jwpacker said:
I think my biggest issue was with the uneven use of armor in the pre-built ships. When a tramp freighter has as much armor, and as much likelihood of shrugging off a missile strike as an Imperial destroyer, there's a disconnect somewhere...
Add to that that at least one of the fighter designs has four times the armor of a frontier cruiser, and there's a bigger problem still.
I agree completely. Armor 12+ fighters with beam lasers? Who are they expecting to fight? Clearly not other well armored fighters.
One house rule I'm playing around with is to say that any successful weapon attack will always do at least 1 pt. of damage, even if it doesn't penetrate the armor. This represents blasting off armor, concussion from kinetic contact or the violent release of vaporized particles into space, etc. I also add all post-armor damage together for the final table lookup, which I believe is what the rules say to do, and which helps mitigate triple turret strike on heavily armored ships - they still only take a "single hit" after everything is resolved since the total doesn't get out of the 1-4 range.
[Another variation would be to say that non-penetrating hits can't ever score do hull or armor damage, so they'll never actually "crack the nut" - those damage results are discarded. To do this, you'd need to consider penetrating hits separately from "glancing blow" hits. Yet another option would be to say that all attacks with damage reduced to zero count as a single damage point to the armor; add them up and apply the requisite number of hits to the armor. So a 12 missile barrage could strip up to 2 points of armor.]
In addition, a 12 missile bay will be able to do up to 12 points if every missile hits, which makes them useful "budget" military weapons even against heavily armored foes. (A meson gun will always be the weapon of choice against heavy armor, but not everyone can afford those.) The sweet spot for most military ships then becomes 4-6 points of armor, unless they expect to routinely go up against particle beams, in which case they'll need 12+rad. But if they're mostly facing small craft (with lasers and missiles) and capital ships with meson guns, then any more than 6 points is a waste of time, and even 4 is quite tenable.
For the normal "Armor 4" ships, this rule won't change much, but it makes missiles fired in large swarms useful even for military ships, which they currently really aren't.
Quick Cost benefit analysis on bays against armor 12 targets using the "each hit does minimum 1pt" idea:
Missile Bay: 12MCr+Ammo Cost: 12 missiles against armor 6 - best result is 12 hits
Particle Bay: 20MCr: from 1 to 24 hits, average 9 hits + crew hit
Fusion Bay: 8MCr: short range, from 1 to 18 hits, average 5 hits
Meson Bay 50MCr: armor irrelevant, from 5 to 30, average 17 hits + crew hit
So missile and particle bays will perform similarly, but missiles are cheaper and lower tech to build, and more expensive to use since you have to buy the missiles. Fusion guns are nice, cheap weapons to shred up low armor targets, and of course Meson guns make armor obsolete.
This rule change would make sense of missile frigates - going against a very heavily armored opponent when you do not have a meson gun, they make a lot of sense, even though they're sort of expensive to operate in a campaign setting. It also gives a good reason for capital ships to keep beam turrets around - not only useful for scaring off small craft, but mostly used in point defense against incoming missiles and torpedoes.
Just a thought.
