CT Only: LBB 5 High Guard Starship Combat

[infojunky]

Just an Idea, have you ever considered retreading High Guard's 1000 dTon increment down to 100 dTons? At least in terms of Weapons installations.

So instead of a 50 ton bay you have a 5 ton bay....

 

[Whipsnade]

Without also scaling back the weapon factors, most ships would kill each other in the first combat round. The critical hits produced in most cases will be overwhelming.

Looking at hulls smaller than 1K dTons, EP requirements will be the biggest limiting factor to bay numbers and types. The smallest EP requirements in order are missiles, repulsors, and plasma guns. Mid range would be fusion guns and PAs in the order. The meson gun bay needs the most.

EP requirements will also limit gee rating, agility, and computer choice.

Back of the envelope time, at TL F I can build a 300 dTon hull, 6 gees, agility 6, PP 10, armor 15, computer J, with a crew of 6 (no gunners) and 79 dTons "left over" for gunner SRs, bays, power plant expansion for EPs, etc. If you want it jump, we'll probably need to increase the size some.

It would be a nasty little thing, but it's life expectancy would be close to nil.

 

[infojunky]

I didn't do a very good describing what I meant.

I meant to rescale the entire kit and kaboodle to the 100 ton increment. including the damage scale.

But mostly it is a intellectual exercise in scaling.

A battery of turrets becomes a turret (Note the 2 ton fusion gun turret remains under this as well)

A 50 ton bay becomes a 5 ton Barbette

100 ton bay becomes a 10 ton bay.

And so forth.

Note how they all drop cleanly into the smaller scale, as do the defenses.

Do note that power and agility formula would need to be adjusted to meet the new scale, but since it is just a factor of ten that isn't a problem. Though Bridge, life support and the like would remained unchanged...

Game play proceeds as per the book.

As I said just playing with a concept.

 

[kilemall]

BL is a great game. It's also insanely detailed and that's coming from a guy who enjoyed Avalon Hill's Trobruk and plays Victory Game's Fleet series with all the advanced and optional rules. For example, you need to create a "3D-ish" external/internal model of each ship to determine damage.

Imagine pushing a skewer through an orange. A weapon strike - the skewer - at the forward port ventral location of a ship - the orange - will damage/destroy the specific equipment/system located there and then, depending on weapon strength and armor, propagate through the ship damaging/destroying specific equipment/system along that path. It gets that detailed.

The game also included a "slide rule" to help the players keep track of all the Diff Mods that will effect each die roll.



BR is Mayday movement coupled with a stripped down version of the CT/MT USP. Combat (mostly) focuses on what HG2 calls critical hits. The "Swarm of small/weak ships mission kill large/strong ships via fuel hits" tactic doesn't occur.

No die rolls either. You flip a special deck of cards. That's interesting, but it can be "gamed".

Got BL on people's recommendation and it certainly is a high detail 'winner', but I oddly want to do more, and less then it has.

Your skewer descriptor is certainly the effect feel I want to do, but against the HG tables, with a different mix of range and armor.

I'm stuck at the moment with that whole simplicity/complex effect dynamic I'm trying to reach, some of the results are absurd before I even drop a version in here for people to chew on.

 

[nobby-w]

Does anybody play using LBB5 starship combat rules?

Do you like the abstract game?

It doesn't work well with smaller ships. You can re-balance it (try mixing in the Book 2 computer rules instead of the +/- difference in computer factor) but it is somewhat problematic for adventuring without mods.