[Space] Adapting "Honorverse" Concepts to GURPS

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

From a couple books ago and probably in the off-shoot "Shadows" series a bad guy smuggler had one of the borderline headcases aboard the smuggling ship flip out and decide to resist a boarding from a RMN cruiser (The Hexapuma IIRC). He blew up one of the cruisers pinnaces with the smuggling ship's defensive laser clusters.

The RMN cruiser was far too close for it's "conventional" weapons but there was a contingency macro in the firing computer for using the cruiser's own laser clusters in such a situation.

So the RMN fire control officer activated this pre-made firing plan and the ship's computer used the laser clusters to completely disable but not destroy the smuggling ship under automatic control.

There is also some discussion in A Rising Thunder about how anyone with any sense sets us a "Case Omega" weapons launch and it was agreed that it's done as a macro with a simple activation code or even a Big Red Button. Obviously a lot of automation.

This is also obvious from anyone who's totaled up the number of missiles involved in a single volley between major detachments of pod-carrying wallers. By the late books of the series the numbers are frankly ridiculous. The computers are doing the unit-by-unit spadework. The humans are just supervising and strategizing.

Setting up a fire pattern macro to execute on command isn't simply supervising and strategizing, it's doing all the actual work.

It is not harder to program 1000 devices than to program 10 devices, unless you want the 1000 to do more than 10 distinct things. Even if you want them to do 1000 different things, it may not be harder depending on how the behavior is structured.

I award zero points for a superdreadnought's fire control systems being capable of feats that could easily be handled by a .bat file on a 286 PC running DOS.