High Guard Smaller Weapons

[rinku]

The ONLY situations where ground scale weapons are going to have any chance of hitting in space combat are Adjacent (docked or attempting to dock) or if the target is not under thrust. The rules about ground scale shooting at spaceships are basically for combat on planets, where ground scale things generally live. And where spaceships are limited to hypersonic speeds. In space the target is routinely moving faster than the bullets.

And even then, small arms (machine guns or lower) are not going to cut it. You'd need at least vehicle scale DD stuff (rockets, autocannon etc) to have any hope of denting spaceship hulls, especially if there's any armour.

Boarding party with a rocket launcher? Sure. I'd give them some chance of doing stuff. A thousand machineguns stapled to the hull? Not so much, though I guess you might ping a sensor by accident.

I'd certainly impose the current MG2e22 rule that vehicles get their TL in bonus armour vs weapons that do less than 4D regular damage. That rule should take care of massed body pistol fire.

 

[Condottiere]

It's basically going to come down to range and latency.

Latency can be handled like ortillery category.

Range will take into account such things as coherency of energy beams, in a vacuum, non gravitated environment.

 

[ProfGrizzlyJon]

The ONLY situations where ground scale weapons are going to have any chance of hitting in space combat are Adjacent (docked or attempting to dock) or if the target is not under thrust. The rules about ground scale shooting at spaceships are basically for combat on planets, where ground scale things generally live. And where spaceships are limited to hypersonic speeds. In space the target is routinely moving faster than the bullets.

And even then, small arms (machine guns or lower) are not going to cut it. You'd need at least vehicle scale DD stuff (rockets, autocannon etc) to have any hope of denting spaceship hulls, especially if there's any armour.

Boarding party with a rocket launcher? Sure. I'd give them some chance of doing stuff. A thousand machineguns stapled to the hull? Not so much, though I guess you might ping a sensor by accident.

I'd certainly impose the current MG2e22 rule that vehicles get their TL in bonus armour vs weapons that do less than 4D regular damage. That rule should take care of massed body pistol fire.

An easy conversion table would have been useful.
I built one

 

[rinku]

An earlier edition of MGT (1e or 2e16, maybe both) had a three tier system (ground/vehicle/spaceship), which has been compressed into ground/spaceship now, but with small arms made much less effective against vehicles. It's pretty much just a x10 scaling between the two now, though I'd definitely apply any rule that talks about effects on vehicles to spacecraft, even if not explicitly mentioned.

There is one mention in Central Catalogue that AP has no effect on spacecraft scale armour, too.

One last point about bullets vs spaceships... muzzle velocities are on the order of 1000 m/s, so hitting a spaceship even a few kilometres away is going to need a lead time of seconds. If they're not under thrust and you have some kind of fire direction, fair enough. Otherwise (it IS maneuvering, or a spaceman is aiming by hand) you can pretty much forget it. Or if the target happens to be receding at 1km/s.

In planetary engagements, you can treat spaceships as hypersonic aircraft, though.

 

[tytalan]

One of my goto in situations like this is common sense and game balance while yes RAW says you can have as many none starship weapons as you want common sense and game balance says that this is potentially unbalanced and the GM should take things into consideration on rather they will allow it or not. Myself I tend to see this as another attempt to power game and would probably either disallow or heavily restrict this on those grounds. There are times when RAW is the wrong answer

 

[rinku]

Nah, rules as written are fine if you look at them fully.

Per MGT2e22 High Guard p.40 anything that's more than 250kg has to go in a fixed mount or turret anyway. Then, hulls that are under 50 tons can add smaller weapons as fixed mounts at 0.25 tons per weapon and an extra Cr5000 per weapon.

Larger hulls can add smaller weapons at 0.25 tons each, but in pop up turrets for Cr50,000 extra per weapon.

You'd probably want to slave them to a battery or computer control to avoid having to carry too many gunners, though.

 

[tytalan]

Nah, rules as written are fine if you look at them fully.

Per MGT2e22 High Guard p.40 anything that's more than 250kg has to go in a fixed mount or turret anyway. Then, hulls that are under 50 tons can add smaller weapons as fixed mounts at 0.25 tons per weapon and an extra Cr5000 per weapon.

Larger hulls can add smaller weapons at 0.25 tons each, but in pop up turrets for Cr50,000 extra per weapon.

You'd probably want to slave them to a battery or computer control to avoid having to carry too many gunners, though.

Even with all that you can easily add 20 weapons of 249kg by RAW like I said it’s very easy to abuse, so yes putting 20 FGMP 15s on a ship is a problem for example. 249 kg gives you a huge amount of leyway to abuse especially once you add the Field Guide

So yes RAW needs to be tempered by common sense and play balance. The whole concept of this thread is to take a loophole in RAW and use that to creat OP ships and fighters that’s is the very definition of power gaming and game balance destruction which is why it’s the GMs job to make a ruling on this. Probably if they are a good GM some short of restriction.

 

[collins355]

An earlier edition of MGT (1e or 2e16, maybe both) had a three tier system (ground/vehicle/spaceship), which has been compressed into ground/spaceship now, but with small arms made much less effective against vehicles. It's pretty much just a x10 scaling between the two now, though I'd definitely apply any rule that talks about effects on vehicles to spacecraft, even if not explicitly mentioned.

There is one mention in Central Catalogue that AP has no effect on spacecraft scale armour, too.

One last point about bullets vs spaceships... muzzle velocities are on the order of 1000 m/s, so hitting a spaceship even a few kilometres away is going to need a lead time of seconds. If they're not under thrust and you have some kind of fire direction, fair enough. Otherwise (it IS maneuvering, or a spaceman is aiming by hand) you can pretty much forget it. Or if the target happens to be receding at 1km/s.

In planetary engagements, you can treat spaceships as hypersonic aircraft, though.

The thing is, the corebook vehicle combat rules don't really work very well. For example, you get a +1 to your to-hit roll to hit any vehicle, and then additional +1s for each 10dT of craft volume (up to a max of +6) - so most of the time with spacecraft targets you'll be firing at them with vehicle scale weapons at a +6 to-hit.

 

[Condottiere]

You probably want consistent rules for groundscale weapons installed in spacecraft.

Otherwise, you send a bunch of Marines onto the hull, armed with fusion guns, man portable, and let them take aim at the enemy spacecraft.

 

[rinku]

The thing is, the corebook vehicle combat rules don't really work very well. For example, you get a +1 to your to-hit roll to hit any vehicle, and then additional +1s for each 10dT of craft volume (up to a max of +6) - so most of the time with spacecraft targets you'll be firing at them with vehicle scale weapons at a +6 to-hit.

Honestly, if you're docked to a building sized thing, hitting it isn't your problem.

If you are NOT Adjacent, your personal scale weapons are already out of range.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Basically, it is a flying gun platform. I don't see this as unbalancing. I kind of feel bad for the PCs if I ever decide to use this. PCs get shot at way more than NPCs. Most worlds, this would be illegal anyhow.

You can mount a .50 cal on the back of a pickup truck, but trying driving that down the road in the US or UK and see what happens.

The rules are basically the physics of the world. Don't change the physics because your players do not understand consequences. You have tons of tools in your toolbox to run games. You have laws, social conventions, religious conventions, etc...

Let your players load their ship up with small weaponry and then make fun of them on every planet they land on for compensating for their lack of manhood. lol. Creative solutions within a setting are way better than making rules more restrictive.

 

[AndrewW]

You can mount a .50 cal on the back of a pickup truck, but trying driving that down the road in the US or UK and see what happens.

You just need an: (They will never see it coming.)

EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicle​

 

[Condottiere]

 

[tytalan]

Basically, it is a flying gun platform. I don't see this as unbalancing. I kind of feel bad for the PCs if I ever decide to use this. PCs get shot at way more than NPCs. Most worlds, this would be illegal anyhow.

You can mount a .50 cal on the back of a pickup truck, but trying driving that down the road in the US or UK and see what happens.

The rules are basically the physics of the world. Don't change the physics because your players do not understand consequences. You have tons of tools in your toolbox to run games. You have laws, social conventions, religious conventions, etc...

Let your players load their ship up with small weaponry and then make fun of them on every planet they land on for compensating for their lack of manhood. lol. Creative solutions within a setting are way better than making rules more restrictive.

While I generally agree with this I don’t believe that’s a common sense limit a ships hull is less than 5% of the ships volume and since these weapons are on the surface of the ship that in itself is a limiting factor. There’s a reason why tanks only carry so many weapons. This is not changing physics of the world it’s recognizing that sometimes the game doesn’t take into consideration the insanity of the players.

Now I definitely understand the part about “You have laws, social conventions, religious conventions, etc...” this is why if my players try to put more than lasers or sandcasters in the civilian ships turrets they happen to get inspected and harassed

 

[MasterGwydion]

Now I definitely understand the part about “You have laws, social conventions, religious conventions, etc...” this is why if my players try to put more than lasers or sandcasters in the civilian ships turrets they happen to get inspected and harassed

Yeah. This last bit seems to get missed a lot by players and referees. The difference between civilian weapons and military weapons on starships. PoD is a good example of this. Most of the ships I design are civilian and so lasers are about the limit. I think the CSC has more info on this.

 

[Condottiere]

You want cheap, and maintenance light.

At the same time, deter people wishing you harm.

 

[tytalan]

My biggest thing is missiles realistically a military weapon
1). The same missile launcher can just as easily fire a nuke as a standard
2). Their range makes them more of a offensive weapon than a defensive weapon
3). They are inherently more expensive
For all these reasons IMTU any of the major powers are going to look very closely at a civilian ship carrying missile racks. And the other turret weapons all have even more reasons to be considered military. Fusion gun and particle beams but have the radiation trait, Rail guns hav3 AP yea so do the Laser Drill but the latter only has adjacent range, the Plasma gun doesn’t have any of these traits but it’s more expensive than a fusion gun and is considered the fusion guns predecessor.

No IMTU the most common weapons on say Free/Far Traders is Dual Beam/Plus lasers with Accuracy Mods on the latter and Dual Sandcasters probably 75 to 80% of Armed Free/Far have this combo in their turrets

 

[Condottiere]

I'd have to see the actual regulations for acceptable commercial armaments.

And those would vary by jurisdiction.

We'll assume, by rulebook/setting default, that lasers, sandcasters, and missile (launchers), in turret format, are acceptable to the Imperium in general, though not necessarily to their member worlds, within their sovereign territory.

 

[MasterGwydion]

My biggest thing is missiles realistically a military weapon
1). The same missile launcher can just as easily fire a nuke as a standard
2). Their range makes them more of a offensive weapon than a defensive weapon
3). They are inherently more expensive
For all these reasons IMTU any of the major powers are going to look very closely at a civilian ship carrying missile racks. And the other turret weapons all have even more reasons to be considered military. Fusion gun and particle beams but have the radiation trait, Rail guns hav3 AP yea so do the Laser Drill but the latter only has adjacent range, the Plasma gun doesn’t have any of these traits but it’s more expensive than a fusion gun and is considered the fusion guns predecessor.

No IMTU the most common weapons on say Free/Far Traders is Dual Beam/Plus lasers with Accuracy Mods on the latter and Dual Sandcasters probably 75 to 80% of Armed Free/Far have this combo in their turrets

Missiles, Plasma and Fusion Weapons are listed as a Category 5 Item (Restricted Military Use) on page 6 of the CSC.

 

[Terry Mixon]

Missiles, Plasma and Fusion Weapons are listed as a Category 5 Item (Restricted Military Use) on page 6 of the CSC.

I thought that was the smaller missiles that are used on a planetary surface rather than in space.