Re: (4159) engine rooms and starship combat...

In your letter dated Tue, 19 May 92 09:29:18 CST, you wrote:
>
> >I kind of like the idea that a weapon still causes damage even though
> >it may not penetrate the hull.  I heartily appaud this idea.
> >Assigning chassis damage is a good idea.  Also burning it's armor off
> >sounds plausible.
>
> I agree.  I'm skeptical about burning off armour unless the weapons
> are really horrendous (large nukes, spinal mounts, MANY batteries of
> lesser stuff).

I agree with Steve.  Burning off armor is probably not necessary in a game
sense, as long as _some_ hull damage is occuring from what are currently
the "no damage" hits.  Let's look at the current vehicle combat rules,
scaled up to starships, for a second.  A 200 ton free/far trader has hull
points of 180/450 under the current rules.  A 250MW beam laser would do
500 points of damage on a "full penetration hit", and 50 points on a
"no penetration hit".  Now recalling that vehicles get their damage
multiplied by ten, that would be 1800 points to disable the hull.  That's
only 36 laser shots--three fire phases from a ship with 4 triple turrets
with beam lasers (which would make a decent system defense boat in this
system...)  As it stands now, the poor SDB probably has all of his turrets
arranged as one factor 5 battery, which will cause weapon-1, maneuver-1 or
fuel-1 three times...  (Critical hits on a 5 battery vs. a 200 ton ship
disregarded.)

Rob Dean