapons, missiles cost enough that that's a potentially good trade.

Originally Posted by Lamech

3) Tertiary very rapid fire. You can't rapid fire missiles

Yeah, but stopping a missile for every VRF gun you have when you only need to fail once is tricky. Stopping more than one is nigh-impossible unless your gunners are incredibly capable.

Originally Posted by Lamech

4) Only use some of your RoF against each attack. Good targetting AIs should have very high skills, and also have a nice technique for dividing fire. (Which actually doesn't seem to apply because "All targets must be specified before rolling to hit." does not apply to saving RoF with point defense.)

If you have point defense, it should more or less automagically wipe out the incoming missiles, even with proximity fuses. Guns can even the playing field a little, but you need to get close. Now what you could do is fire "heavy missiles" a.k.a. heavily armored ships that can tank point defense while ramming the target ship. Which answers the question: Armor is not useless, it is what lets you survive point defense!

Well, if your setting assumptions are approximately equivalent to the rules switch that makes PD automatically score kills equal to its rate of fire, yes.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Lamech

Now what you could do is fire "heavy missiles" a.k.a. heavily armored ships that can tank point defense while ramming the target ship. Which answers the question: Armor is not useless, it is what lets you survive point defense!

That one doesn't make sense. A Tertiary battery on SM+10 does 2d dDamage. Even an SM+4 craft has a mere 3 dDR per layer of Nanocomposite. Anything remotely 'heavy missile'-sized will be toast, and anything fighter-sized is worthy of a micromissile hit. And it can't have PD, because then it has less armour, and with less armour it will be shredded by PD.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

That one doesn't make sense. A Tertiary battery on SM+10 does 2d dDamage. Even an SM+4 craft has a mere 3 dDR per layer of Nanocomposite. Anything remotely 'heavy missile'-sized will be toast, and anything fighter-sized is worthy of a micromissile hit. And it can't have PD, because then it has less armour, and with less armour it will be shredded by PD.

What if you build it with armor on the front, and PD in turrets in the middle? The target isn't going to get a chance to engage the 'missile''s side or rear armor. PD batteries impinge on the ability to maximize the return from high-density design but other that that?

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

What if you build it with armor on the front, and PD in turrets in the middle? The target isn't going to get a chance to engage the 'missile''s side or rear armor. PD batteries impinge on the ability to maximize the return from high-density design but other that that?

I suppose. Doesn't work in formations, but does work 1v1. Requires tonnes of armour, but I actually like the idea of non-flimsy missiles.

I just wish they stopped looking like drones - they're starting to step onto the toes of fighter/bomber craft already. :p

Clarification: For a classic Space Opera, fighters should be piloted.