Is spaceship armor useless?

[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.