Ship to ship combat paradigm

[mike wightman]

What they did wrong was over complicate the rules IMHO.
What I'm looking at is which rules would complement LBB2/Mayday. Firstly by finding out what people like ship to ship combat to represent, and then which rules are needed to get the effect.

I'm a small ship heretic too, but I do like to borrow ideas from here there and everywhere.

 

[BetterThanLife]

I thought the rules as designed in T20 weren't over complicated. They were designed to give the players a central role. It just had some unintended consequences when you got out of the "typical Player Character Scale." Which is why I spent so much time trying to fix them instead of simply scrapping them and starting over. I personally have always loved the Mayday rules, but the problem with them was you were missing the HG weapons, (And some of them are PC scale weapons.) If you use the HG charts with Mayday then your system works better with big ships than small ones. (Most common example of the problem is two typical equal fighters can't hit each other.)

 

[mike wightman]

I'd scrap the High Guard charts and the High Guard damage system.
Integrate the weapons, screen, and armour into LBB2/Mayday.

Trouble is how to do it?

The one version of Traveller ship combat I've not investigated fully is T4. I wonder if there's anything in it worth borrowing?

 

[robject]

I've been convinced by Aramis to scrap the HG charts, too. His suggestion is to use something like MT's vehicle combat system. His problem with T4 is that it doesn't use pen appropriately (?) -- I think that you can't group weapons in T4 together very effectively. I might be wrong there.

Aramis? You there?

Kaladorn said:

How you do (sensors) will be *the* defining aspect of your game. This can either make the game a sub hunt or a 'know where everything is' game.

I vote "sub hunt".

 

[mike wightman]

I like Aramis' MT idea too. The only fault IMHO is the MT based numbers are too high and could do with being reduced, perhaps by dividing through by a factor of 10.
Armour would begin with a value of 4 for unarmoured, instead of 40, etc.

And I love this idea of Kaladorn's:

Yes, and having some sort of rules for raking fire (when you apply repeated hits along the side of a long thin ship) or blow-through fire (such as when you cross the T of a long cylindrical ship and fire down the length) would be nice. The advantages in going broadside with someone would be probability of damage to more areas of the ship, but any individual hit might well result in blow through and wasted energy. On the other hand, taking one 'down the gullet' might well expend the full energy of the shot into area after area of the ship. And having the ship's geometry control the damage would be wonderful. BL did this reasonably well...

 

[Rossoneill]

I like the subhunt concept too.
I am getting a year 0 of the 3rd imperium campaign started, and i cant make up my mind on how to do sensors and what data the sensors should give .

 

[flykiller]

There's another issue, although I may be overstating this through personal bias; T4, and Brilliant Lances/Battle Rider seem to have most of what you need, but they don't seem to be very popular. If this is true and not just my own misperception, finding out what they did "wrong" could be as enlightening as finding out what people want.

What they did wrong was over complicate the rules IMHO.

it's a complicated subject. they didn't do anything wrong, it's just they got into the subject deeper than most people want to go.

you have to figure who your audience is going to be - a gearhead sitting alone in a basement, a referee with a handful of dedicated players, a mob of teenagers at a convention, whatever.

eh, possibly you could have one system with add-on modules. one basic set for the beginner, add-on modules for referees and players, and one set of ultimate add-ons for the gearheads.

 

[mike wightman]

The basic system should be aimed at the PC scale of things and kept as simple as possible IMHO.

The idea of then adding things module at a time is a good one.

 

[robject]

...
Detailed damage results are probably going to need either a deckplan or a TNE-style location table. While this is fine for player ships, that might well bog down a fleet game. Some form of graceful detail shedding would go a long way towards increasing playability.

... There's probably a good deal of variability in how much people are willing to invest in designing ships. I'm a small-ships, LBB2, K.I.S.S. kind of designer. A system that I like is probably not going to have a lot of appeal for a more serious gearhead.

...

And Sigg wrote:

I like Aramis' MT idea too. The only fault IMHO is the MT based numbers are too high and could do with being reduced, perhaps by dividing through by a factor of 10. Armour would begin with a value of 4 for unarmoured, instead of 40, etc.

Aramis thinks the level of detail is perfect. I believe his basis is that the armor ratings are absolute -- that is, they're on the same scale as Cloth and Battle Dress. Maybe a good compromise would be to set ship armor factor x 10 = personal armor level. That would preserve the integrated combat rules while keeping ship-to-ship armor factors low.

And Kaladorn's idea of hull-blowthrough can be related to pen, perhaps? So what's raking fire related to? Close range? Makes fighters a bit more potent, perhaps?

And perhaps the overall hull-shape could provide generic hit-location templates? So you only need a handful of templates, each with a top and side profile:
</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;"> Needle
Slab
Cylinder
Wedge
Boxy
Sphere
Hemisphere
Irregular</pre>[/QUOTE]Shape will determine who is affected by collateral damage, and accessibility to the rest of the ship in case of decompression and damage, and the manner in which fires may spread.

And as for level of detail, Classic Traveller got it right with Book 2 together with High Guard, and TNE + T4 got it right with Fire, Fusion, and Steel. I might have liked MT the best of all, if it had scaled (and perhaps rounded off) its numbers to tons and EPs for the starship-oriented tables.

I'm the kind of guy who generally substitutes 3 for PI.

 

[robject]

I've got a sensors question. I'm sure it's been asked before, but someone recently mentioned that one's assumptions about sensors affects just about every aspect of ship design. So here I go again.

If one says that a ship can run 'silent', thereby suggesting that ship combat often can be characterized as a 'sub hunt', then what does that say about sensors and starship signatures?

Doesn't that imply that starship hulls can be quite stealthy? Does it bend reality "too much"?

I assume that Tech Level ought to play a big part in sensor rules, too. Two tech levels between hull and sensor can make all the difference.

I looked at and borrowed Sigg's sensor rules, and wondered if I could usefully dumb them down without breaking credibility. I dumbed them down all right, but I doubt the rules are credible.

Sensor ratings
Active sensor detection ability is the sensor's TL - 7.
Passive sensor detection ability is the sensor's TL - 10.

Ship Signature
A ship's signature is:
The hull size code (or 0 if the ship is in orbit)
+ the maneuver drive rating if the ship is maneuvering
+ the hull configuration (1-9?) (or 0 if the ship is in orbit)
- the hull's TL
- any black globe setting.

Detection
Detecting an object at distance L (in light-seconds) requires a roll on L x d6 of (sensor rating - target signature) or less.

If the roll is lower than the required roll, a firing solution is also obtained and weapons may fire.

Examples
</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;"> An active TL15 Imperial Navy sensor is placed on a moon.
Its rating is 15-7=8.

A TL12 Free Trader (size code 8) maneuvers by at 2G, with a hull
configuration of 3. Its signature is therefore ( 8 + 2 + 3 - 12 ) = +1.

A TL15 scout (size code 8) maneuvers by at 2G, with a hull config of 2.
Its signature is ( 8 + 2 + 2 - 15 ) = -3.

A TL14 Shivva-class cruiser (size code 8) maneuvers by at 2G, with a
hull config of 5 (say). Its signature is ( 8 + 2 + 5 - 14 ) = +1.

At 4 light-seconds, the sensor achieves a lock on the Free Trader on
a roll of 8+1=9 or less on 4d6. If it rolls an 8 or less it also aquires
a weapons lock. It achieves a lock on the Scout on a roll of 8-3=5 or less
on 4d6. If the roll is a 4 or less, it also has a weapons lock. It achieves
a lock on the Shivva on a roll of 8+1=9 or less on 4d6. If the roll is 8 or
less it also has a weapons lock.

At 3 light-seconds, the numbers are the same, but the roll is on 3d6.
At 2 light-seconds, the roll is on 2d6.</pre>[/QUOTE]

 

[Piper]

Hull shape could provide a generic template but you would probably need to have six versions per shape.
This would give you: bow, stern, and lateral for both military and commercial hulls.
My thinking here is that the typical trader has a lot more waste space (in the cargo hold) than a mil ship.
On the other hand, how much real variation is there in most designs? The bridge/computer is usually in the bow, engineering aft and so on.
Maybe formulating templates based solely on target aspect and commercial vs. military would work?

 

[flykiller]

Doesn't that imply that starship hulls can be quite stealthy? Does it bend reality "too much"?

well, factually, we don't know what the "reality" would be, so we have a free hand here (smile).

one notes that when the recent cassini probe arrived at saturn it promptly discovered three new moons. they're hundreds of miles across, they weren't trying to hide, and people have been looking at saturn for hundreds of years. makes you wonder.

 

[mike wightman]

I wonder if there is any way to use the LBB2 idea of a main compartment and an engineering compartment for damage resolution purposes?

 

[flykiller]

Hull shape could provide a generic template but you would probably need to have six versions per shape.

if the basic version is aimed at referees/PC's then the basic version would not need general templates. it could instead provide pre-worked ships, with deckplans, aspects, etc already completely done and ready for use in gaming combat. we certainly have enough PC-sized deckplans available - I, tanuki, and lots of others have dozens of similar and unique vessels available.

add-on modules could include templates and rules for making new ships.

 

[Piper]

Originally posted by flykiller:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Doesn't that imply that starship hulls can be quite stealthy? Does it bend reality "too much"?

well, factually, we don't know what the "reality" would be, so we have a free hand here (smile).

one notes that when the recent cassini probe arrived at saturn it promptly discovered three new moons. they're hundreds of miles across, they weren't trying to hide, and people have been looking at saturn for hundreds of years. makes you wonder. </font>[/QUOTE]Another factor to consider is "feel". If you want a sub-hunt style of game sensor range is going to have be scaled to the playing surface or handled abstractly.

 

[mike wightman]

Originally posted by flykiller:
if the basic version is aimed at referees/PC's then the basic version would not need general templates. it could instead provide pre-worked ships, with deckplans, aspects, etc already completely done and ready for use in gaming combat. we certainly have enough PC-sized deckplans available - I, tanuki, and lots of others have dozens of similar and unique vessels available.

add-on modules could include templates and rules for making new ships.

This is another excellent idea IMHO.

 

[mike wightman]

Originally posted by Piper:
Another factor to consider is "feel". If you want a sub-hunt style of game sensor range is going to have be scaled to the playing surface or handled abstractly.

The actual scale for ship to ship combat is another of the things I'd like to discuss.

Would it work to have a sensor scale, with fifteen to thirty minute turns, and then a combat scale where turns are only a couple of minutes long?

 

[robject]

Sigg, what's the rationale for setting combat turns to be so short? Also, your idea about LBB2's engine-versus-main compartment is interesting.

Flykiller, that's a good point about ship 'target templates'. After all, Traveller comes with a dozen-odd ships already made, already deckplanned. That would be the obvious place to add effort to.

 

[kaladorn]

Brilliant Lances I think suggested you work from the deckplan to allocate hits vs. systems for hits on a given facing.

I dislike Mayday's implementation of Vector movement and it didn't cover a lot of later systems. MT had all the right bits, but the combat system was kinda sucky.

Brilliant Lances was well done and I don't really think it was overly complex but my complaint was I'm not playing TNE and redesigning all the MT ships over to TNE standards was too much like work. If it had any graceful way to map an MT ship design over into BL's required aspects, I would have happily stuck with just BL.

 

[robject]

Perhaps updated deckplans for the dozen standard ships, with numbered regions corresponding to hit locations, are in order. Can that kind of thing be engineered to replace damage tables?