Experiment - determine ship damage by physical location on deck plan

[Anonymous]

Imagine a ship deck plan. It’s just a grid. What is a grid but a co-ordinate reference?

Let’s say you pick a target point on the deck plan. Then roll 2d6-7 and move the Impact that many deck plan squares. Repeat for each axis.

How does attack roll success affect this? Maybe deviation is 3d6-10-hit quality?

Obviously we don’t need a critical hit roll in this case, as we can see what was hit. But one has to decide how many squares are damaged by a weapon. Perhaps with a beam we roll 2 locations and it drills a 1 square wide path between the two?

Just interested in collecting your ideas.

Obviously things far from the impact point can be damaged, eg by electrical overload or vibration. I am not sure how to resolve this.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Mandatory disclaimer: It's too complicated. It takes too long time at the table. End.


It presumes the deck plans are pretty exact, which not all are. Reasonably attacks damage ships from the surface in, middle decks would be difficult to reach, so we can't just select a random square on the deck plan.

I would prefer a system with pre-made hit location tables à la TNE & T5.


Presumably a hit destroys a number of squares proportional to the inflicted damage. A small ship has 1 Hull point for each 2.5 Dt ≈ 5 squares, so I would let 1 inflicted damage point knock out about 5 squares.

Reasonably drives would be degraded by 2.5 Dt per inflicted damage point, so a 10 Dt drive would be reduced to 50% performance after 2 damage points, and destroyed by 4 damage points.


As usual with hit location systems it will probably make ships easier to knock out. One lucky hit...

 

[phavoc]

Starfire rules handled this by having nearly all weapons (primaries were the exception) do damage from the right to left. You had shields, then armor, then your ship systems. How you put your modules together could mean survival of the crew or not (if you lost all your hull modules, the crew died at the end of combat due to lack of life support).

Though it wasn't by deck, just by module. By deck would be very sticky since you'd have to take into account the penetration angle. While it could be simulated in a computer game, in an RPG I think it would bog the game down too much. The only way I could see this working would be to assign area numbers to the surface of the hull and each deck, and then if a weapon penetrated, determine depth of penetration and mark off those areas that would be affected. Different weapons would do damage differently - some would punch holes like a needle, others might punch a hole and then do an AOE explosion. Some would do wide areas of damage.

To further complicate things, hull armor would resist the most, and once it's penetrated you'd have increased damaged internally compared to that same weapon striking externally.

 

[Anonymous]

@Phavoc: Are you envisaging damage templates like Renegade Legion?

 

[phavoc]

Not for Starfire. I did like how RL had different damage methods for the various weapon systems. It made for a lot more realistic choices of what type of weapon systems to use, kind of like a combined arms issue.

 

[Condottiere]

It's why I commented, ye, eons ago, that this will end up with computer assisted aids.

And also, old enough spaceships are going to have variant deckplans even if they were mass produced.