Major malfunction - High Guard capital ship combat

[ColHut]

A real issue for HG capital ship combat.

A TL 11 (improved TL+) particle beam spinal mount does 230 damage.
It inflicts only residual damage against any ship with an AV of 8 or more (even a lowly Sloan class escort has AV 6) (230-(8x30)= narf! Residual damage is 23. Radiation damage is zero as Av>=8. Chance of a hit is problematic at optimum range (typically 20-40% (-6 formidable task, +3 crew skill +3 FC for tL11 -? size) Better FC cancels out dodge etc . This weighs in at around 3500 tons.

However just 4 x 100 ton particle beam bays (upgraded say Accurate and High yield) will do 36 say 70-80% bearing 28 @ (+3 FC+3 crew skill+2 weapon characteristics) -8 armpourl will do on average 28 die damage, and between 0[for 2] and 63[for 12] damage. This is nuts, and on an 8 or more final score will do system damage! Obviously if we replace 3500 tons of spinal mount on say an 8000 ton ship, we can have 10-60 bay weapons certainly 30. So you can see where this is going. On average against heavily armoured ships Bay particle beams hit and hurt far more than spinal weapons. the crazy thing here is that particle bay beam weapons must be puny compared to their spinal mount cousin and yet do far more damage against armoured ships!. Also of course against unarmoured ships.

This assumes IWD have no addition affect - otherwise a healthy +9 for the particle bays will anhilate the opposiition.

 

[alex_greene]

I think it's more a matter of reputation than anything else. The enemy sees the long barrel of the ship's main spinal cannon aiming at them ever so slowly, and they panic and surrender before the big Dreadly Beam of Death comes along and cracks their planet in half.

Never mind that at the distances involved, the meson gun wouldn't even so much as light a cigarette.

 

[apoc527]

30 armor might be too much. I'd consider making it 20, or even 15.

 

[ColHut]

30 armor might be too much. I'd consider making it 20, or even 15.

This might work at one end, but I would prefer if FC didnot affect damage from barrages as it does.

They would have been MUCH better just differentiating "hitting" with a barrage from "doing damage". They do this, after all, for spinal mounts.

 

[nats]

Spinal mounts should be almost a one hit one kill weapon and as such be extremely expensive. They should take ages to set up, and it should be difficult to actually hit a target with one (which is their disadvantage) but if they hit they should practically slice the target in half. Its the only way to treat them. Think the Death Star. If they arent designed like that then they arent very sensible.

Its like the dreadnoughts of WW1 - they would be used to hit hard large ships from a great distance but ships employing spinal mounts should not be employed in close battles - a navy should not want to lose such a ship to hits from smaller ships in a close fight. Once the close combat starts the spinal mount ships should move out of range and fire from a distance.

But there should also really have a degree of inaccuracy involved so if employing them from a distance there should have a chance of hitting your own ships if they are mingled with the others. These are concept missing from Traveller that would make Spinal Mounts really something to consider carefully.