Is spaceship armor useless?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Mirtai

Your analysis is fine, but you are assuming a total war kind of feeling here.

Not 'total', just war. Missiles are weapons for warfare, probably by far the best weapons for warfare. They're less suitable for non-war circumstances for a bunch of reasons.

I would, however, argue that the non-war scenarios are much less likely and interesting than you suggest.

Originally Posted by Mirtai

In most Space games, not all situations are going to be automatic firefights. What happens when you do not know if an approaching ship is friend or foe? What if they seem like nice folks, then turn out to be space pirates after they come into weapons range? What if you're in a ship that's docked at a space station, and, suddenly you have to flee the station... you've stolen something, or angered a band of mercenaries, whatever.

You get to your ship, and start to run, but they get to their ships and start to chase before you can get outside of beam weapon's range.

I could go on, but the point is, unless you're fighting in a war against clearly identifiable enemies, and you always know who to shoot before they're within 30,000 miles, armor can save you from getting murdered by beam weapons. Which is why it is not useless, even a single layer of it per hull section can prevent, at minimum, your opponent's point defence lasers from killing you.

In those situations, you are either a dead idiot, or somehow operating a covert pocket battleship and the people who started something with you are dead idiots.

Regardless of how nice they seem, there's no reason to let an even remotely suspect ship within weapons range unless you're basically right at a spaceport. Space is big enough to maintain exclusion zones with very little inconvenience.

As for running like you stole something, unless you have wildly unrealistic drives you're going to take more than long enough even running out of range of a stationary weapon for it to turn you into a colander if it can damage you at all. (If you're being chased by paramilitary forces you probably won't be outrunning them in the first place.) If it can't damage you at all, then you're not so much running away as casually strolling away from people who really can't afford to start anything with you.

Originally Posted by Mirtai

Tactics seem to indicate that you have a combination of point defence weapons to defend against balistic attacks, and armor to defend against beam attacks, because you really can't depend on always starting a fight at extreme range. Even a Cargo vessel might have, at minimum, a single point defense turret.

A cargo vessel would definitely have zero weapons as a minimum. Weapons aren't cheap, take up cargo space, and require high-energy power systems that a cargo vessel doesn't necessarily have any other use for. Note that other than the power requirement, armor has all of these problems as well.

A point defense turret (or any RF or VRF beam really) does give you a chance if you need to fend off some schmuck who thinks one or two missiles is an adequate basis for extortion. The usefulness of that is inversely proportional to how many people have such turrets, since if they're common nobody will expect that to work in the first place.

Originally Posted by Mirtai

Heavier beam weapons are more likely to be found on actual warships... they've got only one purpose, really. Same thing for missiles and railguns, etc... but everyone who's concerned with defence with have some point defense weapons. Probably, anyway. They're good for shooting incoming asteriods too.

Railguns Spaceships style are pretty much good for a laugh, not any sort of actual fight.

A rapid-firing beam is the minimum requirement of any combat suite but the most specialized, I'd agree, but I don't think most ships have any real reason to have one at all. Anything you could stand off with such a minimal combat suite is very unlikely to attack you in the first place.

Originally Posted by Mirtai

So long as you have the speed to close into laser range, and enough point defense to weather the missile barrage of patrol boats, you're doing good, but without armor, your pirate ship will get ripped up against other ships with similar load outs, and there's always hidden weapons batferies to worry about on the occasional Q-ship!

If a Q-ship hits you with hidden weapon batteries, they're probably going to blow your guts out immediately. They would, by design, have weapons powerful enough to deal with whatever armor pirates tend to carry.

If anti-pirate patrols are packing missile volleys, frankly, it's very unlikely any pirate ship is going to survive them. If PD isn't ubiquitous, one or two missile tubes might be useful as a pointed reminder that an order to heave to should be take seriously. But if your missiles are intended for killing rather than communicating, you're not going to be running just one or two tubes.

However, it's fairly reasonable for a patrol ship to have armor and beam weapons, to avoid the kind of thing that happened to your inept missile fighters in that playtest. And pirates crazy enough to plan on fighting them rather than staying well away from them would probably use similar loadouts, rather than dumping a very expensive pile of missiles on them. However, a pirate ship with substantial armoring is likely to have trouble passing for anything other than a paramilitary vessel.

Originally Posted by Mirtai

In conclusion... armor is far from useless in GURPS Spaceships. It's very useful for many types of ships. Sure, some specialized designs would do better if they don't bother with it... say, for example, fighter craft that are going up against larger ships. Such a ship might be better off using speed, it's small size, and ECM to avoid hits rather than trying to carry enough armor to survive attack... but such craft, I would think, are an exception. Any ship that's going to have more than a single purpose is likely to find armor handy, even if it's just making micrometeor hits less of a worry.

I think the usefulness of moderate armor is limited to ships that have to fly close to potentially hostile weapons to do their job, and that is only an element of a small and specialized set of roles.

Large ships with heavy armor can potentially stop light missile strikes with it, which is significant.