Variant High Guard rules

[Carlobrand]

In High Guard, agility can be a killer, making a ship - especially a very small craft - untouchable by many opponents (most often other small craft). At the same time, very small craft, with their limited computers, often find it impossible to lay a finger on their larger opponents due to high DMs evolving from a combination of agility and superior computer rating. I have two thoughts on this. They're probably not new, but I thought I'd toss them out to get some comment.

The first is, in place of the "faster fleet" DM, to allow opposing fleets to engage in a bidding war to "spend" agility to gain a DM on the initiative roll, whose most significant result is to determine the range between fleets. In this model, the player who lost initiative last round (or a random player on the first round) bids how much of his fleet's agility he will spend to improve his initiative roll. The opposing player then counters with how much he will spend, the first player rebids, the opposing player counters again, until all agility is spent or one of the players yields the bid to the other. Agility bid by either side is spent, whether that player won or lost the bid; it represents the fleet's collective effort to gain the desired range, and all ships must deduct that amount from their agility during the coming combat step. The winning player gets to add the difference between his bid and the losing bid to his die roll.

The second is, during combat, to allow an attacker to spend part of his agility to try to match course with one defender, reducing that defender's agility advantage, but at a cost to his own agility. This would have to be announced during the precombat decision step: the players would announce who is matching course with whom, each player declaring one attacker and target at a time, starting with the player who won initiative and alternating between players thereafter. The amount of agility expended would be the LOWER of the attacker's maximum agility or the target's maximum agility. During the subsequent combat step, that attacker gets to subtract that amount of his agility from the defender's agility, reducing or neutralizing the defender's agility - and reducing or neutralizing his own effective agility with respect to his target by that quantity.

For example, a squadron of agility-6 fighters tries to match course with an opposing agility-5 dreadnought. The dreadnought's net agility with respect to the fighters is now 0, but the fighters' net agility against incoming fire from that dreadnought has been reduced to 1.

Or, a pair of agility-6 fighters are trying to dogfight. Normally, neither can hit the other with a net DM of -8 due to agility and size. However, one declares that he is applying agility to counter his opponent's agility. The two are now dogfighting with a net agility of 0 with respect to each other.

 

[mike wightman]

Scrap agility.

Each ship/squadron has a manoeuvre rating equal to the manoeuvre drive rating (capital ships and their escorts count as squadrons, so I have tiles for each ship/squadron making up the fleet).

Maneuver points may be spent to change range, attempt a breakthrough or flanking manoeuvre, or as a defensive DM.

Introduce more range bands and extra DMs to hit based on range to mitigate for the lower defence rating (although a squadron using its manoeuvre points for pure evasion is going to be difficult to hit but easy to out manoeuvre).

That's how I do it anyway.

 

[BlackBat242]

What, making it simpler and quicker instead of more complicated and time-consuming?

That's against every principle of "modern" game theory & design!

 

[Carlobrand]

What, making it simpler and quicker instead of more complicated and time-consuming?

That's against every principle of "modern" game theory & design!

Every principle of "modern" game design is precipitated on ensuring the widest possible audience for the greatest possible return. I respect that - no profit, no game company. However, there remains a small niche market of gamers who will accept, and in some odd cases even enjoy, complexity when it adds a tactical dimension or enhances the flavor of pseudo-realism.

Most folk have indeed moved to computers for that, the computer being able to handle those details discretely without interfering with the gamer's enjoyment. However, some of us are a good deal older than desktop computers and remember playing games like Star Fleet Battles and Squad Leader. I lack the programming skill to bring this to the computer with tweaks, and a few tweaks to the paperback rules are not going to bring this little game into the Squad Leader realm of complexity. If two players like it, great. If they don't, they ignore the suggestion and go on with their fun. Everybody's happy.

 

[Carlobrand]

Scrap agility.

Each ship/squadron has a manoeuvre rating equal to the manoeuvre drive rating (capital ships and their escorts count as squadrons, so I have tiles for each ship/squadron making up the fleet).

Maneuver points may be spent to change range, attempt a breakthrough or flanking manoeuvre, or as a defensive DM.

Introduce more range bands and extra DMs to hit based on range to mitigate for the lower defence rating (although a squadron using its manoeuvre points for pure evasion is going to be difficult to hit but easy to out manoeuvre).

That's how I do it anyway.

Scrap agility? Are you suggesting that a light-speed beam weapon fired at a large target a light-second off doesn't have an increased chance of missing if the target puts on a 1-G burst of acceleration for a second? Why, you wild man, you! That's positively heretical!

Yeah, I've debated that idea at times, but it's a bit radical in that it requires one to completely redesign their fleet, as there is no longer any point in having those oversized power plants. It's a good idea if you're playing regularly with someone who's willing to design a fleet around an alternate rule. I used to have some great fun with alternate chess rules and boards. If you're not lucky enough to have a cooperative gaming friend, the folk tend to balk at what it means for their preferred fleet designs.

 

[robject]

Scrap agility.

[...]

Maneuver points may be spent to change range, attempt a breakthrough or flanking manoeuvre, or as a defensive DM.

Introduce more range bands and extra DMs to hit based on range to mitigate for the lower defence rating (although a squadron using its manoeuvre points for pure evasion is going to be difficult to hit but easy to out manoeuvre).

That's how I do it anyway.

Yep, that's how I do it, as well.

I like the idea of spending maneuver points for breakthrough and flanking. Consider that rule borrowed.

I also allow up to Maneuver-9.

 

[Carlobrand]

Returning to the scene of the crime

Revisiting:

Make sandcasters effective against missiles only. With the +6 damage roll penalty, beam weapons are not the lethal threat they used to be. Little loss in balance if they're allowed to hit without defence.

It never made sense anyway, a beam of energy able to burn through a foot of steel but stopped by 50 kg of sparklies.

 

[Carlobrand]

Meson fire:

As suggested by multiple sources in multiple threads: meson screens are treated like armor. They cause at least a portion of the inbound beam to decay prematurely even on an unsuccessful defense, as a result modifying the damage roll of meson weapons on radiation and interior damage tables.

They also reduce the number of extra damage rolls that a spinal gets. This has the advantage of seeing that light cruisers don't hit as hard as the big battlewagons and don't end up replacing them. For example, the J would get only its basic 1 roll instead of 10 (assuming a factor 9 meson screen), the N would get 5 instead of 14, the R would get 8 instead of 17, the T would get 10 instead of 19. Without that, it's largely irrelevant whether you got hit by a light cruiser or a dreadnought cause ten rolls will pretty much take anyone out of the fight.

 

[mike wightman]

Note one other effect of treating meson screens as armour - it gets a +DM on the damage tables so certain results (fuel tanks shattered and crew hits I'm looking at you) are only possible if you have a low screen rating (either due to design or damage).

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

to me, the armour plan of most traveller ships is rather flawed in a setting with Meson weaponry.


Armour is laid out in accordance with the builders expectation of the threats the ship will face. For example, the capital ships of WW1 were build to take hits at ranges of about 10,000-15,000 yards, based on the events at Tsushima in 1905, the most recent example of naval combat. Now, as it happens, the battles in WW1 happened at much longer ranges, 20,000 yards or more, so the armour plan focused on the wrong areas, putting too much armour on the vertical sides and not enough on the decks. but thats a case of improved fire control techology allowing extended ranges.

anyway, my point is, a ship designer in the OTU, knowing full well that his ship may be struck by a meson weapon, would design his armour plan with heavy internal compartmentalisation, to limit the spread of damage. he can't do much about a meson detonation inside the jump drives, but he can, for example, install armoured bulkheads to limit the spread of damage to the power plant and the spinal mount.

so, i think armour should have at least some effect on meason fire, even if at a significant reduction.

 

[Carlobrand]

to me, the armour plan of most traveller ships is rather flawed in a setting with Meson weaponry.


Armour is laid out in accordance with the builders expectation of the threats the ship will face. For example, the capital ships of WW1 were build to take hits at ranges of about 10,000-15,000 yards, based on the events at Tsushima in 1905, the most recent example of naval combat. Now, as it happens, the battles in WW1 happened at much longer ranges, 20,000 yards or more, so the armour plan focused on the wrong areas, putting too much armour on the vertical sides and not enough on the decks. but thats a case of improved fire control techology allowing extended ranges.

anyway, my point is, a ship designer in the OTU, knowing full well that his ship may be struck by a meson weapon, would design his armour plan with heavy internal compartmentalisation, to limit the spread of damage. he can't do much about a meson detonation inside the jump drives, but he can, for example, install armoured bulkheads to limit the spread of damage to the power plant and the spinal mount.

so, i think armour should have at least some effect on meason fire, even if at a significant reduction.

A lot of that depends on how you see the meson spinal operating. Striker has the thing creating massive destruction within a fairly defined zone: "All personnel within the burst area of a meson accelerator are killed; all vehicles and weapons are destroyed; all buildings collapse and any smooth ground surface becomes broken ground." No amount of armor saves you inside the zone - but nothing outside the zone is affected. Doesn't sound much like a meson decay, but I'm no physicist. Compartmentalization won't save anything in that zone under that description. And, those zones can get pretty big for ship weapons. If I figure this right, a T meson has a burst radius of 270 meters, enough to swallow big chunks of even the dreadnoughts under the Striker interpretation.

 

[Carlobrand]

The Reserve: a bit of a headache.

The Reserve brings an interesting dimension to the game, allowing you to withdraw craft from the line for repairs while in battle, or to hold certain types back while you use other types to take out the opposing types that are their worst natural enemy.

Unfortunately, it's very difficult to justify. It mirrors nothing that exists in Book 2 and is a little hard to conceptualize for ships battling in the immensity of open space. It could possibly be considered ships moving back out of weapon's range, but a turn's movement is 43,000 klicks at 6G, some of these weapons have ranges of hundreds of thousands of kilometers, and it's really not hard for them to spot a glowing infrared ember within their weapon's range against the velvet darkness of space. It'd take more than a turn to move from reserve to line or vice versa if the reserve were safe by virtue of being out of weapon's range.

And then there's that squadron of multi-hundred-thousand-ton behemoths successfully shielded from the beams and missiles of your multi-hundred-thousand-ton behemoths by a light sprinkling of little butterflies - I mean, fighters.

Option one is to drop the whole concept - no such concept appears in the later MegaTrav space combat.

Option two is to reconsider how we view the reserve.

For example, if we view ships in space as rather easy to spot IR-glowing embers against a comparatively "cold" black backdrop, then spotting them is relatively easy. Hitting them with a missile, however, requires guiding that missile over tens of thousands of miles to the target while the target's using various strategies to interfere with your comm-link with the missile (said strategies extremely dependent on the specifics, and of course we only know the current stage of that technological conflict, so I'll avoid specifics). Or, it depends on intelligence and sensor equipment that can fit in a space no bigger than a basketball being able to resist spoofing from a ship built by at least equally technically advanced designers with a strong interest in seeing their designs survive. (Say for example, variable-spectrum IR lasers designed to blind an IR sensor, or grains of uranium ejected toward a missile to mask the neutrino signature as a missile passes through the cloud.)

Beams seem straightforward, but active ECM efforts might likewise jam them depending on the specifics of how you're sensing and how they're responding - some sort of active jamming is a must, 'cause really your target is about as invisible as a black skeet crossing a bright blue sky and has no real hope of hiding his IR signature other than to find some way to blind or trick your IR sensors. (Here I envision finding ways to create interference patterns that give the brief impression the target is moving faster or slower, or in another direction, to confuse a targeting system that's trying to anticipate the ship's motion, and discharging heat in quick variable-intensity surges that make it difficult to doppler the ship.)

Anyway, that's a bit of an aside to this: if we presuppose some as-yet unstated method by which ships glowing like stars in the night are able to make it somewhat difficult for beams and missiles to find them, then one possible method of seeing the reserve is to envision ships hugging other ships tight to hide their signature within the signature of the other ships. In that case, we envision opposing fleets as flying tightly together, with some ships actively drawing attention to themselves while using various strategies to capitalize on whatever technical weaknesses opposing sensors might have, while others remain quiet and hug tight to their active partners to lose their signature amidst the "noise".

In that case, option two leads us to a simple rule: the total weight of ships on the line must exceed the weight of ships in reserve in order to conceal the reserve.

 

[aramis]

Option one is to drop the whole concept - no such concept appears in the later MegaTrav space combat.

That's because MT removes one of the major abstractions - namely, that there are only two ranges. By adding a movement system (broken as MT's is), one makes the reserve a matter of practical maneuver, rather than a simulation enforced abstraction of the process.

It also disappears from mechanics if you use the HG adaptations to Mayday.

 

[Carlobrand]

This gets ambitious. In another post, we discussed pirates and the potential for a quick ambush shot as the villain closes to board. That got me to thinking - what if? What if your role play out you in a situation where you were fighting ship to ship at what amount to "point-blank" ranges?

High Guard doesn't speak to range but Book 2 and MT both assume the targets are thousands of kilometers apart. A careful reading of MT and Striker rules suggests fire at what amount to personal-combat ranges would be murderous: missiles and lasers flash out at 20-40 times the usual game rate or more - lasers with double the penetration that they usually see in space combat. There's clear advantage in hanging back a bit: if nothing else, your damaged ships can hope to go home for some repairs and fight again. (Well, unless they were visited by the meson fairy.)

But - that's not always the case. A fighter often has little to no hope of hitting at space combat range. However, take it in really close and a humble pulse laser becomes a lethally effective instrument. He has the problem fighters have always had with survivability, but he becomes effective. Likewise, a low-tech opponent finds his targets impossibly fuzzed out by ECM measures controlled by high-tech opposing computer, but no amount of ECM protects something the size of a skyscraper from a shot at a few hundred yards.

Here are some ideas for High Guard close range space combat, aka dogfighting or strafing, based on a fusion with Striker. I'm looking at some ideas for extending it to multi-ship conflict, but that's proving tricky. This seems to work pretty well for the 1-on-1 encounters.

________________________________________________​

Close combat occurs when spacecraft approach to personal combat ranges (under about 28 kilometers). At those ranges, targets are easier to track, energy weapons strike with much greater power, missiles cross the space between vessels in under a half-minute, and maneuver or electronic warfare have little effect on the outcome.

In 1:1 combat, involving one craft on either side (or one squadron of craft flying together in formation, for example fighters), the side with superior agility may come to close combat range by spending one turn at short range, winning initiative on the next, and then selecting close combat range. Alternately, both sides may mutually agree to fight at close combat range after spending one turn at short range. A craft (or squadron) may not impose close combat on an opponent if its agility is not higher than the opponent's. (Note that this means opposing craft of equal agility cannot engage in close combat except by mutual agreement.)

Note that application of emergency agility will alter the close combat determination. An opponent may declare the use of emergency agility during the Pre-combat Decision Step in order to avoid close combat, if his emergency agility is sufficient to make his agility at least equal to his opponent's agility. If this occurs, close combat does not occur and the participants remain at short range. The player using emergency agility is of course bound by the emergency agility rules for the remainder of the turn.

Certain modifications of standard rules apply in close combat:

Range: close combat occurs at at a range of between roughly 200 meters and 28 kilometers. The combatants are as close as they dare to get without risking collision, close enough for a launched missile to leap the distance and impact the target in under 30 seconds.

Time scale: close combat is on the personal combat time scale. One close combat round is 30 seconds long. (If there is a need to translate between High Guard turns and close combat rounds, there are 40 close-combat rounds per High Guard turn.)

Duration: once close combat is begun, there is no initiative determination step or range determination step. Close combat continues until, at the beginning of any round, either both players or the side with higher agility decides to end close combat; a player may declare the use of emergency agility to accomplish this. (Note that this means opposing craft of equal agility cannot disengage from close combat except by mutual agreement.) If one or both sides successfully disengage from close combat, both sides move to short range and proceed using the normal High Guard turn sequence, except that the player who wins initiative may not change from short range in that turn. A player who uses emergency agility to accomplish a breakaway is bound by the emergency agility rules during that turn.

Computers: at close combat ranges, there is no computer DM for direct fire weapons; Predict programs don't have time to gather the data needed to predict the opponent's movements, and attackers and targets loom large in each others' sensors, so ECM is also ineffective. (If nothing else, craft can be targeted from power plant neutrino emissions or the occlusion of the star field.) Computer DMs continue to apply to missiles.

Agility DMs: A craft's DM to avoid being hit in close combat is its agility plus its size DM. The craft with the higher agility may also subtract any amount from 0 to -10 from the opponent's to-hit rolls at his preference, but he must subtract the same amount from his own rolls (if the opponent is very large, it can be to the faster player's advantage to take the penalty); if both craft have the same agility, there is no additional modifier. The agility DM does not affect missiles, which are presumed to be high performance.

Craft tonnage	modifier
10	-1
20	+2
30	+5
40	+7
50	+9
60	+11
70	+13
80	+15
90	+17
100+	+18

(Extrapolated from a calculation based on Striker size mod and controls mod. Where Striker is concerned, hitting a spacecraft-size target is literally as easy as hitting the broad side of a barn. Spacecraft are affected by the Striker agility DM, which is analogous to the High Guard agility DM. However, High Guard ships are flying in vacuum: there is therefore no maximum velocity, and the direct fire DM [see Errata] is in effect the relative velocity between the two craft - which is not calculated but can trigger a DM anywhere from 0 to -10, and it is controlled by the faster craft. There is no air from which to draw maneuver enhancements. All participants are considered to have the equivalent of computer controls (-6 DM). The basic DM is therefore an indeterminate direct-fire speed DM, the agility rating of 1 to 6, and a 6 for computer controls, for a potential rating of 7 to 22. However, size DMs quickly dwarf any other possible DMs, with a 100 dT craft typically having a size DM in excess of 22, enough to eliminate any possible advantage due to speed, thrust or controls, and things only get worse from there. Only small craft have size DMs small enough to be worthwhile, and then just barely.)

Jump drives: Jump drives follow their usual rules, requiring time to build up the needed energy for jump and to activate jump. Assuming jump fuel is available, a jump drive will activate 80 close combat rounds after the decision to jump if the ship needs to accumulate energy and normally takes two High Guard turns to do so. It will do so in 40 rounds if the ship ordinarily generates the needed energy in one High Guard turn or if enough energy is already accumulated (as with a black globe). Jump fuel is measured in the round the ship will jump: if as a result of battle damage there is not enough jump fuel at the end of 80 (or 40) rounds to make the desired jump, the jump does not occur. (Enough in this instance is defined as sufficient fuel to make the jump plus to fuel the power plant at a rating equal to the jump distance desired for one week.)

Pulse lasers: the pulse laser receives a -5 bonus DM to the damage roll at TL7-12 and a -6 at TL13+.

Beam lasers: The beam laser receives a -3 bonus DM to the damage roll at TL7-12 and a -4 at TL13+.

Energy weapons: the plasma gun receives a -1 bonus DM to the damage roll at TL10, a -2 at TL11 and a -3 at TL12. The fusion gun receives a -6 bonus DM to the damage roll at TL12 and a -7 at TL14.

Missiles: Nuclear missiles do normal surface and radiation damage to the target. However, the launching craft also receives a radiation hit, with an additional +6 penalty to the damage roll for attenuation due to range. Conventional missiles are treated normally.

Particle accelerators: turret-mounted and bay-mounted particle accelerators do normal surface and radiation damage to the target. However, the launching craft also receives a radiation hit, with an additional +6 penalty to the damage roll for attenuation due to range. Spinal mount particle accelerators cannot be used against opponents in the close combat due to the rapid maneuvering of all participants.

Meson weapons¹: Meson weapons cannot be used due to the rapid maneuvering of all participants.

Sandcasters: sandcasters operate normally against missiles. Sandcasters have no effect on ship energy weapons at close combat ranges.

Repulsors: repulsors operate normally.

Meson screens: meson screens are moot since meson weapons cannot be used in close combat.

Nuclear dampers: nuclear dampers function normally. Alternately, they can neutralize ALL nuclear missiles on one opposing craft in the close combat per close combat round, rendering that craft incapable of using nuclear missiles for the remainder of the game. They cannot do both in the same round.

continued...

 

[Carlobrand]

...see previous

Force fields: force fields operate normally. For close combat purposes, this means they only release energy every 40 rounds (i.e. at the end of round 40, 80, et cetera); alternately, if the math permits a straightforward calculation, they can release energy at 1/40 their usual rate every round. They can be turned on or off at any time, but they activate or deactivate 40 rounds after the decision is declared (i.e. if they are turned on in round 3, they become active in round 43, and vice versa). Exception: a ship with a black globe may declare that it is on or off when it is first engaged in close combat, and that decision takes effect immediately (essentially, the decision was taken and the device was starting up or turning off while the attacker was coming in). Because the intense pace of battle can very quickly overload a black globe, the decision to turn on or off the black globe should be considered closely if the ship is targeted for close combat.

With combat occurring at personal combat ranges, weapons not traditionally suitable for space combat may be considered for use in a ship's turret or in the case of missiles (if someone wants to get clever and try something different) as rail-mount or bay-launched weapons. It is for the players to mutually negotiate weapon effects, perhaps by comparing their Striker data to the Striker data of ship-based weapons and extrapolating. As a general rule, a weapon needs to have a penetration of at least 40 at its usual effective range to have any effect, and weapons below a penetration of about 64 should receive a penalty to the damage roll. (I'd suggest roughly a +1 penalty per 2 points below 64.)

(It is also remotely possible for vehicles to be considered for combat, say in the case of a role=play scenario involving a g-carrier jumped by a small fighter before it can get to atmosphere, but the differing damage systems may create a problem. Might be better to lean on Striker there.)

¹Problem here. Striker and High Guard treat the weapon differently. Striker with a defined radius of total destruction and no effect outside of that, High Guard with an interior damage effect and a separate radiation effect. If we follow the High Guard model, then the weapon might have a "flak" effect: craft maneuver too rapidly for it to be aimed, but it might still be fired to achieve a near-miss radiation effect like the nuclear missile. A meson spinal, with its burst radius of up to a quarter kilometer, would be especially dramatic.

 

[Carlobrand]

Let's have fun with damage

A 0.1 kt nuke delivers 418.4 gigajoules of energy as a radiating blast of energy - as a combination of very, very fast nuclei and bits that were once in a nucleus and gamma rays, if I understand it right. Figure half of it radiates off in the wrong direction. 200 gigajoules is enough to vaporize almost 33 tons of iron, or to liquify over 24 times that much iron. That's over 4 kiloliters volume of the metal as vapor or 24 times that as glowing liquid, most likely a mix.

And, we can't very well pretend it's not in contact: it has exactly the same odds as the HE missile.

Treat the nuke as an ice cream scooper. You now have a pretty bullseye consisting of a vaporized crater maybe a couple of meters in diameter surrounded by a hemispherical block of liquid iron over 3.6 meters in radius running from white-molten a red-yellow, surrounded by a more solid and increasingly darker red. Well, for a fraction of a second anyway, and then the vapor that was the crater is going to rather violently carry away most of that molten stuff as it seeks to expand as fast as it can. Striker has a nice view of it: a 15 meter radius of utter destruction and 15 meters around that that has to survive the equivalent of a 60-penetration attack. Bonded superdense handles it much better, but the way the game treats it, we're still postulating holes you could drive a car through.

You're looking at a destroyer drifting away looking like a destroyer-sized space dragon came up and bit a big mouthful out of it - quite a bit more than your typical Maneuver 2 or Weapon 3 result, unless you're meaning that there's a meters-radius hole where a part of the maneuver drive used to be, but that's something no amount of damage control is going to repair.

So, what would it take to keep a nuke from ice-cream scooping several meters of your hull into gas and high-speed liquid globs splashing out into space and deep into your ship? Well, the equivalent of several meters thickness of hull would be a good start, but a factor 15 hull won't give us the equivalent of several meters under the Striker errata. Best we can get is just under 3 meters.

So, blast play balance and survivable battles, let's make 200 gigajoules feel like 200 gigajoules. A contact hit from a nuke is a -12 to the surface damage roll, blow off that bit about a +6 for factor 9 or lower, and that's being nice. Yes, by gum, an unarmored ship that has a nuke go off on it's hull is just flat gonna take a crit; it should, someone just dug a meters-wide crater in it, a chunk of that ship just isn't there anymore, and incandescent gas and gobs of high velocity liquid metal just radiated out from that chunk. Same bonus on the radiation roll: hey, there's one heck of a lot of gamma pumping through the neighborhood; even if the walls near you aren't cherry red, your body's cells aren't gonna be happy.

Life rule #1: being next to an exploding nuke is not something one does with equanimity.

But then, it's awful hard to actually put a missile in contact with a ship. Lots of missiles expended to put that meters-wide hole in you, and not all attackers can pull it off. However, you don't have to be in contact with the hull: if it can go off within about 30 meters, you can give him a nasty dose of gamma, or x-ray as the gamma hits atoms in the hull and the atoms deal with that energy, if I recall - that 60-penetration bit that Striker mentioned. So, Plan B, you can declare a proximity detonation: +6 to hit, but if you penetrate defenses (they still get their chance), you get a straight roll at the radiation table, no surface damage.

While we're at it, let's revisit particle beams. That A/B/C with 500 EP, that's a possible 125 gigajoules, expressed as a beam of relativistic particles. Interacts with the atoms of the hull, just flat smashes some of them, sends their fragments along at somewhat slower relativistic speeds to have their own collisions, much much strange particles and energies and unniceness. That T is delivering twice as much power - it's like finding a way to focus the nuke we mentioned above into a tight beam. It ought to knife through even that Factor 15 hull. Well, cone through; I'm not real good with the physics of such things.

So, let's say it does. Instead of getting more rolls as the power goes up, it's one roll gets more violent and penetrating. For each level above A, the particle accelerator gets a -1 to the surface and radiation damage roll. As the weapon grows more powerful, it goes deeper - as opposed to getting lots of little rolls on the surface. Now we have the classic technological arms race between armor and penetration: the better the armor gets, the better the weapons get, and vice versa.

 

[nyrath]

Carlobrand: back in the 1960's the military thought that nuclear weapons in space was not worth it. As you point out, even if it is in contact with the target, half of the blast is wasted. If the weapon is not in contact, that just increased the amount of energy doing no damage.

However, other scientists working on a different problem found the solution. They were in the nuclear-pulse Orion project. This uses nuclear devices for spacecraft propulsion, with part of the blast being intercepted by a "pusher plate" on the bottom of the spacecraft.

Wasting most of the blast energy would make the system worthless. So they did something insane: they invented the nuclear shaped charge. Their design would direct almost 80% of the blast in a diffuse cone aimed at the broad pusher plate.

About this time the representatives of the military (who were funding this project) noticed that if you could make the plume a little faster and with a narrower cone, it would no longer be a propulsion system component. It would be a directed energy weapon. Thus was born project Casaba-Howitzer.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_ht...hp#id--Nukes_In_Space--Nuclear_Shaped_Charges

 

[mike wightman]

I wonder if we could go back to a HG1 like weapon factor where you only have one weapon factor based on number and type of weapons.
Turrets
1-1
10-2
100-3
1000-4
10000-5
100000-6
TL and weapon type can add from 1-3

50t bays
1-3
10-4
100-5
TL and weapon type can add 1-4

100t bays
1-4
10-5
100-6
TL and weapon type can add 1-4

spinals

light AEJNSW
medium BFKPTX
heavy CGLQUY
very heavy DHMRVZ

 

[Carlobrand]

...Wasting most of the blast energy would make the system worthless. So they did something insane: they invented the nuclear shaped charge. Their design would direct almost 80% of the blast in a diffuse cone aimed at the broad pusher plate.

About this time the representatives of the military (who were funding this project) noticed that if you could make the plume a little faster and with a narrower cone, it would no longer be a propulsion system component. It would be a directed energy weapon. Thus was born project Casaba-Howitzer.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_ht...hp#id--Nukes_In_Space--Nuclear_Shaped_Charges

A nuclear ... shaped ... charge?

Oh, man, we GOTTA get one of those! That little monster would punch a hole straight through both sides of a fully armored planetoid!

Tech level? We seem to be on the brink of them now, but it'd be sad to see good ol' nukes obsolete before we hit space.

Then we get ourselves an x-ray laser standoff nuclear missile ...

See? Armor isn't a problem!

(I wonder how efficient that x-ray laser bit was at converting the blast into a laser.)

I wonder if we could go back to a HG1 like weapon factor where you only have one weapon factor based on number and type of weapons.
Turrets
1-1
10-2
100-3
1000-4
10000-5
100000-6
TL and weapon type can add from 1-3

50t bays
1-3
10-4
100-5
TL and weapon type can add 1-4

100t bays
1-4
10-5
100-6
TL and weapon type can add 1-4

spinals

light AEJNSW
medium BFKPTX
heavy CGLQUY
very heavy DHMRVZ

I have HG1; those weren't the numbers they used. Are those your suggestions for numbers to use?

 

[mike wightman]

Yes, the way the factors were arrived at for HG1 was a bit broken, one of the reasons for its rejection and redesign I think.

Those numbers of mine are just a preliminary idea.