Dec Update - Spinal mount weapon damage

Chas

Mongoose
Give the hull points have just doubled in this draft can we expect to see a significant rise in the spinal weapon damage output?
 
Chas said:
Give the hull points have just doubled in this draft can we expect to see a significant rise in the spinal weapon damage output?

I believe they will Chas. Only because there has been no revision really done to them and Matt has indicated he can see it raised. I will spend those 30 mins today to compare damage/ton/power of bays and try to propose a damage value for spinals that makes them viable. I welcome you do the same :)
 
Well if we consider spinal mounts were underpowered before the hike, there's a fair bit of catching up to do, and the whole balance across the weapon suite needs a look.

A 10k ship has 4,000 hull points before any add ons, a 100k battle cruiser 40,000.

Destroying a 10k ship in one hit still means 10 hits are necessary to deal to the 100k battle cruiser. Which means doing up to 4,000 hit points in a single smash, basically we're talking an order of magnitude in the damage out put increase for spinals, not just doubling or tripling.

Need to play test the critical hits to see how badly say 50% down and 5 of those are going to affect a ship.
 
Chas said:
Well if we consider spinal mounts were underpowered before the hike, there's a fair bit of catching up to do, and the whole balance across the weapon suite needs a look.

A 10k ship has 4,000 hull points before any add ons, a 100k battle cruiser 40,000.

Destroying a 10k ship in one hit still means 10 hits are necessary to deal to the 100k battle cruiser. Which means doing up to 4,000 hit points in a single smash, basically we're talking an order of
magnitude in the damage out put increase for spinals, not just doubling or tripling.

Rather than scaling the dice - which ends up being crazy, have a multiplier and roll the same amount of dice. So therefore, Particle weapons can be:

Particle Spinal - Base TL11
Multiplier = Weapon Weight / 10
Damage = 3D * Multiplier (e.g. a 10,000 ton weapon will do 3D6 x 1000, so 3,000-18,000 hull)

Now before we agree that this too weak, lets not forget TL modifiers:
TL+1 = Size -10%
TL+2 = Size -20%, +1D
TL+3 = Size -30%
TL+4 = Size -40%, +2D

This is important because it scales the Spinal weapon the size of the actual spinal. Perhaps we can say Maximum weapon weight is like 30,000 tons or so (before TL mods), which at TL15, would allow for a 5D6x3000, up to 90,000 hull a hit - pretty crazy.

Need to play test the critical hits to see how badly say 50% down and 5 of those are going to affect a ship.
I think critical hits are trivial now - you're not going to get anything to worry about. By the time your critical hits are anything to worry about, you will be near dead - because most of your crits are coming from you losing most of your hull.
 
A basic question would be should spinal mounts be defendable against? They are, more or less, equivalent to the main guns on battleships. A hit from on a lesser ship is a crippling, if not killing blow. But battleships were designed to fight each other and take a pounding.

Conceptually most, I think, see spinal mounts as something similar to like the wave motion gun. If you get hit, you are most likely dead.

So it comes down to what role you want a spinal mount to play in the overall combat sense. Should they be so deadly they can kill or cripple in one shot, or should a ship of similar size and fully armored be able to take say half a dozen hits before the next punches through and scrambles it's innards?
 
phavoc said:
A basic question would be should spinal mounts be defendable against? They are, more or less, equivalent to the main guns on battleships. A hit from on a lesser ship is a crippling, if not killing blow. But battleships were designed to fight each other and take a pounding.

Conceptually most, I think, see spinal mounts as something similar to like the wave motion gun. If you get hit, you are most likely dead.

So it comes down to what role you want a spinal mount to play in the overall combat sense. Should they be so deadly they can kill or cripple in one shot, or should a ship of similar size and fully armored be able to take say half a dozen hits before the next punches through and scrambles it's innards?

I dont think any players would enjoy 1-shot 1-kill. From personal to capital combat. That may be more acceptable from dissimilar combatants, example a corvette being struck by a spinal - but thats it.

Logically speaking, if we want 1-shot = cripple/kill (aka not fun), then we dont need damage values, we could simply indicate if you get hit, you're dead.

Of course, the above scenarios are a general guideline for most enjoyable RPGs. Don't make me build a ship/character/whatever with so much detail and investment then Pop! goes the battleship.

So for me and my group, definitely half a dozen hits - and thats a half dozen from an equivalent sized spinal (so not 6 hits from a corvette spinal to take out some giant dreadnought)
 
Also keep in mind that any ship that could be killed by a one shot hit by a spinal has no place in a line of battle. Ships of the line are supposed to be 75K tons and above in the past intended design structure. It's quite reasonable that a 10-15kton ship does get totally smashed by a single hit from a spinal. It's much like battles in the age of sail, by custom frigates didn't fire upon men-of-war and the ships of the line didn't fire on frigates even in full on battles, because one good broadside would sink a frigate.

The previous design paradigms (or the intended design paradigms, it didn't quite work out that way) had a bit of an orphan ship size at 10 to 30ktons. Too big to avoid spinals, too small to carry them. It was in fact why I did that example cheap TL12 frigate example at 20ktons. It is a ship that will smash craft below it in size, and as a second rate ship, force the commitment of a first rate medium cruiser to be committed to attack a shipping lane protected by one.

It doesn't mean this version of rules needs to follow the same set up blow by blow but I think the general idea of massive battleships is still intended to be the way things work at empire vs. empire level. And for that to happen spinals do need an upgrade with the current 1 hull point = 2.5 tons.

Not that it would be want to be overdone and then leave bays completely behind. :lol:

I still like the idea of more sliding tonnages and damage ratios Nerhesi. So that say you get a choice to build a 50kton cruiser that will hit 10k ton opponents and up, and then you get a spinal for a 100k ton ship that does say 2d 1000's of hull points, but has problems hitting ships 30k tons or below.
 
Chas said:
Also keep in mind that any ship that could be killed by a one shot hit by a spinal has no place in a line of battle. Ships of the line are supposed to be 75K tons and above in the past intended design structure. It's quite reasonable that a 10-15kton ship does get totally smashed by a single hit from a spinal. It's much like battles in the age of sail, by custom frigates didn't fire upon men-of-war and the ships of the line didn't fire on frigates even in full on battles, because one good broadside would sink a frigate.

The previous design paradigms (or the intended design paradigms, it didn't quite work out that way) had a bit of an orphan ship size at 10 to 30ktons. Too big to avoid spinals, too small to carry them. It was in fact why I did that example cheap TL12 frigate example at 20ktons. It is a ship that will smash craft below it in size, and as a second rate ship, force the commitment of a first rate medium cruiser to be committed to attack a shipping lane protected by one.

It doesn't mean this version of rules needs to follow the same set up blow by blow but I think the general idea of massive battleships is still intended to be the way things work at empire vs. empire level. And for that to happen spinals do need an upgrade with the current 1 hull point = 2.5 tons.

Not that it would be want to be overdone and then leave bays completely behind. :lol:

I still like the idea of more sliding tonnages and damage ratios Nerhesi. So that say you get a choice to build a 50kton cruiser that will hit 10k ton opponents and up, and then you get a spinal for a 100k ton ship that does say 2d 1000's of hull points, but has problems hitting ships 30k tons or below.

So non-linear damage ratios? something like (Weight^2/Weight) or diminishing returns? (Weight/Weight+1000) - Lets see something Chas!

I'm also in favour of scaling the to hit modifiers. Could be a simple relationship between spinal tonnage and target ship weight.
 
Still looking at this. Another way to approach spinal weapon damage would be to greatly increase the hull critical hits from spinal weapons, so that the hull line each 1d does 1000 pts of damage. And/or any critical hit rolls twice on the severity table applying the highest roll.
 
I agree that if you are in the line of battle and you are significantly smaller than your opponents that you'd get shredded quick - but that would assume a BB would target a CA, rather than a BB.

This actually brings up another point - what are the factors that should control spinal mount combat?

If we go back to the naval analogy, ships got bigger to mount bigger guns and more armor. Jutland proved that the concept of arming BC's with BB armament and then putting them up against a BB was just a ship waiting to be sunk. But naval combat in that age did prove a few things:

Targeting - BB's target BB's, CA's target CA's, DD's target DD's, etc.

Armor - You armor against the ships you are expecting to go up against. Plus armor ratings were limited based upon your class. Armored CA's, no matter how much armor they had, still were essentially targets if they encountered a BB, or in some cases even a BC. For their size their armor factor was pretty much not a factor for shells designed to kill far larger ships.

Ability to absorb punishment - Larger ships were able to take more hits, sometimes even critical ones, and keep fighting. Smaller ships didn't have that - even sometimes when fighting ships of their own class and armament size. They were simply too small to have the space to take hits that didn't affect a critical or needed system.

So how does this translate back into Traveller? Possibly:

Hull size affects multiple things. The bigger you are, the more spinal hits you can take (duh). But more to the point, it would make ships such as battle riders still potentially as effective on offense, but with much less tonnage they would have less ability to absorb damage. So it puts the larger jump-capable ships back near the top of food chain.

Armor factors: Total armor factors would be set by tonnage levels. While naval vessels had to deal with flotation issues, there is actually a lot more under-deck engineering going on with armor. In order to shrug off hits you can't just slap more armor on without putting in the required support below, or else your armor plates can buckle and collapse when hit. That could me a bit of a paradigm shift in that smaller vessels would be considered more delicate. One could argue that with energy weaponry you don't have this same issue, which is a fair argument. However since we do have missiles, torps and other kinetic energy weapons to consider, having the appropriate structure to support your armor plating becomes another design factor.

Armament size Somewhat linked to the issue of armor factors, too. Heavily armored ships have the ability to shrug off smaller scale weapons. Spinal weapons should have diminishing returns going up against ships larger than they are designed for (i.e. a CA spinal would do less damage against a BB-sized ship), and additional damage against ships smaller than they are designed for. Armor ratings should be reflected in lessened damage. But we'd still need to come up with some sort or tracking/rating mechanism to reflect a finite number of hits a ship could take from a spinal before it's dead. If spinals are say 5-hits-and-you-are-dead weapons, then the easiest way to integrate them into combat is adjust their ROF. Maybe it would be like once every 3-5 turns you can fire your spinal mount. So if you hit something it's critical, but you don't resolve an engagement too quickly.

One big problem with all this is that it could complicate the game too much. And really, HG is more of a fleet battle system, and the combat for adventure-class ships needs to be different, because it's where you want to see players being able to influence an attack using their individual skills. At the fleet level you get SHIPS that have skill ratings, but not individuals (maybe fleet admiral?). But you'd want to reduce the number of attacks by a single ship to a handful to keep dice rolls down.

I dunno, maybe a holistic review of the entire combat system is needed to try to shoehorn all this stuff in?
 
I know you're advocating for a space-combat redesign phavoc - I just don't think that's a reality at this time.

We fundamentally (and we discussed this before) disagree about armour vs size though.

Either armour is dependent logically on material strength, and hence size is just Hull. Or do away with armour as a stat completely and just have hull. it's like saying a smal rock should be softer than a big rock. Or a small metal cube vs a large metal cube.

Yes I know your asking to focus on the nuances of a hollow metal cube and supporting structure inside and we could spend hours on this... but I think we're completely off topic now :)

So, spinals?
 
A couple of points on your post phavoc:

Regards battle riders you'll note I've already build these and done a general conclusion in the fleet paradigm thread. In the current set up riders are marginalized to the point of not being viable. They leave hull points and hard points back on the tender which means they're vulnerable to fighter attack and bay+missile/torp attack. If we push up the hitting power of spinal mounts this will create more of a use case for riders but should still see, as desired, the big battleships being top dog.

Creating disparate armor factors would be a huge and unnecessary headache. What can be scaled easily should be left that way for game balance and in a sense that these are different weapon issues. And also this is already compensated for with the Hull Reinforcement and Armored bulkheads option. Big ships, or low jump ships can put this in and see real advantage for what we can give a blanket term 'better protection'.

(as an aside the Jutland example should take into account the poor shells of the British big guns. If their weapons were more effective per hit the outcome and relative scenarios could have been quite different)

Anyway... spinals :)

You could get away with putting in a 100x multiplier, but that is leaving all other weaponry far far behind I think.

How's this for a first draft (with edits):

- Damage is a 50x multiplier rather than 10x multiplier (written DDV for x 50?)
So we get in a 10DDV spinal an average of 3.5x10x50=1750 hull points in a shot which is not half of only a 10k ship 4000 hull points basic.
Let's compare that 2DD of medium fusions (not necessarily a good choice with screens impacting this but a start). We have 70 points average a bay = 25 bays, which is not too bad weight and balance wise. 25 x 80 = 4000 power points.
If we assume 1DD as the 100ton balance paradigm and need 50 bays to equal the 10DDV spinal that's a fair comparison with what I'm doing below.

- All particle weapons get a flat 1000 ton increase in weight.
This to be in part counter balance the increase hitting power allowing more bays for the same weight (note this gets reduced considerable at higher TLs) and also to keep in mind the general minimal size build paradigms. This will push battle riders upwards a little but nothing out of control.

- All spinal particle weapons triple their current power requirements
Again a tweak towards the greater hitting power of spinals vs bays. Looking at the 10DDV example that's 2100 power points. Actually fairly restrained.

- Using the new power requirements a 25% increase in power provides 1DDV damage achieving a max dice increase of TL-5. For each 2 DDV add 500 tons to the weapon weight. For each 1DDV the spinal mount obtains the DM-2 when attacking targets of 10,000 tons or less increases by 2,000 tons, the DM-6 when attacking targets of 5,000 tons or less increases by 1,500 tons and the lower 2,000 tons limit to even hit increases by 1000 tons. This hit dice size and power requirement is set during construction, not used on the fly.

- Spinals get a boon on critical effect severity rolls (this will mount up quickly and be of genuine effect)

- Hull criticals (for all weapons) roll the multiplier dice that the weapon uses. I.e 1d hull crit = 1 DDV

:!: It make sense to drop the hull points a bit. What happened to the 4 tons for a hull point that was supposed to be the vehicle alignment paradigm?
 
Nerhesi said:
I know you're advocating for a space-combat redesign phavoc - I just don't think that's a reality at this time.

We fundamentally (and we discussed this before) disagree about armour vs size though.

Either armour is dependent logically on material strength, and hence size is just Hull. Or do away with armour as a stat completely and just have hull. it's like saying a smal rock should be softer than a big rock. Or a small metal cube vs a large metal cube.

Yes I know your asking to focus on the nuances of a hollow metal cube and supporting structure inside and we could spend hours on this... but I think we're completely off topic now :)

So, spinals?

That was the point. Before you can "fix" spinal you have to come up with the underlying point of their existence which will lead you into damage, penetration, firing rates, etc. Otherwise known as game balance.

Or else you could try to fix it without being able to point out fundamental underlying weaknesses.

So spinals. Should they be ship killers with one shot? Should they get crits on the first and every shot? Should you ever be able to shrug off a spinal hit?

If you can answer those questions you can then start to put spinals into a coherent weapons format that do the rate and amount of damage that doesn't over balance the game. If spinals are the end all to be all then whoever has the most spinals wins and all other weapon systems are just noise. Or should spinals be the big guns, but if you ignore your secondary armament you brought a target to a battle.
 
To your point phavoc I believe we can look at the accepted fleet ideal for Traveller. I've called it accepted in that the general idea of how Traveller fleets are made up has been relatively set in stone since the first books, except the rules have never really matched what's been laid out in fluff. Let's start at the start and look at the overall bigger picture.

All the stuff in the glossary is still relevant so I'm assuming this edition isn't looking to break the mould.

So you want battleships of general size bigger than cruisers. Cruisers which can still pack spinals but are limited in other ways. Frigates and corvettes are non-spinal ships. Fine right?

We want fighters that are effective fleet elements. There should be some place for riders but the priority is getting the capital ships working while keeping small craft relevant.

The current capital ship design paradigms are not far off this ideal. If we look at the effective tonnage available for weaponry it's breaking down quite well through that 40-50k medium cruiser up to battleship/dreadnought status once the spinal mount is included.

Now for spinals to justify their existence they've got to pack a bigger punch than bays. Moreover they're supposed to be what determines battles at ship of the line level. So in a way this is easy. Ships have x number of hull points - all we need to do is say, how many rounds of damage do we want to have for example a 100kton ship fight for. In the suggested design above I reckon we're in the ball park of about 10 turns of hits for optimum TL15 designs with help from criticals. Which I'd suggest is a reasonable balance in that if it's quicker the cruiser ships get fried too quickly. Now if we set this as a paradigm of course your 10kt ship is going to smashed by a spinal, no way out of that (except a 10k ship won't be so easy to hit in this scenario).

So that leaves us with the bay weapon balance. You need to look at the general total number of bays available at different tech levels for these vs spinal mounts to make sure you can fit them in jump capable ships in significant numbers, however let's assume you can. So if we've got an ideal for what we want from spinals in a battlefield usage, the bays then need to be worked to suit, which becomes more of a direct weapon effectiveness ratio. I've put 50 x 100 ton medium bays = 1 spinal as a ball park figure. Well, let's call it a rough rough ratio, but at least a start. 5000 tons of weaponry. No biggy in terms of hard points for capital ships, it's neither here nor there. So we're only looking at tonnage considerations. Do cruisers et al still have this tonnage available after including jump drives... sure. Do they have this tonnage available after including a spinal mount... getting tight at jump 4... which is as it should be. So the overall balance is not far off. There's a major weapon that will do big damage quickly, and battleships can carry enough of the secondary weapons to also do major damage, while cruisers and ships below can't be everything to everybody, they'll have to compromise. I think that's what we're looking for here. We don't want spinals to be so good that nothing else matters.

I need to crunch some more numbers but wanted to put this out as a suggestion as to what should be achievable.
 
Hi guys,

Looking at this. A couple of things...

First, critical hits are an issue at this size. They work for small vessels but not capital ships. I will be looking at that in the Capital/Fleet combat chapter.

However, spinal mounts need to work in the core combat system because (contrary to what I have said in the past!) fleet combat will not have a new Capital scale - all values will be derived from the current ship scale, so if it works in one, it will work in the other.

I'll do some tweaks and get the update to you before Christmas. Run your figures from there, and we'll see where we are.

Oh, and damage multipliers for spinal mounts? Great idea :)

I am going to adjust the damage values for spinal mounts but pout a note in that, while they are Destructive, the damage gets multiplied nit by 10, but by 1,000.

We'll see where that takes us. At the moment, I am using a ballpark of a 75k ship getting taken out (in average) by 2-3 hits from a decent spinal mount.
 
msprange said:
We'll see where that takes us. At the moment, I am using a ballpark of a 75k ship getting taken out (in average) by 2-3 hits from a decent spinal mount.

That is going to be grunty. And has a push down effect. It will likely move the medium cruiser out of the line of battle, the 50k ship gets fracked really quickly then. And the frigate has nowhere to hide, ho ho, the 10 to 30K ship can't fight a medium cruiser with spinal mount who sacrifices else where. So the medium cruiser becomes the raider of choice and the <10K bay mounting destroyer a key fleet element, without much in between.

Conversely the battle rider is likely to see more action. The spinal rider will be vulnerable to fighters, but should do enough damage to big ships before it's taken down to make it viable.
 
I would agree - and I think we need to limit what can be taken out in 2-3 hits to... at best, that 75k level.

So the biggest, baddest spinal, can 2 shot a 75k cruiser. But we don't want any spinal 2-3 shotting a 200kton ship
 
Might we link that idea to the ship's tonnage? If you require a minimum tonnage for A/B/C/D/E class spinals, then you can say if you attack DOWN the chart on a smaller ship than you, you get increased damage. Attacking UP, you get decreased damage. This would be a chart (of course!), but if you cross-referenced the attacking spinal mount power and applied it a ships tonnage, you could easily find out how much damage you inflict per shot.

This would allow a CA to one-shot a DD, or BB to one-shot a CA, but not the reverse.
 
As a point of balance comment, if spinal mounts are going to be made that grunty, then their weight will need to be watched. From the current arrangement I would suggest say an extra 1000 tons. This depends a bit on where the negatives in hitting smaller ships are, but these big spinals would not want to be able to be fitted into battle riders that are so small that other spinal mounts can't even hit them, or have serious negatives to hit. If you're getting multiple riders with spinal mounts to a cruiser the cruiser at least needs to be able to hit back. :)
 
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