[Spaceships] Combat Examples?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by apoc527

Very interesting. Missiles seem horribly overpowered. I don't quite understand why proximity detonations get a full velocity bonus either...it seems to me that if a proximity detonation goes off at anything other than the right vector, the fragments are fighting against their own vector to hit and do damage. It just doesn't quite make sense to me.

The other problem I have is the base missile damage in space. The standard GURPS "cr ex" damage type should do nothing in space unless in direct contact with the enemy ship. A proximity detonation should do nothing but damage based on fragmentation, which WOULD be velocity based.

Still, missiles seem to work entirely differently in Spaceships than in normal GURPS. For example, the 400mm (40cm) cruise missile in Pyramid #3/37 with a HEMP warhead does 6dx48(10) cr inc + linked 8dx8 cr ex [20d]. Converted to decade scale, that looks like 6dx5(10) cr inc + linked 6d+1 cr ex [2d]. Compare this to 6dx10 with a potential AD (2) for non-proximity detonations. What gives?

I'm sure there was a good reason that Pulver came up with missile damage like this, but they sure seem off to me, especially considering that a shaped charge warhead would need to make contact to hit--proximity damage would be nothing worthwhile, unless "proximity" means within a yard or two, which I find unlikely at space combat ranges.

It seems that you're seriously misunderstanding what Spaceships missiles are.

First of all, except the nukes, they're strictly kinetic-energy weapon. They don't have explosive warheads, and their damage is not cr ex at all. A conventional explosive warhead is utterly pointless in space combat of the sort Spaceships looks at. (Tangentially, a shaped charge warhead would not exactly need contact to be effective. The shaped charge jet isn't atmosphere-mediated, so it would have stand-off in space similarly to in air. But that's a very short and specific distance in any case.)

Their damage is based on velocity, as explained on both SS61 and SS68.

'Proximity detonation', for conventional warheads, really means the missile separating into submunitions in a rather deliberate (though probably violent) manner. It basically works like Annular Blast Fragmentation warheads, described on HT174, though the scale involved is rather larger and the speed much higher.

I'm not really clear on how the contact version manages to earn its (questionably useful) armor divisor. I've seen it described, but don't know why it adds up to a (2) rather than something else.


EDIT: Again to tangent, but you might note that UT missiles actually default to a solid impact warhead, not an explosive warhead. And that it's actually somewhat reasonable to use them that way...