Some questions on Spaceships

[FeiLin]

Originally Posted by Varyon

They are entirely impact weapons, without a significant explosive payload (they might have something akin to such to allow them to be used as proximity warheads) - largely because in space you can get up to sufficiently high relative velocities that your impact alone exceeds the power of any comparable mass of conventional explosive. They simply do crushing damage. Do note that when not used as proximity warheads, they have a (2) Armor Divisor.

Ok, so I reread the relevant parts, and this makes no sense to me. So, they are explosive, just not represented by the ex modifier when they actually hit something? Instead they get +4 TH and can deal MoS (max x10) hits (presumably only to the target).

Also, why the lack of variety of missiles? Afaik the only choice I have is barrel size and "nuke, super or neither" (disregarding warp, which seems not to behave like missiles). What if I want ion missiles that stun ships, more penetration, or different range? Maybe even different speeds depending on ammo. I could, of course, just go in and add/change it, but then I'd have to open the can of worms of adjusting costs, etc, which I'd rather wait with.

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

It's not that the longer scale makes the missiles move faster, as it is that if you're using that scale, the missiles would have to be moving faster to hit such distant (and fast) targets (or else there'd be no point in using them). It's not a direct cause-and-effect (distance makes missiles go faster), but a correlation (fast ships means Distant scale, but also means faster missiles which along with the faster ships means relative velocities are typically going to be higher).

The basic combat system (as well as the SS design system) is meant to be fairly abstract and simple. It's not a system of solving Newtonian mechanics equations to determine the actual speed from exact known positions and elapsed times. Lots of values are approximations and averages, not hard engineering numbers.

Sure, there's a lot of approximations, and that's fair. I also agree that missiles need higher speeds if targets are faster. But that still doesn't really make sense that individual missiles will differ in lethality depending on this, unless the scale is fixed by setting (or at least campaign). This may be implicit, since choosing TL and what (super)science is allowed may make one engine type far superior to others, even if it's not explicitly the case in the rules.

Accepting this accepting this phenomena, however, incurs other headaches. Are then the Spaceship rules balanced with regards to weapon types, DR and HP? I dont see the other weapons change depending on their "relative speed", so that makes me wonder if I need to start out by outlining a few basic ship types and see what their move ranges are and thus what the most likely scale will be, and then go back to swap/plug in their weapon holes.

What I'm opting for is a solid foundation of beam weapons, with the occasional missile, but how would you start out if this is decided from the start as opposed to "finding it out" along the way? I could, of course, start meddling with costs, etc, but I'd prefer to keep it "as vanilla as possible".

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

What it is is a larger-scale rules issue where the authors, either negligently or knowingly, wrote content that clearly isn't based on the rules as actually published. Maybe, like Stormcrow, they don't think that rules text is meant to be taken 'rigidly'.

Again for this issue: balance. I'm on the verge of just ruling that identical beam/gun weapons can fire even if separate batteries, if they're fixed, same facing and same target. But maybe that makes

Also, would you treat this as a higher RoF or make separate attack rolls, and (if separate attacks) would you Dodge only once and let MoS surplus cover more than one attack or Dodge once per attack?