[Spaceships] Idea for new system: VLS

[Diomedes]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Would you prefer MRL? It's not like VLS isn't a pretty specific term too.

Perhaps something like ILC, for Independent Launch Cells?

[Snoman314]

Originally Posted by Diomedes

Perhaps something like ILC, for Independent Launch Cells?

I hadn't spent a whole lot of cycles thinking about the name, as its the concept thats the important part, but maybe something like Multiple Launch Missile Array/Battery MLMA?

As mentioned above, currently the largest missile systems can take a really long time to empty, and I tend to find that combat is over pretty quickly. I embrace the whole egshells-armed-with-sledgehammers feel of spaceships, as real life combat tends to be like that and will probably only get to be more so. I tend to put PC ships up against the Spaceships equivalent of Mooks, but even then, as it's spaceship combat, if the PCs screw up badly they could still get vaporised.
However, for those that point out that this could tend towards a battle between PD and the largest possible salvo:
-Firstly, yeah? and?
-Secondly, I'm mostly planning to use spaceships to string together ground missions on isolated planetary outposts. The ships fight their way into a system (jump point), then fight to dominate orbit, then to maintain orbital dominance. Small fights, but more than one and with little time between them. This means little to no time to reload hull mounted launch cells (unrealisticly fast/high dV to zip around in system).
With those setting assumptions, it becomes very important for ships to not blow their wad too early by using up all their ammo. This would become an even greater concern when missiles cant be reloaded from cargo easily.
-Thirdly, using a couple of tertiary batteries can have same effect. An MLMA would tend away from this slightly, for the reason I gave in my second point.

Messing around with it some more I feel like the ammo should be no less than half the normal amount, and not more than .75-.8 normal.

And yeah I'm going with Spaceships 3 rules that missiles aren't limited by facing anyway.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Snoman314

However, for those that point out that this could tend towards a battle between PD and the largest possible salvo:
-Firstly, yeah? and?

And this doesn't lend to particularly interesting fights. Depending on the specific role of spaceships in your campaign, you may or may not care, but if you don't care there's little reason to invoke the space combat rules at all.

[Snoman314]

Originally Posted by Anthony

And this doesn't lend to particularly interesting fights. Depending on the specific role of spaceships in your campaign, you may or may not care, but if you don't care there's little reason to invoke the space combat rules at all.

Sorry, I didn't mean to belittle your comment, I was just saying that a really huge salvo is always going to be epically hard to defend against. In my (limited) experience however, missiles are very easy to shoot down.
My idea is to improve a missile salvo's odds by increasing number, at the expense of not being able to do it a second time.