[Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

I think that your thoughts about force screens are on the right track: settings with many big ships, such as Star Trek or the Schlockverse, usually have some kind of 'force field' technology, and that can allow big ships with big power plants to shrug off attacks.

The OP didn't actually express a thought about force screens: the "Missile Shield" setting switch to which he referred is an optional rule regarding defensive fire by beam weapons against ballistic warheads and ramming ships. It's in GURPS Spaceships 3 on page 35.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

The OP didn't actually express a thought about force screens: the "Missile Shield" setting switch to which he referred is an optional rule regarding defensive fire by beam weapons against ballistic warheads and ramming ships. It's in GURPS Spaceships 3 on page 35.

Ok. I do not have money to buy any of the later volumes in Spaceships, and in my view for questions like this, it is always better to start with the real world ("on the back of an envelope, how would large spaceships work?") and worry about how to model it later.

Two common phenomena in naval architecture are big for the sake of big ("mine is bigger than yours!") and ships which have to serve multiple functions (the galleons of the Indes were treasure transports and armed to fight off filthy heretical pirates; an American aircraft carrier is a base for land operations and a weapon of naval warfare). Both can be reasons why there are ships bigger than a rational in-game analysis would justify, let alone our amateur analysis through the foggy mirror of the rules on a lazy Sunday.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Ok. I do not have money to buy any of the later volumes in Spaceships, and in my view for questions like this, it is always better to start with the real world ("on the back of an envelope, how would large spaceships work?") and worry about how to model it later.

We don't really have "the real world", though, so coming up with a plausible model and seeing what consequences it has can be helpful. And tabletop RPGs are arguably the best model we have–computer games have advantages for modeling space combat, but can suffer from AIs that use very, very stupid tactics.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Two common phenomena in naval architecture are big for the sake of big ("mine is bigger than yours!") and ships which have to serve multiple functions (the galleons of the Indes were treasure transports and armed to fight off filthy heretical pirates; an American aircraft carrier is a base for land operations and a weapon of naval warfare). Both can be reasons why there are ships bigger than a rational in-game analysis would justify, let alone our amateur analysis through the foggy mirror of the rules on a lazy Sunday.

"Big for the sake of big" only gets you so far, I think. If the rationally optimized warship size is SM+8, the biggest one or two superpowers might build some SM+10 ships, but even then the backbone of their fleet will still probably be SM+8.

Less sure about the multi-role thing. It would be interesting to stat out a multi-role ship under the Spaceships rules, where each role would only justify say a SM+8 ship. How big could such a ship get? Not sure it would get more than 10x larger than the "single role" ship.