Magazine Explosions

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

As long as we're getting this specific about the "shape" of ships, tracking which magazines are full and all, can we consider allowing the player to "draw" the armor diagram rather than having it always be rectangular?

You could then make it thicker in some places and thinner in others, like how WW2-era battleships were armored.  The engines and magazines were in a heavily armored citadel, while everything else was left mostly unprotected.

You can design magazines to have a higher HTK by sacrificing internal space, which serves as a type of armour.

[King-Salomon]

I raise my hand for the "proportion-solution"

much more realistic than a magical "hit the empty ones first" system

a hit in the magazine should be as catastrophic as it would be for real (just looking at the HMS Hood or the "Battle of Jutland"  )

I really would like a system like this 

[Bremen]

I'd say go with the proportional solution as well. If it turns out ammo explosions become too common, that could be settled in future patches by reducing the explosion chance or other balance changes.

[TCD]

However, as it makes missile ships much more likely to die from low damage, it would reinforce the advantage longer range has over everything else. If I got to pick an outcome that I wanted the system to promote, I would go for "magazine hits are always very serious and often crippling, but rarely truly catastrophic to the point of taking out ships in single hits." To achieve this, I would suggest that the odds of a successful magazine ejection go up dramatically as chain detonations spread. Maybe:

I wonder how often this would make a difference? In other words, what are the chances of a ship surviving the detonation of even a single magazine worth of missiles inside the armor belt? I don't have the game in front of me, but picking randomly from Steve's own missile cruiser designs a 13000t magneto plasma cruiser has 170 ASMs with strength 6 warheads and 440 strength 1 AMMs. Even if you split that payload across 5 magazines you'd still get 34 ASMs and 88 AMMs going off, for 292 points of damage. 10 magazines would still give you 146 points of internal damage on a 13000 ton ship. And that's ignoring the chance of further secondary explosions from eg engines.

[Graham]

I also favour a proportionate system, however I am concerned about the balance issues. With the change to 100% damage it seems like large ships are now much more likely to be killed by a single lucky shock damage or meson hit to the magazine. I think that I prefer sticking with the 20% damage, which you can think of as armour around the magazine directing the force of the explosion outwards through a vent or some such into space.

I am open to other suggestions, but with the proposed changes 5 10kt ships seems to become a much more appealing option than the already more difficult logistics of 1 50kt vessel.

[Zincat]

I also favour a proportionate system, however I am concerned about the balance issues. With the change to 100% damage it seems like large ships are now much more likely to be killed by a single lucky shock damage or meson hit to the magazine. I think that I prefer sticking with the 20% damage, which you can think of as armour around the magazine directing the force of the explosion outwards through a vent or some such into space.

I am open to other suggestions, but with the proposed changes 5 10kt ships seems to become a much more appealing option than the already more difficult logistics of 1 50kt vessel.

I don't really see the problem. If your 50kt ship is a missile ship, and has something shooting mesons at it, you have already lost whatever strategic war you were fighting. So I see no reason to artificially make missile ships magically resistant to explosion damage.

Missile ships and carriers should NEVER allow the enemy close enough to shoot "beam" weapons at it. If they do, your military has been proved inadequate, or you have been ambushed (which also means your military has been proved inadequate). Whatever missile you have should have been launched before that point.

This is not just random things I am writing. Since World War 2, carriers have been kept away from the battle fronts. More recently, the same is true for missile ships. They are never supposed to be close enough to any enemy that shoots "direct weapons".
Even for a modern, real world carrier, if something gets close enough to actually directly shoot at it, it will most likely sink. That is why they move with battlegroups that provide defenses. And field a lot of fighters and anti-air systems.

Once again, I don't see how Aurora should be any different. And you can improve your chances by investing in better magazines and better defenses, SHOULD something get close. Escort ships would be a good idea too.

Also once again, a single meson hit can also destroy a 50ktons "beam" battleships by making the reactor explode. So I see no reason to differentiate between the two, they are in the same boat. I don't see why missile ships should get a preferential treatment.

[Hazard]

With the proposed changes to exploding chances for magazines (and the size of the explosions) there should probably be a way to lower the chances of things going wrong beyond just slapping more armour on magazines themselves. There's already an ejection chance tech, which helps, but as missile yield tech improves and more missile yield can be squeezed into the same amount of missile size points the damage a single magazine can do increases considerably.

So much so that while a magazine explosion at lower tech levels is crippling, yields of the missiles and the required sizes for other components to effectively fight at missile ranges can result in there being something left of a ship. At higher tech levels however between the near certainty of the detonation of multiple magazines and the greater yields there might be a cloud of debris left. Might.

[Garfunkel]

Ejection tech increases the ejection chance to almost certainty though. It's not difficult to reach 90% chance.

I'm in favour of making things more lethal.

[swarm_sadist]

Perhaps make it so magazine ejection isn't binary. Giving the magazine a random chance of either dumping the entire magazine or blowing up 100% of the stored missiles seems like playing the roulette table with explosives. A gradiant system of having only 1/2 or 1/4 of the magazine blowing up, depending on the RNG and tech, might be a little more forgiving without being too all or nothing.

You could even make it a part of magazine design, having ejection success rates depend on the size, tech and layout of the magazine.

Eg 1: Instead of there being a stock chance of ejecting the whole magazine, make it so larger magazines have a higher chance of only ejecting a certain percentage of their stored payload, while smaller ones are more likely to successfully eject, even with low tech.

Eg 2: Armoured magazines could have a better chance of partial ejection, or have more chances to try and eject.

[Person012345]

Is this for balance reasons? It doesn't make logical sense that a missile can teleport out of an magazine into another one just before it gets destroyed. I would have thought that it would make more sense to just equally divide missiles between magazines and have those ones in the damaged magazine potentially explode.

Magazine explosions themselves don't make "logical sense", nuclear weapons don't detonate when they're destroyed. If they did, terminal ballistic missile defense systems wouldn't be much use. We're not talking about an unstable high explosive here. Though I understand that the feature is included for balance and because it makes intuitive sense and I agree that proportional explosions make more intuitive sense.

[QuakeIV]

If you expose the warhead to a huge amount of radiation, especially neutrons, it will ignite to some degree or another.  Given the weapons in play, I think magazine explosions are perfectly reasonable, especially once you research antimatter warheads.

[Bremen]

Perhaps make it so magazine ejection isn't binary. Giving the magazine a random chance of either dumping the entire magazine or blowing up 100% of the stored missiles seems like playing the roulette table with explosives. A gradiant system of having only 1/2 or 1/4 of the magazine blowing up, depending on the RNG and tech, might be a little more forgiving without being too all or nothing.

You could even make it a part of magazine design, having ejection success rates depend on the size, tech and layout of the magazine.

Eg 1: Instead of there being a stock chance of ejecting the whole magazine, make it so larger magazines have a higher chance of only ejecting a certain percentage of their stored payload, while smaller ones are more likely to successfully eject, even with low tech.

Eg 2: Armoured magazines could have a better chance of partial ejection, or have more chances to try and eject.

I like this, or at least a more simplified version of it. I think it would be nice if magazine destruction computed a proportionate number of missiles (so if the ship had 11 missiles, destroying half its magazines would hit 5 missiles with a 50% chance for a sixth) and then rolled the ejection chance for each missile. The result would be losing a magazine was damaging, both in lost ammo and the high chance for extra internal damage, but unlikely to be instantly lethal or cause an out of control chain unless you had huge magazines on a small ship (or civilian magazines on an auxiliary).

[Graham]

I don't really see the problem. If your 50kt ship is a missile ship, and has something shooting mesons at it, you have already lost whatever strategic war you were fighting. So I see no reason to artificially make missile ships magically resistant to explosion damage.

Missile ships and carriers should NEVER allow the enemy close enough to shoot "beam" weapons at it. If they do, your military has been proved inadequate, or you have been ambushed (which also means your military has been proved inadequate). Whatever missile you have should have been launched before that point.

This is not just random things I am writing. Since World War 2, carriers have been kept away from the battle fronts. More recently, the same is true for missile ships. They are never supposed to be close enough to any enemy that shoots "direct weapons".
Even for a modern, real world carrier, if something gets close enough to actually directly shoot at it, it will most likely sink. That is why they move with battlegroups that provide defenses. And field a lot of fighters and anti-air systems.

Once again, I don't see how Aurora should be any different. And you can improve your chances by investing in better magazines and better defenses, SHOULD something get close. Escort ships would be a good idea too.

Also once again, a single meson hit can also destroy a 50ktons "beam" battleships by making the reactor explode. So I see no reason to differentiate between the two, they are in the same boat. I don't see why missile ships should get a preferential treatment.

My balance concerns are not about missile vs beam, but about large missile ships vs multiple smaller vessels. If magazine explosions become too lethal, especially to unfortunate lucky ships, it just gives a huge incentive not to use large vessels. Currently the only real advantages to using very large vessels is increased survivability, but with the changes to shock damage combined with this, that may be reversed. That means that the increased logistical problems related to running larger vessels, like needing larger tenders, larger shipyards etc, will have no real payoff.
Additionally, from what I understand reactors usually make up a very small percentage of a beam ships tonnage, making lucky shots possible, but unlikely. A missile ship however can regularly run with 20+% of its tonnage as magazines.

[Zincat]

My balance concerns are not about missile vs beam, but about large missile ships vs multiple smaller vessels. If magazine explosions become too lethal, especially to unfortunate lucky ships, it just gives a huge incentive not to use large vessels. Currently the only real advantages to using very large vessels is increased survivability, but with the changes to shock damage combined with this, that may be reversed. That means that the increased logistical problems related to running larger vessels, like needing larger tenders, larger shipyards etc, will have no real payoff.
Additionally, from what I understand reactors usually make up a very small percentage of a beam ships tonnage, making lucky shots possible, but unlikely. A missile ship however can regularly run with 20+% of its tonnage as magazines.

I am sorry to insist, but you are completely ignoring my argument that a missile ship's main defense is being far away form the action, and just insisting on the magazine thing. Which is pointless by itself, because it has to be considered in the whole context, not by itself.

This possibility of your ship blowing up just from small damage ONLY happens with mesons. That means, meson fighters or meson warships. If you let a meson ship in range of your missile ships, your entire war doctrine has completely failed. Missile ships are made for long range engagements, if you let something with mesons this close, your military is inadequate.

In that case I see no problem with the fact that you are risking death. In fact you should, because you have failed. And you can still build magazines with a 90% ejection chance and a high HTK as written above, to lower the chances of unlucky hits. And large ships should always have an escort, and anti-fighter defenses as well. So yes, can happen but unlikely to do so. It seems perfectly reasonable to me.


For any other kind of damage, be it long range missiles or any other kind of direct fire weapons, all your defenses apply. So the large ships will have a proportional advantage, compared to the smaller ones. Plus the aforementioned better magazines. Plus the fact that you SHOULD be far away, and so that you should kill your opponents before they get close, and have an escort just in case. So once again, if the magazine explosion thing happens, your war doctrine has failed or you were outgunned to begin with.


Ultimately, unless you are outmaneuvered/outgunned/outresearched, the chances of this happening are really very low. And war is NOT meant to be some kind of exact science. Just having a large ship should not make you immune to everything and anything.

Once again, real world reference. If you let an old, decrepit Word War 2 battleship, or any submarine, close in to ANY modern missile cruiser or carrier, I assure you the missile cruiser/carrier will be sunk in SECONDS. Range is their main defense.


So bottom line, yes I am in favor of both 100% damage and proportional explosions based on how full the magazines are. Because using missiles has to carry the realistic risks it implies.

[Tuna-Fish]

This possibility of your ship blowing up just from small damage ONLY happens with mesons.

It also happens with shock damage from missiles.