Yes, you have got it right.
Thanks. I hope so, I've been churning this back and forth for a while, but it's nice to see others agree that I have drawn the correct conclusions.
Attack is half the equation, defence is the other half.
Cheaper ship equals more ships equals more capability to absorb hits. If your ships costs twice as much the enemy will have twice as many ships, twice as many guns, and twice as much "hit points". The twice as expensive ship must, individually, be four times as good to beat the numbers...
So, the 10,000T Meson N ships
are the cheaper ships. Meson J is half the size of gun, buy you can't make them more than 25% smaller, and needs a 9 to penetrate nuke dampers, so is pretty toothless right out of the box, and only a couple of hits away from degraded to uselessness. Also, it's subject to one more size-based crit than the 10,000-ton Meson N. In any event, there's not much mileage to be gained by shrinking them. The cost savings is real, but not substantial enough, and the effectiveness lost is high. A Meson J SDB can weigh in at 7500 tons, and can certainly slaughter pirates, but against warships, it's almost useless. Cost-wise, the J is about 9200MCr, the N is 11,000MCr, so they're pretty close as it is.
Nothing smaller can mount a spinal, which I think is the minimum cost of entry into the Capital Warship Club. You can trim off tons by only mandating Thrust 5 or not maxing out the nuclear dampers or meson screens, but That's not enough to buy you another meson on the front line, and it all makes you much more vulnerable than what the cost savings buys you.
Sandcasters and Repulsors are also "weapons", so can soak weapon hits. You'll need to inflict up to seven weapon hits for each additional spinal factor reduction.
As far as I can tell, Defensive weapons fire is resolved before screens are resolved (Game turn sequence, p 46 bottom). That means your repulsors get checked before your dampers, and so 1 in 6 missiles get through your dampers, but that's calculated
after the repulsors have done their thing. So rather than using repulsors to clean up what the screens miss, the repulsors reduce your screen's workload. So, your Dampers pass 1 in 6 of a smaller number. (The TL14 ships, which can only mount a rating 6 Damper, are much more vulnerable and need more repulsors, though it can't make up the difference.)
But small battleship-wise, ~20,000T, you're at most getting 20 missile bays, -2 for a 2000-ton spinal, -the number of repulsor bays you have, and so at TL15, a 10+ on the Damper is letting in 1 in 6. If you've got repulsors, you can shave off one per repulsor from the total coming in, but you still take 1 in 6 hits from what remains. So, 20 attacks at 8+ (Base: 2, Agi 6: +6, size: -1, Pilot 3+: +1) is 8 hits, 4 repulsor bays makes that 4 hits, and 1 in 6 of 4 hits is maybe one weapon elimination or spinal degrade per volley. That's a pretty insignificant loss unless you're facing one of the 300,000-ton behemoths. A 430-bay salvo from a Tigress will ... have only 215 weapons that can bear on a target based on its size, and of those, ~90 hit an Agility 6 target, of those, ~86 pass the repulsors, not a huge effect there, ~14-15 pass the nuke damper and do damage, which since it rolls 2d6+armor means that only a 6 or less on the damage location roll can hit a system, so a net result of about 6 hits, or 8 hits if you only do Armor 14. Those 6-8 hits will degrade your spinal by 1 or 2 depending on how many weapon systems you have because everyone gets hit once before you can take a second hit. For a cost of 300,000 tons, that's not what I would call getting a good return on investment, and says maybe I don't need a planetoid to be immune to missiles and particles, maybe I just need a 20,000-ton Meson spinal, which is large enough to avoid size crits from a T Particle. BTW, that's very close to the effect of a Particle T hit, so a Particle T hits about as hard as a Tigress Missile Volley.
Crits can be mitigated with spare systems. Drives are obviously too expensive, but computers, screens, and crew can easily be replicated, mitigating about a third of crits. Another third are ignored on a BR/SDB (e.g. Jump Drive Disabled), so a single crit is only about 12.5/36 ≈ 35% likely to kill a rider.
Yes, but additional systems require additional tonnage. Anyhow, the crits aren't what kills you, they just add insult to injury, so mitigating them doesn't solve the main problem, which is 1 or 2 Fuel Tank Shattered hits. About the most useful thing you could have would be a reserve fuel tank, though by the RAW, Fuel Tanks Shattered takes
all fuel on a ship no matter where you hide it. 'And the ship may not be refuelled' prevents you from holding fuel as cargo, though I suppose if you could do that, then repair the Shattered result with a 9+ roll per Damage Control and Repair (on page 44), but that's far from a sure thing
and takes time, and you're pretty useless and vulnerable in the meantime, and the rest of the
non-critical hits you're likely to take are: 1-2 actual crits; 2x Comp -2, which will make you -4 to hit/+4 to be hit if you can bring back power, this makes you useless in the fight; 2-3x Screens -3 hits, which also don't matter until you restore power though when you do you're wildly vulnerable, 2x Jump -2 hits, so your Jump rating is -4 until repair, a free space for SDBs, 1-2x Power Plant -2 hits, which again don't matter until you can restore fuel, but at least my ships are sufficiently overbuilt that even a reduced PP rating will allow you Agility 6 on Emergency Agility (though it doesn't much matter until you can repair the Comp); and past that, there's a crew hit (which isn't tragic if you have a frozen watch); plus a chance at -1 more to Computer as if -4 wasn't bad enough; and a chance at -2 more to screens.
Better to make it Ag-5 and <20 000 Dt, same difficulty to hit and much cheaper. And it only needs armour 16 to prevent size crits from PA-Ts.
If the enemy has lower tech ships and max PA-S (Zho, Sollie), 10 000 Dt and armour 14 is enough.
This is where the defensive half of the equation lies. You need Armor 20 to
completely ignore hits from nuclear missiles and spinal particle beams, which is the goal of that class of ship. I'm not really worried about the autocrits on the buffered planetoid, they're 40,000 tons, hull N, that's no crits from the N Mesons, and only 10 armor needed to not take crits from T Particles. But as we saw above about the Tigress, maybe we don't need a 40,000-ton Buffered Planetoid, a 20,000-ton Particle T can blunt the enemy's weapons, and then you bring out the 10,000-ton mesons once the particles have degraded the enemy Particle T's past the point where they crit the tiny mesons.
If you are using Statistical Combat Resolution (TCS, p15), a Fuel Tank Shattered, and hence mission kill, is a complete certainty if a Mes-J+ inflicts damage.
Yes, but the Meson J is only about half as likely to get that hit through a Meson Screen, needing a 9+ (28%) as opposed on a Meson N that needs 7+ (58%). You'd need twice as many Meson J ships as Meson N ships, which isn't possible as described previously.
So, TL15 is ~300 years old. You would think they had time to build fleets of ships in the current TL and had wars to see what works and what doesn't? There have been 3 Frontier Wars (Third, Fourth, Fifth) fought at TL15, so you'd think people would have designs that take lessons learned at TL15 into account. Though as can be seen, these arguements go around in circles about what works on what.
