Starship weapons: blast radius against ground targets?

[wbnc]

just thought of a question that popped up a few times.

occasionally in games a starship gets involved in ground combat. Usually when the party is making a hasty retreat , being pursued by people not currently filled with the milk of human kindness.

in other cases its a small craft acting as fire support for people in one of my military games...Ive always had to guess at the blast radius of missiles, and railguns...and occasionally pulse lasers etc...

Perhaps something solid could be added for just those occasions...I know I cant be the only one who has had a group call in a fire mission from their ride.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Close-Air-Support rules would be nice.

 

[MongooseMatt]

Going to put a line in Core about this - blanket rule, assume all have Blast 10. We can mess around with exceptions in supplements.

 

[Annatar Giftbringer]

Aha, here it is! I knew I'd read something about this subject, but couldn't find it the other day so I posted elsewhere. Um, anyways, 10 m blast sounds good! I had an idea about 10 m per damage dice, but 10 for everything is simpler and better - at east as far as core rules are concerned.

Perhaps there should be a table in high guard with blast radius for various weapons? A heavy fusion bay might need a slightly larger blast, for instance...

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

What exactly is doing damage at this blast radius, since it can't be the initial weapons fire itself...

 

[wbnc]

What exactly is doing damage at this blast radius, since it can't be the initial weapons fire itself...

for ballistic weapons, and missiles I would imagine concussion, and fragmentation.

for lasers, plasma, and fusion weapons a similar set of factors. The sudden dump of energy into a point on the ground, or a structure/vehicle, would flash vaporize and shatter anything it hit and turn it into shrapnel.

particle beams...well they would probably be a wide area of saturation...both hard radiation, and the particles themselves.