Spaceship Damage

[Clockwork_Virus]

You'll want to look at the errata for Spaceships. For a 24cm gun, the base dDamage is 6dx6. With a 10 mps shot from a grav gun, this would give you an average dDamage of 6dx60, or 1260.

Yes, this is still incredibly lethal, even after taking TL11 armor and force screens into account. You'll want to invest in methods of neutralizing ballistic attacks, such as point-defense.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Clockwork_Virus

Yes, this is still incredibly lethal, even after taking TL11 armor and force screens into account. You'll want to invest in methods of neutralizing ballistic attacks, such as point-defense.

Or frying your enemies with long range energy weapons before any ballistic attack can get to you. There wasn't a lot done with guns, even electromagnetic or grav during the playesting because their effective range is so limited.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Or frying your enemies with long range energy weapons before any ballistic attack can get to you. There wasn't a lot done with guns, even electromagnetic or grav during the playesting because their effective range is so limited.

Of course, missiles make for a different story.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Of course, missiles make for a different story.

Warp missiles maybe and just possibly super missiles at 500G. Standard missiles (5Gs in the mapped system) take significant amounts of travel time to cross energy weapon range.

At TL10 at least you may be able to armor enough to survive UV laser fire long enough for your missiles to hit but it's not very practical to try that against particle beams.

At TL11 X-ray lasers have the range of UV and the damage of particle beams and even adding Force screens may not be enough.

[GodBeastX]

Keep in mind, if you use Grav weapons (Super science) they will do crap like that. They are just as overpowered in Ultratech. You are sending a projectile out at unrealistic hyper-velocities.

[Skarg]

Hmm. Sounds like it might do well to add a hit-location and "blowthrough" mechanic, so a 24cm projectile carved a hole through a ship, but doesn't make the entire ship necessarily explode in a Hollywood gasoline fireball.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Skarg

Hmm. Sounds like it might do well to add a hit-location and "blowthrough" mechanic, so a 24cm projectile carved a hole through a ship, but doesn't make the entire ship necessarily explode in a Hollywood gasoline fireball.

Destroyed spaceships don't do that, unless they're smashed to shrapnel at -10xHP or blown up by a volatile system exploding.

Hit locations are built right in.

Blowthrough isn't, and it might be appropriate.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Destroyed spaceships don't do that, unless they're smashed to shrapnel at -10xHP or blown up by a volatile system exploding.

Hit locations are built right in.

Blowthrough isn't, and it might be appropriate.

No blowthrough. It's extremely difficult to come up with scenarios where kinetic weapons don't explode on impact (like meteors) rather than remain solid.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

No blowthrough. It's extremely difficult to come up with scenarios where kinetic weapons don't explode on impact (like meteors) rather than remain solid.

Sure, but unless the target is massive or solid enough to stop the impactor (which, if the thing is doing enough base damage for blowthrough to be an issue, it isn't) that explosion will be passing through the ship very fast and out the other side. The damage pattern is more conical than spherical.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Sure, but unless the target is massive or solid enough to stop the impactor (which, if the thing is doing enough base damage for blowthrough to be an issue, it isn't) that explosion will be passing through the ship very fast and out the other side. The damage pattern is more conical than spherical.

The explosion is like every gram of the impactor and the thing it hits exploding as if it were some multiple of its' mass in TNT. 20x at 7 miles per second.

A fragmenting projectile might produce a conical pattern. An aggressively vaporizing projectile not so much. Also, higher energy in the energetic plasma mostly means more thermal radiation and not higher particle speed.

It's pretty easy to get KE hits that look like baby nukes. What you're going to see is points of white light.