Spaceships: Missile launchers and their individual mass

[The Rampant Gamer]

I ran some single ship contests just to get a feel for the basic combat system, and most turn lengths give you plenty of opportunity to fire enormous broadsides of missiles. Unfortunately, the default rule of putting them all into one giant salvo does you no favors, with the high cost to benefit ratio of the default GURPS RoF rules.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by The Rampant Gamer

I ran some single ship contests just to get a feel for the basic combat system, and most turn lengths give you plenty of opportunity to fire enormous broadsides of missiles. Unfortunately, the default rule of putting them all into one giant salvo does you no favors, with the high cost to benefit ratio of the default GURPS RoF rules.

The intersection of missiles with RoF is pretty much a trainwreck in Spaceships, especially with the variable length turns.

[BlackLiger]

Remember, there's the rule that "If the target's SM would negate the penalties from range, roll. If you succeed, you hit with half the shots. If you succeed and your MOS is the ROF or higher, you hit with all the shots."

Ok, it means knife-fighting, but that's a wonderful reason as to why spaceships knife fight, so they can pound the crap out of each other with missiles :D

[Langy]

Originally Posted by BlackLiger

Remember, there's the rule that "If the target's SM would negate the penalties from range, roll. If you succeed, you hit with half the shots. If you succeed and your MOS is the ROF or higher, you hit with all the shots."

Ok, it means knife-fighting, but that's a wonderful reason as to why spaceships knife fight, so they can pound the crap out of each other with missiles :D

That only applies to things that can't move.

[The Rampant Gamer]

Originally Posted by Langy

That only applies to things that can't move.

I thought that sounded too good to be true...

The rules as written lead to some interesting arms races. Missiles come in big flights, hoping to get a few through, making it more likely that everyone has at least an entire tertiary battery devoted to rapid fire lasers for point defense, which makes missiles less likely to have any hope of hitting, which leads to larger beam weapons being mounted as they can't be defended against...

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by BlackLiger

Remember, there's the rule that "If the target's SM would negate the penalties from range, roll. If you succeed, you hit with half the shots. If you succeed and your MOS is the ROF or higher, you hit with all the shots."

Ok, it means knife-fighting, but that's a wonderful reason as to why spaceships knife fight, so they can pound the crap out of each other with missiles :D

You don't exactly need to hit with many missiles. Even one hit is pretty devastating, more so with Proximity Fuses/MIRV.

[vierasmarius]

The 4e Rapid Fire rules are usable, but sloppy at anything beyond Small Arms fire rates. They're certainly inappropriate for independently targeted volley fire, such as a whole bank of turrets or a pack of guided missiles. However, it's a topic that has already been beaten to death countless times on the forums...

[The Rampant Gamer]

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

The 4e Rapid Fire rules are usable, but sloppy at anything beyond Small Arms fire rates. They're certainly inappropriate for independently targeted volley fire, such as a whole bank of turrets or a pack of guided missiles. However, it's a topic that has already been beaten to death countless times on the forums...

I'm new in these parts - any pointers to house rules that better mimic what should happen at scales larger than, say 25 at a time?

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by The Rampant Gamer

I'm new in these parts - any pointers to house rules that better mimic what should happen at scales larger than, say 25 at a time?

My preference is to use the same scale as the Speed/Range table - ie, instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6... hits, you do 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10... etc. For low RoF or high Rcl attacks you're likely to still be getting around the same number of hits, but for the extreme RoF seen in spaceship battles you can potentially get a correspondingly large number of hits. Just remember to let Dodge protect accordingly - rather than avoid 1+MoS hits, a successful Dodge roll shifts the number of hits down 1+MoS (ie, 20 to 15 to 10 etc). For Spaceship point defense I'm not sure if it's better to treat it like a Dodge roll (effectively reducing the number of hits by 1/3 per MoS) or as a rapid fire attack (destroying missiles based on the number of hits rolled).

That said, this is just my houserule. A lot of people are satisfied with (or at least tolerant of) the RAW rules. They're certainly easier to use than 3e's far more detailed Rapid Fire attacks. Also, here's a thread discussing some other houserules for RoF.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by The Rampant Gamer

I thought that sounded too good to be true...

The rules as written lead to some interesting arms races. Missiles come in big flights, hoping to get a few through, making it more likely that everyone has at least an entire tertiary battery devoted to rapid fire lasers for point defense, which makes missiles less likely to have any hope of hitting, which leads to larger beam weapons being mounted as they can't be defended against...

That might be an interesting arms race, but it isn't the likely one.

Rather than launch missiles in large volleys that get ridiculously mistreated by the RoF rules, you want your ship to launch big flights of missiles in volleys of one missile each. If you don't have gunnery AIs and hew strictly to RAW this results in somewhat bizarre crew sizes, but it's not unmanageable. Fired in single-round volleys, with proximity settings, missiles overwhelm point defense fairly easily.