CT Only: Toward a revised CT High Guard 2 damage table

[Carlobrand]

CT High Guard 2 could be useful for roleplay but it is pretty much exclusively designed for warship combat. Under CT Book 2 combat, merchantmen can absorb a lot more damage because almost half of the hits are hitting living spaces (hull) and cargo, while most combat craft have no more than about 3-4 percent of their volume in living spaces and cargo. Merchantmen in High Guard take damage exclusively to maneuver, weapons, or fuel but, with no hits absorbed by living spaces or cargo, they take it almost twice as quickly as in Book 2, which can make it far more difficult to get away from an attacker. The rules on fuel hits also disadvantages craft carrying large volumes of fuel.

Civilian craft are not as densely packed with machinery as military craft; as reflected in Book 2, some hits may strike quarters or cargo instead of equipment. Figure the approximate percentage of craft being used for living space (staterooms and low berths) and cargo. Convert that into a 1d6 roll by dividing by 16 and rounding to the nearest; a value less than 8 means there is too little of that item to support a roll. For example, the classic free trader has 50 dTons in living space and 82 dTons in cargo of a volume of 200 dTons: 4 in 6 hits will strike living space or cargo. However, a Kokirrak class BB has living spaces and cargo space in only about 3.5% of the ship, while a Chrysanthemum class DE has living spaces and cargo space in only about 3.2% of the ship, too little to warrant a D6 roll.

Do the same with fuel. For example, the classic free trader has 30 dTons in fuel tanks: 1 in 6 hits will strike the fuel tanks. A Kokirrak class BB has 100,000 dTons in fuel tanks: 3 in 6 hits will strike the fuel tanks.

Roll 1d6 on each hit to determine whether living space or cargo or fuel are struck. If they are not struck, roll damage normally. If living space or cargo was struck, it's up to the gamemaster to decide which for roleplay purposes. If fuel was struck 10 dTons of fuel is lost. Hits to living space or cargo do not affect a craft's combat performance. Craft entering combat are presumed to have had passengers go into vacc bags or (roughly man-sized bags which can retain pressure in a vacuum to protect the occupant, connected by tubes to the craft's environmental systems to maintain a breathable atmosphere and habitable temperature) and reduced air pressure to the minimum needed, while crew are in vacc suits or body pressure suits.

From here there are two choices: run the existing table for hits that don't strike living spaces, cargo, or fuel, the easiest solution. Or, revise the existing table a bit. There are several issues with the existing table. First rolls of 22+ do no damage, but any weapon except a meson beam has to fire through a port of some sort, and they can be damaged when exposed to fire, so I would eliminate the 22+ line and end the table at 21+. Second, however good the armor is, the heat exchangers and likely the maneuver drive per at least MT canon are exposed to operate: Starship Operator's Manual describes these great glowy panels. Similarly, the jump drive is supposed to work using some sort of a hull net that protects the ship from jump space, and damage to that net might affect the drive's ability to jump. I would have some opportunity to hit these on a damage table, but I'm not sure how to arrange that yet.

 

[ady]

One method I toyed with was a percentage based hit system. Highguard uses a percentage based design system, so it's pretty easy to allocate a percentage chance of where damage takes place on a ship. It never seemed right to me that a mostly empty merchant has the same chance of being damaged in certain things as a gear packed warship. For example, A Subsidised Merchant's cargo bay (200 tons) takes up 50% of the ship, so you give a 50% chance of any hits damaging the bay. Likewise, the powerplant on a Kinunir takes up 7% of it's hull, so that is the chance of any hit damaging it's powerplant. When you design the ships, simply list the percentages of each item in a 1-100 location chart and roll on it. For actual damage, maybe a hitpoint based system, give each item hitpoints based on it's tonnage (or varying amounts) and deduct an appropiate amount of hitpoints based on the weapon factor? Items could downgrade in power as normal when a fration equal to the rating is damaged?

It does mean that combat will be different from ship to ship, ie merchants (mostly cargo bay) will tend to get their cargo and passenger sections swiss cheesed before a lucky hit takes out a drive or bridge, while warships (unless it hits armour or fuel) will suffer critical damage, though this will be mitigated by bulky armour on low tech ships (a Dragon SDB is nearly a quarter armor!) and large jump tanks on high tech ships (Azhanti High Lightning's hull is nearly 60% fuel tankage)

Using hitpoints means that fighters will tend to die from a single laser hit (being so small and having so few hitpoints) and large warships will be gigantic sponges, able to take massive damage before their systems degrade.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Under CT Book 2 combat, merchantmen can absorb a lot more damage because almost half of the hits are hitting living spaces (hull) and cargo, while most combat craft have no more than about 3-4 percent of their volume in living spaces and cargo. Merchantmen in High Guard take damage exclusively to maneuver, weapons, or fuel but, with no hits absorbed by living spaces or cargo, they take it almost twice as quickly as in Book 2, which can make it far more difficult to get away from an attacker.

This difference basically comes down to a paradigm shift between LBB2 and LBB5.

LBB2 lumped everything into a single "bucket" of damage.
LBB5 subdivided damage into 4 categories ... surface, radiation, internal and critical hits.

The surface damage table lists all the stuff towards the "outside" of any hull (maneuver drive, fuel, weapons).
Anything regarding "living spaces" got turned into Crew-n hits on the Radiation and Internal Explosion tables.
The only way to hit "cargo" (and hangar bay/sub-craft) is with a critical hit.

So right from the get go, there's no real way to "square the circle" of the LBB2 distribution of damage results with the LBB5 distribution of damage results. They're just fundamentally different paradigms.



Ironically, one of the easiest ways to "skew" LBB5 damage results back towards what LBB2 does is ... eliminate the +6DM for weapons with code: 9- on them. As soon as you don't REQUIRE NUKES in order to reach the Interior Explosion table, a LOT of the damage distribution results SHIFT rather dramatically. You can also adjust Pulse Lasers to simply "roll twice per hit" on the Surface Explosion Table (now without the +6DM for being code: 9-) as is done in LBB2, rather than applying a -2DM on damage results (which combined with the +6DM for code: 9- means that Pulse Lasers could NEVER achieve an Interior Explosion result on their own).

Take that kind of "surface damage bias" out of LBB5 and a LOT of the issues that you've identified "fall by the wayside" and LBB5 starts behaving a LOT more like LBB2 in terms of damage distribution.

Because, let's be honest with ourselves ... a TU in which ONLY nukes, spinals and meson guns can EVER reach the Interior Explosion Table is pretty darned BIASED against anything that ISN'T a nuke, spinal or meson gun (because, seriously, everything else is "just surface damage" if you aren't dealing with nukes, particle accelerators or meson guns). That's pretty darned SKEWED, if you ask me. It's also that SKEW which gave rise to the mentality of "mesons and missiles are all that matter" for ship killers ... because they're the only weapons that can do the job (and meson guns "ignore armor" on top of that!).

 

[Carlobrand]

They're paradigms based on the view of the ship, as I described. High Guard was for dueling warships. Warships have very little living or cargo space proportionately: a "hull" or "cargo" hit makes little sense when there's so little of it and the game is focused on a naval battle. Those crew hits were hitting crew at battle stations, especially in the pre-errata incarnation.

Merchantmen on the other hand have quite a lot of cargo and living space and proportionally less plant and maneuver drive and weaponry. It's pretty clear from the way CT High Guard handles damage that weapons are hitting the ship randomly. It is straightforward logic that random hits will hit living space and cargo when those form a major part of the ship.

It seems to me I've "squared the circle" adequately. I'm not striving for a perfect emulation of Book 2. I'm just aiming for something that gives the merchantmen something close to the level of endurance they had in Book 2, which they needed for those mad dashes to the jump point, which they had to the extent possible primarily because half the hits there were doing nothing, and which they would not get if they were instead taking interior hits. The real test is whether it works, and it does work.

But this is IMTU. No one's obligated to use it. If someone wants to de-SKEW the original CT HG-2 battle table, they're free to do so. I even talked about that a bit. I agree there's no real logic for drives being invulnerable to surface damage when they need to poke out of the hull to do their work. That's just not an element I've developed yet, so I have nothing to present for it. If you have something like a revised table, I'd love to see it. However, it remains that the major difference between merchantmen and warships, other than armor, is the amount of space merchantmen give to cargo and such. That was the low-hanging fruit, that's what I went for, and it works.

 

[Tobias]

Because, let's be honest with ourselves ... a TU in which ONLY nukes, spinals and meson guns can EVER reach the Interior Explosion Table is pretty darned BIASED against anything that ISN'T a nuke, spinal or meson gun

In HG2, nukes and particle accelerator spinal mounts have zero chance of reaching the interior explosion table against even moderately well-armored ships. To be precise, that means anything with an armor factor of 4+.

 

[mike wightman]

Easy solution.
DMs
+armour factor
+size modifier
-[weapon factor] for non-spinal
for nuke -6
for spinal -[(EP/100)+10]

 

[Tobias]

That could swing the balance widely in the opposite direction, I would think.
I like the idea of incorporating size into damage resistance.
But in general, I think the damage tables should be wholly redone. Specifically, all the nibble damage results (weapon-1, fuel-1, depending on ruleset used crew-1) should go; and the effect of a large number of batteries hitting should be a DM to a single roll instead of rolling dozens or hundreds of times.

 

[infojunky]

I have been pondering the damage tables as well. Especially for civilian vessels.

My current idea is to replace half of the fuel hits with cargo hits... Or realistically fuel hits roll vs weather they hit fuel, cargo or carried craft.

A related idea is to remove the DM+ from the number rated mounts, at least for non capital ships vs the equivalent.

 

[infojunky]

Ok a tangentially related idea is to make agility a relational value working like the Computer modifier...

 

[kilemall]

Ok a tangentially related idea is to make agility a relational value working like the Computer modifier...

I wouldn’t do it at all, except possibly small craft in a dogfight. Or Gundam.

 

[kilemall]

I went halfway where you went with the IMTU system. The surface weapons do half of their damage there, but then roll against the whole CT like CRT for the second half, including crits.

Meson is first half of damage internal (last 5 damage types like power plant, jump, computer etc) plus crits, second half whole table.

PA spinal and nukes roll against whole table both times.

Radiation largely follows where the first hit goes, then second hit rolled separately on the radiation sub roll (same table but modifier for rad only systems).

Hull can eventually break up the ship and meantime loses streamlining and ultimately crits as the hull loses strength.

Soft targets like staterooms and cargo are like all the other systems, get damaged in order of size. So say you have 80 tons of cargo and 40 tons of stateroom, first 40+ tons go to the cargo holds, then the next hit goes stateroom, then afterwards whichever left is largest.

Crits are disabled, not destroyed. Cause drama not demolition derby.