High Guard: Ramming?

E

ericwood8

Mongoose
Situation: 100 ton Zhodani scout ship wants to board the PC craft when refueling at gas giant. Their Imperium spy told the party the Zhodani was after him. Party feared a Zhodani psion was aboard. Party wants to let the smaller 100 ton ship in to dock then quickly pull away then quickly smash it using their larger 200 ton ship. I could not find any ramming rules in the latest High Guard or Core, so just made something up about 8d6 to smaller ship (likely kill to 40 hull Zhodani) and 5d6 to party ship with any 6 rolled equaled some external thing on that side to get bent.

I acknowledge reading this thread after the game: high-guard-fighting-hull-to-hull.121856 back in 2019. Apparently no rules except for 5d6 in Pirates of Drinax that I could not find. Any modern rules since 2019 that I missed?
 
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Vehicle combat (CRB 142) has rules for vehicle and pedestrian collisions.

It also has a Ram action (p139):

Ram: Deliberately driving a vehicle into someone or something requires a significant action and a successful skill check (skill determined by vehicle).
Ram attacks are affected by dodging and evasive action as normal. The referee may grant bonuses to a ram attempt or declare it automatically successful if the target is particularly large or stationary.

It should work for space combat situations, but keep in mind that velocities in space combat tend to be hypersonic. A thrust of 1 (10m/s^2) over a six minute space combat round potentially results in a velocity of 12,960 kph. Relative velocities matter, so if the ships are trying to ram and avoid a ram the actual velocity of any collision is probably much lower.

So...

TLDR, I think your off the cuff rule works fine. But the p.142 table should work once you know the rough speed of collision. 1D for 1-20kph, 2D for 20-50kph etc. Most of the time space combat is definitely going to be in the 5D-10D end of things.

I'd also suggest the dogfight rules would be the best way to run the situation you present, with the ship needing to win Advantage in order to make a Ram action. The six second rounds also mean that the maximum velocity from thrust 1 is 216kph; if the ramming ship was able to use Thrust 1 towards ramming, that would be speed band 5 (high) doing 5D6. Thrust 2 equates to 432kph, which would be 6D6. Thrust 3 would equate to 648kph, which is band 7 (7D6). By the looks of it, a damage value of 4D plus one per thrust used towards ramming would be a good rule of thumb rule. Damage applies equally to each vessel, but obviously bigger hulls come off better. I would allow regular space armour to apply (but not reflec or other fancy types).
 
Ramming when relative velocities are low could be handled as Rinku describes, but keep in mind that 12,000 kph IS low velocity in this context.

It is common for ships to achieve in the 100s of KM per second range during interplanetary travel, or 10s of KPS in more distant orbital space - such as on the trip to 100 diameters. If both ships are kinda going the same way, then the relative velocity might be manageable, but if they are headed opposite ways, things could get interesting.

Dogfight rules assume the ships have more of less matched velocity, and are both travelling on the same vector relative to everyone else while maneuvering around each other, so that would be a low relative velocity situation. This seems manageable for the game context.

Because ships travelling at high velocity would be very, very destructive there might be a temptation to make kamikaze attacks a thing. There are mitigating factors 1) the super-high velocity kamikaze has to go on a fairly predictable trajectory - straight at the target - since otherwise it will just flash by in an instant and have to slow down which would take a really long time. This also means shooting it is easier 2) for the same reason, moving out of the way should be easy - unlike with the dogfight, you get one chance.

Maybe others can think of more reasons why high velocity kamikazes wouldn't work well, because the reasons I give aren't that convincing, and I sure don't want them to be a big part of the game.
 
(Summarizing a recent conversation about this topic from the Book of Faces)
I use the vehicle collision rules with some clarification.
  • These work better with Vector-based rules, although math is math....ramming occurs infrequently during dogfights
  • Collision damage scales with the square of relative velocity, so Damage = (Vector in G)² D × (displacement ÷ 100 dtons)—for example, 20-dton craft at 4G inflicts 3D (3.2D rounded down), a 100-dton fighter at 6G inflicts 36D, while a 400-dton free trader at 2G inflicts 16D.
  • A spacecraft's Armour is the AP value of the attack. IMTU, we use a rules similar to the "Armour Allocation" rule on page 35 of the Vehicle Handbook to represent a hardened prow (and there is a plasma cutter/hellburner version available for smallcraft).
  • There is also a reciprocal version of the Evade program that adds a +DM
 
Not rules, but a stretch of rules:
Your scenario calls for low velocities. You don't have a full ship's turn to get velocity up. You say they are allowing the other ship to come in, so initial vectors are roughly matched, with the small ship having a cautious positive velocity in your general direction.
Page 62 and 63 of the Companion lists damage from falling objects of starship size. It's in meters fallen, but you could use Delta-G instead.
Thus A small starship does 1D6*G. A Medium ship does 2d6*G.
Roll initiative (Tactics(Naval), Holographic Controls) and if you win, they cannot use evasion in a contested piloting roll. The smaller ship does smaller ship damage - large ship Armor to the larger ship, and the larger ship does larger ship damage to the smaller ship - small ship Armor.
Alternately, you could roll use the damage for the smaller ship and scale that for the mass of the larger ship. (In this case, both would result in 1d to the attacker and 2D to the scout per unit thrust)

In either case, add the effect of the contested pilot roll, from the player's perspective to the ram damage. (i.e. A failed check reduces damage)
 
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For starship combat, it's not worth it unless you're moving very fast, snd it's still not worth it because you wasted millions of credits on a suicide attack.
So usually it's best reserved for if you're losing badly, and the other side plans to wipe you out anyways.
 
It's what missiles supposedly do.

But, with a bigger target, greater chance to hit, if the bridge or gunnery crew catch on as to what it's actually planning to do.
 
I thought of one more scenario, so now there are three scenarios I can think of:

1. the ramming ship is going really fast, and for whatever reason destroying the target is so important that it is worth a suicide attack, or maybe the ramming ship is in a desperate situation anyways - there are no rules for this, and how to handle it depends a lot on the relative velocities - but if the ships collide, they are most likely both destroyed. Maybe a large military ship wouldn't be, if hit by a very small ship - the energy release is something that could be calculated, and compared to nuclear detonations to get some idea of the scope of the damage.
2. you are ramming the other ship at low speeds, and want to do damage or intimidate, but hope that it won't hurt your own ship too bad - vehicle collision rules
3. you want to board, and would like to get tangled up with the other ship so your people can go in - this would also be low speed

If you do #2, you might end up with #3 if you're not careful, and vice versa.
 
The problem with actual high velocity ramming in space combat is hitting the target. It takes time to reach those velocities, and you then come back to a opposed thrust battle between the rammer and the target... the ramming ship MUST be very accurate and be capable of matching the target's evasion thrust. A 1G ship coming in at 10,000 kph is not going to connect with a 2G target that sees them coming and can simply maneuver laterally to the intercept vector.

(Conversely, a rammer with more spare thrust is likely to hit)

For collisions at higher speeds than the vehicle combat section allows for, maybe go with 10D per thrust point that has been used to get the ships to Adjacent? So a ship at Short range expends (2+1) = 3 Thrust to close to Adjacent and rams an unpowered target, doing 30D to each ship. If they had closed from Long range they would have expended (10+5+2+1) = 18 Thrust and each ship takes 180D damage, likely destroying both unless they were massive ones (although critical hits are highly likely to come into play even then).
 
rinku said:
The problem with actual high velocity ramming in space combat is hitting the target. It takes time to reach those velocities, and you then come back to a opposed thrust battle between the rammer and the target... the ramming ship MUST be very accurate and be capable of matching the target's evasion thrust. A 1G ship coming in at 10,000 kph is not going to connect with a 2G target that sees them coming and can simply maneuver laterally to the intercept vector.

(Conversely, a rammer with more spare thrust is likely to hit)

For collisions at higher speeds than the vehicle combat section allows for, maybe go with 10D per thrust point that has been used to get the ships to Adjacent? So a ship at Short range expends (2+1) = 3 Thrust to close to Adjacent and rams an unpowered target, doing 30D to each ship. If they had closed from Long range they would have expended (10+5+2+1) = 18 Thrust and each ship takes 180D damage, likely destroying both unless they were massive ones (although critical hits are highly likely to come into play even then).
Click to expand...
How is this any different than opposed piloting rolls with normal modifiers? (If the opposing pilot uses an action to evade, in addition to things like evasion software, etc...
 
No different at all. That's why I suggested using the Dogfight rules to set it up. But a thrust difference makes more difference here than trying to hit with laser beams or missiles. In practical terms, a rammer can't force a collision if the target has an unused Thrust advantage.
 
rinku said:
No different at all. That's why I suggested using the Dogfight rules to set it up. But a thrust difference makes more difference here than trying to hit with laser beams or missiles. In practical terms, a rammer can't force a collision if the target has an unused Thrust advantage.
Click to expand...
Without vector-based combat, you are correct. If they are both heading at each other when the other ship realizes that the other pilot is insane enough to actually ram with a ship, it will be too late to use any of that thrust since they would need to slow to a stop to then head 180 degrees the opposite direction. Avoiding a ramming ship is easy in Traveller because direction of travel doesn't matter.

Edit - Also, isn't ramming basically a death sentence for everyone on both ships?
 
Pretty much, although for VERY large mass differences you would probably see the larger ship mostly remain intact. Consider a hypervelocity round that hits a heavily armoured tank, where the crew are in several armoured compartments. Tank is crippled, maybe the crew are all dead, maybe some are just wounded or stunned. Worth noting that something like a Tigress should be able to survive direct hits by nukes; kamikaze rams by fighters would not be unheard of you, would think. But 366,666 hull points counts for something.

Dogfight ramming is only going to be at velocities in the 500-1000kph range, as I think I demonstrated. Certainly 5D or 6D mutual damage feels about right to me.
 
rinku said:
Pretty much, although for VERY large mass differences you would probably see the larger ship mostly remain intact. Consider a hypervelocity round that hits a heavily armoured tank, where the crew are in several armoured compartments. Tank is crippled, maybe the crew are all dead, maybe some are just wounded or stunned. Worth noting that something like a Tigress should be able to survive direct hits by nukes; kamikaze rams by fighters would not be unheard of you, would think. But 366,666 hull points counts for something.

Dogfight ramming is only going to be at velocities in the 500-1000kph range, as I think I demonstrated. Certainly 5D or 6D mutual damage feels about right to me.
Click to expand...
2,100 kph for 1G
12,700 kph for 6G

This is from a stopped position. Someone please check My math to be sure.
 
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