Armoured Starships

[FallingPhoenix]

According to the Main Rulebook, a starship weapon has its damage multiplied by 50 against non-starship targets. Does this apply the other way around? (Meaning starship armour is multiplied by 50 against ground weapons). That means all but the largest and most high tech weapons won't be able to damage a lightly armored ship, and a more heavily armored one will be immune to basically anything non-starship (including large cannons). Also, a basic starship beam laser will make short work of any military vehicle in the main book (doing 50-300 damage).

Does this seem excessive to anyone else? Was it changed somewhere and I'm forgetting about it?

 

[Captain Jonah]

According to the Main Rulebook, a starship weapon has its damage multiplied by 50 against non-starship targets. Does this apply the other way around? (Meaning starship armour is multiplied by 50 against ground weapons)? That means all but the largest and most high tech weapons won't be able to damage a lightly armored ship, and a more heavily armored one will be immune to basically anything non-starship (including large cannons). Also, a basic starship beam laser will make short work of any military vehicle in the main book (doing 50-300 damage).

Does this seem excessive to anyone else? Was it changed somewhere and I'm forgetting about it?

Yes. You need to do 50 damage to count as a single point of starship damage, 4 points of Crystaliron stops 200 damage meaning it takes 250 to do a single point of damage to a Free Trader

That is correct. It takes an awful lot of man portable firepower to scratch a starships paint

Yes A pulse laser will do 100D of damage to a vehicle.

Build ground vehicles with a spaceship scale missile launcher and a few missiles. A 1.16 cubic meter ship scale missile does 50D6 damage :twisted:

Of course the minimum range is going to be a bit long but as long as you are firing at vehicles in the next country you should be fine :wink:

Note that these are HE rounds so a heavy Grav tank with 120-150 front armour can take a missile hit.

There have been a few threads on this in the past, way back in the archives.

 

[F33D]

Note that these are HE rounds so a heavy Grav tank with 120-150 front armour can take a missile hit.

Not likely at all. An HE missile that small wouldn't scratch a starship. It would have to be a penetrator round moving at very high velocity. Hence the minimum range...

 

[CosmicGamer]

This isn't civilization where a spear man sometimes can take out a battleship. :mrgreen:

 

[Dave Chase]

This isn't civilization where a spear man sometimes can take out a battleship. :mrgreen:

Really, that's sad.

I thought my TL 18 Spearman could easily take out that TL 15 or lower space ship. Guess I will have to complete redesign my home guard structure.

:lol:

Dave Chase

 

[AndrewW]

I thought my TL 18 Spearman could easily take out that TL 15 or lower space ship. Guess I will have to complete redesign my home guard structure.

You need to equip them with disrupter spears.

 

[Epicenter]

Does this seem excessive to anyone else? Was it changed somewhere and I'm forgetting about it?

It's more legacy silliness from earlier versions of Traveller that I don't think Mongoose can remove because it's somehow canon. Starships are entirely too durable. By the straight rules, even civilian starship is just about the most effective gunship known. Often times, even a tank can't harm a starship (while a starship laser will slice a tank in two).

 

[locarno24]

Yup. Starship armour is worth 50 times its equivalent in personal armour.

There is two caveats to that, though:

Firstly, any unarmoured ship will still take a point of damage from gunfire - and a lot of merchantment, light fighters, etc, are unarmoured.

Secondly, Mercenary added additional rules for combined fire on starships, which makes a squad or two firing on a scout ship able to do significant damage.

Ground Force Weaponry against Starship-scale Targets
Gaining a +4DM bonus to hit anything on the starship-scale, ground force weaponry must divide its damage by 50 before comparing it to a starship-scale target’s armour. Because a single weapon will, obviously, be unable to punch though armour it is possible for multiple weapons to all target the starship simultaneously, and the cumulative effect can inflict damage. Every additional ground weapon beyond the first can add half its damage dice to the total before dividing the total by 50 in order to calculate damage.

Which means that, say, a 20-man unit with 4D6 rifles (magrails, I think?) will do 4D6+2D6 per other guy...that's going to be an average somewhere in the 150 range...or able to hurt even a starship with a couple of points of armour. Start combining fire from multiple heavy weapons and it gets painful even faster.

I thought my TL 18 Spearman could easily take out that TL 15 or lower space ship. Guess I will have to complete redesign my home guard structure.

He can. An arc-field spear will only do enough damage to qualify as a single hit, but it still ignores armour...

 

[F33D]

Yes ships are durable but that is okay since they must take micro-meteoroid etc (No Nav-Deflectors) l.e the TNE Far Trader has DR 100 with a tanks main gun punching through more than trice that at [very] short range.

That's just because whoever wrote the rules flunked H.S. level math.

 

[FallingPhoenix]

One of the specific examples that prompted this question was the TL 9 Laser Cannon in the Central Supply Catalog. If you roll all sixes, you can do 48 damage, which is not even enough to penetrate a ship with any kind of armour. The laser cannon weighs 8 tons. A starship laser can do poetentially 6 times as much damage (and is a lot more likely to do so than the laser cannon). It just seems strange to me that an 8 ton laser cannon can't hold a candle to the starship one. Unless a displacement ton involves a massively huge amount of mass, surely the starship laser can't mass much more than this, so why doesn't everyone just mount starship beam lasers on their tanks?

 

[hdan]

Yes ships are durable but that is okay since they must take micro-meteoroid etc (No Nav-Deflectors) l.e the TNE Far Trader has DR 100 with a tanks main gun punching through more than trice that at [very] short range.

That's just because whoever wrote the rules flunked H.S. level math.

True words.

That's why IMTU, part of the ship's anti-gravity drive forms a field around the ship which provides a relatively minor repulsing action. Sure, you can still get into situations where the delta-V between the projectile and your ship is too high to be safe (that's why the MgT encounter table has the meteor swarm event), but in general, the grav-drive system cuts a wake around your ship. I don't have any hard&fast rules on that, it's just my handwave to avoid the question. When repulsors come on line at higher tech levels, it's a refinement of this "wake" effect.

(It also has interesting implications for attempting to board a ship under power.)

Similarly, your ship's power plant generates a magnetic field around your ship that works like the Earth's field to deflect ambient radiation. (Unlike the grav deflectors, this one actually works in real life.)

 

[F33D]

so why doesn't everyone just mount starship beam lasers on their tanks?

Probably because tanks to have starship sized fusion power plants to power them...

 

[dragoner]

Unless a displacement ton involves a massively huge amount of mass, surely the starship laser can't mass much more than this, so why doesn't everyone just mount starship beam lasers on their tanks?

Which is precisely we did for CT, a tank either was just a mobile laser turret or wireless 50kg ATGM, and we used the non-starships table from LBB2 where a hit was a kill on a vehicle and the pc/npc just rolled 8+ on CS. Years of playing ASL was good training for it.

 

[Captain Jonah]

F,F&S unified the design process to the point where it almost made sense.

Tech 15 Imperial Marine or army Grav tanks are big enough and advanced enough that no civilian starship should be able to stand against them. They are running with large fusion power plants anyway and a Marine Grav tank with enough bonded super dense on its front arc to defend against another tanks plasma cannon should laugh at a ships puny little laser. Then blow a ruddy great hole in the ship for its insolence.

10Dton fighters built using the starship rules can be flying around at 12G with 12-15 armour and a single ship scale weapon on board. You only get a -1 to hit with either the Beam or Pulse laser for close range so as long as you are firing at targets 1001m away and have a halfway decent fire control program you are fine. :roll:

This gun boat needs to take 650 - 800 damage in an attack before it is hurt. How many machine guns did you have again :lol:

Here is a final thought. Most of the items on a starship are high tech and delicate, punching some holes in a fusion plant or jump drive are likely to do bad things. Certainly boarding parties need to be careful what the shoot and where in case they breach the hull or damage ships components. So how is it a few players can wreck a ship from the inside with man portable weapons just by being careless but you need dozens of trained infantry firing together to hurt the ship from the outside. I would have thought if you can breach the hull from the inside you could do the same from the outside, or is it that Players are just that dangerous :wink:

 

[F33D]

and a Marine Grav tank with enough bonded super dense on its front arc to defend against another tanks plasma cannon should laugh at a ships puny little laser.

Sure. A laser that can cut through up 11 points of star ship armor at 25,000 kilometers... Whatever floats your boat. :lol:

 

[PFVA63]

Hi,

I agree that it really does some very odd to me. In general, my thoughts kind of tend toward space ships (and later starships) would likely derive from aircraft like structures (a little similar to how the space shuttle kind of appears to be based on modern aeronautical technology).

As such, to me I'm kind of surprised at the differences in armor ratings and damage in the rules as written, and wouldn't be against seeing them revised a bit, especially at tech levels close to our current level.

 

[Nathan Brazil]

One of the specific examples that prompted this question was the TL 9 Laser Cannon in the Central Supply Catalog. If you roll all sixes, you can do 48 damage, which is not even enough to penetrate a ship with any kind of armour. The laser cannon weighs 8 tons. A starship laser can do poetentially 6 times as much damage (and is a lot more likely to do so than the laser cannon). It just seems strange to me that an 8 ton laser cannon can't hold a candle to the starship one. Unless a displacement ton involves a massively huge amount of mass, surely the starship laser can't mass much more than this, so why doesn't everyone just mount starship beam lasers on their tanks?

To get into some RAW written nit-pickiness, it is worse than you think:
First, before rolling damage against a starship, you must divide damage dice that hit the target by 50 and round down. This means that for the TL9 Laser Cannons, you must have 7 actual hits at 8D each to get 56 standard damage dice. Divide by 50, round down, gives you your necessary 1D6 to roll on the Starship Damage table. Now roll on the Starship Damage table. From what you presented it was possible to succeed with 2 hits or even 1 good hit (if Effect is allowed to increase damage). May sound silly to you and ignore it if you like, but RAW would require 7, minimum.

 

[Nathan Brazil]

Hi,

I agree that it really does some very odd to me. In general, my thoughts kind of tend toward space ships (and later starships) would likely derive from aircraft like structures (a little similar to how the space shuttle kind of appears to be based on modern aeronautical technology).

As such, to me I'm kind of surprised at the differences in armor ratings and damage in the rules as written, and wouldn't be against seeing them revised a bit, especially at tech levels close to our current level.

Alien Module 5 - Solomani p.54 may provide a clue:
"The M-drive thruster powered Earth’s new generation of deep spacecraft. These opened up the solar system, reducing travel times from months to days and permitted the design of true spaceships with the size and reliability of ocean going vessels, rather than the slow, delicate and cramped solar sail and reaction drive craft that came before."
I suggest that a design philosophy change came once standard M-drive came into being.

Once gravity is not an issue, air frame for lift is less of an issue. In previous versions of the game, ungainful slabs could take off and land with configuration making the big difference in air speed. It is reduced in MgT, but still here.

 

[Captain Jonah]

and a Marine Grav tank with enough bonded super dense on its front arc to defend against another tanks plasma cannon should laugh at a ships puny little laser.

Sure. A laser that can cut through up 11 points of star ship armor at 25,000 kilometers... Whatever floats your boat. :lol:

Ok try this logic. :lol:

A 10Dton fighter with 10% of its volume given to armour over its entire surface area will have an armour thickness of between 6 and 9cm depending on its shape. This provides 12 points of bonded superdense protection.

An Imperial Marine tech 15 Heavy Grav tank. Built using the small craft design it can easily have 15 armour and a starship grade plasma or fusion weapon (see earlier rules). This makes it immune to any ships laser and allows it to punch through the 12 points of ship armour fairly well. With an armour thickness of up to 14cm all round.

However now build the same sized grav tank with the same bonded superdense armour using the vehicle rules and using maximum tech 15 armour optimisation on the hull and turret front to achieve armour 270. Using F,F&S this works out as 19cm of armour across the nose and leaves the grav tank with as little as 6cm (90 points, ship armour 2) on its flanks and rear. Convert this same armour to scale for starships (divide by 50), even if you round up you get a whole 6 armour against a starship weapon. Enough to stop a beam but one shot killed by many hits from a pulse laser. Is the bonded super dense used on a vehicle somehow inferior to the bonded super dense used on a ship despite being up to 50% thicker?

Same size of vehicle. The armour on the small craft design costs Mcr1.25, the armour on the vehicle scale costs Mcr3 (20 space heavy grav vehicle=2,000,000. 100% of hull cost for AFV, 150% of hull cost for 15 armour layers). :roll:

Lets face it, ship scale to personal scale doesn’t work :wink:

 

[CosmicGamer]

Lets face it, ship scale to personal scale doesn’t work

Is there anyone saying it does work perfectly? Do you have any quick and simple solutions?

Keep in mind, as a vehicle becomes more like a ship you you have some problems, including
A) the vehicle becomes just as hard for ground troops to take out as a ship
or
B) ground troops can take out the ship just as easy as a vehicle
C) a typical ground car with armor 6 becomes tougher than a trade ship with 4 points of armor?

I guess your saying some vehicles could have identical armors in identical thicknesses to providing the same amount of protection? How do the gravitics, power plants, and maneuver drives of a vehicle compare to a ship? Can they support the same armor?

Maybe it's the massive ship sized weapons and, for energy weapons, the huge amount of power available that differentiates vehicles and ships of various size?

Is it possible for things to scale? I don't know science well enough. Even if scientifically possible, would it make the design system too complicated? Could a vehicle or ship 10/50/100 times the size of another be capable of having 10/50/100 times the thickness in armor? 10/50/100 times larger more powerful weapons? Would various ships and vehicles of different size categories all need different weapons and armors defined? This series of questions obviously is not based on the RAW.