hi,
This is a suggestion as to a possible way to handle disintegrators under
the 'new' TDR ship combat system.
Currently disintegrators are basically worthless weapons, they get less
'free' hits than meson guns, they are affected by armour, they don't get
internal damage hits. Altogether a pretty poor showing --- little better
than PAs. When you also consider that they are expensive, large, heavy and
suck power like nothing else they become totally useless (I won't mention the
Jump spinal mounts, they are VERY different to everything else and basically
not worth mentioning in a traditional TL game).
There are several different ways to fix this problem. Weaken the other spinal
weapons; strengthen the disintegrator weapons; use them to replace PAs at high
TLs rather than replace meson weapons.
Weakening the other weapons seems a bit excessive to me. Besides, combat
should be really really fatal and quick :-)
Using disintegrators as a PA replacement would be possible if you greatly
lighten the power/volume/weight/price requirements for them to something
comparable to PAs. Division of all these attributes by 5 or 10 would
bring them back into line but PAs would still be preferable in most
circumstances.
Strengthening a disintegrator is the other way to go. After some thought and
lots of heat arguments between Eric Halil and myself, we thought of some 'nice'
ways to improve them. They have to be pretty much single hits destroy style
weapons to match the large meson guns --- let a given disintegrator be capable
of totally destroying a given mass of matter on a hit. That causes ships to
be disintegrated properly and maybe absolutely. They should also cause major
damage to the ship's armour factor because they are physically removing it.
Also, the disintegration of matter is likely to produce quite major radation
effects so increase the number of radation damage rolls (unmodified?) and also
apply some damage rolls to ships that are using the taget as a screen or that
are screening the target (or apply some radation damage hits to all ships in
the same hex as the target). Finally, disintegration is likely to produce some
impressive quantities of EM radation over the entire spectrum so cause all
EM sensors (passive especially) to be either considered jammed or to suffer a
negative DM on sensor tasks [ this shouldn't be too much of a problem on
military ships since EM sensors aren't really necessary if you've got
densos and neutrio sensors ]. These sensors would be able to get a very nice
pinpoint upon the ship being hit since it would be a very impressive EM source.
I don't think that neutrio sensors or densotometers are going to be gravely
affects by the large scale disintegration of matter around the place. Could a
more physics orientated person verify these ideas?
The handling of the destruction of portions of the ship could be done:
1) percentage destroyed is the save for each of the major systems.
2) as 1 but also certain systems are destroyed after so many percent damage
reguardless of saves.
3) percentage degradation of some/all ships systems.
Also, things like the jump grid should always suffer a percentage degratation
as damage is taken (this kind of damage is mentioned in the 'official' rules
somewhere).
The powers at large in the imperium (GDW) seem to consider disintegrators to
be powerful weapons, so the modified ship combat/design systems should help
out a little.
Future work to be done:
Formalise these ideas a little bit more, giving damage rolls etc.
Convert them into something RebelGuard can use.
Rework the necessary sections of the ship design procedure for the TDR
vehicle/ship design group.
I'll get this done eventually, but it is going to have to wait for a little
while since I've got to devote some time to my work.
Any comments are appreciated.
Pauli
Paul Dale | Internet/CSnet: [email removed]
Dept of Computer Science| Bitnet: [email removed]
Uni of Queensland | JANET: [email removed]
Australia, 4072 | EAN: [email removed]
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f4e6g4Qh4++ | JUNET: [email removed]