Comparison of Space Beam Weapons in GURPS Vehicles, 2 Ed.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Curmudgeon

Recently, I started doing some conversions of FGU’s Space Opera to GURPS, specifically Starships of War, Vol. 1. If you haven’t bought the book, there are some potential problems with using it as written. All star nations in the game (so far, volume one covers four of the star nations and there are at least nine other star nations that have been mentioned) use Nova guns (pulsars in GURPS Ultratech; antiparticle beams in GURPS Vehicles, 2nd Ed.) and MegaBolts and StarTorps (which have ratings that translate into Nova fire for damage). The only differences in armament is the calibre used (which affects damage and range) and the number of weapons mounted. The issue with that is that the author had some blatant bias towards the starnations. On any given class of ship, the Terran Union has more weapons and bigger caliber weapons than any of its opponents, followed by the Azuriarch Imperium, Merchantile League and finally, the Galactic Peoples’ Republic. Additionally, some classes of starship don’t appear in some of the star nations’ inventories.

Funnily enough I've been noddling around with this for some time, too. I have the old "Seldon's" series Fred mentions. And yes, the Terrans are simply richer and a bit more advanced than everyone else, so they make gold-plated ships, and match everyone else's ship types. I doubt they actually know shere some of their ship types actually fit into their naval doctrine.

Below that it's not quite so clear-cut - some Mechantile League ships are better than their Azuriach contemporaries in some areas. The GPR, being Space Soviets, build them cheap and cheerful (but some of their ships have some features that can surprise).

I was going to treat Nova Guns as some kind of laser and play with Gravitic Focussing options and exact type until I got the range and damage balance I wanted. StarTorps are just missiles. MegaBolts would need some special penetration rules. I was intending to use Spaceships - maybe. Or maybe VE2. Or maybe Fire, Fusion, and Steel (Traveller: The New Era's design rules).

For movement I was going to go with pseudo-velocity, with the surrounding techno-babble including the TISA drive being at least partly inertialess, thus allowing the massive accelerations without turning everything in the ship into paste.

The UV laser is surprisingly good. At 1,061,100 km, it has the longest range of any beam weapon and its FP 31 is decent enough. The rainbow laser is marginally less effective with a range of 1,000,500 km and FP 29. Where the rainbow laser kills the UV laser is in cost and weight. At $22 million rainbow laser costs less than half as much as a $48 million UV laser and weighs only 650 tons instead of 950 tons. Most starship designers are willing to make the tradeoff and mount rainbow lasers instead of UV lasers, but their ships do need heavier armor to get within range of the odd ship that mounts UV lasers.

Rainbow lasers lose range and penetration in a vacuum (UT116) - x1/10th range and no penetration modifier. EDIT - only relevant if you're converting all the stats and behaviour to 4e, I suppose (and doing that involves having to make some choices about how to convert lasers).

Have you experimented with giving the types with high damage and low range one of the extended range options?

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by Rupert

Funnily enough I've been noddling around with this for some time, too. I have the old "Seldon's" series Fred mentions. And yes, the Terrans are simply richer and a bit more advanced than everyone else, so they make gold-plated ships, and match everyone else's ship types. I doubt they actually know shere some of their ship types actually fit into their naval doctrine.

Below that it's not quite so clear-cut - some Mechantile League ships are better than their Azuriach contemporaries in some areas. The GPR, being Space Soviets, build them cheap and cheerful (but some of their ships have some features that can surprise).

All true, I was simplifying it a bit, but I may have slid into oversimplifying the relative positions.

I was going to treat Nova Guns as some kind of laser and play with Gravitic Focussing options and exact type until I got the range and damage balance I wanted. StarTorps are just missiles. MegaBolts would need some special penetration rules. I was intending to use Spaceships - maybe. Or maybe VE2. Or maybe Fire, Fusion, and Steel (Traveller: The New Era's design rules).

It sounds like you're converting to 4e while I'm converting to 3e. I can't answer for Spaceships but I'm finding that Vehicles is workable but as I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm not going for an exact conversion, partly because even a FP 40 beam weapon is an energy hog. IIRC getting an antiparticle beam (which is what both games claim the Novagun/Sungun/Pulsars are), required a powerplant in the 10 Gj range and I have trouble justifying someone cramming a powerplant that's equivalent to two Niagara Falls generating stations into one starship to power just one weapon, and then do it repeatedly. Fire, Fusion and Steel [FFS] is a good call, though so far my tendency has been to use it as a reverse engineer system for GURPS firearms, i.e. I prefer to design the round being fired first and then build the weapon to fire it, which is FFS's process, and then dump those stats into GURPS to get my weapon.

For movement I was going to go with pseudo-velocity, with the surrounding techno-babble including the TISA drive being at least partly inertialess, thus allowing the massive accelerations without turning everything in the ship into paste.

That seems like a workable choice, though I don't like the way pseudo-velocity drives mess with physics. So says the guy who blithely puts FTL stardrives in his starships. :)

Rainbow lasers lose range and penetration in a vacuum (UT116) - x1/10th range and no penetration modifier. EDIT - only relevant if you're converting all the stats and behaviour to 4e, I suppose (and doing that involves having to make some choices about how to convert lasers).

That's a huge change from 3e where rainbow lasers gain x50 range in vacuum (compared to x10 range for regular ruby lasers) and there is no loss in penetrating power (armor divisor) in vacuum.

Have you experimented with giving the types with high damage and low range one of the extended range options?

Not yet, but as all the weapons I was comparing took the extreme range option to maximize their ranges, I'm doubtful that it would change things by much.

The primary objective in the comparison was to see exactly how the beam weapons compared to each other and whether there were any clear winners in the superiority sweepstakes. Once that analysis was done, it got posted here since I hadn't seen a similar analysis and it might save others a bit of work setting up and running the numbers.

If I were flat out designing my own starships from scratch, I suspect that I might go Dreadnaught-style with nothing but big rainbow lasers, maybe with some smaller rainbow lasers to swat starfighters and provide point defense.

The only other nod to wet navy thinking might be to carry a small horde of starfighters, but there've been enough articles in gaming magazines to suggest that it's not really a feasible strategy unless you make your carrier vessel really sluggish, which isn't something most design rules force on you.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Curmudgeon

It sounds like you're converting to 4e while I'm converting to 3e. I can't answer for Spaceships but I'm finding that Vehicles is workable but as I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm not going for an exact conversion, partly because even a FP 40 beam weapon is an energy hog. IIRC getting an antiparticle beam (which is what both games claim the Novagun/Sungun/Pulsars are), required a powerplant in the 10 Gj range and I have trouble justifying someone cramming a powerplant that's equivalent to two Niagara Falls generating stations into one starship to power just one weapon, and then do it repeatedly. Fire, Fusion and Steel [FFS] is a good call, though so far my tendency has been to use it as a reverse engineer system for GURPS firearms, i.e. I prefer to design the round being fired first and then build the weapon to fire it, which is FFS's process, and then dump those stats into GURPS to get my weapon.

I've also considered using the gun rules for nova guns, because they use up ammunition (of a sort), etc. That does require making up their range and damage from near-scratch though.

The only other nod to wet navy thinking might be to carry a small horde of starfighters, but there've been enough articles in gaming magazines to suggest that it's not really a feasible strategy unless you make your carrier vessel really sluggish, which isn't something most design rules force on you.

Space Opera does what a great deal of SF settings do, and tries to have it both ways - huge (lumbering) dreadnoughts that dominate the spaceways, and small fast (and nimble) starfighters (aircraft analogues) with their heroic pilots that can 'sink' capital ships. The problem being that these are mutually exclusive, and the only reason we saw both in WWII (which is what these settings are copying) is because it happened at a moment of transition and just after a series of treaties had forced an artificial 'building holiday'.

However, Space Opera and pretty much all those other settings don't seem to have any sort of political set up or sudden technological change that would explain the mixture - the two exist side-by-side, somehow, but either the big ships or the small ships and their carriers are a terrible waste of money and crews.

[Fred Brackin]

Working with Seldon's stuff we see that some late Starfighters (and even those 375 ton scouts) are capable of exceeding 300ls/turn i.e. light speed without hyperjumping.

Exactly what this does is unexplained but going strictly by the SO rules they've run off the Attack Matrices and you can't shoot Nova Guns at them. I think I remebr combinations of speed and ranges where you couldn't target them even under lightspeed.

In a game that doesn't deal with distances less than 25 LS you have little need to get really close and there isn't even any reason to launch StarTorps at less than 300 LS.

Still in battles when we had them masses of StarFighters and their StarTorps made a good hammer to start knocking shields down with. Hangers full of StarFighters would multiply the number of StarTorps you could get into a battle. I remember mass firing their N25s into shields too.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Working with Seldon's stuff we see that some late Starfighters (and even those 375 ton scouts) are capable of exceeding 300ls/turn i.e. light speed without hyperjumping.

Exactly what this does is unexplained but going strictly by the SO rules they've run off the Attack Matrices and you can't shoot Nova Guns at them. I think I remebr combinations of speed and ranges where you couldn't target them even under lightspeed.

There are. Also even moderately fast ships (like high TL destroyers and light cruisers) can't be hit at long ranges.

Back in the day we ruled that ships doing more than 300LS couldn't see what was going on and you had to write out orders for everything they'd do until they came back down under light speed. They were still trackable though, so mostly it was good for getting close fast and running away.

In a game that doesn't deal with distances less than 25 LS you have little need to get really close and there isn't even any reason to launch StarTorps at less than 300 LS.

Yes there is - less time to shoot them down, and for starfighters they really have to launch them at under 400LS so the torps can self-target because they lack the gunners and computers to guide them.

Also, megabolts had a max range of 400LS, and the 'carronade' function on some warships had a 300LS maximum. If the target ship's screen were weak enough that would let you go straight to doing hull damage.

As for 25LS, there's a little comment that at 25LS big guns can 'penetrate any armour', so getting in close speeds up the 'smash shieldless ship to rubble' phase a lot.

Still in battles when we had them masses of StarFighters and their StarTorps made a good hammer to start knocking shields down with. Hangers full of StarFighters would multiply the number of StarTorps you could get into a battle. I remember mass firing their N25s into shields too.

Space Opera was very much about hammering shields down, because only quite small ships had shields that even huge guns/torps could penetrate. If the ships were large, even then most guns wouldn't penetrate the underlying battlearmour, so once the screen were down you were hammering away doing 10% damage per hit unless you could close to 25LS.

There were some interesting ideas and rules in Space Opera, but the execution was somewhat lacking in most cases.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Rupert

There were some interesting ideas and rules in Space Opera, but the execution was somewhat lacking in most cases.

I embraced it at the time because Traveller was so much more limited in comparison but from even at the time I knew SO was awkward. Now I'm annoyed that it was both abstract and awkward. You'd think that if you were abstracting so much you could at least make things simple.

If I was tempted to rescue soemthing from SO I think it might be the Sector Atlases. Possibly my memories are tinged with nostalgia but what I remember seems good to me by comparison with alternatives.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

If I was tempted to rescue soemthing from SO I think it might be the Sector Atlases. Possibly my memories are tinged with nostalgia but what I remember seems good to me by comparison with alternatives.

They are fun in a very 80s cold war way. That also means they are very much a product of their time, and if not taken as such won't have aged well.

The Azuriach are of course Space Nazis and clearly set up as one of the bad guys. The UFP/Terrans are the good guys of course (but there's a chance that a serious political shock could result in an imperialist faction gaining control of Terra, and a possible civil war from that).

A recent re-read of the Mercantile atlas was interesting - on the surface they're presented as 'flawed, but basically good', but they're raging libertarians and mercantalists and there's a sub-text of slavery, displacement of populations, etc. going on 'out there' where nobody can see it. So maybe not so good after all.

Some of the individual world writeups are worth stealing. Others, not so much.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Curmudgeon

It sounds like you're converting to 4e while I'm converting to 3e. I can't answer for Spaceships but I'm finding that Vehicles is workable but as I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm not going for an exact conversion, partly because even a FP 40 beam weapon is an energy hog.

I'd use VE2, but my brain doesn't really grok it any more. Also, were I to use the stuff it'd be in a 4e game, so there would be a further conversion step, and choices to be made about tech levels, and it starts looking like too much work at that point. I wish 4e had its VDS, but that's probably not a thing that's ever going to see the light of day.

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by Rupert

I'd use VE2, but my brain doesn't really grok it any more. Also, were I to use the stuff it'd be in a 4e game, so there would be a further conversion step, and choices to be made about tech levels, and it starts looking like too much work at that point. I wish 4e had its VDS, but that's probably not a thing that's ever going to see the light of day.

That's a problem alright. I commiserate. The awfulness of some of the game systems and the choices made in some of the premises have contributed to my dilitariness with this conversion project. Some days the game just doesn't seem worth the candle.