Shields

[Kelly Pedersen]

Another idea to encourage derring-do and stunts with small fighters is to assume that small craft can actually get under a big ship's shield, and do direct damage there. Spaceships tends to assume that force screens roughly conform to the ship's hull, but if you assume they're more classic Star Trek-style "big bubbles", you can assume that a sufficiently small ship can go underneath the shield but still not crash into the bigger ship's hull, and then do much more immediate damage without having to deal with the shield's DR. This can be combined with the ablative suggestions above - if the shield has to be battered down to a certain level before a small craft has a chance of slipping through it rather than just crashing against it.

Offhand, I'd suggest that to do this, the smaller ship has to be 6 or more SMs smaller than the larger one. That means that SM +10 ships (the smallest I really think count as "capital ships") need tiny SM +4 fighters to slip into, and you don't get SM +10 ships being able to slip into a bigger ship's shields until you hit the truly huge SM +16.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

Another idea to encourage derring-do and stunts with small fighters is to assume that small craft can actually get under a big ship's shield, and do direct damage there.

I've considered this in the past, but the primary issue with it is that, if fighters can do this, it's hard to justify missiles not being able to do so, which means swarms of missiles will work out much better than death defying fighter stunts... which kind of defeats the purpose.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I've considered this in the past, but the primary issue with it is that, if fighters can do this, it's hard to justify missiles not being able to do so, which means swarms of missiles will work out much better than death defying fighter stunts... which kind of defeats the purpose.

This is true, but I think that's another reason to state that you have to wait for the shields to be battered down more before slipping in. If missiles in the setting are smart enough to loiter around a capital ship, avoiding point defense, while waiting for other ships to take down the shields enough for them to get in, then you're in a setting where you really don't need fighters at all. So, design your setting where that isn't possible, and you'll still have some room for fighters, and cool tricks like this for them to pull off.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

This is true, but I think that's another reason to state that you have to wait for the shields to be battered down more before slipping in. If missiles in the setting are smart enough to loiter around a capital ship, avoiding point defense, while waiting for other ships to take down the shields enough for them to get in, then you're in a setting where you really don't need fighters at all. So, design your setting where that isn't possible, and you'll still have some room for fighters, and cool tricks like this for them to pull off.

While it typically won't lead to fighters ducking under shields for strafing runs, that scheme does lend itself to a decent paradigm, provided you have the caveat that the screens are much more affected by energy weapons than impacts - you have starfighters move in and pound away at the shield enough the missiles can slip through, then either they launch their own small payload of missiles or you have dedicated bombers come in to launch a much larger payload and destroy the target. Meanwhile the starfighters are busy taking on the enemy's starfighters while going after the enemy's bombers or protecting their own. Make the lowering of shields somewhat unpredictable (have it roll a check penalized by the damage it's taken every so often, or at certain damage thresholds) and typically short-lived (shield regenerates rapidly while lowered, coming back up fully once it's full or passes a check or whatever) and you've got an excuse to keep the bombers close while not having a reliable option of just launching missiles from forever-and-a-day away and counting on the shields being down when they arrive. I like that idea enough I might steal it for my own space opera setting, thanks.

[Humabout]

Its worth noting that if your ships mount any ohysical armor, two systems of SotA armor will generally be sufficient to stop SotA energy weapons of 3 to 4 SMs smaller. No amount of shield ablation would help in this case. Ways around this include making all armor ablative, too, or unsurprisingly, don't give ships 2 systems of SotA physical armor. Just be aware that this artifact can happen.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Humabout

Its worth noting that if your ships mount any ohysical armor, two systems of SotA armor will generally be sufficient to stop SotA energy weapons of 3 to 4 SMs smaller. No amount of shield ablation would help in this case. Ways around this include making all armor ablative, too, or unsurprisingly, don't give ships 2 systems of SotA physical armor. Just be aware that this artifact can happen.

They need to be unstreamlined (which is indeed appropriate for capital ships) and have 2 systems in each hull section dedicated to armor, which is pretty substantial (30% of the ship's mass is in armor*). And doing this doesn't protect them from the fighters aiming at weakpoints (at -10 to hit, true, but the bonus from the capital ship's SM offsets this markedly) - you need 4 armor sections (60% of the ship's mass is in armor, at which point it's dense enough that it's targeted at -1) to protect from that. Well, under Spaceships 1 rules anyway - needed armor modules is reduced if using the more realistic armor volume rules from Pyramid #3/34. Regardless, you're talking about some very heavily armored ships. If using the optional rules for exposed radiators, those can't be protected by armor (at least, not while exposed), so the fighters can take those out, forcing the target to basically shut down in 30 minutes - a solid mission kill that can set it up for proper destruction (either by heavies or a boarding party, depending on the feel you're going for).

All that said, that's a pretty good observation, and something to keep in mind if you want primarily energy weapons.


*For reference, a Main Battle Tank built using Spaceships would likely have somewhere around 60% of its mass in armor.

[Humabout]

Originally Posted by Varyon

They need to be unstreamlined (which is indeed appropriate for capital ships) and have 2 systems in each hull section dedicated to armor, which is pretty substantial (30% of the ship's mass is in armor*). And doing this doesn't protect them from the fighters aiming at weakpoints (at -10 to hit, true, but the bonus from the capital ship's SM offsets this markedly) - you need 4 armor sections (60% of the ship's mass is in armor, at which point it's dense enough that it's targeted at -1) to protect from that. Well, under Spaceships 1 rules anyway - needed armor modules is reduced if using the more realistic armor volume rules from Pyramid #3/34. Regardless, you're talking about some very heavily armored ships. If using the optional rules for exposed radiators, those can't be protected by armor (at least, not while exposed), so the fighters can take those out, forcing the target to basically shut down in 30 minutes - a solid mission kill that can set it up for proper destruction (either by heavies or a boarding party, depending on the feel you're going for).

All that said, that's a pretty good observation, and something to keep in mind if you want primarily energy weapons.


*For reference, a Main Battle Tank built using Spaceships would likely have somewhere around 60% of its mass in armor.

All very true points, and if you notice in the Spaceships series, capital ships - even with shields - usually mount 2 armor systems in at least one facing. And considering how lenient Spaceship rules are for pointing a facing at your opponent, this makes the bigger ones quite scary. Just a general heads up. Personally, if I wanted fighters to hurt capital ships through volume of fire, I'd make armor ablative like shields. That'll give more of a video game feel than simply unarmored ships.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Hellboy

Not sure how to price this concept though.

It's called Semi-Ablative, and is a -20% Limitation on the DR Advantage. See B47. There's been some talk in the past about trying to make a progression between Ablative (every point blocked removes 1 DR) and Semi-Ablative (every 10 points blocked removes 1 DR), but I don't think there was ever anything official. It would probably be fair to follow a scheme of +10% per +1 SSR, however - -80% for 1:1, -70% for 1.5:1 (every 1.5 points blocked removes 1 DR), -60% for 2:1, -50% for 3:1, -40% for 5:1, -30% for 7:1, -20% for 10:1, and -10% for 15:1. I'd probably allow for -5% for 20:1, but anything beyond that doesn't count as a Limitation.

In terms of gear, Vehicles (for 3e) suggests ablative armor (which is semi-ablative) being something like 3xDR of Laminate (otherwise the best armor) at a tiny fraction (something like 5% per pound) of the cost. For my Vehicles<->Spaceships conversion houserules, I felt a simple +1 SSR to DR (70 becomes 100) and 1/10th the price was more fair*. The armor design articles from Pyramid also have some options for ablative armor that could be exported to Spaceships fairly readily (although those are basically a small price decrease for no improvement in DR).

*3xDR means you're protected from a lot more, but have the risk of things that couldn't hurt you before now being able to. Assuming base DR 100 and a worse-case scenario of an attack that always does exactly 100 damage, the semi-ablative DR 300 has to be hit 22 times with that attack for you to get wounded. That might be a fair trade if they were the same cost, but at 5% of the price it's really hard to justify not using semi-ablative armor pretty much everywhere.