High Guard 1.5 (<1979 edition)

[robject]

WHAT'S THE GOAL HERE?

• To accommodate the OTU
  • In particular, Agent of the Imperium
• And retain some of the feel of High Guard 1979

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NOTES ON SIGNIFICANT PARTS OF HG1

1. Battery factor is directly from the total amount of firepower installed per weapon type.
2. Larger hulls field more and better defense and offense.
3. Deadlier spines are geared towards larger ships.

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DECISIONS

1. Reject the normalization factor of HG79.
2. Normalize the weapon strengths against a single Mass Battery Factor Chart.
3. Baseline battery factors on a BCS-oriented scale, not an ACS-oriented one.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

I think Mike means that ships had only one battery of each type, so potentially a lot less attack rolls. Unfortunately it meant that a battleship with hundreds of bays and a corvette with a single bay had the same firepower, if I understand correctly.

 

[robject]

NOTE: this post was made based on a bad interpretation of the weapons table.

There are some guard rails in place, but I noticed the possibility as well. The tables start at 7 bays (and "one bay per 1,000 tons") so the problem might begin at around 7,000 tons -- although a 7,000 ton ship with 700 tons of bays might have to sacrifice something else. I'll have to dwell on that a bit longer. I want Mike in on that to crunch the numbers.

Note that the table runs from 7 bays up to 15 bays, so that means a 15,000 ton ship can max out the bay allocation. But, yes, we divide by kilotons, and the best points you can buy are ...well I can't tell without a spreadsheet I guess.

Let's say I have an 11,000 ton ship, and I take eleven 100t missile bays. That's 50 points each, for a total of 550 points. Divide by 11 gets me 50 points, for a very powerful missile Code 9.

And you can't get higher than that... and a 15,000 ton ship with fifteen missile bays has a lower score.

11,000 tons appears to be an optimal missile frigate size.

 

[kilemall]

Those are the problems that popped out at me about an hour or two into builds, and caused me to skip out on the tournaments.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Note that the table runs from 7 bays up to 15 bays, so that means a 15,000 ton ship can max out the bay allocation. But, yes, we divide by kilotons, and the best points you can buy are ...well I can't tell without a spreadsheet I guess.

LBB5'79, p25:
The bay weapons section of the weapons table indicates specific weapon types and shows costs involved for each such type. The table itself indicates the tech level ranges at which the weapons are available, and point values for each weapon at such tech levels.

The columns are TLs, the rows weapon types, and the cell value is points per bay.

One TL-11 100 Dt bay gives 50 pts, divided by 1 kDt hull gives 50 pts/kDt which gives factor 9.
100 TL-15 100 Dt bays gives 100 × 50 = 5000 pts, divided by 100 kDt hull gives 50pts/kDt which gives factor 9.
A battleship has the same firepower as a 1 kDt missile frigate...
And I don't think the frigate even needs to be 1 kDt to mount a bay...

I may be wrong, I haven't really looked at LBB5'79, except in regards the Gazelle (and the perennial reaction drive discussion).

 

[mike wightman]

Rob, the number you keep referring to as number of bays is actually TL

If I understand it correctly the aim of HG 79 was to end up with a weapon factor that determines damage potential - note that there is no to hit roll in combat only rolls to penetrate defences.

You only roll once for each weapon type. This is a good thing.

To get to this damage potential factor the points totals, for the installed weapons, determine final factor. Not a bad idea.

The problems:

averaging points per kiloton of big ship makes their weapon factors worse than a 1000t ship (my potential solution to this is to modify the points scale, drop the averaging and calculate the factors with the end results in mind]

a particle accelerator points value of 3 has no factor

the factors and penetration values for particle accelerators and meson guns #1-9 are very poor compared with turret and bay weapons.

Oh, and we have to decide if we want to go with the modern interpretation of number of hardpoints left after installing bays.

Rob, next time you talk to Marc will you ask him to make HG79 and original LBB:1-3 available on drivethru, they are not on my cd and I want to buy them for stuff like this.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

You only roll once for each weapon type. This is a good thing.

To get to this damage potential factor the points totals, for the installed weapons, determine final factor. Not a bad idea.

Doesn't work when ships range rom 10 Dt to 1 000 000 Dt. Silly idea.

 

[mike wightman]

As printed it doesn't work, which is why I want to discuss how to fix it rather than go the HG80 route.
Start from the perspective of what a 1,000,000 battle rider would look like - factor 9 everything and highest possible spinal - and work backwards.

Immediate thoughts is some sort of pseudo-logarithmic factor based on points total sum

so

points	1	3	9	27	81	243	729	2187	6561
factor	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9

 

[AnotherDilbert]

We need a greater range than 0-9, perhaps 0-Z [33], comparable to hull codes?

That could remove extreme cases, such as battleships against fighters. Perhaps factor X hitting hull (X-5) is an automatic Ship Vaporised and factor X hitting hull (X+5) is no damage?

Logarithmic scale sounds good (or should I say obvious?).

A ship firing at several enemies might require recalculating battery factor on the fly? A battleship should be able to engage all ships in a destroyer squadron. Messy...

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Implication 1. Spines require about the same infrastructure, and therefore ship size, as that in HG2. The "N" Meson spine is the same plucky 2,000 tonner you know and love, so the Nolikian will probably still look like a Nolikian.

They need a lot less space, since they don't need any power or extra power plant fuel.

Armour also require a lot less space at higher TLs.

Large ships will have a lot more space free; battleships will be more like the Tigress, riders will be much smaller.

 

[Spinward Flow]

WEAPON ATTACK FACTORS. From page 25, 26, and 27, explain that each weapon emplacement has a point value; you sum up the points for each weapon type across all emplacements, normalize to a 1,000 ton baseline, then consult a ratings table to determine the actual USP code for that weapon type.

Normalizing to a 1000 ton hull baseline achieves multiple things simultaneously.

First and foremost, it skews the construction rules in favor of a "small ship universe" rather than making room for an emphatically BCS paradigm where cruisers start at 20k tons and up. If the bigger ships don't get "economies of scale" simply from being larger, then the evolutionary design impetus is going to favor numerous smaller ships over singular big ships.

Secondly, it's a kind of back door method of working in a "batteries bearing" reduction into the factor, so you don't need to throw as many dice to resolve combat. By normalizing everything to a 1000 ton baseline (as you say) with a single attack per weapon type, combat can be resolved much faster than rolling dice for each and every single battery bearing on a target. Remember, the entire idea behind batteries bearing is that as hulls get larger, fewer batteries can be brought to bear on a target (they're on the "wrong side" of a bigger hull) ... so you need more batteries on larger ships in order to make the same quantity of attack rolls as a smaller ship. Normalizing to a 1000 ton baseline then subsumes all of that into a single attack roll, rather than trimming the number of batteries that can be fired per combat turn using the batteries bearing mechanic.



It was an imperfect system (game mechanically) that didn't make sense unless you already understood it ... so it wasn't intuitively accessible. If you didn't poke at it too much, it kinda sorta held up for tabletop wargaming ... but it was more of a house of cards and lacked robustness.

More of a first draft than an elegant and intuitive solution.
If you liked math that simplified everything for you (and you understood the process of how to calculate everything) it worked ... okay.
If you didn't (or you didn't) it was quite the impenetrable mess.

LBB5.80 made the right choice in moving to the batteries bearing paradigm, along with the "factor per battery" formulation. Far less "rules clunk" along that path ... although you wound up with "dice clunk" when needing to make a lot more dice rolls in combat.

 

[mike wightman]

And it is the dice clunk that makes it unfit for purpose, once you are reduced to using statistical resolution then those numbers should be used to determine the factor in the first place thus reducing the number of dice rolls to a minimum.

I am coming at this from a wargame perspective because when you are resolving battles at a squadron to fleet level a wargame is often good fun. If part of a role-playing session, I would abstract the lot to just concentrating on character actions.

 

[robject]

The most important part of the Bay Weapons page is, I think, the tables that show the effectiveness of each weapon type in each emplacement type by tech level. I think there's a lot of ink written that forms the general views on their strength curves.

HG1 encodes a lot of data in one page of tables. I think it would help to normalize the bay and turret tables based on one weapon rating scale -- a Least Common Multiple comes to mind.

Using the One Page Rule for fair-use quoting, and as a worksheet for all our brains to digest, here's the weapons table.

 

[robject]

Just looking at that bottom table alone, the columns really follow the same general behavior, mainly, though there are variations. So it ideally only needs one unified column with a Least Common Multiple scheme.

The LCM is in the thousands; however there is a trend in the Energy Weapons column that the other weapons generally follow, with the exception of Repulsors and some wildness with Sandcasters. So if I declare _by fiat_ the Energy Weapons column x 3 is the "normalized" scale then I get this.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
12	60	120	180	240	300	360	450	540

Note that this scale has two discontinuities, at Factor 2, and again at Factor 8. The implication -- assuming I've done this correctly -- is that Factor 1 has a low bar of entry, and Factor 8 + 9 are the "really special and painful" factors, in the same manner that the last few drive letters in Book 2 are special. Obviously they represent tradeoffs in expressive power.

Less obviously I think Mike's observation stands: a kind of gentle curve here is worth looking into. My first reaction was that this OUGHT to be a straight line, but I've changed my mind.



Then I can _normalize_ the emplacements tables based on this uniform scale, and have a standard comparison scale.

For example, the Large Bay Table would look like this:

Wpn	7	8	9	A	B	C	D	E	F
Meson Gun	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	180	720
PA	-	12	60	90	-	-	-	-	-
Repulsor	-	-	-	60	120	180	240	360	540
Missile	360	360	450	450	540	540	540	540	540

The only interpolated entry there is the Particle Accelerator-10, with a strength midway between Factor 2 and 3.

The 50 ton Bay table looks like:

Wpn	7	8	9	A	B	C	D	E	F
Meson	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	450
PA	-	-	-	90	120	180	240	-	-
Plasma	-	-	-	90	120	-	-	-	-
Fusion	-	-	-	-	-	270	300	450	540
Repulsor	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	180	360
Missile	300	300	360	360	360	360	540	540	540

And the 10 ton bays looks like:

Wpn	7	8	9	A	B	C	D	E	F
PA	-	-	-	-	-	-	360	450	540
Plasma	-	-	-	-	90	150	180	-	-
Fusion	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	360	450
Repulsor	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	120	240
Missile	240	240	300	300	300	300	300	360	360

Finally, the Turrets:

Wpn	7	8	9	A	B	C	D	E	F
Pulse L	12	12	12	12	12	12	40	40	40
Beam L	40	40	40	40	40	40	60	60	60
Plasma	-	-	-	12	15	18	-	-	-
Fusion	-	-	-	-	-	24	27	30	36
Sand	12	15	15	18	18	18	18	18	18
Missile	12	12	12	12	12	12	12	12	12

Note in the original table that the base attack strength is on the Pulse Laser, Sandcaster, and Missile Launcher (yes and the Particle Accelerator I suppose). Thus all values are ultimately, via a tortured path, based on multiples of these.

 

[robject]

Normalizing to a 1000 ton hull baseline achieves multiple things simultaneously.

First and foremost, it skews the construction rules in favor of a "small ship universe" rather than making room for an emphatically BCS paradigm where cruisers start at 20k tons and up. If the bigger ships don't get "economies of scale" simply from being larger, then the evolutionary design impetus is going to favor numerous smaller ships over singular big ships.

Unless I've calculate things wrong -- which is possible -- it looks like it skews ships to somewhere around the 10,000 ton mark, plus whatever tonnage the Spine requires. Not small ship as we know it, but small BCS certainly.

Secondly, it's a kind of back door method of working in a "batteries bearing" reduction into the factor

I noticed that as well, and I immediately liked the idea.

For me, the problem is that it normalizes too low. Thus, the expressive power of these tables breaks too early.

However, I think if it could be ... adjusted ... to normalize to 10,000 tons, it might. Just. Work.

Assuming that that skewed ships to somewhere around the 100,000 ton mark, then that might (might!) leave wiggle room for capability tradeoffs. This would justify midsized battle riders as well as Tigress-sized dreadnoughts.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Mike is correct: It has to be a logarithmic function to span everything from a single turret on a fighter to a battleship.

The scaling has to be something like (scaled for missiles):

Factor   Weapons            Points
  1         1 weapon            1
  2         1 turret            3
  3         3 turrets          10
  4         1 bay              30
  5         2 large bays      100
  6         6 large bays      300
  7        20 large bays     1000
  8        60 large bays     3000
  9       200 large bays    10000

Squeeze a massive span into a tiny factor scale, and you get a massive point jump between factors.

The damage scale would have to be massively different too...

For small ships we would roughly have battery sizes of 1 weapon, 1 turret, 3 turrets, or 10 turrets.
The difference between 1 turret and two? None.
The difference between 3 turrets and 7 turrets? None.

The difference between 50 bays and 100 bays? None...

 

[robject]

There is one interesting effect that seems to be here: your ships must specialize. It looks to my untrained eyes that you cannot have a ship that has Factor 9 *everything*. In fact, it might only be able to have Factor 9 of *one thing*... or maybe two if you pick less powerful weapons in the first place?

 

[robject]

Here's ... well here's my first High Guard 1 ship attempt, ever. I tried to get something sort of along the lines of a Nolikian.

Volume.    Component.       Notes.
(16,000)   Hull
    320.   Bridge
  4,160    Drives           M6 J0 P6, 200 crew
    960    Fuel
  7,000    Meson-T Spine    Factor-T
     80    8 x TTBay PA     Factor-5
     10    10 x T3 Sand     Factor-6
    240    Hull Armor       Factor-9
     20    Nuke Damper*     Factor-9
     40    Meson Screen*    Factor-9
    320    Troops (320)
    800    Crew Staterooms
   2050    Open

* "tons indicates the total tonnage required to protect the entire ship, regardless of size."

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Here's ... well here's my first High Guard 1 ship attempt, ever. I tried to get something sort of along the lines of a Nolikian.

You might want a computer, it's kind of important?

 

[AnotherDilbert]

From the combat tables, I see value in a sensible layered defense -- which is also what High Guard 2 aspired to. I think both rules systems suffered from a problem there of course, but the philosophical intent is there from the beginning.

The big difference is that in '79 a defensive battery countered all attacks, not just one, so they are more important.

So at TL15, there doesn't appear to be a "real" reason to have warships larger than 20,000 tons or so.

As in HG'80...

At lower tech levels, larger warships becomes very important, since you need considerably more hull volume for armor Factor-9.

There is no Armour-9 at lower TLs. Armour is a one time thing, the factor dependant on TL.