Repairing Critical hits

PsiTraveller

Cosmic Mongoose
I think I asked this once before, but cannot find the thread, so am asking again.

Repair System (Engineer)
A Traveller on engineer duty can attempt to effect a quick repair to the effects of a critical hit. This requires an Average (8+) Engineer check (1 round, INT or EDU) with a negative DM equal to the Severity of the critical hit. A cumulative DM+1 is gained every round the Traveller works on repairing the same critical hit. If the spacecraft receives critical hit to the same location during this time, the Traveller must start again from the beginning with no positive DM.
Note that only the effects of the critical hit can be repaired, and these quick repairs will only last for 1D hours. Any additional Hull damage and destroyed equipment and weapons cannot be repaired this way and will require the spacecraft to leave combat.

here is a question about repairing critical hits. The first paragraph describes what happens if an engineer is working on a system and the system gets another critical hit while they are working on it. It is the second paragraph I am wondering about.

Suppose the M-Drive is hit in combat and suffers a critical hit. (Effect of 6+ on attack roll and damage occurs). The following round the engineer repairs the damage. In a subsequent round, after the repair is finished, the M-Drive is hit again and takes another critical hit. Can it be repaired again or does the ship have to leave combat for a repair to take place. I am getting this from the last line of the second paragraph.

The reason I ask this is that I can understand a system being patched together during combat, "divert power to the secondary feeds and bypass the damaged section" sort of thing. This is a jury rig repair and will last 1D hours. A second Critical hit will take out the secondary system and cannot be worked around and the system degrades in performance as per the table.
Is that correct or can repairs be made over and over again?

Also, Hull damage can be repaired during combat? in six minutes? Is the idea that extra armour is bolted or glued on in the middle of battle to tape over the damage in the hull? If so I think this will be houseruled out of MTU. Wait until the bullets stop flying around and take the time to repair the area. I have visions of R2D2 working away outside.

If systems cannot be repaired twice, then this could be an effective tactic for getting as high an attack modifier as possible and trying to score multiple Effect 6+ hits as possible. You are hoping to get a system damage after it has been repaired. This means that it cannot be repaired again.
The other option is to generate as many critical hits as possible per round witha s many weapons as possible and overwhelming a system to get to Severity 6 and the 6D damage per subsequent hit.

Which critical hit repair interpretation is correct?
 
So from my understanding based on the rules:

You repair system damage. Hull is not considered a system (oddly - armour is though..). So no need to worry about repairing hull mid-combat - you simply can't.

As for the second hit to a jury-rigged system in combat, currently as per RAW, it just like the first. So you can technically have the same system critical-hit and jury-rigged 100 times if you have enough hull...
After 1D hours (which is 10-60 turns of combat), a system that was "jury-rigged", regardless of how many times or the severity of the critical received, breaks down and has to be repaired. This is the "real repair" that is on page 150, and requires X amount of spare parts.
 
Yeah I typed in Hull and not armour. Confused myself.

Umm, In looking at the pages on last months version of the Core book and today's version. What is the price for spare parts per ton?
Page 150 on both books. One says 10 000 Credits, the other says 100 000 Credits per ton.

Thanks for clearing up the infinite repair. There goes my idea of rotating crits. It now comes down to generating as many crits as fast as possible and overloading the engineer and getting to the shred the ship level damage. :)
 
Well that makes each Hull hit worth 10k, which is enough to make missiles cost effective, as it stands a missile is 20k and does 14 k damage on average.
 
Nerhesi said:
So from my understanding based on the rules:
As for the second hit to a jury-rigged system in combat, currently as per RAW, it just like the first. So you can technically have the same system critical-hit and jury-rigged 100 times if you have enough hull...

This is more forgiving variation indeed.

My understanding was that a the jury-rigging only removes the effect, but not the severity, i.e. second hit will continue from the previous severity (minimum increasing it by +1 and applying the new severity effect).
 
arcador said:
Nerhesi said:
So from my understanding based on the rules:
As for the second hit to a jury-rigged system in combat, currently as per RAW, it just like the first. So you can technically have the same system critical-hit and jury-rigged 100 times if you have enough hull...

This is more forgiving variation indeed.

My understanding was that a the jury-rigging only removes the effect, but not the severity, i.e. second hit will continue from the previous severity (minimum increasing it by +1 and applying the new severity effect).

I would love for that to be the case actually - I think being able to Jury-Rigg a system 6 times or so before it is "un-riggable" is more than enough. It would also properly simulate the increased difficulty with "continuous" Jury-Rigging, and the fact after some point in time.. it's just gonna be broke!

Matt... make it so!! :p Of course, capital ships would need a bit more of a forgiving threshold scale (crits not factored per 10 points, and not per single effect 6+ weapon hit) - But Matt already mentioned that.
 
I don't know if I want to mess around with Severity in that way - at the moment it is very clean and simple.

As for critical hits on big ships, I was thinking about some sort of multiplier on the amount of damage needed to deal one, based on tonnage. x10 per full 10k tons or somesuch (haven't run the figures yet). Anyone see any issues with that?
 
msprange said:
As for critical hits on big ships, I was thinking about some sort of multiplier on the amount of damage needed to deal one, based on tonnage. x10 per full 10k tons or somesuch (haven't run the figures yet). Anyone see any issues with that?
I'm not seeing any.
 
ShawnDriscoll said:
msprange said:
As for critical hits on big ships, I was thinking about some sort of multiplier on the amount of damage needed to deal one, based on tonnage. x10 per full 10k tons or somesuch (haven't run the figures yet). Anyone see any issues with that?
I'm not seeing any.

I'm seeing huge problems with the actual values, but Matt's approach is dead on. I like grading it per 10k, but x10 threshold is way too much (you end up with like a crit thresholds that are actually higher than your total hull haha :) Anyways, but I take it that was Matt's "somesuch" comment, so I'll refine the values below:

So we need to scale and to keep it simple:

Up to 1000 = every 10 points (1/40 or 2.5% at worst)
up to 5000 = every 50 points (1/40 or 2.5% at worst)
up to 10,000 = every 250 points (1/16 or 6.25% at worst)
every full 10k tons above that, Times two (x2) - continues at ratio of the above

This wont need changes to the core-rules. If we wanted "smoother" transition we'd have to change the core rule book because it says currently hard-coded 10 points and it has an 800 ton spacecraft :)

Obviously, we can make it a "formula" like 7% or 5% or whatever, but then it wont be clean values and it'll have to interact with reinforced hull and other issues.
 
I like this suggestion.

However do we need such multiplier for every 10k above that? Individual weapon damage does not grow with tonnage, only the number of the weapons (not considering spinals here). For example scoring 750 dmg with a single weapon seems unlikely (except maybe huge missile salvoes).

Perhaps the difference will come in play when barrages are introduced.
 
arcador said:
I like this suggestion.

However do we need such multiplier for every 10k above that? Individual weapon damage does not grow with tonnage, only the number of the weapons (not considering spinals here). For example scoring 750 dmg with a single weapon seems unlikely (except maybe huge missile salvoes).

Perhaps the difference will come in play when barrages are introduced.

I figured we needed something arcador so that we dont have a 200kton battleship that is being crit as easily as a 10kton destroyer. Without it, the battleship will be crit destroyed just as fast as a destroyer. So you end up with a fairly healthy (hull wise), but crit-to-death target...
 
Yes, a good point. I agree. I forgot reaching severity 6+ results in 6D dmg with each subsequent critical.
 
One point to make here...

I might be perfectly okay with a 500k battleship (say) _never_ receiving a crit except from spinal weapons - you have to figure that something so massive has so many redundant systems that any pin prick is never going to have an effect on its operations...
 
msprange said:
One point to make here...

I might be perfectly okay with a 500k battleship (say) _never_ receiving a crit except from spinal weapons - you have to figure that something so massive has so many redundant systems that any pin prick is never going to have an effect on its operations...

That a simple addendum. You still want threshold crits though Matt - when a ship is in tatters, it can't still be fully functional. So somethings have to fail sometime.. it doesn't just work perfectly fine then implode :)

However, to address the lucky/simply crits - this is a pretty easy capital rule addenum:

Redundant systems:
While a damaging attack with an Effect of 6+ would cause a critical hit on most ships, the same is not true for larger spacecraft.
Spacecraft greater than 1,000 tons can only be crit by Small Bay weapons.
Spacecraft greater than 10,000 tons can only be crit by Medium Bay weapons and ignore criticals from missile salvos.
Spacecraft greater than 100,000 tons can only be crit by Large Bay weapons and are shrug off any criticals from torpedo salvos.

Spinal weapons can always cause critical damage.

Threshold critical of course still apply and are calculated as per the formula given below...
<insert formula for threshold criticals here>

There you go. Now you will still take critical at certain points regardless of weapon type, but you can't take like 6 pin-pricks from fighters and be disabled :)

EDIT: As per the Large Bay post, this also creates a LOT more appeal to the large bay :) It is now the only non-spinal way to crit large ships with a High Effect roll!
 
The crits from bay weapons looks good, but what about the 500 turrets a 500k ship has. You have 500 turrets that could be hitting opposing turrets and doing damage to the 1 ton turret. This could impact PD ability (and will PD arrays be able to be hit by Critical hits to remove / reduce their effectiveness? The hull and weapons can be shredded, but all the PD defences keep working

A big ship still has small bits on it that a hit from a turret or barbette weapon should be able to do sever damage to. A simple exhaust port can cause a lot of damage internally. I saw a show about that once. :)
 
PsiTraveller said:
The crits from bay weapons looks good, but what about the 500 turrets a 500k ship has. You have 500 turrets that could be hitting opposing turrets and doing damage to the 1 ton turret. This could impact PD ability (and will PD arrays be able to be hit by Critical hits to remove / reduce their effectiveness? The hull and weapons can be shredded, but all the PD defences keep working

A big ship still has small bits on it that a hit from a turret or barbette weapon should be able to do sever damage to. A simple exhaust port can cause a lot of damage internally. I saw a show about that once. :)

Lol - I think we will have to be happy with the fact that the 500k ship will get crit through thresholding rather than lucky crits.

That exhaust port movie, I'm pretty sure that was plot device/referee fiat because there was a ton of Effect 6 hits by x-wings all over the place! :)
 
The same can be applied to Traveller. As I have mentioned before I am running the Drinax campaign. The battle of Exe is about to occur, and the players may be getting some small fighters to face off against Hroal's fighters.
'
Once dogfighting starts a fight is over in a minute or so. Crit accumulation on the part of the larger ship from multiple craft hitting and either getting the cumulative Crit, or the bonuses allowing for Effect 6+ Crits. Either way, at 6 seconds a round it ends pretty quick.

So in the next couple of weeks I have to sort out a strategy. For small scale combats I think the first one or two waves of missiles will be aimed at the fighters to thin them out, THEN the larger ship. Allowing fighters to engage a large ship gets ugly for the large ship. That all depends on whther or not the fighters have enough armour to shrug off turret damage, IF they get hit.
 
Yeah you've highlighted a good reason why I dont want fighters critting larger ships.

As it is, big ships will be at a massive disadvantage. They should be getting pin-pricked to death :) I wouldn't want it to go any faster :)
 
I realised we have critical hits from sustained damage pinned at 10% so thats not a problem. This addresses Critical hits from 6+ effect and the severity of critical hits - which we dont want at 10 points, otherwise every single bay hit that crits will outright destroy a system. Here is the amended clean fix below:

Redundant systems:
While a damaging attack with an Effect of 6+ would cause a critical hit on most ships, the same is not true for larger spacecraft.
Spacecraft greater than 1,000 tons can only be crit by Small Bay weapons.
Spacecraft greater than 10,000 tons can only be crit by Medium Bay weapons and ignore criticals from missile salvos.
Spacecraft greater than 100,000 tons can only be crit by Large Bay weapons and are shrug off any criticals from torpedo salvos.

Spinal weapons can always cause critical damage.


Critical Severity Threshold:

The severity of a critical hit depends on the size of the ship being attacked. The severity threshold is equal to 10% of the ship's total hull points. Divide the attacks damage by that amount to determine the severity of the critical caused. Example:

A 10,000 dton destroyer has 4,000 hull. It's critical severity Threshold is therefore 400 points. The Severity of the critical hit is equal to the damage the spacecraft has taken from the attack, divided by 400 (rounding up).
 
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