[Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Can you say what rules you used?

Because you probably remember all the analysis of point defense vs. massed missile fire back when Spaceships was new.

Well, I used all of the Spaceship rules at different times.

I first went into missile salvos v. point defense during the playtest for Spaceships 1. This obviously became very important when the one shot kill quality of kinetic weapons at very high velocities became evident.

A general principle that one tertiary battery given over to point defense tended to cancel out one missile battery.

A bit of fluff text in the write-up for an "Ares" battlecruiser (I think it's in the Designer's Notes) about a possible weakness v. missile boats caught my eye. So I took the Ares and swapped out the main beam weapons for missile batteries and called the new ship type the Hydra..

The first thing I discovered was that the Ares had many light guns and was unable to penetrate its' own frontal armor and this made it an almost automatic loser against it's mirror image. So I made an Ares II that swapped a secondary battery for a larger one. That one showed little special vulnerability to missile barrages mostly because it could limit engagement length by damaging/killing its' opponent..

From this we develop the principle that a big gun is better than an equivalent mass of little guns except for missile defense. This fuelled my preference for main battery/spinal mount and tertiary battery with nothing in between.

You also see support for this in the damage rules where you want weapons heavy enough to actually disable the target hit location and not just damage it.

Then Spaceships 3 and 4 were tested together and it was with the mapped rules I did the space station attack. I used a Gibraltar station in defense and a Nova carrier with a bay full of TL8 ASATs.

The Novas stated out at Mars which is how they built up that 70 mile per second velocity. What I remember was that this came to 100 ASATs. There may have been multiple Novas to get that number.

Each ASAT could fire 3 missiles so the total number of incoming targets was 400 and this was too many to counter. Just one of the missiles gave you a _hard_ kill on the SM+14 asteroid station too.

A general result from multiple test battles is that they tend to be short in terms of number of turns. I attribute this to Spaceships realistic rules bias that mimics modern naval combat with its' "one shipkiller missile to one ship" tendencies.

Even older battles that appear longer and more epic only seem that way because we tend to count shots fired rather than those that hit and almost all shells fired miss. One shell from Bismarck sank the Hood. One shell from the Rodney effectively killed Bismarck.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Well, I used all of the Spaceship rules at different times.

I first went into missile salvos v. point defense during the playtest for Spaceships 1. This obviously became very important when the one shot kill quality of kinetic weapons at very high velocities became evident.

A general principle that one tertiary battery given over to point defense tended to cancel out one missile battery.

When I ask what rules you used, I mean how did you actually resolve this? Because there are definitely some differences in opinion on what the Spaceships rules are, and even more so how you should employ them. Are you rolling the entire missile battery as one attack, or rolling one attack per missile? You can do either by the book, if you've got enough gunners. What about the point defense battery?

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Even older battles that appear longer and more epic only seem that way because we tend to count shots fired rather than those that hit and almost all shells fired miss. One shell from Bismarck sank the Hood. One shell from the Rodney effectively killed Bismarck.

Having read about WWI naval battles...no, those often involved legitimately substantial numbers of hits (and didn't necessarily kill the recipient ship either).

Abysmally low hit rates, sure. Sub-percentile at least some of the time. But many ships took solidly 2-digit hit counts in battles.

I'm pretty sure age of sail ships really could and did get hammered by a lot of hits, but I don't have statistics on that.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

When I ask what rules you used, I mean how did you actually resolve this? Because there are definitely some differences in opinion on what the Spaceships rules are, and even more so how you should employ them. Are you rolling the entire missile battery as one attack, or rolling one attack per missile? You can do either by the book, if you've got enough gunners. What about the point defense battery?
.

Attacks were rolled as a volley both for the attacking missiles and the defending PD. I believe this to be the norm for 4th ed and the author of Spaceships and the co-author of 4e did not correct my procedure(though he did catch other problems in my detailed reports). It appeared to be what was used by everyone else as well.

I just don't see this "roll every missile" imperative. It's more simulationist but 4e has gone against simulationism in ranged combat in general and Spaceships in particular is a fast and simple combat system.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Attacks were rolled as a volley both for the attacking missiles and the defending PD. I believe this to be the norm for 4th ed and the author of Spaceships and the co-author of 4e did not correct my procedure(though he did catch other problems in my detailed reports). It appeared to be what was used by everyone else as well.

I just don't see this "roll every missile" imperative. It's more simulationist but 4e has gone against simulationism in ranged combat in general and Spaceships in particular is a fast and simple combat system.

I'm not sure I'd call it an imperative, exactly...but it is permitted by the rules as written, if the attacker has the right features. And it increases performance immensely. (It's also actually an imperative per the text if your battery is turrets - the option to fire an entire battery as one attack is strictly for fixed batteries.)

While I don't know if I could respect it because I have little patience with the Rapid Fire rules being used in places where they're very non-simulationist, I do believe Spaceships might work better if it actually was written to enforce the spirit that you brought to the rules. But it's not written that way, and the way it is written either side of that missile/PD exchange gains a tremendous advantage by choosing to use their weapons otherwise.

[Michael Thayne]

The first thing I can think of to offset the increase in beam weapon power under "the square root of destruction" is give an SM-based multiplier to DR. Something like this progression:

SM+4: x1.5
SM+5: x2
SM+6: x2.5
SM+7: x3
SM+8: x3.5
SM+9: x4
SM+10: x5
SM+11: x6
SM+12: x7
SM+13: x9
SM+14: x11
SM+15: x13

This is more or less consistent with how the Square Root of Destruction rules increase the damage output of major batteries. I'm a little worried that for some paradigms it might make ships too tough, but not sure what that paradigm is.

[Michael Thayne]

Proposed square-root based damage progression for conventional warheads:

2cm: 1d+2
2.5cm: 2d
3cm: 2d+2
3.5cm: 3d
4cm: 3d+2
5cm: 5d
6cm: 6d
7cm: 7d
8cm: 8d
10cm: 11d
12cm: 3dx5
14cm: 6dx3
16cm: 6dx4
20cm: 6dx6
24cm: 6dx8
28cm: 6dx11
32cm: 6dx16
40cm: 6dx22
48cm: 6dx28
56cm: 6dx32
64cm: 6dx44
80cm: 6dx60
96cm: 6dx80
112cm: 6dx100

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Even older battles that appear longer and more epic only seem that way because we tend to count shots fired rather than those that hit and almost all shells fired miss. One shell from Bismarck sank the Hood. One shell from the Rodney effectively killed Bismarck.

On the other hand,three days earlier three shells hits from the Prince of Wales did not kill Bismarck. Neither did a torpedo hit from one of HMS Victorious' torpedo-bombers on the 25th.

In the final battle on the 27th, four British ships fired 2,800 shells at Bismarck and scored 400 hits. Then they sank it with two torpedo hits.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

In the final battle on the 27th, four British ships fired 2,800 shells at Bismarck and scored 400 hits. Then they sank it with two torpedo hits.

Apparently, King George V's 14 inch shells were largely ineffective against Bismarck's armor, so a lot of those hits were effectively meaningless. I've heard it claimed that the RN so wanted to be sure they killed it, they closed to point blank range. While that gave them a lot of hits, most of them were high, disabling things like gun direction and turrets (and most likely killing the bulk of the senior officers early on) but not having as great an effect on the seaworthiness as would ordinarily be expected.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Apparently, King George V's 14 inch shells were largely ineffective against Bismarck's armor, so a lot of those hits were effectively meaningless. I've heard it claimed that the RN so wanted to be sure they killed it, they closed to point blank range. While that gave them a lot of hits, most of them were high, disabling things like gun direction and turrets (and most likely killing the bulk of the senior officers early on) but not having as great an effect on the seaworthiness as would ordinarily be expected.

I know there's a reason that Bismarck survived three shell hits from Rodney on the 24th, a torpedo hit and at least one shell hit on the 25th, and four hunred shell hits on the 27th, before being sunk by two torpedos, or whatever the hellish battering it took was. I'm just trying to give context to the statement that it was "effectively killed by one shell".

[Anthony]

It probably worse better with general GURPS mechanics to use expanded wound size modifiers. I came up with mine here and several other people have had nearly identical schemes.