Is spaceship armor useless?

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

That's not answering the question in the slightest, unless you're saying that it's a one shot to one shot exchange rate, which is obviously not right.

The ratio is not 1:1, but firepower dominance is still the overwhelming factor in deciding the outcome of space battles in G:SS. You just can't compensate for insufficient PD by filling those 'missing' weapon battery slots with more armour (to make missiles less deadly; armour tends to be not very relevant against KK missiles) or more engines (to get a significant boost in Dodge; no, you get maybe +1 MR, meh), and even adding ECM stations is kinda meh (-6 to be hit, +3 to Dodge for the maximum of three slots; this essentially reduces number of hits per salvo by 9, which, as you corrected me downpost, doesn't help much against prox-det KK salvoes). More Dakka seems like the way to go.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Because, of course, conventional explosives make no sense.

Lots of things make no sense in our setting, but they do in other settings. FTL and Reactionless drives are perhaps the first two that come to mind.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

But they're referred to in multiple other tables in Spaceships, and used on designs in Spaceships 3 and 4.

Yeah, but at the moment I looked into that one. Sorry.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

-4 for multitasking how? Launching one missile per turn is simply normal. And I don't see anything saying that resolving a ballistic attack counts as a task. (And I wasn't suggesting stacking up your salvos to hit with them all at the same time, though you obviously could and probably should.)

Anyway, multitasking multiple gunnery tasks is explicitly forbidden in Spaceships 1, so there's no way that penalty could apply.

Ah, so it is. So it's Spreading, not Multitasking, and it's -2 for beams/guns, and -1 for missiles. A single salvo of multiple missiles counts as no spreading fire, but you're offering multiple salvoes, and in that missiles indeed seem to have an advantage (though they also have less RoF to provide to-hit bonuses).

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

You need huge MoSes to dodge, since single frag missiles have 10 potential hits at de facto rcl 1, and pretty heavy bonuses.

Okay, guess you're right.