Is spaceship armor useless?

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I think your expectations of Spaceships are a lot higher than mine are after having fiddled with it for some time...

So far, nothing seems to be better.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

It seems like you'd start in the right direction with pseudoatmospheric space rules, optionally plus Boost Drives. There are still some unfortunate limitations, but I think they're down to the fact that GURPS tactical combat vehicle and general high-speed movement rules are kind of ugly. And, unfortunately, you kind of have to make up how those apply to the missiles and what missiles with non-kinetic warheads do. And as setting choices, you have to disallow AI-controlled point defense guns on small ships and preferably make sure every battle occurs in a ridiculously cluttered environment so that you have props for your evasive flying.

What about those generic rules, specifically?
As for cluttered environment, I'm not sure that's necessary. Sure, asteroid thickets are a thing in some settings (SW), but not others (BSG).

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I'd note that the 'evasive action' thing almost always applies to fighters, not large ships. Star Destroyers don't dodge missiles or torpedoes. (They also don't shoot them down, generally. Which actually makes sense if you consider that Star Wars weapons are almost never VRF and are not lasers...try making a PD loadout with only RF plasma beams and you'll give up pretty quick.) Although real, seagoing ships did try to dodge torpedoes, when the torpedoes were not effectively guided.

Star Destroyers and the like generally have enough DR from shields and armour that their lack of Dodging and poor PD are not a tragedy. That's actually one of the issues of 'armour is useless': armour tends to either make a ship invulnerable to a given class of attack, or has such a small effect that the lifespan of the ship on the battlefield changes very little.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

All of which correspond somewhat to Splitting Fire, in the sense of actually splitting your fire, but not much to multiple missiles arriving on target simultaneously.

You could be rolling your skill to represent things that you had done in advance rather than things done during the actual attack.

Looking at the Spaceships 3 weapon fire sequence, the Aim and Attack 'maneuver' is used to fire beams or launch ballistic weapons. The weapons arriving is clearly not a maneuver, since the rules recommend arranging to have gun shells arrive the same turn they're fired.

Yeah, it can represent doing things in advance. It still takes twice the concentration to do two things* in advance on turn 1, even though the final effect of those things is resolved on turn 2.

Of course, none of it matters if you have as many operators as missiles launched.

* == Calculating and assigning suitable approach vectors or whatever.