Mayday Guard- Bringing Movement To HG2

[kilemall]

Hmm, okay, that's a reasonable approach then.

I want more nuanced damage increase closing and the breakpoint to be 100,000 km not 300,000 km (want a factor of 10 in there) and the 100s phasing is integral to the fight the ship paradigm, so probably not appropriating that part.

I had already been considering how to do a 12-direction maneuver set to get it as close to our usual method as possible for maneuver (graph paper), so it will be handy to have a worked out system for that.

The nice thing about graph plots for Traveller or Harpoon is that you have a nice artifact of the battle when you are done.

 

[kilemall]

BL has a completely different maneuver system than Mayday or BR. BL has the 12 facings, but maneuver is through thrusting, then turning, in contrast to Mayday/BR where you can simply put the ship anywhere you want within the G window of your drive.

Er, not quite getting that, the Mayday version near as I could tell had a counter thrust in X direction to add to Y momentum to arrive at Z location heading and speed. What is the difference?

BL has a Technical Booklet, which is essentially a condensed FF&S1. As long as you want to work with the weapon selection in the booklet, then it's fine. But BL is ACS+ sized combat, BR is designed for the 10+KdTon ships. You could build a 1MdTon ship with BL, but it would just have a zillion lasers, and killing such a ship would be tedious at best. Augment with FF&S to make bigger guns for the larger ships. BL Tech Booklet is very good, it could be a wee bit simplified by bundling the detail of all the electronics systems in to a single package, just to get rid of some detail. But BL is all about detail.

Ya, not big on that for my NDP ships, and TNE-style detail goes against what I envision our ships are like, from what I have seen between the lines.

In any event I would be translating HG designs into the simpler resolution format, or more likely lifting maneuver/combat specific resolution systems into an HG ship format.

BR has no facing rules under the basic rules, BL does. BL lets you change your facing proportionally to the amount of thrust you use during the turn. If you're burning full G, then you're not going to be able to point the front of the ship wherever you want. BR has advanced rules that sorta mimics this behavior. For small ships, arcs don't mean much save for spinals. BL considers things like rolling, as ships essentially have 3 arcs: front, middle, back. It has 20 hit locations, but most of them are available to be hit from any particular angle since they assume your ship is rolling. You could always say your ship isn't rolling if you wanted, taking weapons out of play, but also taking hit locations out as well.

Now this is definitely how I view our ships operating, and of course exactly the sort of tradeoffs one wants between acceleration, weapons use, damage potential, etc.

Among other things that puts a premium on being on the edge of a fight and being able to choose the 'broadside to unmask' and where the weapons are placed, counter to that is a split fleet hitting from both sides.

But splitting fleets has it's own risks.

Both games use thrusting to light up sides of the ship for detection. So, if you're decelerating in to combat, expect to be lit up by your opponents as they lock on to that bright, shiny thruster pointing at them.

I settled on that in the Sensors and Engagement range thread, main engines are an 'active' system just like RADAR-LIDAR/firing weapons/radio-laser comms, etc. and so once you decide to thrust, might as well turn on all the eyes.

Being active makes you easier to detect and again lock on, but vice versa for the active craft detecting everyone else, including passive and stealth craft.

So, major datum point and lock mechanism, but not more-so then weapons or especially active sensors.

No real stealth here, but there is Electro Magnetic Masking packages which can add 1 or 2 diff mods to the detection rolls. This effectively makes ships smaller. They always know "something is out there", they just can't quite get a lock on it if you have an EMM package.

I'm assuming two directions- classic stealth in terms of emission reduction, whether a return on actives or system emissions or a more drastic 'shut the ship down' move, and countermeasures, which I liken to 'space chaffroc' and creates a gigantic return/emission where it is difficult to pick out the ship's actual position from a large false bubble.

In both cases, you turn on any active system (shoot/move/comms in a detectable cone) and you lose that effect.

You also have missile based jammers and missile detonation white outs to try and break lock on.

The man does love his EMP EW doesn't he. I'm assuming too broad a spectrum, too big a VLA and too much computing power for just EMP detonations to do the job.

BL and BR handle missiles differently. BL is more detailed and designed for ships dying through the thousand cuts as lasers poke deep, itty bitty holes in to ships. Missiles are basically laser platforms.

More Star Cruiser with the detlasers. Perhaps a more realistic conception of missiles, but we have plenty of lasers already, I think I'm sticking with kinetic punch as a differentiating weapon/tactical choice.

Of course, the missile rules are just like the missile rules have been since the beginning (The missiles are basically 12G12 missiles -- that is a 12 G drive with 12 G-Turns of fuel), that is before the complete nonsense that is S3 Special Edition "no missiles have always been like this despite 15 years of game development history to the contrary, through different versions, through different authors plus the extra 15 years of nobody is telling anyone about how wrong it's all been interpreted that whole time" Revised BS. So, you'll hate the missiles.

Er, wow, I must have set a lot of nerves on edge with that set of assertions.

Heh, I'll see if this rulebook continues with that paradigm you all hold so dear, but a missile that putters along at such a snail's pace for the classic interpretation is near to useless, and even without seeing the rules seems to me the designer was seeing what I was seeing, pretty much useless at pokey 5-6 G speeds.

I don't know that I could ever code a 12G12 missile with 6 hours of fuel with anything like a straight face, but at least the damn thing could hit some targets eventually.

BR is a Big Gun (i.e. meson and PAs) means Big Crit's and dead ships system, so idiomatic BL missiles don't really work (since most lasers aren't big on crits anyways). So, Chadwick tweaked the missile game to give them more punch and to make them effective in BR.

Hmmm, I'm intending to treat turret missiles one way and bay missiles as big HG missiles as per the Striker definition. Best I can figure, bay missiles are 5x as big as the CT trad missile rack missile, 250 kg as per the SS3 design process.

Since sensors/detonators and the like will be a smaller proportion of the missile total, I'll probably do some SS3 design studies to validate, get them going faster and/or longer, and figure out what each bay missile value really means (more missiles, smarter missiles working as a pack, and/or better warheads).

Looks like i might have to get both products, as the BL maneuver and BR missiles are what interest me most out of those systems.

I'm also going to have to have a gut check on terminal missile maneuver and detection. Could be at greater ranges they are more autonomous and 'attack ship with this profile' coding due to extreme differences in the sort of EW power/computing/signal jamming advantage a defending ship has at 1 LS+.

 

[aramis]

Mayday: 3 counters - past location, present location, future location. Maneuvers affect future location, then counters shuffled forward one step, with a new future location. facing ignored.

Brilliant Lances: 1 counter, shows facing. Maneuvers increase/decrease speed, or, if speed low enough and thrust high enough, change direction of movement. At higher speeds, thrust must accumulate to change movement direction.

Both are valid methods, but Mayday is more "natural," as it handles better high speed engagement. Note that by high speed, we're talking speeds in excess of 12 hexes per turn, which are not particularly fast for in-system travel at all.

 

[whartung]

Er, not quite getting that, the Mayday version near as I could tell had a counter thrust in X direction to add to Y momentum to arrive at Z location heading and speed. What is the difference?

Mayday is where you start with 2 counters: one where the ship is, and the other where the ship will be next turn (thus representing the vector). Maneuver is performed by adjusting the future marker, and you can normally adjust the marker by as many hexes as you have a G rating. The number of hexes distant from the original future point is how many Gs of maneuver that were applied. It's very simple. BR uses the same system.

BL is completely different. You only have one marker on the map, the rest is represented on the control form for the ship. Specifically, in order to turn the ship, you must apply G-Turns opposite the direction you wish to turn the ship. It cost 1/2 G Turn for each hex of velocity to turn the ship 30 degrees (i.e. 1 facing -- BL has 12 facings).

So, if you ship is moving speed 4, and heading direction 6, and you wish to turn port, to direction 5, you would need to spend 2 G Turns of fuel.

So, in BL, your vector is represented as a heading (1-12) and a velocity. Whereas in Mayday, it's represented as a differential managed by the counters, giving implicit heading and velocity. In BL your headings are in 30 deg increments, whereas in Mayday they can be most any actual heading (notably more so when the ship is faster, as you're still limited by the granularity of the hex map).

In BL you have the issue with faster vectors. Consider a ship with a 1G drive and a velocity of 6. That ship needs to spend 3 G Turns of thrust to make a single heading change. A 1 G drive can not do that all at once in a single turn. So, in BL, you can accumulate G turns over time. In this case, the ship would need to burn for 3 turns, and would make the facing change on the 3rd turn.

However, as you accumulate thrust, you're more and more committed to the turn. Specifically if after the 2nd turn, after you have accumulated 2 G Turns of thrust, you wish to turn the opposite way, well, you have to burn down those accumulated G Turns and start accumulating in the opposite direction. So, it would take 5 turns to change your mind and turn the opposite direction.

Of course, you can slow the ship down, and once your accumulated G Turns exceeds the amount necessary for the turn, the ship turns. As an artifact of this mechanic, you can store up the accumulated G in advance, and then apply the final thrust to actually make the turn later. So, for example, you could accumulate 2 G turns of thrust, and then coast for some turns, and then apply the remaining thrust and engage the turn.

I think the Mayday way is simpler to use. The BL system is more explicit on facing compared to Mayday, that's the only reason I can think of why they went with the new system vs the old system.

I settled on that in the Sensors and Engagement range thread, main engines are an 'active' system just like RADAR-LIDAR/firing weapons/radio-laser comms, etc. and so once you decide to thrust, might as well turn on all the eyes.

Being active makes you easier to detect and again lock on, but vice versa for the active craft detecting everyone else, including passive and stealth craft.

All sensor systems are the same, only the DMs are different .

The man does love his EMP EW doesn't he. I'm assuming too broad a spectrum, too big a VLA and too much computing power for just EMP detonations to do the job.

Well I dunno about that. Hard to get a signal through white noise, that's how I see it. I mean, the EMP is just another DM to the equation, it's not a wall.

More Star Cruiser with the detlasers. Perhaps a more realistic conception of missiles, but we have plenty of lasers already, I think I'm sticking with kinetic punch as a differentiating weapon/tactical choice.

Chadwicks POV on this is simply that anything that can get close enough to the ship is guaranteed to be met by a defending laser. The laser simply can not miss. If missiles are cheap and can swarm to overwhelm the defending lasers, then so be it (in TNE they're not that cheap, essentially being small ships themselves). The second is if you are shooting hard things at each other, at space combat speeds, things, anything, hit REALLY hard. So, if you're flinging missiles at each other, and they're impacting, then warheads may well be more useful simply as adding mass to the overall potential energy equation than bringing any actual value themselves by detonating. Explosives are not that explosive in vacuum which makes "near misses" not particularly useful, and if you're actually impacting the ship, explosives aren't really necessary.

So missiles either hit at "not quite relativistic but damn they really, really hurt" speeds, or they detonate in to a bright flash that does little more than make pretty sparkles in space (or cascade "not quite relativistic…" shrapnel all over the ship).

This is why he favors det lasers. Get the laser in close enough to do damage before the defender takes out the platform.

 

[kilemall]

Mayday: 3 counters - past location, present location, future location. Maneuvers affect future location, then counters shuffled forward one step, with a new future location. facing ignored.

Brilliant Lances: 1 counter, shows facing. Maneuvers increase/decrease speed, or, if speed low enough and thrust high enough, change direction of movement. At higher speeds, thrust must accumulate to change movement direction.

Both are valid methods, but Mayday is more "natural," as it handles better high speed engagement. Note that by high speed, we're talking speeds in excess of 12 hexes per turn, which are not particularly fast for in-system travel at all.

Mayday as I recall is 5 hours 1LS hexes, going fast in that game is really booking relative to these other scales published or proposed.

My scale starts off slow but can get cranking in a few turns especialy if 3G or higher, and a more 'classic' time scale (not to mention to break up into those 100s action phases). So faster move resolution is of interest.

 

[kilemall]

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Mayday is where you start with 2 counters: one where the ship is, and the other where the ship will be next turn (thus representing the vector). Maneuver is performed by adjusting the future marker, and you can normally adjust the marker by as many hexes as you have a G rating. The number of hexes distant from the original future point is how many Gs of maneuver that were applied. It's very simple. BR uses the same system.

BL is completely different. You only have one marker on the map, the rest is represented on the control form for the ship. Specifically, in order to turn the ship, you must apply G-Turns opposite the direction you wish to turn the ship. It cost 1/2 G Turn for each hex of velocity to turn the ship 30 degrees (i.e. 1 facing -- BL has 12 facings).

So, if you ship is moving speed 4, and heading direction 6, and you wish to turn port, to direction 5, you would need to spend 2 G Turns of fuel.

So, in BL, your vector is represented as a heading (1-12) and a velocity. Whereas in Mayday, it's represented as a differential managed by the counters, giving implicit heading and velocity. In BL your headings are in 30 deg increments, whereas in Mayday they can be most any actual heading (notably more so when the ship is faster, as you're still limited by the granularity of the hex map).

In BL you have the issue with faster vectors. Consider a ship with a 1G drive and a velocity of 6. That ship needs to spend 3 G Turns of thrust to make a single heading change. A 1 G drive can not do that all at once in a single turn. So, in BL, you can accumulate G turns over time. In this case, the ship would need to burn for 3 turns, and would make the facing change on the 3rd turn.

However, as you accumulate thrust, you're more and more committed to the turn. Specifically if after the 2nd turn, after you have accumulated 2 G Turns of thrust, you wish to turn the opposite way, well, you have to burn down those accumulated G Turns and start accumulating in the opposite direction. So, it would take 5 turns to change your mind and turn the opposite direction.

Of course, you can slow the ship down, and once your accumulated G Turns exceeds the amount necessary for the turn, the ship turns. As an artifact of this mechanic, you can store up the accumulated G in advance, and then apply the final thrust to actually make the turn later. So, for example, you could accumulate 2 G turns of thrust, and then coast for some turns, and then apply the remaining thrust and engage the turn.

I think the Mayday way is simpler to use. The BL system is more explicit on facing compared to Mayday, that's the only reason I can think of why they went with the new system vs the old system.

Well that's unpleasant. Sounds more like a wallowing supertanker turn then point and thrust in intended correction direction, not to mention strange sounding.

Facing would be determined by which way you are pointing the main maneuver drive, assuming reaction drives. If you are looking to decel and go back the way you came, that drive will be 'forward' and thrusting in effectively full reverse (or properly speaking accel the other way).

If you need to point the spinal weapon, you are pointing at your target.

Agility maneuver as opposed to accel means any facing can hit since the ship is spending its maneuver to spin around using thrusters to generate a wider range of potential quick bursts without altering the main course or velocity.

Simple.

Unfortunately doesn't sound like a 12-point Mayday. Hrrrm.

Chadwicks POV on this is simply that anything that can get close enough to the ship is guaranteed to be met by a defending laser. The laser simply can not miss. If missiles are cheap and can swarm to overwhelm the defending lasers, then so be it (in TNE they're not that cheap, essentially being small ships themselves). The second is if you are shooting hard things at each other, at space combat speeds, things, anything, hit REALLY hard. So, if you're flinging missiles at each other, and they're impacting, then warheads may well be more useful simply as adding mass to the overall potential energy equation than bringing any actual value themselves by detonating. Explosives are not that explosive in vacuum which makes "near misses" not particularly useful, and if you're actually impacting the ship, explosives aren't really necessary.

So missiles either hit at "not quite relativistic but damn they really, really hurt" speeds, or they detonate in to a bright flash that does little more than make pretty sparkles in space (or cascade "not quite relativistic…" shrapnel all over the ship).

This is why he favors det lasers. Get the laser in close enough to do damage before the defender takes out the platform.

Not an unreasonable take, but I am also looking for differing tactical/maneuver choices and ship/fleet designs that flow from those choices.

As such, impactor missiles are far too tasty to write out.

My view is similar re: lasers and all manner of beam weapons getting down to the last 10,000 km.

The difference are things like missile packs, where maybe 10% are the brains and sensors, 30% are pure penaids, 20% are additional LR sensors/comm relays, and the remaining 40% are the actual damaging warheads.

So it's not 'laser CIWS' vs. stupid missile, more like PD against the missile team.

I'm not given my missiles any hit or PD miss advantage to speed. 1-G or 300-G, the calc is the same.

The impacting missiles like in SS3 would be like APHE rounds penetrating the ship then detonating internally, but the real damage is from the missile body itself.

Non-impactor warheads would be basically high velocity shot pellets as you note, the warhead giving a final nudge to their kinetic impact. The DE could be construed as a more sophisticated powerful version of that, or a HEAT jet with the vee of the missile working for it.
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[kilemall]

You like rules, here is one I am not revisiting until I have the rest of the system settled in.

Remember, I want engineering drama, and I have a very specific view of our starships.

Specifically, they have a LOT of toughness and safety built into them.

And that critical systems are also not dealt with in the damage tables.

And that hull hits are 'free', when each one should hurt, although I gather MgT1E has a hull effect.

So I went through major systems I felt would be terribly important to survival, even after loss of computer/power/plant/bridge, and determined in what order the ships would be designed to preserve their functionality even after 'ship disabling'.

These are important systems, so their loss could 'mission kill' the ship even before the main systems are gone.

For each hit the ship's hull takes a 10% increment of damage, a roll is taken on this table. This is per hit, not per percentage exceeded.

All rolls above the level the ship is damaged at is ignored- so if 10% hull damage has been taken no systems can be rolled, if 50% of the hull is damaged all rolls above 5 are ignored, etc.

2- Artificial Grav/Compensators; speed past 1G can hurt, zero-G combat/rules in effect
3- Active Sensors
4- Wired Control
5- Passive Sensors
6- Wireless Control; ship control can be hacked if on this backup system
7- Thrusters (no roll/evade/docking even by manual control)
8- Damage Control; continuing damage may occur
9- Comms
10-Batteries
11-Life Support
12- Hull Integrity; roll this, ship breaks apart

Rolling on CT tables- each Hull hit counts against this chart.

Divide tonnage by 50, that is the number of hull hits the ship has.

Divide the tonnage by hull hits, that is the percentage damage each hull hit does.

Rolling on HG tables- divide tonnage by 50, this is the number of hull EPs the ship can take.

Divide the tonnage by hull EPs, that is the percentage damage each hull hit does.

 

[whartung]

Well that's unpleasant. Sounds more like a wallowing supertanker turn then point and thrust in intended correction direction, not to mention strange sounding.

Facing would be determined by which way you are pointing the main maneuver drive, assuming reaction drives. If you are looking to decel and go back the way you came, that drive will be 'forward' and thrusting in effectively full reverse (or properly speaking accel the other way).

If you need to point the spinal weapon, you are pointing at your target.

Agility maneuver as opposed to accel means any facing can hit since the ship is spending its maneuver to spin around using thrusters to generate a wider range of potential quick bursts without altering the main course or velocity.

Simple.

To be clear, BL distinguishes between Heading and Facing. Heading is the direction of the vector, Facing is the position of the ship. You can freely change the facing of the ship, limited by how much of the drive you burn. If you don't burn anything, spin the ship all you want. If you're in full decel, then, yea, you're standing on your drive the whole time.

BL also has a catch all Erratic/Evasive maneuvering mechanic, where you burn G-Turns off the drive to "jink" the ship. Rather than apply a straight DM per G-Turn spent, each G-Turn increases the chance of the EM working at all, and success of the task determines the actual diff mod change.

The Mayday method is certainly more fluid, but as I said, I think that the reasoning behind the way they do maneuver in BL is because they consider facing to be quite important. Obviously this isn't the case in situations where you can free face the ship (i.e. when it's not maneuvering), but when your hand is forced due to use of the drive. Perhaps the mechanic of determining the facing based on the future position was too fiddly compared to the deterministic mechanism in BL.

In play, the BL system is not that awkward. It's not really any different than any other "turn mode" system where you have to keep track movement points before turning, both SFB and Starfire do this. The only difference is that in those systems, turning comes "for free" rather than having to expend thrust to do it.

But I will certainly agree -- if you have a 1G drive, your ship isn't going to be doing a whole lot of turning. Sllloowwww. Now, mount a 10G drive and Wheee!!

Not an unreasonable take, but I am also looking for differing tactical/maneuver choices and ship/fleet designs that flow from those choices.

Well, to be honest, one of the things I like about BL is that it really is a simulation with a game on top of it, rather than a game with some set mythology that it's trying to represent. (Obviously the actual game is in the gray area between those extremes.)

As such, impactor missiles are far too tasty to write out.

My view is similar re: lasers and all manner of beam weapons getting down to the last 10,000 km.

The difference are things like missile packs, where maybe 10% are the brains and sensors, 30% are pure penaids, 20% are additional LR sensors/comm relays, and the remaining 40% are the actual damaging warheads.

So it's not 'laser CIWS' vs. stupid missile, more like PD against the missile team.

I'm not given my missiles any hit or PD miss advantage to speed. 1-G or 300-G, the calc is the same.

The impacting missiles like in SS3 would be like APHE rounds penetrating the ship then detonating internally, but the real damage is from the missile body itself.

Non-impactor warheads would be basically high velocity shot pellets as you note, the warhead giving a final nudge to their kinetic impact. The DE could be construed as a more sophisticated powerful version of that, or a HEAT jet with the vee of the missile working for it.

I just don't think that at the velocities that I think will be entertained in space combat, that something like HEAT or HE or anything will make any difference. Perhaps you anticipate advanced armors being able to bounce that kind of energy off of it.

It certainly becomes an issue when the missile are trailing the target, since the DV will much, much less.

There was an interesting note from Chadwick about lasers and blinding. Basically, there's no mention of the blinding affects of lasers in Traveller. He doesn't mention it simply because it makes for a crummy game. Bunch of NPC and PCs running around -- blind. Permanently. We have that issue today with powerful, handheld green lasers attacking aircraft pilots. We don't have a battlefield blinding laser that I know of -- simply something you of reasonable power that you sweep over and area where you know combatants to be. Perhaps it's bad precedent. Like that sensor laser in Aliens, only with mo' powa'. Better to shoot them than blind them.

The designers may have punted on colliding large objects in to each other.

A standard TNE missile is 7 metric tons. If it accelerates for 1G turn, and impacts, head on, a ship that also accelerated 1G turn, that's a net closing velocity of 33,200 m/s. The kinetic energy of the missile is 3.8 TRILLION Joules, about 0.8 kilotons of TNT.

That's a 1G ship going speed 1 against a 1G missile going speed 1.

That's a big owie. That's WITHOUT a warhead. And, in Traveller terms, those are "unrealistic" velocities. A speed 6 missile, that's 11+ kilotons. Bigger owie. I am not a plasma physicist to understand what happens when an impact like that occurs on an egg shaped space ship.

I think it comes down to what your ranges are, how fast and how cheap you think you can make your missiles go. Using made up, hand crafted napkin math, an solid fueled Minuteman missile burns at about 16G for 3 minutes. That's a pretty big missile. I just don't think the ships are going to be flinging SM3's, or Sidewinders at each other, not to have something that can cover the 1000's of km necessary for space combat.

So, similar to the whole blinding issue, I can see them punting around this. Large objects impacting each other in space are Not Fun. Getting them to hit each other isn't very interesting either.

 

[kilemall]

Well, I came to this when I realized the kinetic impact of a classic CT missile in SS3 yielded a specific damage result at a specific velocity with a known weight.

I approached it from just the missile impact, not the combined kinetic impact, but even so you get into some vee of a fuel burned mostly warhead and sensor missile in the 20-30 kg range at 10G closing and it starts looking like a nuke on the boom table.


http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/usefultables.php

https://www.easycalculation.com/physics/classical-physics/kinetic-energy.php

Well that gets us into all manner of chasing, escaping, avoiding high-vee missile hits, a counterpoint to closing with beams, a sort of 'impale high speed charges on a stake line of missiles' sort of role, a lethal volley a fighter group targetlinked possibly with a higher computer model that does damage out of proportion to their size, etc. etc.

And we got ourselves a game.

 

[kilemall]

Armor/hull architectural concepts-

All critical hits are deemed to be penetrating.

Standard- this is what every ship defaults to without specific armor values, including LBB2 ships.

A 1 or 2 armor level is arranged like a Nautilus bulkhead (see below) around the engineering section. Damage incoming to engineering is deflected, and engineering detonating (particularly jump capacitor detonation or power planet destroyed) is less likely to cascade out to the rest of the ship.

This armor scheme is free, built into every hull that is not otherwise armored. Standard armor value is reduced by one per critical hit.

Imperial- this is the default HG armor as per the damage tables. Like most ships, the fuel tanks, holds, vehicle bays, weapons, and maneuver drives are all on the external surface, partially because most of these need exterior access to function, but also to function as ersatz armor to protect more sensitive critical systems.

The Imperial armor scheme puts an internal armor hull, like a submarine pressure hull, underneath the surface systems. If a higher percentage of volume is given to armor, then part of the armor is used to 'bulkhead' the external systems and reduce the number damaged per shot. Armor value is applied if a shot falls through the surface to an internal system or cascades to an adjoining surface system.

Imperial armor value is reduced one per critical hit.

Carapace- otherwise known as 'crab' armor, this scheme puts a premium on external damage at long range being shrugged off, at the expense of long term survival should ranges close or spinal weapons used against it.

Damage will be deflected as long as the damage value of the successfully hitting battery is equal to or less.

Each penetrating hit, critical or otherwise, reduces Carapace armor value by one, and each surface penetration can continue on into internal damage if there is damage value left to roll for.

Nautilus-a heavy internal bulkheaded armor at the expense of any external or internal protection. The interior of the ship is heavily bulkheaded but open to the surface. A hit can readily hit an internal system, but the armor is then applied and potentially will stop the damage from hitting another internal system. Remaining damage value gets deflected back towards surface systems, much like the blowout panels of a Terran TL8 MBT.

This is a form of armor developed largely to counter meson guns- it cannot stop the penetration and initial explosion but can direct away grievous damage. Each critical hit reduces Nautilus armor value by one.

Citadel- a classic pre-interstellar ship armor scheme, Citadel wraps entire critical systems in armor while leaving others unprotected.

Different systems can be 'wrapped' at different armor values. Citadel armor costs 1.5x the tonnage and resulting costs due to it's non-mutually supporting nature, and can only cover up to 70% of the ship system tonnage.

This is the only armor system that can be used on distributed hulls, with a limit of 30% of tonnage and 2x the tonnage/cost due to the need to build in additional bracing.

General hits reduce Citadel armor value against the specific systems the regular hit strikes. The first critical hit eliminates the armor protecting that specific system, along with the system itself.

 

[kilemall]

Have not let this go.

Ordered the Brilliant Lances, have it, working through now.

And it's looking like about what I expected, Striker marries Star Cruiser and has a starship combat game baby that resembles granddaddy Traveller.

Not exactly what I have in mind, although going detlaser might be a more palatable option for normal missile resolution.

But I will finish absorbing it and seeing if there are some gems in there that do not involve 10MW 30m3 area/power calculations.

My big stickling point in general though is speed vs. range vs. armor effects.

I want armor and range to affect penetration and probability to hit, but the simplified resolution I had ends up making that more a 300,000 km or less proposition, which at the speeds one ends up going, can be a LOOOONG time in a weapons envelope or no time at all.

The 30,000 km hex isn't looking so stupid now.

Power system phasing is all a-okay.

But going back to the HG system reminds me of how sad it is that a Maneuver-1 hit on a 1000 ton ship vs. a 10000 ton ship is the same resolution even though the latter's maneuver drive is 10x as big. Have to think on that one.