Multiple Missile Salvoes Arriving Simultaneously

[AnotherDilbert]

So now you're tracking to see which Salvos are from which ships and are hitting at the same turn?

So if a ship is being hit by 7 salvos during this turn, however 3 are from the same ship/squadron? So regardless of the turn they were launched in, those need to have opposed tactics rolls or else they deal with "fresh" PD? Even though PD is basically x-shot over Y-time, it magically overdrives during that turn?

I saw it as a fleet wide thing. One opposed roll per fleet per round, if needed.

The simplified definition of a multiple salvo is if a ship/squadron is hit with salvoes launched in different rounds. For each salvo we already need to note target, number of missiles, type of missiles, and when it attacks. If we add the round it was launched, we can see if a multiple salvo is happening. We add to the bookkeping, but perhaps not unbearably so.

A salvo, or group of salvoes, are organised to hit the ship in a short period of time, to overwhelm PD. We will not face a continuos stream of missiles for the full 6 minutes of a round, but a sudden onslaught during a short time, followed by a lull. If the attacker fails the opposed roll he fails to coordinate his salvoes to hit in the same minute, instead the salvoes arrive 2 - 3 minutes apart, still in the same round. Hence, I do not find it difficult to imagine PD to be fully effective against both groups of salvoes.

I saw a fairly simple way to prevent multiple salvoes to be an instant win condition.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Torpedoes? Let's try:

Take the heavy PD Particle ship from http://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewtopic.php?p=900461#p900461
against a torpedo BC http://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewtopic.php?p=900257#p900257. It launches 2360 torpedoes / attack.

2360 MW standard torpedoes launched in round 1 at Distant, arrives round 11, not halved since torpedo.
2360 Advanced torpedoes launched in round 4 at Distant, arrives round 11, not halved since torpedo.
PD kills 2360 Advanced torpedoes and ( 10250 - 2360*2 ) * 80% / 2 = 2212 MW torpedoes, 148 MW torpedoes remains.
148 MW torpedoes hit, doing 148 * 30 / 10 = 444 damage, killing 5,5% of enemy ship. Particle ships win.

Note that the particle ship has very heavy PD, 800 out of 1100 hardpoints are filled with PD batteries.

 

[phavoc]

Torpedoes? Let's try:

Take the heavy PD Particle ship from http://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewtopic.php?p=900461#p900461
against a torpedo BC http://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewtopic.php?p=900257#p900257. It launches 2360 torpedoes / attack.

2360 MW standard torpedoes launched in round 1 at Distant, arrives round 11, not halved since torpedo.
2360 Advanced torpedoes launched in round 4 at Distant, arrives round 11, not halved since torpedo.
PD kills 2360 Advanced torpedoes and ( 10250 - 2360*2 ) * 80% / 2 = 2212 MW torpedoes, 148 MW torpedoes remains.
148 MW torpedoes hit, doing 148 * 30 / 10 = 444 damage, killing 5,5% of enemy ship. Particle ships win.

Note that the particle ship has very heavy PD, 800 out of 1100 hardpoints are filled with PD batteries.

So this is kind of a problem. A ship launching 2,360 torpedoes. The explosive growth of weapon mounts is making the fleets look ridiculous. I think part of issue is that weapon mounts have grown without their hardpoint consumption growing as well. HG is going to get published with all these rules in here and capital ship combat is going to be Monty Haul-ish. I don't see anything saving us from that now.

 

[phavoc]

So now you're tracking to see which Salvos are from which ships and are hitting at the same turn?

So if a ship is being hit by 7 salvos during this turn, however 3 are from the same ship/squadron? So regardless of the turn they were launched in, those need to have opposed tactics rolls or else they deal with "fresh" PD? Even though PD is basically x-shot over Y-time, it magically overdrives during that turn?

I saw it as a fleet wide thing. One opposed roll per fleet per round, if needed.

The simplified definition of a multiple salvo is if a ship/squadron is hit with salvoes launched in different rounds. For each salvo we already need to note target, number of missiles, type of missiles, and when it attacks. If we add the round it was launched, we can see if a multiple salvo is happening. We add to the bookkeping, but perhaps not unbearably so.

A salvo, or group of salvoes, are organised to hit the ship in a short period of time, to overwhelm PD. We will not face a continuos stream of missiles for the full 6 minutes of a round, but a sudden onslaught during a short time, followed by a lull. If the attacker fails the opposed roll he fails to coordinate his salvoes to hit in the same minute, instead the salvoes arrive 2 - 3 minutes apart, still in the same round. Hence, I do not find it difficult to imagine PD to be fully effective against both groups of salvoes.

I saw a fairly simple way to prevent multiple salvoes to be an instant win condition.

One thing that has kind of bugged me about the missile salvo rule is that the opposing player gets to know what ships are being targetted by incoming salvo's. In combat the enemy doesn't send you telegram letting you know they are planning on launching 100 missiles in your direction this turn.

For fleet actions it's basically an us vs. them sort of concept. A fleet (i.e. all the ships that have the capability to do ECM, which is basically every ship) has an ECM rating. As a fleet they should roll to see how many incoming missiles (closest salvo's first) they can jam, lure away, etc. Then simply remove them from play. Next turn they get to do the next wave. The attacker can write down which wave is targeting which ship(s). Or they could declare it at launch, but where's the fun in that? Knowing what ships are being targetted allows the defender to potentially sacrifice a ship before it's time.

 

[Nerhesi]

The growth isn't really explosive - this is linear. In fact, their growth in tonnage is actually punishing not beneficial (1 ton turret fires 1 missile, but to fire 12, you need a 50-ton bay).

Any change to reduce/slow down weapon mounts/hardpoints would further push capital ships into legacy/endangered/useless. As AnotherDilbert pointed out, you'd have even less reason to build capital ships, it'd be K'kree drones and Aslan/Zhodani fighters everywhere!

A ship launching 2,360 torpedoes. The explosive growth of weapon mounts is making the fleets look ridiculous

Assuming you've been considering Traveller ridiculous since the beginning... as this really hasn't changed. I'm sure by modern standards launching 2,360 torpedoes is still.. but so would be having 110 fusion bays on the same ship....

Of course, this is in line with a lot of other space opera games as well (D6 space, Battletech starships, etc). A change from this would require a massive revisit to core underlying systems (basically moving away from hardpoint systems)

 

[AnotherDilbert]

So this is kind of a problem. A ship launching 2,360 torpedoes. The explosive growth of weapon mounts is making the fleets look ridiculous. I think part of issue is that weapon mounts have grown without their hardpoint consumption growing as well. HG is going to get published with all these rules in here and capital ship combat is going to be Monty Haul-ish. I don't see anything saving us from that now.

2000 torpedoes, that's nothing...

This Orbital Fortress http://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewtopic.php?p=899256#p899256 launches over 100 000 torpedoes per attack.

It's the same today:

If a truck can carry and launch 4 anti-ship missiles, how many missiles could a super carrier sized ship optimised to launch as many missiles as possible launch?

 

[IanBruntlett]

When that truck has finished launching its 4 missiles, it can't contribute anything else to an ongoing battle. It is relatively small and unlikely to be targeted by the enemy.

So people are writing that a large warship can launch 1000's of missiles. Once those missiles are launched. can that ship make any other offensive action? Or even a defensive action? At least with energy weapons you aren't dealing with a one-shot system.

I think it was the USAF that decided that arming jet fighters with cannons/machine guns was a waste of time, that missiles were the only viable weapon until real life combat showed that missiles had to be supplemented with something else.

 

[phavoc]

The growth isn't really explosive - this is linear. In fact, their growth in tonnage is actually punishing not beneficial (1 ton turret fires 1 missile, but to fire 12, you need a 50-ton bay).

Any change to reduce/slow down weapon mounts/hardpoints would further push capital ships into legacy/endangered/useless. As AnotherDilbert pointed out, you'd have even less reason to build capital ships, it'd be K'kree drones and Aslan/Zhodani fighters everywhere!

A ship launching 2,360 torpedoes. The explosive growth of weapon mounts is making the fleets look ridiculous

Assuming you've been considering Traveller ridiculous since the beginning... as this really hasn't changed. I'm sure by modern standards launching 2,360 torpedoes is still.. but so would be having 110 fusion bays on the same ship....

Of course, this is in line with a lot of other space opera games as well (D6 space, Battletech starships, etc). A change from this would require a massive revisit to core underlying systems (basically moving away from hardpoint systems)

Well, considering a 500 Dton turret only takes up 10 hardpoints, it's (potentially) a problem. I'm very well versed in space opera games, but if we look at say SW in comparison, you don't see Star Destroyers mounting hundreds, or thousands, of massive turrets. They have lots of smaller guns, but only a relative handful of larger ones.

The other thing is that people keep saying capital ships are useless. I disagree. What is broken is that a teeny little 500 ton ship has the capacity to mount the same armor as 500,000 ton ship. That strikes me as rather odd. One of the purposes of having larger capital ships is that only they can mount the larger weapons (And actually survive a combat round to fire them again). The other purpose is (or should be) that only they can mount say level 15 armor factor. This idea isn't different than most other space opera or other games - the larger the ship the more stuff you get, the more shields/armor you get. And go down the scale and the same idea remains the same. If you scale armor to displacement, all of a sudden the big battle wagons, and even cruisers, will start to become far more viable and survivable on the battlefield.

So those 10 torpedo frigates would have 2-3 factor armor, and when the launch their salvoes at the Tigress, it might take some damage, but those 10 frigates are dead. Traveller has, in my opinion at least, always tried to channel the WW1 vibe of ships and commerce. Big ships = big guns and armor. Taking out the idea of flotation, you saw the older classical designs trading speed for armor because they were meant to slug things out with similar brethren. Of course you had other missile defenses to make it harder to kill them from afar, too.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Take something like this:

362 m long, 72 m high, 50 wide.
Let's say we could use 200 m * 50 m = 10000 m2 to mount torpedoes.
Fill that area with launchers like this

Assume each missile takes 0,5 m2, then we could fit 20 000 launchers in each broadside.

Ridiculous? Yes.
Possible? Probably not, but if we spent a few decades and trillions on the problem?

 

[AnotherDilbert]

When that truck has finished launching its 4 missiles, it can't contribute anything else to an ongoing battle. It is relatively small and unlikely to be targeted by the enemy.

This particular truck was Swedish Coastal artillery. After it has launched its missiles the Soviets/Russians are likely out of marine landing ships in the Baltic, so mission accomplished.

So people are writing that a large warship can launch 1000's of missiles. Once those missiles are launched. can that ship make any other offensive action? Or even a defensive action? At least with energy weapons you aren't dealing with a one-shot system.

Default magazine space included in most launchers is 12 missiles for each launched in a salvo, so you can generally launch the same amount of missiles every 6 minutes for an hour or so. Possibly less because missiles are expensive.

The ships I build also generally include Point Defence able to shoot down a similar amount of missiles, so it can survive a few salvoes from itself. And some screens to blunt meson or fusion attacks. So yes, these numbers presume a decent defensive capability.

 

[phavoc]

So this is kind of a problem. A ship launching 2,360 torpedoes. The explosive growth of weapon mounts is making the fleets look ridiculous. I think part of issue is that weapon mounts have grown without their hardpoint consumption growing as well. HG is going to get published with all these rules in here and capital ship combat is going to be Monty Haul-ish. I don't see anything saving us from that now.

2000 torpedoes, that's nothing...

This Orbital Fortress http://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewtopic.php?p=899256#p899256 launches over 100 000 torpedoes per attack.

If a truck can carry and launch 4 anti-ship missiles, how many missiles could a super carrier sized ship optimised to launch as many missiles as possible launch?

I'll go you one better. When I was in the military I was a MLRS crewmember. We could target a grid square (1km x 1km) and saturate it with bomblets in 60 seconds of firing time - time to target varied obviously). On a good day we could drop the empty pods and load a new set in about 6 minutes and ready to go again. My job was split between divisional level fire support and counter-battery - MLRS had the ability to really ruin a tube batteries day because we could take a fire mission on the fly, launch a couple of rounds and be gone - something tubes couldn't do back in the day (but some can now, with internal gyroscopes or GPS to properly lay their guns).

So why hasn't every tube been replaced with rockets? Cost for one matter - a 155mm shell is a LOT cheaper than a rocket pod. But each is tasked with a different mission. Plus sometimes all you need is a few well-placed 155 rounds instead of bomblets. And MLRS isn't a precision weapon like a tube can be. So each weapon has it's place on the battlefield (not to mention MLRS is an ammo HOG! Each SPLL had TWO HEMTTS with HEMAT trailers attached to it (16 spare pods) because it could burn through ammo far faster than a tube battery would. Usually one HEMTT would drop it pods and get back on the autobahn and head to the rear to start bringing up more ammo. At least that was the plan... the balloon never went up so we just played at killing Soviets pouring through the Fulda Gap.

On the flip side, the entire MLRS system had a LOT of offensive capability and ZERO defensive. The entire system could be taken out by an infrantryman armed with a HMG or RPG (ammo side was susceptible to a simple AK-47). The idea of putting sledgehammers in eggshells has existed for a very long time. But usually most militaries figure out you sometimes need to armor and protect that egg if you want to use it more than once. And for every disposable fighter/bomber you have, there's a cheap counter to it.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Well, considering a 500 Dton turret only takes up 10 hardpoints, it's (potentially) a problem. I'm very well versed in space opera games, but if we look at say SW in comparison, you don't see Star Destroyers mounting hundreds, or thousands, of massive turrets. They have lots of smaller guns, but only a relative handful of larger ones.

The other thing is that people keep saying capital ships are useless. I disagree. What is broken is that a teeny little 500 ton ship has the capacity to mount the same armor as 500,000 ton ship. That strikes me as rather odd. One of the purposes of having larger capital ships is that only they can mount the larger weapons (And actually survive a combat round to fire them again). The other purpose is (or should be) that only they can mount say level 15 armor factor. This idea isn't different than most other space opera or other games - the larger the ship the more stuff you get, the more shields/armor you get. And go down the scale and the same idea remains the same. If you scale armor to displacement, all of a sudden the big battle wagons, and even cruisers, will start to become far more viable and survivable on the battlefield.

And Fire, Fusion, and Steel could almost model that. But most people (?) thought that was too complex, and wanted a simpler system.

CT High Guard is very simple. And as far as I can see still perhaps the most used (http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/showthread.php?t=35283) ship design system for Traveller.

Simplicity is good. Simplicity is usable.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

At least that was the plan... the balloon never went up so we just played at killing Soviets pouring through the Fulda Gap.

Thankfully, we simply do not know how a massive conventional war would work for the last few decades.

I fear that small-scale colonial wars in South East Asia and the Middle East have given Western nations a false sense of security.

Real life is always vastly more complex than any game.

 

[phavoc]

Well, considering a 500 Dton turret only takes up 10 hardpoints, it's (potentially) a problem. I'm very well versed in space opera games, but if we look at say SW in comparison, you don't see Star Destroyers mounting hundreds, or thousands, of massive turrets. They have lots of smaller guns, but only a relative handful of larger ones.

The other thing is that people keep saying capital ships are useless. I disagree. What is broken is that a teeny little 500 ton ship has the capacity to mount the same armor as 500,000 ton ship. That strikes me as rather odd. One of the purposes of having larger capital ships is that only they can mount the larger weapons (And actually survive a combat round to fire them again). The other purpose is (or should be) that only they can mount say level 15 armor factor. This idea isn't different than most other space opera or other games - the larger the ship the more stuff you get, the more shields/armor you get. And go down the scale and the same idea remains the same. If you scale armor to displacement, all of a sudden the big battle wagons, and even cruisers, will start to become far more viable and survivable on the battlefield.

And Fire, Fusion, and Steel could almost model that. But most people (?) thought that was too complex, and wanted a simpler system.

CT High Guard is very simple. And as far as I can see still perhaps the most used (http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/showthread.php?t=35283) ship design system for Traveller.

Simplicity is good. Simplicity is usable.

It's not hard to model at all. Ships of less than say 2,000 tons are limited to armor 4, ships of 5,000 tons or less get armor 5... ships 100,000 tones get max armor 10, ships 250,000 or greater can be armor 15... leave the rules in for buffered planetoids as is. Viola. No FF&S required. It's a simple table chart to reference. Just like CT, simple,effective, and makes capital ships remain the king of the battlefield like they should be.

That's just a quick and dirty view. Obviously it needs to be fully scaled up to make sure it's reasonably fair and logical. Perhaps you could buy additional armor factors (a few), but the tonnage cost would make it so that you really need to be willing to offset your losses elsewhere. This would allow for more heavily armored SDB's, though they aren't flying tanks. Doesn't really take away from an SDB, as they are warships still. Or maybe we need to add more tonnage to an armor factor so that ships are flying around with reasonable armor factors instead of everything being a Thrust-9, Chemical thrusters, armor factor-15. Players don't often have to live within their means since they aren't paying the taxes to support their tournament navies.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

You are just throwing around random numbers based on what you feel is right. We have more information than that.
From Striker and MegaTraveller we know that Armour 15 is about 1 m of bonded superdense. We also know that grav tanks can have that kind of armour on at least some surfaces with a bit of effort.

From that we can easily calculate the armour as a percentage of the total volume of the craft

      dT      Radius   -armour     internal   Armour%
       10      3,22      2,22          3,28   67,2%
      100      6,94      5,94         62,71   37,3%
    1 000     14,95     13,95        812,50   18,8%
   10 000     32,22     31,22      9 097,42    9,0%
  100 000     69,41     68,41     95 739,81    4,3%
1 000 000    149,54    148,54    980 072,14    2,0%

where a craft is assumed to be a sphere. Radius is the radius of the sphere, -armour is 1 m less, internal is the volume of a sphere with radius = craft radius - 1, and finally Armour% is the volume % of the armour.

We can see that fairly small ships (1000dT) could conceivably carry that much armour and that for large ships the armour is insignificant. Heavily armoured fighters are problematical, for a 35dT fighter 1 m of armour would be ~50% of volume.

We could argue that large ships could carry heavier armour, like in MegaTraveller. But then large ships would be immune to turrets or perhaps even bays. Then you would need bigger guns, and we soon end up with FFS.

This is a game. We need simplicity. Predefined weapons, like turret laser or barbette fusion gun, are reasonably simple. And since we like fighters to be able to hurt battleships, the turret weapons need to be able to damage ships with heavy armour.

So armour is highly abstracted to a simple linear formula, like in CT and most of Traveller Canon.

But Traveller is a big toolbox, if you want more detail FFS provides it.

I'm sorry, we are far off topic. Perhaps we could go back to discussing multiple salvoes attacking in the same round?

 

[phavoc]

Not random numbers, but you are missing the point of the concept - that is to address the issue of why have capital ships. Also you are assuming that every point of armor is a linear increase. Armor factor 2 might be 200% more damage resistance than armor factor 1. Pretty much the entire book of High Guard is random numbers based on what someone felt was right... so I'm following in a lot of previous footsteps in that matter.

But it's also relevant to the idea of multiple salvo's arriving in a single round. IF you can manage to do that, then you are utilizing your ships offensive weapons properly. Every attacker hopes to do this in order to kill his opponent.

As a defender you have to decide how to engage a missile-armed enemy. If they deploy missile drones you need to deploy anti-drone killers. If they deploy fighters you need to kill them or deploy fighters on your own.

Players don't tend to often build "real world" warships. Most warships are armed and armored to be generalists. Specialized warships tend to be smaller (Anti-fighter escorts, anti-missile escorts, minesweepers, etc). You rarely see specialized capital warships (some notable exceptions, such as carriers or planetary assault ships). A battlecruiser may emphasize beam or missile armament, but it would be rare to see it armed with say 80-90% missile/torpedo launchers.

All of this boils down to the efficacy of massed missile salvo's. As it stands I don't see anything wrong with it. When the numbers have been run, has the defending ship ever reversed course and made it into a running battle, with the defender whittling down the missiles as they close? That's one way to offensively employ our own missile launchers against drones and fighter craft (which can't take much damage).

The other part comes back to defenses. At range you have EW and small craft. Closer you have point-defense. There is a gap in defenses here, which is where the anti-missile missile concept could be implemented. You also have the idea from CT to re-introduce repulsors to help offset waves of missiles. The idea for all these layered defenses is to force your opponent to concentrate fire on just a handful of vessels in order to swamp their defenses. Which means, to me at least, that you should leave the capability to attack en masse alone and try to address it in other ways (addressing armor issue is one way to do it too).

 

[Nerhesi]

Just to bring things back on topic:

I'm very well versed in space opera games, but if we look at say SW in comparison, you don't see Star Destroyers mounting hundreds, or thousands, of massive turrets. They have lots of smaller guns, but only a relative handful of larger ones.

Victory Class (The Smallest) Star Destroyer:
Quad turbolaser batteries (10)
Double turbolaser batteries (40)
Concussion missile tubes (80)
Tractor beam projectors (10)

140 weapon systems, the smallest of is bigger than a Traveller Turret. At least 50 of these weapons require a crew of 5 and are easily the size of small bays in traveller.
As for battletech, Naval bays/weapons are even bigger than the traveller sizes(when you look at Naval PPCs, Autocannons, Gauss Cannons and so on).

Can either of those ship-systems mount 10 or even 100 times as many smaller lasers/laser cannons/simple turrets? Absolutely - the above ships placed weapons simply based on size/volume availability and not hardpoints.

The other thing is that people keep saying capital ships are useless. I disagree. What is broken is that a teeny little 500 ton ship has the capacity to mount the same armor as 500,000 ton ship.

You've mentioned this countless times, and im opposed to this because it is really toe-matoe vs toe-mahto - there is no superior system here, just what is preferred. Whether you choose to have a hard "threshold" of armour + "hit points" or just straight hitpoints is a design principle that has it's own flaws and balances. No reason to revisit the same issue that we've revisited because it brings more problems than it solves (requires entire rework of the combat system, rebalancing all weapons, accounting for small craft agility and so on.

I may even be in favour of what you proposed if we explored it further - but that was never an option for MGT2 (I dont make those decisions either FYI). So really, no reason to keep discussing this.

Traveller has, in my opinion at least, always tried to channel the WW1 vibe of ships and commerce. Big ships = big guns and armor. Taking out the idea of flotation, you saw the older classical designs trading speed for armor because they were meant to slug things out with similar brethren. Of course you had other missile defenses to make it harder to kill them from afar, too.

With a healthy mix of WW2 and Anime? because Fighters and carriers have always been a huge part of it.
Also with HG in CT, Missiles just dominated (from my understanding of the conversations on COTI).
Example: Sylea battleship main weapons past the spinal are 60 Missile BAYS (with 130 laser turrets afterwards)

I think we need to focus on the facts at hand. That is:

a) We will always have a king-of-the-hill / optimum build.
b) However, missiles are clearly so with very little thought required - this, in my honest opinion, is a problem.
c) This especially presents itself due to long range sniping and "doubling up" salvos

Lets fix this specifically.

 

[phavoc]

I was thinking of their larger cousins, from the first SW film - An Imperial SD is 1,600m long x 1,015m wide and lets say it's only 500m tall (it's a wedge with built-up sections. And I don't wanna do all the math). According to a mix of info from two different books, it's got six large anti-capital ship turbo laser stations along with two heavy ion cannons along the flank. Each is 50m in diameter. It also has smaller turbolasers and ion cannons 60 of each) as well as concussion missile launchers (and probably proton torpedo launchers too). It carries 72 Ties, nearly 10,000 storm troopers and all their ground gear and supplies. It's definitely huge. But if you look at the number of smaller turrets, it's nowhere near the numbers that a Traveller ship would mount. Granted the gaming systems are different, but I wanted to provide it as a comparison.

You've mentioned this countless times, and im opposed to this because it is really toe-matoe vs toe-mahto - there is no superior system here, just what is preferred. Whether you choose to have a hard "threshold" of armour + "hit points" or just straight hitpoints is a design principle that has it's own flaws and balances. No reason to revisit the same issue that we've revisited because it brings more problems than it solves (requires entire rework of the combat system, rebalancing all weapons, accounting for small craft agility and so on.

I may even be in favour of what you proposed if we explored it further - but that was never an option for MGT2 (I dont make those decisions either FYI). So really, no reason to keep discussing this.

Traveller has, in my opinion at least, always tried to channel the WW1 vibe of ships and commerce. Big ships = big guns and armor. Taking out the idea of flotation, you saw the older classical designs trading speed for armor because they were meant to slug things out with similar brethren. Of course you had other missile defenses to make it harder to kill them from afar, too.

With a healthy mix of WW2 and Anime? because Fighters and carriers have always been a huge part of it.
Also with HG in CT, Missiles just dominated (from my understanding of the conversations on COTI).
Example: Sylea battleship main weapons past the spinal are 60 Missile BAYS (with 130 laser turrets afterwards)

I think we need to focus on the facts at hand. That is:

a) We will always have a king-of-the-hill / optimum build.
b) However, missiles are clearly so with very little thought required - this, in my honest opinion, is a problem.
c) This especially presents itself due to long range sniping and "doubling up" salvos

Lets fix this specifically.

I agree, there is always going to be that group of people that build min/max designs. You will NEVER come up with a set of rules that can protect you from that sort of thing AND still expect relatively balanced designs to be created in a game to be fought with as essentially NPC's. I've never seen a game system work that way in any sort of manner. Rules lawyers abound looking for ways to exploit generalized rule sets.

That means you can either nerf missiles offensively (which would seem arbitrary with no valid reasons to do so, other than nerfing them that way is easier), OR you look at the defenses and come up with reasonable opposites.

You don't like the armor issue, so we'll set that one aside. That leaves us with making point defense more effective, making EW more effective, or adding in additional point defense options. If you don't want to alter the existing point defense batteries or turrets, then you could easily enough add in more dedicated ECM capabilities to capital vessels, justifying it by adding energy costs to attempt to jam incoming missiles. By requiring some decent sort of tonnage and an energy requirement you can move them out of the capability of adventure-sized craft. You could also halve their capabilities in defending against incoming attacks that are NOT directed at them.

And that leaves the final option which nobody seems to like - putting in the concept of anti-missile missiles. Easy enough to add in. You can fire one AMM or a missile per turn. And restrict them to missile launchers, not bays, to reflect their special status. This gives some balance to the idea, with the justification that bays would have to much fraticide or something. It's really just to stop people from using bays to launch shoals of AMM's. I'd also make the same size as a standard round. The downside is you have to install missile turrets, and you have to choose between offensive or defensive fire from that turret every turn, no double dipping. The max you get is 3 AMM launched per hard point. It doesn't really break any of the other rules, plus you could potentially extend them to adventure-class ships. Then you could have missile attackers trying to wear out the magazine of a defender, or hoping they get lucky and the AMM has a miss (Prolly a standard 6+ to hit would make them effective).

 

[Nerhesi]

To be honest Phavoc, the only problem with anti-missile missiles is that is makes Missiles even better.

Want to attack? Use missiles
Want to snipe from range? use missiles
Want to protect against missiles? Dont worry! Use missiles!

So we have to be very careful with the ratio... But otherwise, I do think we need to bump missile defense a bit.

I'm also very much in favour of allowing long distance firing on missiles.

 

[-Daniel-]

Reading this thread reminded me of why I created a house rule once that ships over 5000 tons break up when they try to enter jump space. Kept the whole weapons race down to a much saner level. :mrgreen: