Particle Beams, Radiation hits vs Lasers. Crew Attrition

[PsiTraveller]

I have been playing around with the Harrier design and just thought of this strategy. Rather than having lasers or missiles go with Particle Beams or any other radiation based weapon. The average does of radiation is enough to severly injure or kill a crew member every round. In a battle lasting half a dozen rounds you may well drop a significant portion of the crew. This could impact Guns, piloting, leadership and engineers for damage repair.

Particle beams do 700 rads, 6d damage to a crew member. For smaller crewed ships a radiation weapon can casue a win by attrition in very few rounds.

To protect themselves the ship needs to be radiation shielded, which triples the cost of the hull, or the crew need to be in suits.

Anyone else played with this idea?

 

[Nerhesi]

I have been playing around with the Harrier design and just thought of this strategy. Rather than having lasers or missiles go with Particle Beams or any other radiation based weapon. The average does of radiation is enough to severly injure or kill a crew member every round. In a battle lasting half a dozen rounds you may well drop a significant portion of the crew. This could impact Guns, piloting, leadership and engineers for damage repair.

Particle beams do 700 rads, 6d damage to a crew member. For smaller crewed ships a radiation weapon can casue a win by attrition in very few rounds.

To protect themselves the ship needs to be radiation shielded, which triples the cost of the hull, or the crew need to be in suits.

Anyone else played with this idea?

Is this including the 500 hull that a basic ship hull absorbs?

 

[PsiTraveller]

Well the description of the Particle weapon in Chapter 8 of High Guard has
"Particle Beam: This weapon fires a stream of accelerated subatomic particles at a target. It is not only more powerful than the average ship-mounted laser but some of the particles it fires easily penetrate ship armour as if it were not there, irradiating the crew on board. "

And the 500 protection provided by pg 77 of the Core book has the Hull offering the protection. And the radiation description has the 2D X 20 X 5 for spaceship weapon. So I am not sure if the penetrating the armour as if it were not there line inidcates that the damage done is after it gets into the ship easily.

So I do not know if the damage is after the 500 protection, or if the damage ignores the armour, or if the hull provides protection. That's a good question for the folks writing the book. What damage is done by a radiating weapon, and what does it mean if it penetrates armour as if it were not there?

 

[Nerhesi]

To me it seemed clear - Radiation damage before protection. When you were hit by a spacecraft radiation weapon, you took 2D x 20 X 5 radiation damage. So 2D X 100 radiation.

Minus 500 for basic spacecraft hull.

So without radiation treated hull, you took between 0 and 700 rads at most. If you have the expensive (and wow is it expensive) radiation hull treatment, you took an... extra 1000 off? Thats what is unclear to me. It is an extra 1000 or a total of 1000 off?

MGT1 had you immune to radiation damage with armour 12+