Geir
Emperor Mongoose
There are other older threads about this, but I just wanted to confirm my understanding about how it really works, to make sure I'm not running it wrong. There're some asides in this, but please, pick my narrative and asides apart where they're wrong. Sorry in advance about any sarcasm and irreverence. I blame migraines, but it's probably just personality flaws. And thanks in advance if you read through it and comment.
Scenario: Flight of fighters attacking a small ship, say a patrol corvette, as part of a bigger battle.
The flight launches towards its target. At this point, long, medium, even short range, the fighters can't fire back. They need to be close or adjacent to even fire their firmpoint-mounted weapons.
There's also no DM for being a small ship against turret or barbette weapons, so the best way to avoid getting hit is to waste some maneuver thrust to use as a pilot skill DM against getting hit. This slows their approach.
If they're standard fighters, Armor 2 and Hull Points 4, then any hit doing damage is probably the end of them. Even a single point of damage is worth two critical hits and if one of them is a hull crit… Basically, the fighters pop when you hit them.
Aside#1: What's your ruling on crew survival? I could take the statement, "Once a spacecraft has been reduced to zero Hull, it is wrecked and becomes totally inoperable, and is beyond any repair. Those on board will find themselves without power or life support." and extrapolate to say, well that’s a Severity 4 Power Critical and a Severity 6 Crew Critical, so let's retroactively apply the previous crew Criticals if they haven't happened. Seems fair.
Aside #1.1 There's another damage question here, too: What's the difference between a wreck and wreckage. My own house rule is that Hull 0% is a hulk; Hull 100% is an expanding sphere of wreckage and don't expect to be alive.
Aside #1.2 Hull Critical: if the Dice damage taken from a Hull hit knocks the ship down another 10% threshold, that's another critical hit, applied immediately, right? So roll again, another hull crit… at some point the ship just cascades into little bits.
Aside #1.3 Weapon Criticals: I've been treating each weapon (turret, bay, whatever) as a separate critical chain. Not "Weapons" as a group. So one random weapon gets a Severity 1 and a bane. Next Severity 1 critical is randomly applied to the weapons pool (not counting "called shots" here) and only if it’s the same weapon is it a Severity 2.
So, back to the narrative. Fighters are vulnerable to popping on approach, then the survivors get to dogfighting range.
Aside #2: now if the fighters are the 50-ton heavy fighter variety with 15 points of armor, we have the opposite problem here. You have to do 16 points of damage to do one point of damage, making triple pulse lasers barely able to penetrate on a critical hit.
Aside #2.1: In personal combat a critical hit (Effect 6+) always does at least one point of damage. In space combat, a critical hit only happens if the hit doesn't "bounce off the armor". Fine. No critical hit. But, that's not necessarily incompatible with doing one point of damage regardless. And on a ship with less than 10 Hull Points, well, it's still a critical hit.
On to dogfighting. Fighters have a thrust advantage on their target in this and many other examples. Escaping out of dogfighting range is tricky. I'm not exactly clear on how to do that (see below for what I think). They also have an overwhelming dogfighting advantage, say DM 0 vs. DM-5 for fighter vs. corvette.
At this point, the dogfight commences. The rest of the battle takes a dose of Fast Drug.
The fighters, as I said, pretty much always win the dogfight role. And now to actual combat. The winner gets DM+2 and lines up nicely. Luckily the target has turret weapons, so it can fire back, but the target already has a DM-6 (!) for being bigger than 100 tons and add to that a DM-2 for losing the dogfight. So it has DM-8 to hit! Literally an impossible shot (Well, 16+ is a difficulty Impossible task, anyway). Unless the gunner is really good and using beam lasers, even rolling 12 won't hit.
So how do you get out of this dogfight?
The close combat rules say:
"If one of the vehicles’ drivers chooses to initiate a dogfight again in the following combat round, the winner of the previous dogfight applies the difference between that round’s opposed check as a positive DM to this round’s opposed check."
Implies the corvette can get away if it wins the opposed check that it statistically has a DM -5 on. Never mind if you're a cruiser, then your DM is -500 or something and the fighters always win.
And the spacecraft rules say:
"If the dogfight continues into the following combat- round, " - I assume as a result of the above check - "the winner of the previous dogfight applies the difference between that round’s opposed Pilot check as a positive DM to this round’s opposed check."
So, fighter wins and then gets another DM + whatever it won by for use in the next round. Carry this forward a few rounds and it cascades. If you don't break away first or second try, you will likely never break away.
Fast-forward fifty-odd rounds while the rest of the battle is still frozen and the fighter eventually nibbles the corvette to death. The end.
Compare this to a salvo of missiles: In this case, the target can't fire at the missiles until they get to impact range and then it has no penalty to fire at them in point defense. Kind of the opposite of the above fighter vs. corvette example.
Hopefully my interpretations are fairly close to the rules. But, I guess my point for writing this is this: Is that DM-6 to hit for ships larger than 100 tons really a reasonable DM?
Scenario: Flight of fighters attacking a small ship, say a patrol corvette, as part of a bigger battle.
The flight launches towards its target. At this point, long, medium, even short range, the fighters can't fire back. They need to be close or adjacent to even fire their firmpoint-mounted weapons.
There's also no DM for being a small ship against turret or barbette weapons, so the best way to avoid getting hit is to waste some maneuver thrust to use as a pilot skill DM against getting hit. This slows their approach.
If they're standard fighters, Armor 2 and Hull Points 4, then any hit doing damage is probably the end of them. Even a single point of damage is worth two critical hits and if one of them is a hull crit… Basically, the fighters pop when you hit them.
Aside#1: What's your ruling on crew survival? I could take the statement, "Once a spacecraft has been reduced to zero Hull, it is wrecked and becomes totally inoperable, and is beyond any repair. Those on board will find themselves without power or life support." and extrapolate to say, well that’s a Severity 4 Power Critical and a Severity 6 Crew Critical, so let's retroactively apply the previous crew Criticals if they haven't happened. Seems fair.
Aside #1.1 There's another damage question here, too: What's the difference between a wreck and wreckage. My own house rule is that Hull 0% is a hulk; Hull 100% is an expanding sphere of wreckage and don't expect to be alive.
Aside #1.2 Hull Critical: if the Dice damage taken from a Hull hit knocks the ship down another 10% threshold, that's another critical hit, applied immediately, right? So roll again, another hull crit… at some point the ship just cascades into little bits.
Aside #1.3 Weapon Criticals: I've been treating each weapon (turret, bay, whatever) as a separate critical chain. Not "Weapons" as a group. So one random weapon gets a Severity 1 and a bane. Next Severity 1 critical is randomly applied to the weapons pool (not counting "called shots" here) and only if it’s the same weapon is it a Severity 2.
So, back to the narrative. Fighters are vulnerable to popping on approach, then the survivors get to dogfighting range.
Aside #2: now if the fighters are the 50-ton heavy fighter variety with 15 points of armor, we have the opposite problem here. You have to do 16 points of damage to do one point of damage, making triple pulse lasers barely able to penetrate on a critical hit.
Aside #2.1: In personal combat a critical hit (Effect 6+) always does at least one point of damage. In space combat, a critical hit only happens if the hit doesn't "bounce off the armor". Fine. No critical hit. But, that's not necessarily incompatible with doing one point of damage regardless. And on a ship with less than 10 Hull Points, well, it's still a critical hit.
On to dogfighting. Fighters have a thrust advantage on their target in this and many other examples. Escaping out of dogfighting range is tricky. I'm not exactly clear on how to do that (see below for what I think). They also have an overwhelming dogfighting advantage, say DM 0 vs. DM-5 for fighter vs. corvette.
At this point, the dogfight commences. The rest of the battle takes a dose of Fast Drug.
The fighters, as I said, pretty much always win the dogfight role. And now to actual combat. The winner gets DM+2 and lines up nicely. Luckily the target has turret weapons, so it can fire back, but the target already has a DM-6 (!) for being bigger than 100 tons and add to that a DM-2 for losing the dogfight. So it has DM-8 to hit! Literally an impossible shot (Well, 16+ is a difficulty Impossible task, anyway). Unless the gunner is really good and using beam lasers, even rolling 12 won't hit.
So how do you get out of this dogfight?
The close combat rules say:
"If one of the vehicles’ drivers chooses to initiate a dogfight again in the following combat round, the winner of the previous dogfight applies the difference between that round’s opposed check as a positive DM to this round’s opposed check."
Implies the corvette can get away if it wins the opposed check that it statistically has a DM -5 on. Never mind if you're a cruiser, then your DM is -500 or something and the fighters always win.
And the spacecraft rules say:
"If the dogfight continues into the following combat- round, " - I assume as a result of the above check - "the winner of the previous dogfight applies the difference between that round’s opposed Pilot check as a positive DM to this round’s opposed check."
So, fighter wins and then gets another DM + whatever it won by for use in the next round. Carry this forward a few rounds and it cascades. If you don't break away first or second try, you will likely never break away.
Fast-forward fifty-odd rounds while the rest of the battle is still frozen and the fighter eventually nibbles the corvette to death. The end.
Compare this to a salvo of missiles: In this case, the target can't fire at the missiles until they get to impact range and then it has no penalty to fire at them in point defense. Kind of the opposite of the above fighter vs. corvette example.
Hopefully my interpretations are fairly close to the rules. But, I guess my point for writing this is this: Is that DM-6 to hit for ships larger than 100 tons really a reasonable DM?