High Guard 1.5 (<1979 edition)

[mike wightman]

I think we are getting somewhere with this

 

[robject]

I think we are getting somewhere with this

Mostly that was you and me getting a level-set on how the OTU appears to be. I think we're affirming many important fundamentals, but there are also some less-sure ideas there as well to consider and modify.

---

SURE

0. Traveller's basic assumptions of (a) layered defense and (b) Tech is a force multiplier.
1. Size is an indicator of a BCS.
2. HG79/80 Types of damage (surface explosion, interior explosion, radiation, special, critical and ship explodes).
3. HG79's more abstract attack strength by type, as opposed to the more flexible HG80.
4. We like the idea of a SpineMaker.
5. We like the idea that BCS battles are more about ship-crits than component attrition.
6. BCS' non-exclusive focus is on capital ships.

---

LESS SURE

1. _How_ all of the above work.

 

[mike wightman]

Does Marc consider BBs like the Tigress to be BCS or the larger FCS - fleet class ships as T5 defines them?

Are the rules for BCS to include the larger FCS capitals?

AotI defines thus

capital. capital ship. A major warship, for example a battleship, battlecruiser, fleet
carrier or dreadnought.

while T5 defines the sizes as

Battle Class Ships
Ships from 2500 tons upward to about 100,000 tons. Battle class ships may
be encountered but are rarely under the control of player characters. They are
important for strategic decisions in naval warfare.
Fleet Class Ships
The ultimate in starships: the largest of ships with tonnages in hundreds of
thousands of tons (to the practical maximum of about a million tons).
Fleet class ships are most important in strategic government operations

 

[robject]

For the sake of sanity, let's break this into a new thread.

 

[whartung]

Or maybe the easy way out is the best way out -- grant DMs based on size class.

Crits are already DM by size. A 3 Factor laser shot is 3 crits with a -DM of ship size. There is no weapon that can directly crit a Tigress.

Armor also protects against crits and interior explosions, and you need crits to reduce armor.

Meson guns skip all that, which makes them an outlier. A meson can can crit the ship. But it pretty much takes a spinal mount to do that.

Were it not for a meson gun, a Tigress would be almost invulnerable (almost).

The 2 knock-out-of-fight crits are Ship Explosion and Fuel Tanks Shattered. Those are one shot, one kill. The rest can be mitigated with Frozen watch and redundant systems (easier said than done).

A meson gun hitting a ship has a .5% chance of vaporizing the ship.

The worrisome affects are Screens and Computer hits, as they make the ship easier to hit in the future. And the Crew hits will knock the ship out of the fight.

The crew hit is, to me, the singular problematic hit result. 1 Crew hit disables the ship. That almost makes sense on a small ship, but on something like the Tigress, not at all. There's a LOT of people on the Tigress.

If the ruling was that a ship reduced to 1/2 its crew factor was disabled, it would be a better result I think.

I have no problem with a crit knocking out a drive, any drive. It's not like a V-12 is going to run well on 9 cylinders, doesn't work that way. This is where ideally you'd have redundant drives. An aircraft carrier has 4 screws. Take out one, and it's still a fighting ship.

Only power plants are "scalable" that way. (Add another power plant, get more power), You can't stack M-Drives, for example. 6 1G drives to get 6G and 6 M-Drive hits.

That's where the system can use a bit of work to better mitigate crits.

 

[mike wightman]

Most of your replies are HG80 focused - this is HG79+

The point is to adapt HG79 - there is no weapon that can crit a Tigress, well in the new rules a Tigress class spinal can crit a Tigress and blow up cruisers.
Armour has to be penetrated in the 79 rules, it doesn't reduce crits at the moment but maybe it could when you use that Tigress class PA on a Heavy Cruiser or Battle Rider.
Crew hits in HG79 do not disable a ship, just stop it firing (I would strongly recommend a simple fix to this crew reduction is used as a -DM to penetrate rather than a flat 'no weapons can be fired')

 

[robject]

So it's been a bit over a year and I've been soaking on these concepts.

I've abandoned the "normalization" step in HG79.

I've retained the method of tallying up points to get an attack factor for weapons.

I've also considered ways to separate the small ships from the larger ships, and the spines from everything else. But they don't mesh with HG1 very well, so I'll just say that the pea shooters need to be separated from the bays. This solves the ACS problem. Both are already separated from spines.

Just today I've wondered if fractional attack factors are the solution. This would help in two ways:

1. It requires small ships to attack larger ships en masse, adding their factors together to something effective. This requires CommCasters.
2. It solves the factor scale problem by demoting small batteries to a fractional factor.

 

[Spinward Flow]

1. It requires small ships to attack larger ships en masse, adding their factors together to something effective. This requires CommCasters.

This is one of the few ways to make small craft fighters effective ... massed fires.

Each small craft can have only a single turret's "worth" of weaponry, which puts some extremely strict upper limits on code factors. Those limitations on code factors then mean that against larger hulls those fighters become substantially irrelevant (aside from the need to swat them down like the pests they are).

A lot of that changes when you can have a group of fighters "fly in formation" and attack as a group against a single target. Instead of throwing lots of little batteries against the target (and probably failing because low code factors), they mass fire as a single large battery against the target (thereby becoming a threat that needs to be dealt with). Being able to coordinate Time On Target attacks in order to mass fires like that can then become a decisive factor in both military planning, procurement, training and doctrine.

CT included no such rules to make such things possible ... but there's no reason why house rules allowing it in CT can't be advanced.

 

[kilemall]

Hmmm reducing rolls?

I have a few for that CT/HG hybrid-

If the battery/spine strength is less then the armor, it cannot penetrate. This can mean that bay weapons cannot penetrate Armor 10+, so they target weaker armor ships for the most part.

Smaller ships require higher percentages of space to get armor values, the capital ships add the +1 or +2 size value to whatever level they have for free.

Weapon battery values drop 1 every 100000 km of distance, so you can maneuver to get no pen or close to pen. They also do less damage, except for missiles which do more damage the more comparative velocity on impact.

At longer ranges only spinal weapons can reach and penetrate higher armor ships.

Damage is calced off the energy damage values from the black globe rules.

Bays can combine to form super batteries above value 9, subject to battery bearing rules and only getting +1 added value per added battery.

More then one spinal can be mounted on ships large enough to carry them.

There is more to it, but this technique reduces many many rolls. Flip side, this is an LBB2 maneuver game not Imperium/LBB5 line em up so involves tracking moves, missile swarms and distance/blocking rules.

 

[robject]

So here's a wild-ass guesstimate of what I'm thinking of.

POINTS BY TL

Large Bay	TL 10	TL 11	TL 12	TL 13	TL 14	TL 15
Laser/CommCaster	8	10	12	14	16	18
Plasma/Fusion	7	10	20	25	38	45
Particle Accel.	7	10	15	20	25	30
Missile Launcher	30	30	30	38	38	38
Jump Damper	-	-	-	-	10	16
DataCaster	4	10	25	40	55	70
Ortillery	-	-	4	10	20	30

Points	300	1000	3000	6000	12,000	20,000	32,000	50,000	80,000
Factor	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9

1. With massed fire, you can increase your attack by one factor.
2. ACS cannot participate at this level without using massed fire rules.
3. Fractional factor strength has some significance.
4. CommCasters make mass fire possible.

Thus a TL15 ship with one 100t Missile Launcher is rated as a Factor 0.126; eight of these ships could attack at Factor-1; otherwise they're ineffective.


80,000 points is a LOT of 100t bays. A Factor-9 missile battery is 80,000 points / 38 points per LBay = 2105 Large Bays.

 

[robject]

Fractions are a pain, though.

So today's thought is to take those fractional concerns and instead separate bays from small emplacements entirely.

The spines are already separated, both by rating and by function.

So, separate the bays by function as well as rating, too.

 

[mike wightman]

Separating the weapon types into different strings for the USP is something I have suggested before.
eg
spinal -P.M.D- particle, meson , disintegrator
bay - P.M.E.T - energy, torpedo
turret - L.M.E.P
defences - A.D.M.G.L.E - armour damper meson screen globe laser energy

 

[whartung]

Fractions are a pain, though.

Indeed.

If you're going to have fractions, i.e. 1/2, just double and scale everything.

And if you're "mass firing" larger ships (i.e. not fighters), then it's creeping out of a tactical system, and into a more operational system.

 

[Spinward Flow]

And if you're "mass firing" larger ships (i.e. not fighters), then it's creeping out of a tactical system, and into a more operational system.

When you can coordinate mass fires between multiple craft (from fighters to capital ships) you start moving into the realm of FLEET TACTICS and FLEET FORMATIONS ... because the "shape" of your forces determines both what you can do and what you are vulnerable to ... and at that point, you enter the realm of the Legend of the Galactic Heroes.