Sure. It just seems to me that even for a small commercial / para-military scale RPG setting, the addition of some rules for armour would seem like and easy/obvious addition (even if just for the Patrol Cruiser and Mercenary Cruiser).
What works? How are ships and vehicles armed?
- Thread starter Badenov
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Sure. It just seems to me that even for a small commercial / para-military scale RPG setting, the addition of some rules for armour would seem like and easy/obvious addition (even if just for the Patrol Cruiser and Mercenary Cruiser).
The No-Armor thing is a huge paradigm shift, though. In RL, armor for ships isn't much good for anything past small arms, (and even more problematic for aircraft, which are very sensitive to weight) so if that's true for spacecraft as well, maybe no armor for spaceships is a better answer? I can certainly see putting on enough armor to matter against a particle beam might not be possible. Or maybe 1-4 points is a practical limit, just enough to soak the hits from ground-scale guns but not enough to make a big deal in space combat? This is definitely food for thought. 15 points of Naval armor takes turrets completely out of the equation in Mg1, which doesn't sit right either.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
LBB5.80 Armor formula
So the point is that until you reach TL=12+ armor is "ruinously expensive" in terms of hull fraction that needs to devoted to the stuff. You then wind up with a sort of perverse inversion, in which at lower tech levels power plants and maneuver drives (and thus, agility) is a "better defense" for the tonnage than armor ... but at higher tech levels armor becomes "cheap enough" to neutralize most weapons that aren't spinal mounts or meson guns (or both).
| Tech Level | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| Armor | 4a+4 | 4a+4 | 4a+4 | 3a+3 | 3a+3 | 2a+2 | 2a+2 | a+1 | a+1 |
| Max | 32% | 36% | 40% | 33% | 36% | 26% | 28% | 15% | 16% |
So the point is that until you reach TL=12+ armor is "ruinously expensive" in terms of hull fraction that needs to devoted to the stuff. You then wind up with a sort of perverse inversion, in which at lower tech levels power plants and maneuver drives (and thus, agility) is a "better defense" for the tonnage than armor ... but at higher tech levels armor becomes "cheap enough" to neutralize most weapons that aren't spinal mounts or meson guns (or both).
A 5 KTd destroyer, in CT, MT, and T20, isn't a meson spinal mount ship... because there's no room for crew, fleet speed, armor, screens, and j4...
They're usually a bay or two, and many turrets, as their envisaged fleet role is screening fighters and merchantmen. The minimum meson spinal is 1000Td at TL 13
The fundamental hierarchy in CT is that Mesons are king, but numbers can strip weapons and leave ya' crippled,
In MGT1, that was not accurate... the first to get a telling shot in was. But bigger is better, to a point.
I find myself wondering what eurisko would develop given MGT 2e rules...
ManOfGrey
SOC-12
I think it interesting that in Book - 2 Starships, armor was not an option. Yet later, in Book 5 - High Guard, armor could be included as an option.
This is in comparison to MegaTraveller, where a minimum amount of armor was required for a ship to be considered space-worthy.
And yet... despite that adding additional armor to a starship was optional, it is surprising how few naval architects took advantage of that option, and designed starships that were meant to go into harm's way do so with only the minimum amount of armor required.
The problem being that each bk 2 hit was one letter off, and most weapons did 1 hit. Only missiles did significantly more.
So... how to implement a suitable armor system for Bk 2?
I've given it a bunch of thought over the years.
My best solution:
Armor is a 2 Td per letter install, rating from the table, to maximum 5; when hit, roll 1d per hit of damage; if 1d ≤ armor rating, armor absorbs the hit, no effect. Any damage through to Hull hits armor first. Pulse Lasers +1 on the pen.
It works, minimum additional cruft, but, man, does it ever slow down fights.
@Badenov:
there have been basically 3 "scales" of universes discussed at length on COTI...
- Small Ship Universes 100⋯5000 Td, or MGT 1e's 100⋯2000 Td. Warships begin a 400Td, and typically peak at 2000 Td, simply due to drive issues
- Medium Ship Universes: 100⋯20,000 Td. Warships generally run 800⋯20,000.
- Some go an extra 5-10 k... with battleships in the 25-30 kT... to get in the Trek Dreadnought size.
- Large Ship Universes 100⋯500,000 Td. Warships generally 10,000-300,000, some BB's to 500,000
isco and ST:SNW are using smaller ships, too, some new trek fans.) Now the OTU is a large ship, Bk5 universe; most of the TNE and T4 ships were converted from Bk5 into the FF&S system, and tweaked a touch.
In a Bk2 SSU, you wind up with cruisers and battleships being carriers and/or troop ships. due to quirks of the 1 per 100 Td turret limit, and the lack of bays and spinals.
We've only got a few canonical warship sizes for the SSU... well, by comparison to
| Tons | Code | CT Data Ref | CT Plans | Ship | comments |
| 10 | F | Bk 2 Mayday | — | Fighter | CT core fighter. 6G, Mod/1 |
| ??? | ??? | Mayday | — | fighter | 4G, no computer |
| 100 | S | Bk 2 | S07 | Scoutship | Missing system: mission bay |
| 100 | ??? | Mayday | — | Scoutship | Launch, not A/R |
| 100 | ??? | Mayday | — | Escort | No carried craft |
| 100 | ??? | Mayday | — | Courier | Launch |
| 400 | T | Bk2 Mayday | S07 | Patrol Cruiser Patrol Cutter | Great as a small Bk2 warship. Lousy as a bk 5 one. |
| 400 | CE | S07 | S07 | Close Escort, Gazelle | a 400 Td design with 100 of that the drop tanks... also incorporates draft material for Bk5. |
| 400 | P | S04 | — | Corsair | Bk 2 & undocumented stealth features. |
| 800 | C | Bk2 A07 Mayday | A07 | Cruiser (Mayday) Mercenary Cruiser (CT Core) | 2 cutters as well as its own weapons, but it can theoretically replace one of those with 5 fighters... |
| 1250 | BC | A01 | A01 | Battlecruiser | Mixed HG preview and Bk2 design. |
Types P & S have documented but not mechanically described features
the 100 Td Mayday ships appear to be different mostly in programs used.
In the various CT Alien Modules, the "Cruiser" was usually 1000Td.
The Zhodani Vlezhdatl Strike Cruiser was 2000Td.
I would go with 3000Td for a BB in a Small Ship Universe.
They're all written after bk 5.
It was. Unfortunately, still WIP at the time of his passing IIRC.
To be quite honest, I'd strongly advise against using either version of SS3. It's an unbalanced mess. You could go about completely rewriting it, but I'd prefer fixing the combat systems for before tackling that.
That would be because the MT design rules made it really hard to design ships with decent drives and much of anything else. That's also why those ships are all TL15.I think it interesting that in Book - 2 Starships, armor was not an option. Yet later, in Book 5 - High Guard, armor could be included as an option.
This is in comparison to MegaTraveller, where a minimum amount of armor was required for a ship to be considered space-worthy.
And yet... despite that adding additional armor to a starship was optional, it is surprising how few naval architects took advantage of that option, and designed starships that were meant to go into harm's way do so with only the minimum amount of armor required.
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mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
I have been trying for years to come up with a way to use LBB:5 armour with LBB:2.
Let's try again.
AV14 immune to turret beam laser
AV16 immune to pulse laser
Armour can't be damage reduction, it is the binary choice of damage or no damage, although there is the potential for the pulse laser since it does 2 hits.
I don't like adding extra die rolls, so do I use the 2d damage table roll in some way or the 2d to hit roll?
Let's try again.
AV14 immune to turret beam laser
AV16 immune to pulse laser
Armour can't be damage reduction, it is the binary choice of damage or no damage, although there is the potential for the pulse laser since it does 2 hits.
I don't like adding extra die rolls, so do I use the 2d damage table roll in some way or the 2d to hit roll?
It sounds like the way armor works in LBB5 is so different than the way it works in Mg1 that there's not really any comparison. In Mg1, it flat out subtracts from the amount of damage done to the ship, and is easily bought in amounts that, even at TL12, make turret weapons ineffective, or at least unreliable for the very heaviest. It seems like in CT, this is not the case at all?
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
Simplest solution that I can think of would be that when using LBB2 damage tables, each 2 points of armor (round fractions down) gives the defender +1 reroll of the damage results and the defender gets to pick which dice result "happens" as the damage taken. This means that higher armor values enable defenders to "funnel" the damage results to choices which avoid destruction or "mission kill" type outcomes, thereby "soaking" the incoming damage more effectively into "sacrificial results" that the defender can survive.
That way, the damage still "happens" but the results drop off in "effectiveness" due to the armor.
There are multiple damage results which if hit repeatedly produce "no additional (useful to an attacker) damage effect" under LBB2 combat rules.
That way, armored craft become "tough" in a way that is meaningful to the designers and crews occupying them, relative to the alternative of unarmored craft. It also means that armor is "no guarantee" of survival, but it's definitely "better than nothing" when it comes to improving the odds of survival for a defender taking hits.
Game mechanically, it's a bit like a "roll at advantage/disadvantage" game mechanic that can broaden out into a "dice pool" of possible results, which then lets the defender PICK the results they want to endure (because, armor).
For armor vs. attack roll:
- Take the HG Armor Value and divide by 3 (round up fractions)
- Result is treated as a Disadvantage Roll mechanic to the to the "to hit" roll of the attacker, where the adjusted value is the number of additional disadvantage dice rolled.
- So for Factor 9 Armor: 9/3 = 3
- Attacker rolls 5 Dice, use the lowest two for attack roll
- # of Hull hits are ignored up to the HG Armor value
- Critical Hit reduces HG Armor value by one and always produce an effective Hull hit
If you designate that two of the dice need to be of a particular color, you can even specify those to be the "primary" dice, so that on a miss if the "primary" dice would have hit, you know it was an armor hit as opposed to a clean miss.
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There is also potential for missiles, which do 1D6 hits in LBB2.
For armor vs. damage result:
- Take the HG Armor Value and divide by 3 (round up fractions)
- Result is a DM by which the damage result is "skewed" (-/+) toward the median result ('7"), with excess DM points ignored.
- # of Hull hits are ignored up to the HG Armor value
- Critical Hit reduces HG Armor value by one and always produce an effective Hull hit
In my LBB2 modification, Book 5 armor has two effects:
A combination of ship size and Book 5 armor factor yields the hull defense value, typrically between 0 and 3 for LBB2-size ships. This is simply a negative DM to hit. The same negative DM applies to the 1D damage roll for missiles (which can be reduced to 0).
A fixed value depending on the ship's hull configuration, plus the armor factor yield hull integrity. Hull, fuel and hold hits reduce it. Current hull integrity limits the ship's maneuvering abilitiy. Reduction to 0 or less will eventually result in the ship breaking apart.
The idea was to give every point of armor factor a bit of usefulness, but otherwise integrate with LBB2's systems as smoothly as possible. The idea was not to emulate LBB5 armor effects for small ships because those are boring and ridiculous (pointlessly blasting away at each other for weeks on end and all that.)
I took a different tack to truly merge LBB2/LBB5.
Maneuver like LBB2, missiles tracked, to hit per LBB5 with two modifications-
-1 weapon factor per 100000km for any particle/energy weapon and +1 per 10000 km closer then 100000 km.
250000 km or less is short range.
Armor and weapon factor compared for all surface impact, if the weapon number is not higher than armor, it doesn’t penetrate. Nukes get + 6 pen to their value. Higher vee missiles get better pen/damage but not increase to hit.
New damage table based on the CT one, but with expanded effects that have one type roll for surface (1d6), one for radiation (1d6+3), one for internals (1d6+6), and the regular (2d6) for spinal PA hits, nukes. Damage is split in half for two hits, one surface or internal unless spinal PA/nuke, 2d6 for all else.
Damage is calced per the black globe EP system with each EP translating to 10 tons. Damage is abstracted so no countdown of system factors, instead a failure roll occurs that checks on percentage tonnage and steps through 50% factor, factor 1, disabled and destroyed at all tonnage damage.
Critical hits is disabled not destroyed- a roleplay artifice to create engineering drama.
More to it but that’s the basics.
Maneuver like LBB2, missiles tracked, to hit per LBB5 with two modifications-
-1 weapon factor per 100000km for any particle/energy weapon and +1 per 10000 km closer then 100000 km.
250000 km or less is short range.
Armor and weapon factor compared for all surface impact, if the weapon number is not higher than armor, it doesn’t penetrate. Nukes get + 6 pen to their value. Higher vee missiles get better pen/damage but not increase to hit.
New damage table based on the CT one, but with expanded effects that have one type roll for surface (1d6), one for radiation (1d6+3), one for internals (1d6+6), and the regular (2d6) for spinal PA hits, nukes. Damage is split in half for two hits, one surface or internal unless spinal PA/nuke, 2d6 for all else.
Damage is calced per the black globe EP system with each EP translating to 10 tons. Damage is abstracted so no countdown of system factors, instead a failure roll occurs that checks on percentage tonnage and steps through 50% factor, factor 1, disabled and destroyed at all tonnage damage.
Critical hits is disabled not destroyed- a roleplay artifice to create engineering drama.
More to it but that’s the basics.
During the Age of Dreadnoughts, ship armor was most certainly was a Thing. They didn't build it into their ships just for show. Most projectiles were not fired so as to plunge in from above (like a bomb from dive bomber), rather they were fired "direct fire" and came in at shallow angles. A large round could certainly do damage to the superstructure of the ship, take out a gun bay, etc. But those weren't the vulnerable parts. The main turrets were also heavily armored.
The Hood exploded because her armor was breached and her magazine exploded.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Bad luck and insufficient protection.
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