[Spaceships] Combat Examples?

[apoc527]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

I added to takes on the "corvettes versus a strike carrier" scenario to my blog:
http://noschoolgrognard.blogspot.com...vs-strike.html
http://noschoolgrognard.blogspot.com...strike_21.html
(the ship designs for these examples are here http://noschoolgrognard.blogspot.com...s-bricriu.html)

The first version was played out at 3 minute turns, and was something of a disaster.

The second version was played out with 1 minute turns, and was just painful and sad.

My final conclusion was that the default dHP scaling in Spaceships may be realistic, but it isn't fun to game. In the future, I'm almost certainly going to use the "HP and Weight: an Alternate Approach" scaling from Pyramid #3.34, p25, which would scale dHP with the square root of weight and dramatically increase the dHP of the larger ships.

VERY interesting stuff, Mark. I am interested in the use of the square root dHP system and I like your suggestion on your blog to allow disabling by lower powered weapons to make small strike craft useful against large ships.

One other solution -- Spaceships assumes that weapons scale with size to no real limit. What if there ARE limits on the size of weapons? I'm pondering how to convert the Star*Drive setting to GURPS and I was a big fan of ship design under that game's Warships supplement. The largest ships are upwards of SM +20, but there were no "spinal mounts" that large in the setting. Indeed, I'm tempted to say that the maximum size of weapons is more in the SM +16 scale.

Finally, the other way to increase survivability of ships is to simply make the design decision to use smaller weapons on your ships (like in Star Wars). But that doesn't work very well when doing conversions...

Anyway, your examples are very helpful and while I was distressed to see you were distressed by the latest round, I'm hopeful that there are some good solutions out there.