Have been looking at the capital ship & small craft design rules, and Barrage Combat rules in High Guard recently.
I was wondering if anyone's had much experience in running capital ship engagements (as in multiple multi kdTon warships, using the Barrage Rules)?
The more I look at it, the more it looks like a nice simplification - and very fast to use - albeit with a few oddities from the system:
I do like the rule for fighter swarms - the DM-4 to hit and limit of the number of hits equal to firing weapons seems nice in theory, although in practice the fact that a VHY large particle bay gives such a whacking huge DM on your barrage attack roll means that you're killing one fighter per big gun per salvo without fail.
Capital ship critical hits and radiation hits seem pretty rare - unless the ship is essentially unarmoured, getting a net roll of 8+ seems pretty unlikely, and dropping the radiation damage band by the armour means it's pretty unlikely to achieve much. That said, it does making tracking damage a damn sight faster, even on (very) big ships.
The way the single roll is resolved, a well-aimed beam laser is more likely to hurt an armoured target than a badly aimed particle beam (fair enough), but fire control, gunnery skill and upgrades can quickly outweigh the weapon damage.
One odd artefact of this is that pulse lasers revert to being the flak weapons of choice (as only the number of laser mounts matters) whilst beam lasers are better against ships (weapon damage 1 versus weapon damage 2 with a DM-2 actually works out better, especially when range modifiers are better too); designing a ship with dozens of triple pulse laser turrets is better than reduced numbers of accurate beam lasers (the best point defence weapon in 'normal' scale).
Equally, because 1D6 is only worth one point of barrage damage, a Very Heavy Yield beam laser is the equal of a particle beam, and the most devastating thing you can pack for a weapon is...well...almost anything, as long as it has a dedicated Fire Control/5. Go figure.
The splitting up of barrages is a little bit odd - a barrage being a minimum of either ten guns or all the guns a ship carries means that the heavy bay mounts on, say, a 5,000 dTon destroyer will never all fire - if you have 10 or less, you can only fire 70-80% of them in a barrage, and the remaining two or three then don't seem to be fireable under the barrage rules (whilst the 'remainder' of your dozens of turret mounts will be enough to fire a second barrage).
One other thing to note is that it's very bloody. Capital ships seem very fragile (against other similar-sized warships, anyway). A putative 5 kilo-dton destroyer with armour 12, 5 50-dton bays, and two batteries of 10 particle beam turrets - not an especially heavy armament compared to what you could pack it with - can blow an equivalent ship to dust bunnies in an average of three turns.
Anyone actually used it? Half tempted to do a few capital ship/barrage engagements, if anyone would be interested in a quite-a-lot-of-credits squadron...
I was wondering if anyone's had much experience in running capital ship engagements (as in multiple multi kdTon warships, using the Barrage Rules)?
The more I look at it, the more it looks like a nice simplification - and very fast to use - albeit with a few oddities from the system:
I do like the rule for fighter swarms - the DM-4 to hit and limit of the number of hits equal to firing weapons seems nice in theory, although in practice the fact that a VHY large particle bay gives such a whacking huge DM on your barrage attack roll means that you're killing one fighter per big gun per salvo without fail.
Capital ship critical hits and radiation hits seem pretty rare - unless the ship is essentially unarmoured, getting a net roll of 8+ seems pretty unlikely, and dropping the radiation damage band by the armour means it's pretty unlikely to achieve much. That said, it does making tracking damage a damn sight faster, even on (very) big ships.
The way the single roll is resolved, a well-aimed beam laser is more likely to hurt an armoured target than a badly aimed particle beam (fair enough), but fire control, gunnery skill and upgrades can quickly outweigh the weapon damage.
One odd artefact of this is that pulse lasers revert to being the flak weapons of choice (as only the number of laser mounts matters) whilst beam lasers are better against ships (weapon damage 1 versus weapon damage 2 with a DM-2 actually works out better, especially when range modifiers are better too); designing a ship with dozens of triple pulse laser turrets is better than reduced numbers of accurate beam lasers (the best point defence weapon in 'normal' scale).
Equally, because 1D6 is only worth one point of barrage damage, a Very Heavy Yield beam laser is the equal of a particle beam, and the most devastating thing you can pack for a weapon is...well...almost anything, as long as it has a dedicated Fire Control/5. Go figure.
The splitting up of barrages is a little bit odd - a barrage being a minimum of either ten guns or all the guns a ship carries means that the heavy bay mounts on, say, a 5,000 dTon destroyer will never all fire - if you have 10 or less, you can only fire 70-80% of them in a barrage, and the remaining two or three then don't seem to be fireable under the barrage rules (whilst the 'remainder' of your dozens of turret mounts will be enough to fire a second barrage).
One other thing to note is that it's very bloody. Capital ships seem very fragile (against other similar-sized warships, anyway). A putative 5 kilo-dton destroyer with armour 12, 5 50-dton bays, and two batteries of 10 particle beam turrets - not an especially heavy armament compared to what you could pack it with - can blow an equivalent ship to dust bunnies in an average of three turns.
Anyone actually used it? Half tempted to do a few capital ship/barrage engagements, if anyone would be interested in a quite-a-lot-of-credits squadron...