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

[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.