Actually I think it is nigh impossible to target missiles during the combat phase.
Page 149 states “The missiles can only be destroyed in the moments before they strike the spacecraft as they are too small and fast to effectively target at greater ranges”.
I’d say, this implies that Point Defence occurs at adjacent range (and therefore the range DMs should apply) and that the missiles cannot be targeted at any other range.
I assume it is indeed rare to actually have missiles adjacent to you in your combat phase. If you consider the range table on page 146 you only have several very few situations when this will occur, as the two opponent ships would need to have a very exact range to each other (unless you are actually applying thrust to change your distance to a missile).
As for inertia considerations of the missiles: luckily (?) MGT does not consider velocity in space combat but only thrust, so we can discard this item. (a spacecraft does not – as hogscape’s thread suggests – travel at Thrust 6...thrust is the
change of velocity, not the velocity itself)
Basic vs smart missiles. Basic missiles will only ever try to impact once, whereas smart missiles will continue to harass your ship even if they failed to impact before.
I personally think missiles in MGT are crap. :evil:
A (non-nuclear) missile does only 1d6 points of damage. Most spacecraft have at least Armour 4, so the damage of a missile is only 1d6-4. Some ships even have higher armour. Without having any data for bigger Naval ships, I must assume that most of those have Armour 6+ and thus are invulnerable to (non-nuclear) missiles ! As nuclear missiles are only allowed on Naval spacecraft, I think your standard pirate is very unlikely to have nuclear missiles.
That subjective invulnerability has lead me to take these rules from personal combat and apply them to vehicular combat (I apply them for both beam attacks and missile attacks):
1) A hit with an effect of 6+ does at least one point of damage, regardless of armour
2) The effect of a hit is added to damage
#1 does not really help missiles as much as it does pulse lasers (for missiles your launching would need to have an effect of 6 AND your actually to hit roll would need to be a 12, as the missile itself cannot profit from software or gunner-bonuses), but it’s still something to make those high-armour vessels at least a bit afraid of missiles.
I remember playing “Wing Commander” where missiles were truly powerful.
I also saw a comment somewhere that in CT, missiles actually did 1d6 hits (as opposed to 1d6 damage)…
now that would truly be something to exclaim “Why I LOVE missiles!”
My 50 pence
