Is spaceship armor useless?

[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...