Is spaceship armor useless?

[Mirtai]

Originally Posted by Varyon

That depends on how you use them. Firing a barrage of missiles and demanding surrender can work - if your target powers down their weapons and power plants, you redirect the missiles elsewhere (or blow them up prematurely, if that's an option), then board and take the ship...

You know... that's exactly what happened in my playtest with the missile carrying fighter vs the Cargo Ship with the point defense lasers. The Cargo Ship "surrendered" and powered down, and the fighter detonated the missile he fired. Of course, it was a ruse, but using the Missile to force a surrender was the tactic used.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

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

So far in my playtests, I find Railguns quite good at close range. They can fire faster (sometimes significantly faster) than an equivalent missile battery, so they're harder for point defense to stop... and they do nearly as much damage. In close range, the railgun rounds will reach the target before the missiles do, at least in the TL 9 to 10 range of things.

And of course, they do more than enough damage to punch through most armor. They're excellent for stopping suicide fighters from reaching your ship, for example, because of their high damage and high volume of fire.

On a separate note, I have also noted that bigger beam weapons can equal or exceed the range of missile weapons in the same TL, if they're big enough... and since a Beam weapon has the advantage over a missile in that at long range it'll hit the target many times before the a missile can cross the distance, someone with a heavy beam weapon will usually win the fight quite easily unless their opponent has enough armor to take the hits from it.

A classic battleship will have a combination of weapons... point defense lasers for defense, of course. A battery of Railguns or conventional guns for close in barrage against tougher foes that get in close (they'll wipe out suicide bomber type fighter attacks, for example), missile launchers... for obvious reasons, and very often, a Major or Spinal Battery Beam weapon which can take out lightly armored targets that like to fight at long range with missiles.

No design is perfect, of course, but I'm still convinced that a Pirate Ship could do just fine with Beam weapons, good engines and good armor alone, and be quite effective in a fight, as they could use, for example, a Spinal Beam Weapon to take out their opponent while using Point Defense VRF lasers to destroy incoming missiles. Naturally, a missile boat with enough ammo could probably throw enough missiles at the target to eventually get through any point defense, but that's what the Spinal Weapon is for, to destroy the target's weapon systems in the first few seconds of combat... preventing it from firing more than a single load or two of missiles.

Armor has a very vital place in this sort of engagement of course. If you've got 2 or 3 armor locations with hardened armor in your forward section, you can probably take a few hits, even from a Spinal beam weapon... and if you don't, you're meat for the grinder.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

What about those generic rules, specifically?

Well, my issue was with the turning radius rules, and really still is, but I'd forgotten that they are very slightly ameliorated by the Pushing the Envelope rules. Having turning agility inextricably linked to accel/speed is a pretty bad fit for vehicles maneuvering aerodynamically (or based on ground friction).

The Pseudoatmospheric rules seem like they may be worse, actually, but I'd need to look again.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

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).

How do they dodge missiles in BSG?

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

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.

Well, yes, of course...

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

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.

If it only matters if you're launching multiple missiles per turn with one gunner I'm almost entirely disinterested because that should never happen.

However, I would contest that if you're launching two missiles to the same place, you don't in fact have double the things to do in advance...

I'd also note that you can have multiple missile salvos arriving in one turn without ever having launched multiple salvos in one turn.

Originally Posted by Mirtai

So far in my playtests, I find Railguns quite good at close range. They can fire faster (sometimes significantly faster) than an equivalent missile battery, so they're harder for point defense to stop... and they do nearly as much damage. In close range, the railgun rounds will reach the target before the missiles do, at least in the TL 9 to 10 range of things.

And of course, they do more than enough damage to punch through most armor. They're excellent for stopping suicide fighters from reaching your ship, for example, because of their high damage and high volume of fire.

The words "at close range" pretty much summarize why they're pointless. There's no reason for anything to happen at that range.

Suicide fighters can be stopped with an RF beam pretty well, I would think, though I'm not sure what the idea there is exactly. Massive, armored missiles that are allowed to dodge?

Originally Posted by Mirtai

On a separate note, I have also noted that bigger beam weapons can equal or exceed the range of missile weapons in the same TL, if they're big enough... and since a Beam weapon has the advantage over a missile in that at long range it'll hit the target many times before the a missile can cross the distance, someone with a heavy beam weapon will usually win the fight quite easily unless their opponent has enough armor to take the hits from it.

No, beam weapons cannot outrange missiles, because missiles do not have limited range.

Unless you're talking about how much range the missiles can cover before the target has time to burn more delta-V in evasion than the missile has, and thereby completely evade the missile. That can be an issue, though mostly only with high-performance superscience drives.

Originally Posted by Mirtai

A classic battleship will have a combination of weapons... point defense lasers for defense, of course. A battery of Railguns or conventional guns for close in barrage against tougher foes that get in close (they'll wipe out suicide bomber type fighter attacks, for example), missile launchers... for obvious reasons, and very often, a Major or Spinal Battery Beam weapon which can take out lightly armored targets that like to fight at long range with missiles.

I think under the tactical conditions you imagine, it is not at all obvious why you would have any missile launchers at all.

However, I'm also pretty sure you're very wrong about those conditions.

Originally Posted by Mirtai

No design is perfect, of course, but I'm still convinced that a Pirate Ship could do just fine with Beam weapons, good engines and good armor alone, and be quite effective in a fight, as they could use, for example, a Spinal Beam Weapon to take out their opponent while using Point Defense VRF lasers to destroy incoming missiles. Naturally, a missile boat with enough ammo could probably throw enough missiles at the target to eventually get through any point defense, but that's what the Spinal Weapon is for, to destroy the target's weapon systems in the first few seconds of combat... preventing it from firing more than a single load or two of missiles.

They will never be within range of your spinal beam while they still have a single missile on-board. And they won't run out 'eventually', if this is a serious fight, they'll run out of missiles at the beginning, stack them all up, and hit you with every missile they were carrying simultaneously. If you are not dead, you win, but good luck with that.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

No, beam weapons cannot outrange missiles, because missiles do not have limited range.

.

That's being picky over semantics. There are multiple possible universes where missiles have limited _practical_ ranges.

Also cases where beam weapons (such as very long range ones like X-ray lasers) can be used at ranges where missile launch will not be practical.

So no, your statement is not a universal truth when discussing practical combats.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

That's being picky over semantics. There are multiple possible universes where missiles have limited _practical_ ranges.

Also cases where beam weapons (such as very long range ones like X-ray lasers) can be used at ranges where missile launch will not be practical.

So no, your statement is not a universal truth when discussing practical combats.

You mean like I addressed in the immediately following paragraph that you cut from your quote?


EDIT: So I ran some numbers. With TL9+ missiles using 10 mps to close and reserving 10 mps to cancel out evasion, shooting from rest, against a ship with 5 high-thrust TL10+ fusion pulse drives, the effective range goes down to a bit over 30k miles, which can be covered by a 100 GJ UV laser (SM +12 major battery). That's a bit extreme, but not impossible. They'd pretty much have to be battleriders of some kind, since they only get 20 mps per tank at TL 11 and at TL 11 that's embarrassingly bad for travel, but it's doable. High-thrust water antimatter plasma gets moderately longer legs but lets the range slip to over 50k miles, requiring a 3 TJ beam (SM+15 spinal).

Orion or nuclear salt water of course can get it to fairly short ranges (8k miles or less), but burning 10 mps to dodge a missile volley is brutally expensive when you get at most 8 mps per tank. So the tactic there would be to use missiles to force the beam-ship to exhaust its maneuver reserve at a safe distance, rather than going straight for the kill.

Bringing in superscience, cosmic power beams or grav lenses let you cover a bit more range. Super drives smash the whole thing, obviously, but shouldn't be used with regular missiles. Reactionless drives certainly hammer it too, though again I'd argue they're also rather unfair to the poor missiles. I have to admit, though, that even fusion torches (preferably TL 11+ for the delta-V) severely limit the effective range of missiles against evading targets.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Well, my issue was with the turning radius rules, and really still is, but I'd forgotten that they are very slightly ameliorated by the Pushing the Envelope rules. Having turning agility inextricably linked to accel/speed is a pretty bad fit for vehicles maneuvering aerodynamically (or based on ground friction).

Well, you can probably say that some vehicles have a higher effective acceleration for purposes of turning in a gas/liquid. Not strictly RAW.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

How do they dodge missiles in BSG?

Well, they do perform evasive manoeuvres (on small craft, mostly); GURPS sees all anti-ranged dodges as mostly similar (with some modifiers). But it doesn't take an asteroid thicket to make a dodge of some sort.
Really, why are we even assuming that thickets are required for evasive actions?

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

If it only matters if you're launching multiple missiles per turn with one gunner I'm almost entirely disinterested because that should never happen.

Ah, so you're assuming one gunner per missile. Fair enough. That's still a requirement.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

However, I would contest that if you're launching two missiles to the same place, you don't in fact have double the things to do in advance...

Well, if you're launching them in a single attack (RoF), sure. You seem to want the best of both worlds, though.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I'd also note that you can have multiple missile salvos arriving in one turn without ever having launched multiple salvos in one turn.

Possible, but puts extra demands on timing and acceleration.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Well, you can probably say that some vehicles have a higher effective acceleration for purposes of turning in a gas/liquid. Not strictly RAW.

Might work.

Basically, for typical cinematic space fighting what you need is a decent air combat maneuver system, with altitude-based elements stripped out.

(Interestingly, while B5 has some fighters that look more like reasonable spacecraft, the ludicrously low speeds that you pointed out that they move at arguably makes them make less sense than airplanes-in-space.)

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Well, they do perform evasive manoeuvres (on small craft, mostly); GURPS sees all anti-ranged dodges as mostly similar (with some modifiers). But it doesn't take an asteroid thicket to make a dodge of some sort.
Really, why are we even assuming that thickets are required for evasive actions?

I'm not, sorry. That was a strictly non-rhetorical question.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Ah, so you're assuming one gunner per missile. Fair enough. That's still a requirement.

It is, though it's also a requirement for point defense.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Well, if you're launching them in a single attack (RoF), sure. You seem to want the best of both worlds, though.

I do, because I can't see any good reason for multiple missiles with a single operator to be basically worthless, but multiple missiles with one operator each be awesome. It's not like a handheld firearm where there's actually a good reason for the effectiveness to drop. (I'm pretty sure we've discussed that before.)

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Possible, but puts extra demands on timing and acceleration.

Pretty trivial ones. You just puff out one missile per turn, keep the existing missiles stacked with your ship if it's under thrust, and once you've launched them all fly them as one big shoal.

(I forget, do nukes clear all missiles in a hex? If they do, it'd be worth spreading the shoal out a bit.)

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

You mean like I addressed in the immediately following paragraph that you cut from your quote?
.

You put an idea in a paragraph by itself and people will think it's an idea that stands by itself. Especially true if the idea is expressed broadly and the separate caveat is quite narrow.

In fact your successive paragraph was no narrow as to be of no relevance to the point I was making and I was not addressing it. That's why I cut it.

There are _many_ possible situations where missiles are not practical weapons. On the other hand the only situation where missiles have no practical maximum range is when they are being fired at targets that will be expending no delta-v like planets or some space stations.

[Mirtai]

I was speaking about GURPS Spaceships... you know, the book?

Where they list the "range" of missiles pretty specifically, pretty close to where they list the range of all the other types of weapons listed.

Missiles can technically hit targets past their range, they just automatically miss if the target can manuver, since at that point the missile is out of fuel and can't maneuver.

I'm honestly not sure what you mean by "missiles don't have a range"

Just as an example, smaller missiles (I believe they were referring to missiles in the 20 to 28 cm range) are listed as being able to reach long range, and bigger ones X (or extreme) range.

There are beam weapons that can reach the same ranges, and do so instantly, instead of taking a couple hours of flight time, for the extreme examples.

At TL 10, a SM+8 ship can hold a spinal beam weapon capable of hitting you 50,000 miles away 1/3rd of a second after they deside to do so, while a volley of missiles accelerating up to 10 mps will take more than 5000 seconds (over an hour) to travel the same distance, and will be out of fuel upon arrival. I don't care how many missiles you carry. 5000 seconds is a LONG time. Your target has tons and tons of time to deal with your missiles after killing you, if you don't have some armor to take the beam weapon hits.

I'm really not sure where the "missiles don't have ranges" idea is from. A different book?

[Mirtai]

We could create a whole new forum for "Are Railguns Useless" as well.

My opinion is that, like any weapon, they are quite useful in the right conditions. At TL 9, when they first become available, they seem quite good. (And in practice, in my playtests so far.)

And while it may be possible for some ships to always stay in deep space far beyond the range of such pedestrian weapons, I do wonder when such lone wolves ever manage to get fuel or resupply. Of if they live life in universes where no ship ever approaches 10,000 miles of another for fear of sudden death. Where the "hidden weapon" modification is never used to lull someone into close range. Where speed, armor, ECM, and point defence lasers on a bunch of small but deadly fighters never combined to be able to rush into range of these invunerable missile boats and blow them to pieces with their rapid fire Railguns at point blank range.

I do wonder about those things.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Might work.

Basically, for typical cinematic space fighting what you need is a decent air combat maneuver system, with altitude-based elements stripped out.

(Interestingly, while B5 has some fighters that look more like reasonable spacecraft, the ludicrously low speeds that you pointed out that they move at arguably makes them make less sense than airplanes-in-space.)

Low speeds are likely a result of needing to stick to 'stationary' objects like space stations during combat, while also having low accelerations as compared to ΔV.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

That was a strictly non-rhetorical question.

Ah. In BSG, missiles seem to be either exclusively or mostly a big capital-vs-capital weapon. There was I think one Raptor (two-pilot craft) that used a missile launcher, firing something like 8 missiles, each a nuke. It was a big deal.
But the fighter craft do perform many dodges against non-missiles, and don't seem to hide behind asteroid thickets.

Another setting came up: WH40K. From what I remember about Rogue Trader, big ships can opt to fly dodgy style, but in addition to making it harder to hit them, it also makes it harder to shoot the enemy out of them.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

It is, though it's also a requirement for point defense.

Is is. This branch seems pretty long now . . . I'm already forgetting what it started with. Anyway, point defence gets more shots per shooter/turret due to VRFness, right?

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I do, because I can't see any good reason for multiple missiles with a single operator to be basically worthless, but multiple missiles with one operator each be awesome. It's not like a handheld firearm where there's actually a good reason for the effectiveness to drop. (I'm pretty sure we've discussed that before.)

You're getting benefits of extra hits as compared to shooting them in one salvo:
Assuming that your skill after all modifiers except RoF is 10:
300 missiles in one salvo: chance of scoring at least one hit is 98%ish, and your average hit number is 9 missiles.
300 missiles in 300 salvoes: chance of scoring at least one hit is enormously close to 100%, and your average hit number is 150 missiles.

Either you need to change the way Rapid Fire works (I'm in favour of this for a hypothetical Alternate GURPS IV / GURPS 5e / G4e Revised), or you shouldn't let missile users benefit from gigantic bonuses at no drawback whatsoever.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Pretty trivial ones. You just puff out one missile per turn, keep the existing missiles stacked with your ship if it's under thrust, and once you've launched them all fly them as one big shoal.

(I forget, do nukes clear all missiles in a hex? If they do, it'd be worth spreading the shoal out a bit.)

Again, one big shoal is either flying as a shoal (suffering from RoF issues), or it's controlled as 300 or whatever number of independent 'piloted' vehicles.