House rule for starship combat

Pyromancer

Mongoose
House rule suggestion:

The hull points are divided into a number of segments equal to the armour (one segment if there is no armour).
A ship with 40 hull points and 4 points of armour has divisions at 30, 20 and 10 hull points.

Whenever the hull points drop below one of those thresholds, armour is reduced by 1.
After fighting for a while, the ship still has 32 hull points, but now is hit for 8 points of damage. After subtracting the 4 points of armour, it suffers 4 points of damage, dropping hull points from 32 to 28. Armour is now reduced to 3. It will drop to 2 if hull points fall to 20, and to 1 if hull points fall to 10.

A ship suffers a critical hit whenever the damage it suffers is equal or greater than the current armour value. On a ship with no armour, every hit is critical.
The above example is a critical hit, because 4 points of damage is equal to the armour.

What do you think?
 
Armor can already be reduced by a Critical Hit so I think this would make space combat deadlier.

I’ve instituted a house rule that armor can only be repaired at a starport, not jury-rigged in a field repair. That might be a better way of making armor damage more serious - it’s harder to fix.
 
In personal combat I use 10% of damage inflicted on the character also goes to the armor itself. I set one milestone at 50%:
http://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewtopic.php?f=89&t=121302&p=928416#p928416

So by my system Pyromancer’s ship wouldn’t lose armor until a total of 20 Hull has been inflicted while by the example above the ship loses armor more slowly over time. So that system is more gradual and feels better than my Personal scale one.

TL13 SDB (HG 2e pg 142)
400 ton Reinforced Hull
Armor 13
Hull 176
176 / 13 = 13.5 = 13 segments of 13 Hull each (21 Hull in final segment)
Pyromancer= every 13 hits, reduce Armor by 1 point
Mine= at 65 Hull hits, reduce Armor to 7

Again, more gradual and feels better than a coarse break at 50%. But we seem to be on the same page regarding rate of decay for the armor itself.

Consider this yoinked - updating the Personal scale to match. 👍👍👍

In my defense I make the PCs track this kind of stuff so went as simple as possible. Silly Ref!
 
NOLATrav said:
In my defense I make the PCs track this kind of stuff so went as simple as possible. Silly Ref!

Make a bar on the ship sheet where the players can cross off the hull points they have lost, and note the remaining armour besides it. So the players can just look at the sheet and see with a glance how much armour is left.
 
I put a hull-point bar on the ship record sheets for my campaign. Makes it easier to recognize the Critical Hit thresholds as ships accumulate damage.
 
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