Ship combat stuff

My favourite can of worms has been opened (yet again).....
[ I'm not going to make any comments about the rumoured 'new' version of
  Trav, except that they'd better do it right! ]


In message (2918?) Burton says:

>Another problem is missiles.  It takes a M-6 ship 1 turn to travel 6 hexes if
>starting from a standstill.  Missiles launched said ship when many hexes away
>hit THAT SAME TURN.  Ppbbtt!

I've got the same gripe with missiles.  Mayday had an almost reasonable system
for missiles (you had counters and they moved and could accelerate in a rather
limited fashion).  The problems with having missiles as ships is that you can
arrange to defend against them multiple times (by not getting hit until a
later turn), which may seriously impair the effectiveness of missiles.  I
think that was the agreement Bertil and I arrived at when we discussed this
topic.


>With a 30 second turn (3 personal combat turns), the hexes are 4.5km across
>(so we'll fudge it to 5km).

5km is getting awfully small, how many ships can you stack into a hex?
A 1Mton battleship is a measly 150m diameter sphere so you could get lots
of them in, however a cyclinder of the same volume with a base area of
10000m^2 (=1 hectare) is 1.35 km long (and the cross-section need not be
anything like that big).  A cone/wedge configuration will be even worse.
If I was in one of those 'big' ships, I wouldn't desire another one inside
the same hex as I was in.  [ I do know that ships of those sizes are not
really combat capable but they do serve as an example ].  Having 5km hexes is
also going to cause some havoc with ranges....how far can you see in space?
(a very large number of hexes).  Active sensors are going to have some really
impressive ranges (0.1 light seconds is almost 30000km, 6000 hexes for a round
trip).  This would tend to make having sensors pretty much a non-issue,
especially for the long range EMS ones.


>[] was experiencing was that two small ships (1 200 tons, the other 400 tons)
>[] could not do any damage to each other except Fuel-1, Weapons-1, and, I
>[] think, Maneuver-1 (I'm not sure about that because of the modifier screw

>Armor should be used similar to the 2300ad way -- shots that do not
>penetrate can cause surface hits.  This will most likely damage sensors,
>exposed comminications gear,turrets,and perhaps the maneuver drive (giv it half
>armor?). Everything else is unaffected.  Penetrating hits have the possiblility
>of producing surface damage in addition to internal damage.

Not a bad idea.  It shouldn't be too difficult to work something out along
these lines.


>This is the major problem I saw.  Another that I feel is wrong is the way
>hits are calculated.  Doubling the size of a component does not double the
>damage it can take, in my mind.  I have come up with a small formula based on
>hull volume and the hull armor weigh modifier to compute the hull hits.
>I use a square-root rule (4x volume is 2x effective).  At present the formula
>is something like SQRT(VOL/4050/WM)*7.  VOL is hull volume, WM is armor weight
>modifier.  "7" is the constant I use for basic hits, assuming crystaliron
>I think.  Steel ships have less, superdense have more, etc.  Assuming
>the normal armor, a 100t ship has 7 hull hits until it is "disabled", meaning
>no maneuvering allowed.  Perhaps at double this it just falls apart.

I kind of like this point.  The TDR ship people should have a look at this
to see if could be implanted without too many devistating side-effects.
It would also make ships even easier to damage which has to be a good thing :-)


>I really don't like the real movement very much when I'm playing a space-opera
>game.  I may try to use a variant of the 2300ad system, where ships have a
>raw speed for each turn.  Actually, I'd like to use some Star Fleet Battles
>Ideas as well.  With such a system, you actually have to plot your movement
>so as to expose your best weapons (or to hide battle damage to the armor.

Going towards SFB would make the ship design process much more interesting.  You
suddenly have to allocate positions for all of your weapons and (I presume)
firing arcs (cones?) for them.  This would add some details for die-hard board
gamers; while for the rest of us who really don't like lots of paperwork, it
would make the entire process quite tedious.  I made the suggestion (to Bertil
again ;-) that agility be used for multiple different tasks --- I seem to
remember that the three we came up with were: maneuvering, evasion, aiming of
fixed mount weapons.  Maneuvering is simply how fast/far you can move in a
round;  Evasion gives all incoming attacks a reduced penetration; and Aiming
gives you a bonus on your to-hit/damage (I forget which) for spinal mounts/any
fixed weapon.  These three different aspects all got allocated out of your
ship's agility pool.  i.e. you got to trade them off against each other.
I think that this might give a first order approximation to the excessive
system that SFB uses.  [ I don't mean to sound so hard on SFB, I actually
enjoy playing it ]




        						Pauli

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