MT Starship Combat rules...

In your letter dated Thu, 8 Aug 91 17:16:36 -0700, you wrote:
>
> 	This is probably whistling in the dark, but I have some questions for
> anyone who has actually used the MT starship combat rules, or someone
> with a recent printing of them (if the bugs were fixed).
>
> 	I've applied the erratta changes to combat tables, but have a few
> questions about the Explanation of Damage Results.
> 	One: do the 'crew sections' rules work, and if so, why? 8-) (they don't
> make any sense to me, esp. in terms of damage)

Well, I'll admit that they don't make much sense to me either--you realize that
your ship basically gets one crew hit point for each thousand tons of hull
displacement.  The actual number of crewmen per thousand tons of hull is
irrelevant.  This is a little more intuitive to me than the old High Guard
'exponential' crew factor, where each crew hit wiped out 90% of the remaining
crew.  Ships dead of crew radiation overdose were not uncommon in High Guard
combat.

> 	Two: For damage to Power Plant, the rules say 'reduce UCP factor',
> obviously a direct copy from High Guard.  Unfortunately, the craft design
> rules no longer _use_ the UCP for powerplant rating or design.  How do you
> handle PP damage?

You don't have both sets of official errata?  In the second one (I think) is
the part that says that you lose 10% of the 'disabled' damage point value
of the power plant for each hit, with a minimum of two points...so a plant
with a value of 4/8 would be disabled by 2 hits and destroyed by 4 more, but
a plant with a value of 600/1200 would be disabled by ten hits, and destroyed
by twenty more.

Personally, for both of these I would like to see things replaced by absolute
rather than relative damages.  (i.e. Crew-1 kills 10 people, if you've got lots
you're OK, and Power-1 does 4 points of damage, so the first example ship above
is scrod if hit.)  For that matter, I'd change things as they are now to say
that a Weapons-1 hit destroys a turret rather than a battery...with dynamically
reconfigurable controls, how can one hit wipe out ten turrets on a large ship,
or just knock out one weapon in a triple beam,sand and missile turret on a
small ship?

I can tell by your questions that you haven't looked at critical hits yet?
What is a bridge hit in the new game, and how do I designate the fact that
my ship has an auxiliary bridge?  Why should a computer system in triplicate
for redundant safety have all installations co-located so that a single
computer critical hit wipes out _all_ computer installations?  I think there
are a couple more of these, but I haven't got my rules with me today.

Rob

>   = Robert S. Dean
> > = George William Herbert

> > 	I've applied the erratta changes to combat tables, but have a few
> > questions about the Explanation of Damage Results.
> > 	One: do the 'crew sections' rules work, and if so, why? 8-) (they don't
> > make any sense to me, esp. in terms of damage)

  I suspect that they are a way of representing the 'density' of the crew.
A ship with a high density of crew will loose more crew from each hit simply
because more crew is 'in harms way'.

  As for the effects of lost crew, the first effect IMHO should be large
penalties for damage control (wich don't really appear in MegaT so how could
it be penalized:(. This also highlights a related problem with the way MegaT
handles crew and similar things.
  MegaT seems to assume that all members of the crew has their own little
console with a cozy acceleration couch somewhere in the ship. I believe that we
should factor in watches (each person works only 8 hours per day) and damage
control crew (those 'off duty') in this. Only about one third of the crew has
a 'real' crew station and the rest are usually idle, except when at battle-
stations when they serve as the damage control crew.

  In combat, this should mean that the ship could operate without penalty until
it was below 1/3rd crew, but that damage control and repairs would begin to
suffer immediately.
  (This is also my resoning behind that I count each robot as three crew: robots
are active around the clock. But without the other 2/3rds of the normal crew as
damage control crew, you better hope nothing breaks!)

> > 	Two: For damage to Power Plant, the rules say 'reduce UCP factor',
> > obviously a direct copy from High Guard.  Unfortunately, the craft design
> > rules no longer _use_ the UCP for powerplant rating or design.  How do you
> > handle PP damage?
>
> You don't have both sets of official errata?  In the second one (I think) is
> the part that says that you lose 10% of the 'disabled' damage point value
> of the power plant for each hit, with a minimum of two points...so a plant
> with a value of 4/8 would be disabled by 2 hits and destroyed by 4 more, but
> a plant with a value of 600/1200 would be disabled by ten hits, and destroyed
> by twenty more.

  The net result is that all plants over a certain size will take the same
number of hits to destroy, regardless of how large the battery hitting and how
large the drive hit:(

> Personally, for both of these I would like to see things replaced by absolute
> rather than relative damages.  (i.e. Crew-1 kills 10 people, if you've got lots
> you're OK, and Power-1 does 4 points of damage, so the first example ship above
> is scrod if hit.)

  I agree with this. I am thinking along similar lines with drive damage in
Rebel Guard, shortly it is:
  A minor critical hit on the manuever drive resulting from a hit by a battery
that did 1000 damage points will do the minimum of full inoperable damage for
the drive and 1000 damage points.
  The performance of the drive is degraded with full performance on zero damage
and zero performance at inoperable damage (ie a 100/200 5G manuever drive will
loose one G for every 20 points of damage).

  I'm in two minds on wether using full inoperable or half inoperable as
maximum, or maybe base it on the ships displacement.

> Rob

- - -bertil-
- - --
"Med ett sjyst ja"rnro"r sla^r man va"rlden med ha"pnad!"

Scott Kellogg writes:
> Auxiliary Bridges:
> On my Azhanti High Lightning conversion design, there are two bridges.
>
> To accomplish this I doubled the number of HUDs, HoloLink panels,
> and Large Holo displays.
> It went something like this:
> LrgHoloDisp=10*2, HoloHUD=20*2, HoloLink=200*2, AuxBridge installed
>
> I don't think we need double the number of computers, because in
> High Guard we didn't have to for the aux bridge.
> That's how I would (did, and will) do it in future.

You can if you like, but it seems to me that you are making the peculiar
assumption here that every control panel on the ship is concentrated on
the bridge.  No controls on the engines, or near the gun mounts?  If you've
got SOM (which you've quoted) it looks like dynamic reconfiguration ought
to let you get by without a physical bridge, which would certainly make a
'bridge hit' that didn't involve knocking out the entire distributed
computer network a bit problematic.

Personally, my inclination at the moment is toward rewriting the critical
hits table and replacing Bridge Destroyed with something like "Crew-1,
One Computer Destroyed, One of Each Comm and Sensor System Destroyed".

Rob Dean

Critical Hits for the most part didn't worry me that much.  A bridge hit is
about the same as it was before...same effects.  If you bothered to design in
a second bridge (not that anyone is, as far as I can see) to your MT ship, it
would nullify one bridge hit.
	I also don't know about undoing the weapon hit/battery correspondence.
Admittedly, it's a not well supported artificiality, but it will ruin some
game mechanics and slow things down a lot as you figure out how reconfiguring
weapons can be done... 8-)

	And unfortunately I seem to have missed the second set of erratta.  If
someone would copy them and mail them to me, I'd be much appreciative...
(will pay postage if you like 8-)

- - -george