Aurora 4x
Starfire => Starfire Rules => Topic started by: Paul M on September 04, 2012, 03:32:18 AM
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The RM also have "pods" and will "soon" have pod rollers, but more important than that they have the damn things for WP assaults. If mines and IDEW change that defensively...well SBMHAWK is David Webers absurd overreaction.
Take the last Thing-Norse attack. The Norse had 12, lets say, interestingly designed battlecruisers on the warp point. Not the greatest but still with elite crews they actually managed to even make the Epc look useful. But at a guess, that is 12*1200 MCr or 14,400 MCr worth of ships plus many turns of maintenance investment. The Thing so far as Starslayer has said lost a ship or two and had several baddly damaged.
The RM could have...expended 140 SBMHAWK or SBMHAWK(AM) and under the rules would have 10 surviving pods fire on each ship for 30*7=21 hits-7 intercepted by 2xD with elite crew and that is 14 impacts for 28 hit points of damage or 56 with anti-matter. The first leaves the ships cripples for the E-beam armed RM assault ships to pick off, the second probably wipes them off the map. In the first case that was 2800 MCr for this, not sure but I think 3360 MCr for AM armed SBMs. Their shipyards ships can manufacture their repleacements in a month while 12 BCs takes even the RM 7-8 months (building 6 or 4 new BC's per month with 6 months of construction time). Cost effectiveness on the order of 6:1 and even factoring in the SD to transport them it remains 2:1.
Addmittedly against more modern ships they would need more pods but the ships would be correspondingly more valuable to the race owning them.
What are peoples ideas for tonning down the SBMHAWK into something not quite so game destroying?
I was thinking of limiting them to 6 pod datagroups that fire in sequence rather than the devesating single salvo which pretty much invalidates point defence.
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I do have a question about SBMHawks- I have cleared the WP of its bases and nearby fleet. A different enemy fleet will most likely come in on me later on in the month. As there are no real rules about this, how should I coordinate SBMHawk launches from my side of the WP? I have cleared a path through the minefield from the WP, so I could have software directing the pods to go on the path before moving on to the enemy ships. Does this make sense? Or would it be better to retractor them to this side of the WP?
Secondly, I am a higher tech level than he is, so I would like to preserve my tech edge. Aside from killing all of the ships in his fleet, anything else I should do?
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To coordinate the SBMHAWKs from your side of the warp point (though why you want to do this is not clear) you need to:
1. send a courier drone with the targeting information through the warp point.
2. upload said information from the drone to the ship that is responsible for deploying the SBMHAWKs (I assume here they are deployed and waiting inactive)
3. that ship then downloads the the targeting information to the waiting SBMHAWKs and sends the activation signal.
4. SBMHAWKs can start transiting as programed. You can program their course (and infact must do so based on the status of the CD) but this means you can tell them to transit, and move through the open lane. That will work only if you have grav surge data. For that you need a X equiped ship to have transited the warp point and returned with the X intact.
What I am not sure of is timing for 2 and 3, I think that is only 1 turn. So if you see the ships on turn 4, the CD is launched turn 4. The CD transits the WP on turn 5. The information is downloaded from the CD on turn 6. The SBMHAWKs are programed and activated on turn 7 based on the information from turn 4. They start to move on turn 8 and transit the WP, on turn 9 (5 turns later) they will be able to engage (assuming you want them to have no fire penalty).
You would be much better off to deploy the SBMHAWK on the other side of the WP. As you would then be delayed only a turn. But this requires you have military freighters as no CFN crew would do this. The RMs pod rollers could easily do this (include also carrying 6 pods on tractors).
Why destroy the fleet in its entirety? Damage it sufficiently to force break off and surrender rolls then capture those that do surrender.
One important point, active pods have a life time, and HT9 pods once activated cannot be de-activated as they self destruct. You can't "tractor the pods" to the other side of the warp point, you have to recover them to their transport, the transport has to transit the warp point then then redeploy them. You can't tractor anything through a warp point.
What tech edge are you worried about? The cost of TRPT development is so crazy that you could show SBMHAWKs to anyone and they will never be able to develop them, since without SBM and Fighters the development cost goes up by another factor of 2.5. If they have SBM and Fighters they have pods of their own.
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Well, I am not sure. SBMHAWK are two kettlesof fish...
1) if you have grav data and a good idea on the oposition, they are very effective.
2) if you ahve no grav data, the # of poods needed to asure kills has gone up by 6*.
The rework needs to cover both situations.
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For a warp point assault the grav data is nice but not required as the pods can target anything inside of 20 hexs of the pod. If the enemy is forced to hold their ships and bases back 30 hexs plus from the warp point then you win a few free transit rounds and can fire pods at them as they close.
If you have bases, you don't need 6 times as many because the pods split up automatically. So to kill bases 15 hexs from the warp point you just need the number of pods you need. The pods are by grav surge split 6 ways. They then engage the bases they can detect based on their programing. You only need 6 times as much if you have a distinct blob at only one point and want to take it out...but realistically you just establish a pod shell around the warp point and start your transit. Either the enemy only harrasses from range (in which case the pods did their job) or the enemy closes and gets hit by successive SBMHAW waves as he crosses the pod detection range (in which case the pods did their job).
Once you can recover them, then even pods which wandered off aren't wasted anyway. The only time pods are wasted is when a HT9 SBMHAWK is fired through a warp point blindly; programed to engage a traget that doesn't exist (not present in the fleet, or fleet not present). In one of Kurt's stories this happens.
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Without grav surge, the pods split up into 6 groups. Each group fires on al elegible targets though. Thus, if 6 groups of bases are in range, with grav data, they would get hit by one wave of missiles each. Without, they get hit by 6 waves. (assuming your pods move out and turn to deal with close in bases.). Each group of pods then has to split itself among the same number of bases.
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I have completed the WP assault and have had an 'X'-equipped ship go back through the WP, so grav surge is not an issue, unless you are saying that grav surge shifts daily.
The SBMHawks were deployed on the other side (I thought I might need them for the WP assault, but I was incredibly lucky in the WP interpenetration rolls), so I thought it would be easier to launch from my side. I did not want to be caught in mid-redeployment when the enemy fleet shows up.
A good portion of my big ships were chewed up in the assault, and I used up my first set of strikefighters, so I figured the SBMHawks would help out a lot when the enemy fleet arrives.
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Without grav surge, the pods split up into 6 groups. Each group fires on al elegible targets though. Thus, if 6 groups of bases are in range, with grav data, they would get hit by one wave of missiles each. Without, they get hit by 6 waves. (assuming your pods move out and turn to deal with close in bases.). Each group of pods then has to split itself among the same number of bases.
All eligable targets it can detect. With or without grave surge data the pods only engage one group of bases if you have them move far enough out so they can only see the single base group. It is really only an issue if there is a single base group then you have to use 6 times the pods; otherwise for 6 base groups things work out properly anyway, more or less, depending on how far the bases are deployed from the warp point (closer is harder to avoid splitting fire). But for close in bases you are better off to not have the pods move...then all pods fire at once and split fire evenly anyway. Bases <18 hexs are probably best dealt with by just transiting in, waiting 1 turn for systems to stabilize and then firing. I think from 3-18 hexs the tohit number is the same. Split all fire between all eligable targets. Anything within 3-18 hexes of a warp point just vanishes in a pod-led attack. One pn scout, 2-4 turns later the pods transit in, another 2 turns later anything fixed isn't there. First time it happens I don't see any reason for the defenders to flee for their lives even...basically with pods you have to move back from the warp point by 26 hexs (20+pn movement range). And even that defence fails once fXr for pn shows up. The only defence is either deception mode or else cloaking and the buoys with deception ability. Too bad we aren't getting comments from people who have used them...it is possible there is something wrong with my theory but at the moment they just seem game breakers.
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I have completed the WP assault and have had an 'X'-equipped ship go back through the WP, so grav surge is not an issue, unless you are saying that grav surge shifts daily.
The SBMHawks were deployed on the other side (I thought I might need them for the WP assault, but I was incredibly lucky in the WP interpenetration rolls), so I thought it would be easier to launch from my side. I did not want to be caught in mid-redeployment when the enemy fleet shows up.
A good portion of my big ships were chewed up in the assault, and I used up my first set of strikefighters, so I figured the SBMHawks would help out a lot when the enemy fleet arrives.
Can you see the enemy ships on the interception scale? If not then the time it takes to deploy the pods is pretty trivial...assuming you have a bare bones military freighter with no tractors it would take 20 min to deploy or recover a SBMHAWK (per H on the freighter). The RM's pod rollers can drop 6 on tractors in 60s (most of the complexity is shutting down and restarting the DF), or 36 per minute (that number may be wrong as I may have aggregated the holds but I think you can do that). So you should be able to recover and move your pods in an hour or so easily. I would put some scouts out to get a good read of the enemy ship types (or send a fighter squadron to get the data) then send in the pods and remove the pests without risking ships.
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If it takes only that amount of time, then I have much better chances. I can then redeploy the SBMHawks past the minefield and don't have to worry about that. Now, how are SBMHawks against Assault Shuttles?
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SBMHAWK can only target large units...they make use of the onboard electronics on the SBM(HAWK) missile itself, and no non-anti-fighter missile can target a small craft. So SBMHAWKs can't do diddly to ast (there is a much higher tech level pod DPOD that can but I assume you aren't talking about those).
The only thing that you need to check with your SM about is targeting program upload. The rules are a bit different in 3rdR and UTM and you need to know what the restriction is. The deploying ship or any ship can issue the program and activation signal.
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What are peoples ideas for toning down the SBMHAWK into something not quite so game destroying?
I think that there's a flaw in your proposition here. And that is that you should be able to engage in essentially the same WP defense tactics after SBMHAWKs show up. I think that's a very flawed way of looking at things. When fighters show up, defenders have to change their tactics. When Capital missiles show up, defenders have to change their tactics. Why shouldn't defenders have to seriously rethink what they do when SBMHAWKs show up?
I don't think that being forced to rethink and change one's WP defense tactics due to SBMHAWKs is "game destroying" at all. Indeed, I don't think that one should have the slightest expectation of being able to act as if nothing has changed and use the same old tactics here. Players *should* have to change their tactics after SBMHAWKs show up, whether that means pushing their forces back from the WP or coming up with devious tactics to deal with missile pods. (I think that I recall some players developing such devious tactics for this purpose from the old Starfire mailing list.)
I was thinking of limiting them to 6 pod datagroups that fire in sequence rather than the devastating single salvo which pretty much invalidates point defence.
The problem with this sort of limitation is that it would make it all but impossible for SBMHAWKs to have much of a chance against Asteroid Forts, for better or worse ... which would seriously go against the canonical history of the Battle of Thebes.
Having said that, I think that the "requirement" for all SBMHAWK pods to fire as a single salvo could be seen as a problem of having those SBMHAWKs firing guided missiles which are interceptable, therefore "requiring" that SBMHAWK fire be so highly coordinated so that it can swamp point defenses. If missile pods weren't based on interceptable guided missiles, but on CAM's (like a later generation of missile pods happens to be), there actually wouldn't need to be any great requirement for massive salvos. You could have could limit "CAMPODs" to groups of 10 or 6 or 3 or lower without really affecting their combat effectiveness, aside from the possibility that some might get destroyed by fighters, etc. flying CAP on the WP or active bases or ships close to the WP. Of course, such "CAMPODs" wouldn't have the range of pods carrying SBM's or even SM (if such existed). But they would alleviate some of the concerns you have about the single overwhelming SBMHAWK volley. Also, given their somewhat limited range, CAMPODs couldn't clear as great a sphere around the WP that SBMHAWKs could, for better or worse. But if someone did place AF's in close proximity to a WP, "CAMPODs" would still be very nasty even without firing in a single massive volley since its missiles aren't interceptable.
Anyways, just some food for thought at this late date....
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I think that there's a flaw in your proposition here. And that is that you should be able to engage in essentially the same WP defense tactics after SBMHAWKs show up. I think that's a very flawed way of looking at things. When fighters show up, defenders have to change their tactics. When Capital missiles show up, defenders have to change their tactics. Why shouldn't defenders have to seriously rethink what they do when SBMHAWKs show up?
I think as cited in the OP it's as much a matter of cost effectiveness as anything else. like it's okay to have SBM hawk capability of they are priced appropriately. I believe the contention is they are either priced inappropriately low or their capabilities are inappropriately high.
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I think as cited in the OP it's as much a matter of cost effectiveness as anything else. like it's okay to have SBM hawk capability of they are priced appropriately. I believe the contention is they are either priced inappropriately low or their capabilities are inappropriately high.
Shoe, for the moment, I'm not going to address whether SBMHAWK's are priced too low. However, you then suggest that the contention may be that they may be too good, i.e. "their capabilities are inappropriately high". That's why I made the assertion that there's a flaw in the assumption that players should be able to continue using the same WP defense tactics after SBMHAWKs show up. Assuming that one should be able to use the same tactics sort of goes in parallel with saying that SBMHAWKs are too good. If they weren't all that good, you probably could go on doing what you'd always did for WP defense tactics. But if they're "too good", that tells me that one who makes this complaint is essentially asserting that SBMHAWKs are "too good" because they prevent the player from being able to use the same old tactics.
Let's face it, there's a really easy way to avoid getting nuked by SBMHAWKs. Don't position your ships close to WP's. Another (under 3E/3rdR rules) is to swamp the WP with fighters, assault shuttles, etc. to try to shoot down as many missile pods as possible. And there may be other more devious tactics which haven't occurred to me or I don't remember.
SBMHAWKs are essentially a pre-battle artillery bombardment. And the only real way to avoid getting destroyed by such a bombardment is to either dig in really deeply (not possible in space) or not be in the bombardment zone. And to the best of my knowledge, artillery bombardments aren't particularly expensive, particularly compared to sending in the manned forces to fight the battle, be they tanks or starships, and the cost of losses that may occur without a pre-battle bombardment.
Regardless, I still think that this complaint about SBMHAWKs being "too good" boils down to some players being unhappy that they can't use the same old WP defense tactics as they did before SBMHAWKs, when the fact of the matter is that that's the entire point of SBMHAWKs... to (try to) destroy anything in range of the WP or force the defender to move further back from the WP and make it somewhat safer for the attacker to get into the system.
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It's not whether or not SBMHAWKS should be able to used in their intended role, it's price:performance. Picking an arbitrary number, If SBMHAWKS cost 4x as much, they could still do what they do now, but it would be a tough decision whether it was worth it or not. It feels like they are better for cost than warships even if you can get warships through the point. By 'capabilities are inappopriately high', i meant inappropriately high for how much they cost.
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Mines, dsb and pods all share one problem. They lack a maintainance cost, allowing them to be piled up on any wp in huge numbers.
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It's not whether or not SBMHAWKS should be able to used in their intended role, it's price:performance. Picking an arbitrary number, If SBMHAWKS cost 4x as much, they could still do what they do now, but it would be a tough decision whether it was worth it or not. It feels like they are better for cost than warships even if you can get warships through the point. By 'capabilities are inappopriately high', i meant inappropriately high for how much they cost.
TDS, I guess that I have to disagree that the issue is only about price:performance. To quote PaulM:
What are peoples ideas for toning down the SBMHAWK into something not quite so game destroying?
I was thinking of limiting them to 6 pod datagroups that fire in sequence rather than the devastating single salvo which pretty much invalidates point defence.
If his only concern was price:performance, the question would have been "what do people think that SBMHAWK's should cost?" However Paul is clearly asking here about the actual performance of the system apart from its cost. And it was these final two sentences of his initial post that I replied... which can also be seen from looking up at my first reply wherein the only 2 quoted lines of PaulM's post were these 2 lines, rather than the lines about price:performance.
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Mines, dsb and pods all share one problem. They lack a maintainance cost, allowing them to be piled up on any wp in huge numbers.
Starslayer, I agree that they share this problem ... for the most part Pods don't really have this problem is you haven't deployed them (i.e. if you're keeping them stored in cargo holds on freighters). You could build up a rather substantial supply of missile pods without ever deploying them until you intend on using those pods in an assault. Of course, that's sort of true for mines and DSB, except that mines and DSB's are strictly defensive weapons whereas missile pods can be used offensively. And it's the offensive side of missile pods that PaulM was concerned about in his initial post.
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Pods can be used offensively, they can be used defensively, if both sides have them the game tends to podfire. I don't believe increasing the cost of something that pays no maintenance ever works because well eventually your economy grows to the point where the cost is acceptable. AW in starfire are a problem because they don't pay maintance, and with the CFN you can deploy them willy nilly all over the place for peanuts. They aren't a problem in Webber's fiction and in the Stars at War/Crusade because he put what amounts for an empire the size of the TF a trivial amount of AWs into those scenarios. I don't think there is in his offical ship lists a buoy tender-minelayer. Who doesn't build those when playing Starfire?
Pods have the problem that when they fire they form a missile swarm that is so large that point defence drops out of the equation. This is for me the real issue, fix this and then sort out price:performance
Pods have the problem that the SBMHAWK 2 had double the firepower of the SBMHAWK 1 but only a small cost and size increase and negligable development cost and they are re-usable. So the initial investment is actually effective lower since you can use the pod more than once.
For the situation where the pods don't simply blot the enemy out of existance they can inflict crippling damage. That damage is inflicted to units that have a large accumulated maintance value to the empire, are slow to build and have to have a serious investment in logistics support to be fixed. The only time you loose with pods is when you can't breach the targets shields...in this case arm the pods with laser warheads and scrub armour and XO racks.
For an attacker the worst thing is that you can easily loose your assault fleet to nothing more than AW. You pop through the WP there is a minefield, you are stuck sitting there to build up enough ships so that you can force the field, and the IDEW/CSP chew on you, then sometime around turn 3 a wave of pods appears and the 3 existing waves of transited ships vanish. Another wave of pods wipes out the next transit wave and the next while an additional wave of pods goes through the warp point as the defender knows the enemy fleet is clustered around it, and if they have any idea at all what its composition might be you probably get some free kills. The attacking player has to get a drone back from the fleet to stop his scheduled transit so they are stuck shoveling ships into the meat grinder.
If the attacker has pods they can of course send pods through first to sanitize the warp point but frankly there is a limit to this due and should the defender have half way decent designed (and not terribly expensive) military freighters they can largely keep their fleet out of range of the pods while deploying their own pods. The pods can only engage target up to 20 hexes and will target only a single target type and fire on a specific turn...so blindfiring pods is where the highest chance of throwing money away comes into play. The defender needs relatively fewer pods to accomplish the goal of blasting each transiting wave out of existance and this then means that in order to carry out an assault you are forced into mass transits, carrier assaults combined with mass transited armed small craft or something new and unique that I've not yet though of. If the defender and attacker have pods as I said...it becomes complex: the defender is forced to deploy back from the warp point but their automatic weapons combined with a CSP can damage the attackers while the attackers pods can prevent the defender from closing on the WP (at least during the initial 10 or so rounds) but can't stop the defenders from sending in pods that are targeted much more accurately and have all the ships concentrated in a small area due to the mine fields. Shooting ducks in a barrel.
Pods are extremely inexpensive for their firepower, they have no maintenance, and if deployed in any half way sensible fashion they will remove point defence from the equation.
If you up their price and charge maintenance is one solution but it is eventually trumped by Starfires compound interest ecnomy and so I don't see it as a viable one.
If you change how they work then they are dangerous, and useful but not overpowered "I win" buttons. Only how do you apply the nerf bat without rendering them pointless.
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Pods can be used offensively, they can be used defensively, if both sides have them the game tends to podfire. I don't believe increasing the cost of something that pays no maintenance ever works because well eventually your economy grows to the point where the cost is acceptable. AW in starfire are a problem because they don't pay maintance, and with the CFN you can deploy them willy nilly all over the place for peanuts. They aren't a problem in Webber's fiction and in the Stars at War/Crusade because he put what amounts for an empire the size of the TF a trivial amount of AWs into those scenarios. I don't think there is in his offical ship lists a buoy tender-minelayer. Who doesn't build those when playing Starfire?
Paul, I agree 100% that increasing the price on something like SBMHAWKs (or mines or armed buoys) while those items pays no maintenance really doesn't accomplish much of anything. Oh, it might slow down the rate at which someone could buy them. But with no maintenance, you just end up building up your supply of those things a little more slowly. Requiring them to pay maintenance, at least when they're deployed, is critical to keeping their numbers somewhat in check.
Pods have the problem that when they fire they form a missile swarm that is so large that point defence drops out of the equation. This is for me the real issue, fix this and then sort out price:performance.
As I pointed out, from my PoV the problem here relates to the fact that guided missiles are interceptable. So if you limit the number of pods that can link into single salvo, you limit their ability against really large units such as huge OWPs or asteroid forts which can mount massive amounts of point defense without serious limiting their overall offensive capabilities. But if the number of pods allowed to link together is high enough to be a major threat to a well defended AF or large OWP, then it's also going to be sl large that nothing any smaller that AF's or large OWPs has any hope of survival.
As I pointed out in an earlier post, perhaps a way around this might be to do away with missile pods that fire guided interceptable missiles, and only use pods that fire CAMs. The advantage here is that you could then say that, for example, only 6 pods could link into a "squadron" for firing purposes without there being any serious disadvantage. "Interceptability" is what causes SBMHAWKs to need to be able to be fired in such large volleys to make certain that large installations can't just swat the missiles away like flies. But if all pods were firing uninterceptable sprint missiles of some flavor, volley size would no longer truly matter since swamping the target's point defenses would be a moot issue.
Pods have the problem that the SBMHAWK 2 had double the firepower of the SBMHAWK 1 but only a small cost and size increase and negligible development cost and they are re-usable. So the initial investment is actually effective lower since you can use the pod more than once.
I agree on the point of re-usability. Being able to re-use missile pods makes the entire "system" much cheaper overall. It also means that you don't have to expends a lot of time and money replacing expended/destroyed pods. But if all pods were destroyed when used, it would make the "system" much more expensive to use, since you'd have to always build new pods.
For the situation where the pods don't simply blot the enemy out of existance they can inflict crippling damage. That damage is inflicted to units that have a large accumulated maintenance value to the empire, are slow to build and have to have a serious investment in logistics support to be fixed. The only time you lose with pods is when you can't breach the targets shields...in this case arm the pods with laser warheads and scrub armour and XO racks.
This point is only true if you don't follow up the SBMHAWK bombardment with your WP assault. If you do, then that shield damage is still useful. However, if you do not follow-up the bombardment with an assault, then you're correct. The defender will just repair those shields and be good as new.
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There will always be leaks through the point defence and you can arm the pods with laser warheads. This means that taking into account ecm 50% of the missiles hit and 30% of those will break through the point defence.
So for SBMHAWK1 (listing pods surviving interpenetrations):
if I send 120 pods through with LT1 against your big base: 6*3*.5*.3=2.7 pts of damage on average per group of 6 pods x 20 groups is 54 armour damage (unless they deploy anti-laser armour then it is 0).
if I send 120 pods through with AM against your big base: 6*3*.6*.05=0.5 hits/groupx4 pts per hit x 20 groups = 40 damage. Not particularily spectacular.
So for SBMHAWK2 (")
if I send 120 pods through with LT2 against your big base 6*6*.5*.3= 5.4 impacts for 2pts or 10.8 damage x 20 groups = 216 armour damage (half that if all the armour is anti-laser)
if I send 120 pods through with AM against your big base 6*6*.6*.05 = 1.1 impacts x4 pts per hit x 20 groups = 88 damage. Again not spectuacular
So for SBMHAWK3 (")
if I send 120 pods through with LT2 against your big base 6*8*.5*.3 = 7.2 impacts x 2 pts per hit x 20 groups = 288 armour damage (half that is all the armour is anti-laser)
if I send 120 pods through with AAM against your big base 6*8*.6*.05 = 1.4 impacts x6 pts per hit x 20 groups = 173 damage. I doubt they could not take that on shields.
However it is pretty clear while fighting the tech 12 base with tech 10 weapons is a bit hard...you could wear it down with 1500 pods or 32,000 MCr. That is a stiff fee.
By TL11 that drops to 240 pods, and doesn't change if you are TL12. 240 pods are ~8000 MCr more or less and a SD costs half that...and a 1000 HS asteroid fort would be a lot more than 8000 MCr and 120 ship yard points.
I'm not seeing how the fact that you can intercept the missiles is actually stopping you from getting that base out of the way. HT10 it is expensive but do-able but by HT11 it becomes cheap to do so.
If I could use CAMs
So for SBMHAWK1s
if I send 120 pods through with CAM-AM against your big base 6*3*0.6 = 10.8 impacts x 4 pts per hit x 20 groups = 864 pts of damage. I need 240 pods and it is gone. That is around 6000 MCr and it gets worse when I go up in tech level as I double the number of impacts so 6000 MCr again does it. That is hardly worth discussing in terms of cost to wipe out a 1000 HS asteroid fort.
If I use the regular rules 120 SBMHAWK1 pods would release 360 missiles*0.6 to hit is: 216/6 = 36 Dcz's to intercept... lets say for the sake of argument you can double up that is 22 impacts (90% intercepts) for SBMHAWK-a so 88 pts of damage. But for LT1 you get 360*0.5 to hit is 180...assuming again you can double up is 9-3=.6 so 180*.4 = 72 points of damage. But the advantage would be I could double the number of pods and suddenly the number you can intercept goes down and you probably get free hits as while 60-70 Dcz's maybe someone builds in that many...but I can't see many more and 240 pods is 720 missiles*0.6 to hit or 432 missiles impacting and at this point 12 missiles get in free and 420*.2 = 84 others join them for 96 impacts x 4 pts per hit = 384 damage. Go to 360 pods and it goes up to 1080 missiles*0.6 to hit or 648 missiles impacting 228 of them get in free and 420*.2 = 84 other join them for 312 impacts x 4 pts per hit = 1248 damage and I would think scratch the base.
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Paul, one thing that you left out in your calculations was the effect of EDM's on regular guided missiles. Big bases could probably always be able to deploy the max of 3 EDM's and reduce the number of hits after point defense by 50%.
As for CAM's, a thing to remember is with their shorter range, if the big bases are stationed, say, 20 hexes from the WP, it'll take 2-3 turns of movement to get the pods into position to fire, during which time any CAP would have a chance to whittle away at the # of attacking pods.
Regarding big bases and PD, if you're at a TL where you can expect missile pod bombardments, it's probably money and space well spent to mount large amounts of point defense. It might seem crazy to use 10-20% of the hull on PD under normal circumstances. But if you're in an environment where you can see massive missile pod bombardments, if you have asteroid forts that you want to have any chance of survival, you might just have to mount that much PD. OTOH, given the nature of the SBMHAWKs, an attacker with the time and money could simply buy so many pods that he can produce a salvo beyond the size that even a 1000 hs AF with half the hull dedicated to PD could even resist, staggering as that sounds.
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I decided to ignore factoring in EDM but probably should not have. In terms of the LT warheads EDM is a non-issue as the the LT warhead ignores it. Just means that the LT warhead is probably your best overall pod choice.
Also a non-issue is the concept of the CSP destroying the pods, unless you have available 4x as many fighters as the person can send through as pods they will not have that much effect. If the CSP is armed for pod killing (gun armed) then they will be in-effective against ships, if they carry fL then they aren't very effective agains the pods unless you outnumber the pods signifantly. The CSP is a factor but at the end of the day, the lack of maintenance on the pod trumps the fighters. I can send through 300-400 pods...to maintain a CSP with 300 fighters requires a fighter pool of 1200 and that is 40-60 carriers...and carriers plus their associated magazines are anything but cheap. The cost of the fighters/carriers and magazines dwarfs the pods. The RM have been learning that it costs more to fill the magazine of the carrier than it does to build the carrier.
If the base is 20 hexs from the warp point it is dead in the second round to cam armed pods. The pods transit in round 1, move 7 hexes from the warp point and stop. Turn 2 in they move 8 hexes and are now at 5 hexs from the base. Optimal firing range. Nothing survives inside of the reach of small craft sensors once pods enter into the game...the pn can spot anything within 20 hexs...if it does a quick fly out and back it can get everything inside of 26 hexes from the warp point, once fXr is avaiable it is even more harry. My rule of thumb is nothing that can't cloak would suvive within 30 hexs of a WP...after cloaking shows up, especially with deception mode you have a greater opportunity to play silly buggers with the offensive force.
Just to keep the discussion sensible here I was assuming 70 Dcz present on the base (21% of its hull space) I don't think you will ever put more. But that is 11,200 MCr just for the point defence. I would say even spending 30,000 MCr in pods is going to be very cost effective and with the higher tech solutions...astoundingly price effective. That fort must cost around 50K MCr. And every month you pay 2500 MCr more just in maintenance on it. The pods only cost 3 months worth of maintenace to destroy it....and I can build the pods up over 3 months.
The other thing is that getting that base built (assuming it was not in your home system) was a monumental task. You need either years of effort or else a large force of yard ships. 600 pods is only 300 shipyard points, plus a few hundred MCr of CFN transport fees and 1 or 2 military freighters to pick them up from the CFN.
It is here where I start throwing my hands up into the air. When the RM attacked the Buer, they had to fight battles with what ammounted to a TL7 fleet against a TL4.5 defender. The last battle was very close and they nearly suffered a serious defeat. But it was basically ship on ship battles and while they lost few ships they had 2 years before they had their fleet fully repaired. Now...they would obliterate each of those defences for minimal cost of pods.
I quite frankly don't see how to apply the nerf bat in this case. One possibility is to change the construction cost in HS of the pods and the other is to increase the cargo size of them. They are about the size of a pinnance but transportting a non-crated pn would take 2 HS or so...these things I get 10 SBMHAWK3's into a single H. So long as the numbers of the pods is kept under control they are ok. That is true of all AW in starfire...the problem is once you take the brake off...all hell breaks loose. 20,000 pattern mine fields...1500 IDEW-P...3000 pods...none of them are good for the fun factor.
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Paul, do you have any thoughts on the automated weapons used in Ultra (i.e. armed buoys and drones, but no 3E style mines nor SBMHAWK missile pods)?
Also, while I basically don't disagree with any of your points in the previous post regarding the deadliness of SBMHAWKs, there's one point you have yet to address that I made earlier. And that is, the given the mostly revolutionary nature of many tech developments in 3E, such as Cap missiles, fighters, and SBMHAWKs, why should a player have even the slightest expectation that the defensive tactics he used before the introduction of SBMHAWKs would remain viable after SBMHAWKs show up?
This is something that sort of bugs me. You can't fight a TL4 fleet the same way against a TL5 fleet that's armed with CM's as you would against a fleet without them. You can't fight a sub-TL8 fleet against a TL8+ fleet armed with fighters in the same way that you would against a fleet without fighters. Why should you expect to be able to stick with pre-SBMHAWK tactics after SBMHAWKs show up on the scene? I don't think that you should be able to do so, at least not without using a lot of trickery and deception to avoid getting squashed.
I have to admit though, that even if you do hold your defense fleet back perhaps 1 interception hex or so from the WP to avoid the SBMHAWK bombardment, those missile pods are still unexpended. And the attacker can probably get them back under control and still be able to use them against the defender if the two fleets ever come into combat range of each other. (I suppose if the defender had fighters, he could send in fighter strikes to whittle down the force of missile pods. However, given that the race with the pods is of a high enough TL to have its own fighters, it's likely that that "whittle them down" mission would be opposed, with the outcome largely dependent on who had the larger force of fighters.)
On a different but related thought.... Have you read the most recent Starfire novel, "Extremis" (by Steve White and Dr. Charles Gannon)? I bring it up because in it, the Alliance has developed a way to deal with SBMHAWKs in a rather nasty way. They fire AMBAM's at them, pretty much just like they were attacking minefields and blast them into dust bunnies.
So that gets me to thinking that if one might use AMBAMs in this way, one might be able to develop some sort of advanced buoy or mine that was capable of doing much the same thing. (That said, I'm not sure that you'd want your regular anti-ship minefields in the same hex where you intended to detonate some truly massive anti-matter warheads capable of wiping out missile pods or mines in great numbers. You might end up wiping out your own anti-ship mines in the same tac hex in the process.)
Anyways, just some food for thought. There really is no reason why a technological counter for missile pods couldn't be developed ... at least one that's intended to destroy them before they fire.
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Paul, do you have any thoughts on the automated weapons used in Ultra (i.e. armed buoys and drones, but no 3E style mines nor SBMHAWK missile pods)?
I only have the 4thE rules and there the pods are limited to 6 pod datagroups and at least the intial ones are pretty limited due to the size of the XO racks and such. The problem with no maintenance is still there and I suspect that in time the same issues that show up in 3rdR show up there. As I have no experience playing with the 4thE rules beyond a relatively short solo game I find it hard to comment. As they are data group limited though at least that is a plus. But as my example above shows even limiting the pods to 6 pod volleys doesn't really change the end outcome.
Also, while I basically don't disagree with any of your points in the previous post regarding the deadliness of SBMHAWKs, there's one point you have yet to address that I made earlier. And that is, the given the mostly revolutionary nature of many tech developments in 3E, such as Cap missiles, fighters, and SBMHAWKs, why should a player have even the slightest expectation that the defensive tactics he used before the introduction of SBMHAWKs would remain viable after SBMHAWKs show up?
None of the others invalidate years of effort, millions of MCr of investment and maintenance, and impose not the slightest penalty to the person using them. Capital missiles are nice but they don't change WP defences that much...the RM was tech level 7 and the Buer were tech level 4.5 and they managed to inflict serious damage on the RM and the final battle came down to a shorter distance for the RM because if the Buer fleet had been on the WP they would not have taken it. But they could have blotted it out of existance with a trivial cost in pods.
Fighters require a training school that limits your expansion. The first carrier you get is barely effective, the first fighter is also barely effective and against a player race would be less so. A solid warp point defence can stop cold a carrier led assault. I did it playing "Wall of Fire, Wall of Steel." Fighters are also terribly expensive toys. More dangerous is armed pinnances. But both mean you have to adapt your defensive arrays.
Pods invalidate them. Nothing will survive inside of 30 hexs of the warp point until you develop ECM3 with both cloak and deception mode. The effectiveness of the pods is just overwhelming. Buoys and minefields are annoying, but you can come up with ways to deal with them. But they don't invalidate assault ships...infact they demand specialized assault ships (Starslayer one time came up with a CL that cost more in DSB-L to kill than to build).
Pods are just without a down side. They are Webber's wünderkind. My personal opinion is they ruined the Herringswine books along with LACs and frankly I feel starfire would be better off without armed smallcraft and pods as well. But armed small craft require expensive carriers, or else a lot of ships that you have to pay maintenance on. A SBMHAWK3 pod has the firepower of a Superdreadnaught and costs 50 MCr.
I play starfire to have fleet battles between ships, not to play accountant at war or podfire or whatever.
This is something that sort of bugs me. You can't fight a TL4 fleet the same way against a TL5 fleet that's armed with CM's as you would against a fleet without them. You can't fight a sub-TL8 fleet against a TL8+ fleet armed with fighters in the same way that you would against a fleet without fighters. Why should you expect to be able to stick with pre-SBMHAWK tactics after SBMHAWKs show up on the scene? I don't think that you should be able to do so, at least not without using a lot of trickery and deception to avoid getting squashed.
It isn't about having to change tactics it is about invalidating a massive investment. CM or fighters doesn't invalidate your investment in ships and bases, you just have to adjust and refit. It also makes it impossible for an inferior opponent to even slow down an enemy. Because of the pods you can't fight at the WP you have to conceed it and then what is your option? Fight a deep space battle with inferior numbers of ships? Starfire combat works as follows: dA/dt = B and dB/dt = A so if you are inferior you loose and inflict not much damage to the enemy. Worse if they pods they have fighters...so it is hopeless. Trickery in starfire is nearly impossible to do unless you have a SM working to make the fog of war the fog of war or else you have ECM3...but you get that long after you get pods. So trickery is limited to the time when the enemy first gets a working Xr into the system. And you can spoof a pn probe as the basic pinnace sensors are limited.
It isn't hopeless as I managed to make "When Enemies Join Hands" into "Then Rigillians Dance on their Graves" but that was because the Righillians have F2 while the TFN and KON have F0.
And as I have pointed out if both sides have pods then it becomes podfire. As the defender can smash the attackers initial assault waves with pods while staying back far enough that the deployment ships can't be hit before they activate their deployed pods. And you can play silly buggers on the attacker here with mines, IDEW and Pods. To the point that even though pods are introduced to prevent stalemates they generate an even easier to produce stalement that costs no maintanence and can be shifted around easily. The carrier led assault is the best bet against that but nothing prevents the defender blindfiring pods throught the warp point to catch the entire assembled assault force sitting at the warp point.
And you have to ask yourself is the apn just as bad or for that matter the gunboat, which is essentially a manned pod. But they at least have maintenance fees of a sort. The only thing that limits pods is pure income...
On a different but related thought.... Have you read the most recent Starfire novel, "Extremis" (by Steve White and Dr. Charles Gannon)? I bring it up because in it, the Alliance has developed a way to deal with SBMHAWKs in a rather nasty way. They fire AMBAM's at them, pretty much just like they were attacking minefields and blast them into dust bunnies.
I have tried to read the book but stopped early in the book since it didn't even feel like starfire to me.
Anyways, just some food for thought. There really is no reason why a technological counter for missile pods couldn't be developed ... at least one that's intended to destroy them before they fire.
The rules are written to make that exceptionally difficult to do. Webber's wünderkind... Theoretically though you can fire AMBAM at them in the current rules but an ABMBAM would kill ony 1-10 pods per AMBAM treating them as DSB...and 1-5 for the internal launched ones. And you would have to close to a range where the AMBAM can even be fired. Suicide riders would be more effective I'd think or smallcraft loaded with lots of warheads in the cargo bay.
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I only have the 4thE rules and there the pods are limited to 6 pod datagroups and at least the intial ones are pretty limited due to the size of the XO racks and such. The problem with no maintenance is still there and I suspect that in time the same issues that show up in 3rdR show up there. As I have no experience playing with the 4thE rules beyond a relatively short solo game I find it hard to comment. As they are data group limited though at least that is a plus. But as my example above shows even limiting the pods to 6 pod volleys doesn't really change the end outcome.
Ok, no prob. Just an FYI, in Ultra deployed AW's do pay maintenance.
None of the others invalidate years of effort, millions of MCr of investment and maintenance, and impose not the slightest penalty to the person using them. Capital missiles are nice but they don't change WP defences that much...the RM was tech level 7 and the Buer were tech level 4.5 and they managed to inflict serious damage on the RM and the final battle came down to a shorter distance for the RM because if the Buer fleet had been on the WP they would not have taken it. But they could have blotted it out of existance with a trivial cost in pods.
That's only because the other revolutionary advances aren't specifically related to WP defense. SBMHAWKs are designed to break overwhelming WP defenses which are a significant part of WP stagnation, a problem that brings games to a grinding halt.
Fighters require a training school that limits your expansion.
Honestly, I have no desire to create "pilot training school" facilities. It's an unnecessary complexity to me.
The first carrier you get is barely effective, the first fighter is also barely effective and against a player race would be less so. A solid warp point defence can stop cold a carrier led assault. I did it playing "Wall of Fire, Wall of Steel." Fighters are also terribly expensive toys. More dangerous is armed pinnances. But both mean you have to adapt your defensive arrays.
The first fighters are lame because some dufus (actually, I do know the person's name) at Task Force Games back in the 80's totally nerfed the first generation of fighters for 2nd edition and DW failed to fix that abomination. I intend to fix that.
As for "armed pinnaces", I don't know if you mean the APN's from the UTM or the 2nd gen PN's from 3e. I don't intend on keeping the 2nd gen PN's from 3E as is. I don't like general purpose smallcraft being armed at all because I think that it causes players to abuse them. And if there are going to be armed pinnaces, they should be honest-to-goodness combat pinnaces, not oversized shuttles pretending to be combat smallcraft.
Pods invalidate them. Nothing will survive inside of 30 hexes of the warp point until you develop ECM3 with both cloak and deception mode. The effectiveness of the pods is just overwhelming. Buoys and minefields are annoying, but you can come up with ways to deal with them. But they don't invalidate assault ships...in fact they demand specialized assault ships (Starslayer one time came up with a CL that cost more in DSB-L to kill than to build).
Pods are just without a down side. They are Webber's wünderkind. My personal opinion is they ruined the Herringswine books along with LACs and frankly I feel starfire would be better off without armed smallcraft and pods as well. But armed small craft require expensive carriers, or else a lot of ships that you have to pay maintenance on. A SBMHAWK3 pod has the firepower of a Superdreadnaught and costs 50 MCr.
I play starfire to have fleet battles between ships, not to play accountant at war or podfire or whatever.
I agree that a major difference between fighters (and also cap missile armed ships, BTW) and missile pods (and mines and beam buoys, BTW) is that you pay maintenance on fighters and cap missile armed ships, but you don't pay maintenance on deployed automated weapons. IIRC, Marvin did this to simply the paperwork, but I think that it's a case where making thing too simply had an unintended effect. In Ultra, he clearly recognized this problem because you do pay maintenance on deployed AW's now.
It isn't about having to change tactics it is about invalidating a massive investment. CM or fighters doesn't invalidate your investment in ships and bases, you just have to adjust and refit. It also makes it impossible for an inferior opponent to even slow down an enemy. Because of the pods you can't fight at the WP you have to concede it and then what is your option? Fight a deep space battle with inferior numbers of ships? Starfire combat works as follows: dA/dt = B and dB/dt = A so if you are inferior you loose and inflict not much damage to the enemy. Worse if they pods they have fighters...so it is hopeless. Trickery in starfire is nearly impossible to do unless you have a SM working to make the fog of war the fog of war or else you have ECM3...but you get that long after you get pods. So trickery is limited to the time when the enemy first gets a working Xr into the system. And you can spoof a pn probe as the basic pinnace sensors are limited.
I guess that I have to seriously disagree. To me is is entirely about people not being happy about needing to change tactics. A massive investment has gone down the drain? Cry me a river. It's "massive investments" like these which create the problem of WP stagnation in the first place. SBMHAWKs were just one way of breaking the gridlock of WP stagnation. Besides which, it's not like we haven't see this happen in real life. Think of all the money wasted on the Maginot Line that was made obsolete by modern artillery, etc.
I will agree that trickery and deception is of limited ability. But of course, its value can also be related to how cautious or thoughtful or whatever the attacker is. A reckless attacker might send in a missile pod bombardment without first checking out what's on the other side of the WP.
It isn't hopeless as I managed to make "When Enemies Join Hands" into "Then Rigillians Dance on their Graves" but that was because the Righillians have F2 while the TFN and KON have F0.
And as I have pointed out if both sides have pods then it becomes podfire. As the defender can smash the attackers initial assault waves with pods while staying back far enough that the deployment ships can't be hit before they activate their deployed pods. And you can play silly buggers on the attacker here with mines, IDEW and Pods. To the point that even though pods are introduced to prevent stalemates they generate an even easier to produce stalement that costs no maintanence and can be shifted around easily. The carrier led assault is the best bet against that but nothing prevents the defender blindfiring pods throught the warp point to catch the entire assembled assault force sitting at the warp point.
And you have to ask yourself is the apn just as bad or for that matter the gunboat, which is essentially a manned pod. But they at least have maintenance fees of a sort. The only thing that limits pods is pure income...
I have tried to read the book but stopped early in the book since it didn't even feel like starfire to me.
That's ok. I only referenced it to make the point about there being counter tech to SBMHAWKs. That said, I can tell you that the underlying story of Exodus and Extremis, i.e. the Arduan War, was originally plotted out with or before 3E by Dave Weber and Steve White. It was always intended to be the next act after the Insurrection. And I recognized almost all of the new tech referenced in those novels from DW's descriptions 20+ years ago.
The rules are written to make that exceptionally difficult to do. Webber's wünderkind... Theoretically though you can fire AMBAM at them in the current rules but an ABMBAM would kill ony 1-10 pods per AMBAM treating them as DSB...and 1-5 for the internal launched ones. And you would have to close to a range where the AMBAM can even be fired. Suicide riders would be more effective I'd think or smallcraft loaded with lots of warheads in the cargo bay.
I should say that when I said "AMBAM's" I was talking more about a higher TL version, rather than the original versions that are closer to TL10 or so. And IIRC, I think that what passes for AMBAMs in the Exodus/Extremis time frame may indeed be more on the level of a suicide rider warhead.
But I think that you could also get a similarly useful effect if there was something like an anti-missile pod minefield. Each mine might not have the power of a massive AMBAMM but taken together, the mineFIELD could probably wipe out tons and tons of missile pods as they tried to pass thru the tac hex. However, this is a place where there's a problem when one compares the pure 3E readiness rules vs 3rdR's version or later versions. The point I'm getting at here is that in pure 3E, you could have a portion of your fleet fully active. But in 3rdR and Ultra and Solar, the best you can do is have a portion of the fleet at a state you might think of as "alert" (it's not called that, though), where it would take you 1-3 turns to get fully active. The problem here is that the incoming SBMHAWKs aren't going to wait around for you to get activated, though of course, you can start the activation process once you see something like a pinnace come thru the WP for a look-see. But if the the enemy doesn't make his attack within a short time frame, you're supposed to revert back to this "alert" like status. But my point was that, with the exception of always active MF's, any sort of weapon that requires an activated ship to use will not be ready quick enough to do so before the attacking pods have fired their missiles.
This is a case where I can see why SDS wanted to not have defenders having lots of active ships around WP's ready to smash attacking ships as they made transit, to give the attacker at least a handful of turns to get a decent number of ships into the system. But that same change makes the defenders much more vulnerable to SBMHAWKs because they are mostly forced to sit back and wait to get smashed. Without any fully active ships or OWPs, there's no one able to fire AMBAMs at the attacking missile pods. I guess that it's a damned if you do, and damned if you don't kind of thing.
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Look, I don't think the problem is pods, the problem is automatic weapons in general and armed small craft (be they fighters or apn or pn2) plus the stupid smallcraft ramming rules where it turns out you can obliterate a major fleet with a minor investment in ramming shuttles.
A major problem is that Marvin simplified things so his 50 turn games would play easier without wondering if there is a knock on effect. Removing the fighter training school is like not having crew grade they both "simplify" the game but in the one case it means you can spam infinite amounts of fighters (only limited by your income) and in the latter it allows you to mothball a huge fleet and invalidate the massive investment the other player has put into maintaining his active fleet.
I am going to be as clear as I can be. SBMHAWKS do not unjam warp point assaults in general. They do so if and only if only the attacking side has them and in this case the defender has virtually no options unlike with CM or fighters. Once both sides have them or if the defender is the one with them they make a warp point assault all but impossible for the attacker since 3-6 rounds after the assault starts their ships on both sides of the warp point are likely to be hit by a bombardment of sbmhawks. The attacker will loose ships to AW (mines, IDEW and pods) the defender will loose nothing but some AW. Worse, this defence requires nothing more than the CFN to raise. So if you say they are in the game to make a warp point assaultable again, I say they fail and fail big time. A defender gains the most from having pods as they know where the attacker will be. The attacker trades maintenance paying assets for ones without. This is assuming the defender gives them nothing but the CSP, and AW to engage near the WP and makes their mine belt in such a way that even after the attackers pods wear it down it will still contain the attacker for long enough for his ships to send in their pods. The attacker can have only limited numbers of ships (excluding simultaneous transit) on the warp point and all other ships must be in the immediate vicinity of the warp point in the other system. It is the ideal situation for maximizing the effectiveness of the defenders pods. Worse once the attack starts you just need clear out the attackers transisted ships then you are faced with a limited number of ships with degraded performance (no ECM, no datalink, degraded point defence) so killing each transiting wave becomes fairly simple. If the defender is the one with the pod monopoly they could also have a standard warp point array or else have their fleet in closer to complicate the attackers situation even more.
AW favor the defence is basically the best way to sum it up.
The only fly in the pod ointment is ECM3 deception mode and cloaking. Bases with ECM3 operating in deception mode can survive near to the warp point, cloaked bases can survive...but even so I think this is relatively limited as sooner or later you have to drop the cloak and I'd think that the attacker can eventually program the pods to engage you no matter what you do...may cost more pods to send them through but it works. But cloaked bases/ships likely can be used to control IDEW. Once you have this system then things get exciting to put it mildly.
The other thing about pods that is very different from any other revolutionary weapon (but not different than IDEW and minefields) is that it is something that one turn you don't have and the next turn you have lots of. It takes a long time to refit your fleet to Rc armed, it takes an even longer time to build up a fighter force that is of any real value. Also consider that IDEW are expensive, they are a weapon system that fires 1 time per battle (given their recharge rate), has a relatively poor chance to hit, and does fairly poor damge 65 MCr for an IDEW-P is more than the cost of SBMHAWK5, while the cheapest, the IDEW-L, is 45 MCr and is more than a SBMHAWK2 pod. The SBMHAWK5 is capable of doing 72 pts of damage, while the IDEW-P can do 1 (admittedly through any level of shields and armour) and the IDEW-L can do 2 compared to 6 for LT1 armed SBMHAWK missiles. Their price per hitpoint is very low, while IDEW have a high cost per point of damage (18 MCr/damage point for IDEW-F, 12 MCr/damage point for IDEW-Fa)...(2 MCr/damage point for anti-matter armed pod1s, and less than 1 MCr per damage point for the more advanced pods)...mines the most cost effective AW out there at 0.25 MCr/damage point, but given you need to cover 6 hexes...that is really 1.5 MCr/damge point. So of all the AW pods really are exceptionally cost efficent.
I don't see where "changing tactics" comes in. If a system invalidates things it should only do so if it adds something of value back to the game. You want to invalidate warp point assaults what do you add back to the game? A warp point fight is fun to play out and it can be damned exciting for both sides. Also that a warp point defence cannot be broken by a conventional assault does not come because of the bases on the warp point, it comes because the minefields and IDEW are so thick that the attacker can't break out of the death zone near the WP itself. Fundamentally it is due to a prolliferation of AW. Even given the gross stupidity of the TFN during the Theban war they forced several heavily defended warp points. Quite frankly they forced warp points with more defences on them than I've ever seen personally or read about in an AAR of an actual game. Even in Kurt's I've never recalled too much in the way of extensive fortifications.
My feeling is that something that pays no maintenance should not be very effective in killing things that do pay maintenance. Because the "opportunity cost" of building a warp point defence is huge, not giving the player value for that strikes me as wrong. It takes a great deal of planning, logistics effort and what have you to build up a warp point defence that causes the attacker to whimper like a two year old child, invalidating that with a system that take no more effort then stealing candy from a sleeping baby is wrong. That it isn't even a solution to the problem well that is just icing on the cake.
As for AMBAMing the pods, nothing should stop that working but if it works on pods it would be just as effective at killing fighters, small craft and so on. But that is TL15+ tech then well there are a lot of tech levels to go through and for a TL8 race trying to stop the pods it is of zero value. Also the rules for the suicide rider make it pathetically useless at killing IDEW...it only takes out 1-2 of them so I'm not sure why the AMBAM thing would be more effective. The counter pod minefield at TL14 works but at 9 submunitions to max out your killls of pods and you get only 25 per pattern I can see that it takes a lot of them to kill a pod wave. They also require a ship or base with a sensor that can pick up the pods...that base or ship had better be cloaked.
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Look, I don't think the problem is pods, the problem is automatic weapons in general and armed small craft (be they fighters or apn or pn2) plus the stupid smallcraft ramming rules where it turns out you can obliterate a major fleet with a minor investment in ramming shuttles.
Removing fighters from the game is highly unlikely (ignoring any question of canonicity), given that I strongly suspect that most people like them and expect fighters in sci-fi games such as this one. As for smallcraft ramming, I'm already on record as saying that I think that aside from the presence of anti-matter in the mix, small craft hitting a starship's DF should be like a bug hitting a windshield.
A major problem is that Marvin simplified things so his 50 turn games would play easier without wondering if there is a knock on effect. Removing the fighter training school is like not having crew grade they both "simplify" the game but in the one case it means you can spam infinite amounts of fighters (only limited by your income) and in the latter it allows you to mothball a huge fleet and invalidate the massive investment the other player has put into maintaining his active fleet.
What's this "remove"? There is no fighter training school in ISF. IIRC, fighter training schools are a Galactic/Ultra/Solar thing.
As for crew grade, I'm on record as saying that I think that it's a massive headache that's not worth the benefit, and I stand by that.
As for the lack of crew grade invalidating a massive investment in maintaining an active fleet, I don't entirely agree, though I see where you're coming from. However, if the player with the active fleet attacks the player with the fleet mostly in mothballs, the defending player had better be able to hold off the attacking player long enough to get his reserve fleet activated, otherwise his reserve fleet may still be in the shipyards getting reactivated when the invader comes to visit his home system. Regardless, I still believe that crew grade is such an massive headache that no justification for its use outweighs the paperwork headache it creates (and I do mean PAPERwork, not spreadsheet work). There is no reasonable benefit that is sufficiently good that could offset the utterly ridiculousness of having to track each and every freaking ship in an empire's fleet for its crew grade!!! Sorry, but I feel very, VERY strongly about this.
This isn't to say that there might not be some value to (non-accumulating) crew grade for certain NPR types as has been suggested in the past. I can see where certain NPR types might be better than average and other might be worse than average.
I am going to be as clear as I can be. SBMHAWKS do not unjam warp point assaults in general. They do so if and only if only the attacking side has them and in this case the defender has virtually no options unlike with CM or fighters. Once both sides have them or if the defender is the one with them they make a warp point assault all but impossible for the attacker since 3-6 rounds after the assault starts their ships on both sides of the warp point are likely to be hit by a bombardment of sbmhawks. The attacker will loose ships to AW (mines, IDEW and pods) the defender will loose nothing but some AW. Worse, this defence requires nothing more than the CFN to raise. So if you say they are in the game to make a warp point assaultable again, I say they fail and fail big time. A defender gains the most from having pods as they know where the attacker will be. The attacker trades maintenance paying assets for ones without. This is assuming the defender gives them nothing but the CSP, and AW to engage near the WP and makes their mine belt in such a way that even after the attackers pods wear it down it will still contain the attacker for long enough for his ships to send in their pods. The attacker can have only limited numbers of ships (excluding simultaneous transit) on the warp point and all other ships must be in the immediate vicinity of the warp point in the other system. It is the ideal situation for maximizing the effectiveness of the defenders pods. Worse once the attack starts you just need clear out the attackers transisted ships then you are faced with a limited number of ships with degraded performance (no ECM, no datalink, degraded point defence) so killing each transiting wave becomes fairly simple. If the defender is the one with the pod monopoly they could also have a standard warp point array or else have their fleet in closer to complicate the attackers situation even more.
I don't disagree with some of what you're saying here. However, SBMHAWKs were never meant to be a long term WP defense weapon. To the best of my recollection, I don't recall the Alliance ever using SBMHAWKs as a static defensive weapon, except perhaps in circumstances when they ran thru a WP with the Bugs hot on their heels, and dumped out their missile pods into space because they knew that the Bugs would hit the WP within minutes. I don't recall SBMHAWKs being used defensively at the Battle of Centauri, the "Black Hole of Centauri" battle at the end of In Death Ground, which would have seemed to be the perfect time to use them, given the desperation of the situation.
AW favor the defence is basically the best way to sum it up.
With the caveat that I don't believe that SBMHAWK pods were ever meant to be allowed for use in long term static WP defenses, I agree with this statement. Particularly since, if you remove missile pods from the mix, what's left? Immobile AW's. And immobile AW's are defensive weapons.
The only fly in the pod ointment is ECM3 deception mode and cloaking. Bases with ECM3 operating in deception mode can survive near to the warp point, cloaked bases can survive...but even so I think this is relatively limited as sooner or later you have to drop the cloak and I'd think that the attacker can eventually program the pods to engage you no matter what you do...may cost more pods to send them through but it works. But cloaked bases/ships likely can be used to control IDEW. Once you have this system then things get exciting to put it mildly.
Yeah, as nice a cloaking can be, as currently envisioned, it's not a system that's meant to be functioning all the time. And that's where the ship or base would have a problem with cloak in a WP defense. Of course, it also depends on what iteration of the readiness rules one's using ... pure 3E, 3rdR, or Ultra/Solar. In pure 3E, you could have a portion of your fleet always being fully active, (say 1/3), so you could have the active third cloaked, and the rest of the fleet pulled well back from the WP at a lower readiness state, with cloak turned off. (Bases are tricky here, since you could only pull them back if you supported them with a force of tugs to move the active ones into position and the normal state ones back out of range. Otherwise, the normal state bases are dead meat.) But in 3rdR and Ultra/Solar, you can't have any ships being fully activated, so there may be no ships or bases under cloak.
The other thing about pods that is very different from any other revolutionary weapon (but not different than IDEW and minefields) is that it is something that one turn you don't have and the next turn you have lots of. It takes a long time to refit your fleet to Rc armed, it takes an even longer time to build up a fighter force that is of any real value. Also consider that IDEW are expensive, they are a weapon system that fires 1 time per battle (given their recharge rate), has a relatively poor chance to hit, and does fairly poor damge 65 MCr for an IDEW-P is more than the cost of SBMHAWK5, while the cheapest, the IDEW-L, is 45 MCr and is more than a SBMHAWK2 pod. The SBMHAWK5 is capable of doing 72 pts of damage, while the IDEW-P can do 1 (admittedly through any level of shields and armour) and the IDEW-L can do 2 compared to 6 for LT1 armed SBMHAWK missiles. Their price per hitpoint is very low, while IDEW have a high cost per point of damage (18 MCr/damage point for IDEW-F, 12 MCr/damage point for IDEW-Fa)...(2 MCr/damage point for anti-matter armed pod1s, and less than 1 MCr per damage point for the more advanced pods)...mines the most cost effective AW out there at 0.25 MCr/damage point, but given you need to cover 6 hexes...that is really 1.5 MCr/damge point. So of all the AW pods really are exceptionally cost efficient.
IDEW's seem to be either overpriced for their existing performance, or underperforming for their price. IDEW's really only get to fire once per battle. And if you lose the battle, you lose the IDEW's and never get to use them again. If you win the battle and repel the invader, you might get to reuse the IDEW, IF it survived the battle.
As for mines, unless we're talking about closed WP's, the cost per damage point can be a questionable value, given that mines usually seem more about preventing an attacker from entered the mined hex than in being a weapon that gets used. Still, they are valuable, if only for penning up the attacker on the WP for a while and that's a value that can't be calculated in MC/dp.
I don't see where "changing tactics" comes in. If a system invalidates things it should only do so if it adds something of value back to the game. You want to invalidate warp point assaults what do you add back to the game? A warp point fight is fun to play out and it can be damned exciting for both sides. Also that a warp point defence cannot be broken by a conventional assault does not come because of the bases on the warp point, it comes because the minefields and IDEW are so thick that the attacker can't break out of the death zone near the WP itself. Fundamentally it is due to a prolliferation of AW.
Of course the proliferation of automated weapons is the fundamental reason for WP stagnation. That's not exactly an epiphany. ;)
But I don't see any rational justification for not including automated weapons in the game in some form. But "in some form" doesn't have to mean "in their current form".
As for WP battles being fun, I'm not sure that everyone would agree with you. When I did a survey a while back, one of the complaints was that there were too many WP battles. Personally, I thought that that observation was a bit ignorant in a way, due to the nature of WP's as the perfect natural chokepoint. Of course, many, many battles will be at WP's. Where else would a defender want to fight, given a choice? About the only reason for a defender to prefer a deep space engagement instead, would be if he felt that there was an advantage to be gained. The Battle of Zapata in Insurrection would be a prime example of this.
My feeling is that something that pays no maintenance should not be very effective in killing things that do pay maintenance. Because the "opportunity cost" of building a warp point defence is huge, not giving the player value for that strikes me as wrong. It takes a great deal of planning, logistics effort and what have you to build up a warp point defence that causes the attacker to whimper like a two year old child, invalidating that with a system that take no more effort then stealing candy from a sleeping baby is wrong. That it isn't even a solution to the problem well that is just icing on the cake.
Not buying it. I suspect that history is replete with examples where a great new advance in technology completely invalidated years or decades of investment. Take battleship fleets during WW2 being made obsolete practically overnight (well, at least for the battleship admirals who didn't believe that fighters could sink BB's).
As for AMBAMing the pods, nothing should stop that working but if it works on pods it would be just as effective at killing fighters, small craft and so on. But that is TL15+ tech then well there are a lot of tech levels to go through and for a TL8 race trying to stop the pods it is of zero value. Also the rules for the suicide rider make it pathetically useless at killing IDEW...it only takes out 1-2 of them so I'm not sure why the AMBAM thing would be more effective. The counter pod minefield at TL14 works but at 9 submunitions to max out your kills of pods and you get only 25 per pattern I can see that it takes a lot of them to kill a pod wave. They also require a ship or base with a sensor that can pick up the pods...that base or ship had better be cloaked.
I agree that the TL8 race trying to stop pods isn't going to get any value from a TL15+ solution. But frankly, I'm not going to really have much sympathy for the TL8 race in that situation. They're supposed to get squashed in that situation, though a TL8 (!) race could try building up a really large force of fighters or assault shuttles to attack the pods as they enter the system. That's probably the best direct counter to SBMHAWKs they'd have.
BTW, Paul, even though it's clear that we disagree about a fair amount of stuff (and agree on a lot of other stuff), I appreciate you taking the time to comment here.
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Paul, even though it's clear that we disagree about a fair amount of stuff (and agree on a lot of other stuff), I appreciate you taking the time to comment here.
For whatever it's worth, Paul, I hope that you didn't take the above comment from the previous post as a way of saying that I wanted to end our conversation, because it wasn't. I was only indicating my appreciation of your willingness to take the time to discuss this stuff with me in depth. But if you have no desire to continue the conversation that's OK too.
Just as an FYI, at this time, I am thinking about significantly changing automated weapons for Cosmic. One of the problems I foresee however is that automated weapons are logical, so it would be hard to argue that they wouldn't be developed. Of course that doesn't mean that they'd have to take the form that they do in 3E. But it seems to me that there are certain logical issues that have to be considered.
First of all, one might want to rule that things smaller than starships can't survive transit, as a way of preventing the existence of things like missile pods. However that would also rule out courier drones as well. And if courier drones are possible, then it seems logical that some form of automated drone weapon would also become possible as well. This doesn't mean that missile pods would necessarily be in the logical mix though... It could be that something more akin to GSF/Ultra/Solar style drones might be an alternative here.
Secondly, buoys don't even face a potential limitation against WP transits since they're not meant to be mobile, let alone transit WP's. So, it seems likely that they'd be a logical development. Of course, that does not by extension mean that 3E-style mines need to exist. And as with drones, it could also be that something similar to GSF/Ultra/Solar style buoys might be an alternative. Of course, 3E's laser buoys and IDW buoys aren't too terribly different from 4E style buoys. It's more the 3E mines that are the real problem.
(Of course, AW's absolutely should pay maintenance. That sort of goes without saying at this point.)
Another related issue is readiness states in WP defense situations. In pure 3E, a certain portion of the defender's fleet could be at full battle readiness, which meant that if they chose to park on the WP to try to destroy missile pods as they emerged, they had a chance of destroying a pretty fair number of them, though once CAM-pods showed up, that strategy might get a lot more painful. Regardless, in 3rdR and 4E+, readiness states were tweaked such that there were no ships truly at full readiness, which I think was done in GSF and beyond as a way of giving the attacker a chance to get a few turns worth of ships into the system before the defender could start shooting with significant numbers of ships and OWPs. However, IIRC, in 3rdR, this gave missile pods the advantage that there were no ships able to at least try to attack missile pods on their turn of transit.
My point here isn't to debate the details of the various editions. It's to point out that if defenders aren't able to have a portion of their force at full combat readiness the instant the first enemy ships make transit, then one has to be very careful about just how capable any attacking AW drones can be. Otherwise, you either have a defending force of sitting ducks or the defenders are forced to sit well out of weapons range of the WP to give themselves time to get their units activated. And on the flip side, one has to wonder if defending AW buoys should be allowed to always be active, since a sufficiently powerful enough force of armed buoys might adequately defend any WP, or at least defend it long enough to get the (distant) defending starships activated and into battle. It also makes one wonder if armed buoys should have to be be activated by a defending ship or base.
Anyways, those are just a few thoughts I've had on the topic of automated weapons.
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G'Day All,
Just to give my 2c on this.
I believe that everyone agrees that SBMHAWK pod's are overpowering - the disagreement is whether or not this imbalance is warranted or not (i.e. is it O.K. for a revolutionary weapon to be as effective or not....)
Just to comment here on a possible solution - what about developing a basic decoy DSB (i.e. DSB-?db)?
DSB-?d is a TL13 system, and was developed to counter SBMHAWK pods's. (I would question why it took 4 TL's to develop a counter - but that's neither here nor there....)
So there is room there to develop a "basic" decoy DSB, and place it in the TL9 to TL 10 range.
A suggested difference between the two, would be to only allow the decoy function to work against SBMHAWK pods. I.e. the (original TL13) DSB-?d can be recognised as a decoy by a ship within a hex (or 5 hexes if mounting Xr/Xrs), the (new TL9 or TL10) DSB-?db can be detected as a decoy by a ship within (say) 20 hexes (and within 40 hexes when using Xr/Xrs).
As a result, this bouy would be useless against assaulting ships, but would be effective against SBMHAWK pods.....
Comments?
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G'Day All,
Just to give my 2c on this.
I believe that everyone agrees that SBMHAWK pod's are overpowering - the disagreement is whether or not this imbalance is warranted or not (i.e. is it O.K. for a revolutionary weapon to be as effective or not....)
Just to comment here on a possible solution - what about developing a basic decoy DSB (i.e. DSB-?db)?
DSB-?d is a TL13 system, and was developed to counter SBMHAWK pods's. (I would question why it took 4 TL's to develop a counter - but that's neither here nor there....)
So there is room there to develop a "basic" decoy DSB, and place it in the TL9 to TL 10 range.
A suggested difference between the two, would be to only allow the decoy function to work against SBMHAWK pods. I.e. the (original TL13) DSB-?d can be recognised as a decoy by a ship within a hex (or 5 hexes if mounting Xr/Xrs), the (new TL9 or TL10) DSB-?db can be detected as a decoy by a ship within (say) 20 hexes (and within 40 hexes when using Xr/Xrs).
As a result, this buoy would be useless against assaulting ships, but would be effective against SBMHAWK pods.....
Comments?
Hi Matt! Long time, no "see".
Some points vis-a-vis a "basic decoy buoy"...
First, given that Deception ECM (as part of ECM-3) doesn't show up until TL11, it'd be difficult to argue in favor of a basic version of deception ECM, even in a larger ship-borne version, at an earlier TL, let alone a smaller buoy mounted version. Mind you, having the deception ECM buoy 2 TL's after ECM-3 seems about 1 TL too much.
Actually, let me step take a step back. I suppose that one might be able to argue in favor of a ship-borne version of a basic deception ECM (with no cloaking) at perhaps TL10, possibly ... possibly TL9. I'm not sure what being a "basic" version of deception ECM would mean in game terms (compared to what ECM-3 does in deception mode), but it might be possible. As for then developing a smaller version for buoy use at least 1 TL later, I do not know.
Also, a lot of PaulM's concerns about the effectiveness of SBMHAWKs has to do with races having lower TL's than a SBMHAWK using race, i.e. TL8 or lower. So, even a TL9-10 decoy buoy wouldn't do them much good, unless one was going to allow for some sort of "threat response" development rules (which IIRC, PaulM has no fondness for) that would allow a slightly lower TL race (perhaps TL7-8?) to develop a counter-tech to missile pods (decoy buoys, for example). ((Of course, I suppose using ISF's perceived threat development rules, a TL6-8 race could develop its own SBMHAWK technology, though that's not exactly a defense against your enemy's missile pods, only an ability to respond in kind.))
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SBMHAWKs have issues. Adding in the buoys before you get deception mode on your ships seems an odd solution and the trouble is the buoys would have to fool pinnances, and by definition any ship not equipped with Xr since the SBMHAWKs have basically small craft sensors.
To my thinking the problem that SBMHAWKs are supposed to prevent is a huge warp point assault that costs the attacker a lot to win. Personally I doubt that those happen often enought to need a specific system to defeat. What is also clear is that the SBMHAWK only does this when it is used against a lower tech race, or when only one side has them. Then the attacker forces the defender to conceed the near WP enviroment to him. Except for mines and buoys or cloaked ships and bases. Cloaking is not that useful for close to the WP but for control bases/ships it is fine. It will block SBMHAWK attacks though since you need Xr to see through the cloak.(Added in edit: checking the rules this wrong but for units without Xr the detection chance is a lot lower...basically you need to be on top of the target to see it.)
So for a very narrow window of time the SBMHAWKs are overwehlmingly powerful for the attacker. Allowing him to advance fairly quickly and invalidating the defenders long strategic assets. (added in edit: to be utterly clear the only thing SBMHAWKs are always good against is bases...so if SBMHAWKs are the solution the problem is bases. And that is a load of cow dung. Only on either a long running games highly developed systems--with clear strategic value or in most games the races homeworld will there ever be sufficient bases piled up to be an issue.)
On one hand against the unprepared the invalidate strategic planning stretching back god knows how long.
On the other hand they are stalemate weapons once both sides have them.
On the third hand the best use of them (slaved to ship fire control) or use en mass against limited numbers of well defined targets is easiest for the defender to achieve.
At higher tech levels their main effect is to force the defender to keep their ships back from the warp point or to operate in deception mode or cloak nearly continously. And that is allowed in the rules. Not to mention that even as early as in the theban war it was routine to do so. In ISW4 both sides operated extensively under cloak. As for the TFN not using pods defensively...*sigh* to put it mildly the TFN isn't populated by the sharpest spears in anyones armoury.
The idiotic part of this is that the things pods would be good for "minesweeping" you don't get for a long time. I don't see why you can't strap an AMBAM to a SBMHAWK1 and tell it to blow up after moving through the warp point. Or for that matter why telling it to fire the missile at a specific point in space on the other side is so hard to do.
Ultimately what makes the pods dangerous is that they fire in a single group. This makes no sense since they would all target the same ship...as they all have the same target program running. The only way to spread fire is to communicate their target choices to each other and then adjust. However, even saying they fire in 6 pod data groups doesn't change the outcome at the end it only makes it take more pods.
Once the defender has the pod then the concentrated attacking force near the warp point is a lot easier to target with pods then a dispearsed, mobile and not well identified defender. Add in deception mode, fighter CSP to kill pinnace probes, cloaking and IDEWa and the attacker is faced with a further nightmare, only this nightmare takes no real effort to set up. It is also worth pointing out that I've never seen this sort of attacker whimpers like little girl warp point defence either in Steve's or Kurt's ficton, any other AAR or in a game. Heavy defenses yes...but almost always restricted to the homeworld. Outside of the homeworld the logisitic effort to build up massed warp point defences is generally un-available. And if you have sufficient yards to build big bases in quantity then you can snow the attacker under in pods, IDEW and MF.
The worst part is that if you break through a strong WP defence as the attacker usually you have done something and acquired freedom of action, now you fight through a bunch of AW and then the next WP you know they will be there again unless you have astrogation data and can advance quickly.
So you have a system intended to aid the attacker that does so only so long as the attacker alone has it (it is worth pointing out this is what Webber assumes). After that it is more valuable defensively as the defender knows where the attacker will be (the WP), with mines can pin him to a small area for the time needed for the pod controling ships to activate the pods and the pods to move to launch position. At the same time the attacker ships are degraded by IDEW and transit effects. Then nothing stops the defender from mounting a pod-counter attack to catch the assault fleet at the WP in the system they are attacking from, and frankly I'm dubious it will be that effective but it will damage the assault force even before it transits and can catch things like carriers. There are other ways that the defender can use the pods that the attacker can't: pre-positioned pods can be locked up by pod-missile ships and used with shipboard fire control without requiring the pod-missile ships drop shields and drive field to roll pods. I'm certain that other possibilites exist.
In this sense I guess we shall see in our current game if the money I invested in the RMs pod roller designs pays off. It won't be long before everyone has them...and the podfire part starts.
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Hi Matt! Long time, no "see".
Some points vis-a-vis a "basic decoy buoy"...
First, given that Deception ECM (as part of ECM-3) doesn't show up until TL11, it'd be difficult to argue in favor of a basic version of deception ECM, even in a larger ship-borne version, at an earlier TL, let alone a smaller buoy mounted version. Mind you, having the deception ECM buoy 2 TL's after ECM-3 seems about 1 TL too much.
Actually, let me step take a step back. I suppose that one might be able to argue in favor of a ship-borne version of a basic deception ECM (with no cloaking) at perhaps TL10, possibly ... possibly TL9. I'm not sure what being a "basic" version of deception ECM would mean in game terms (compared to what ECM-3 does in deception mode), but it might be possible. As for then developing a smaller version for buoy use at least 1 TL later, I do not know.
Also, a lot of PaulM's concerns about the effectiveness of SBMHAWKs has to do with races having lower TL's than a SBMHAWK using race, i.e. TL8 or lower. So, even a TL9-10 decoy buoy wouldn't do them much good, unless one was going to allow for some sort of "threat response" development rules (which IIRC, PaulM has no fondness for) that would allow a slightly lower TL race (perhaps TL7-8?) to develop a counter-tech to missile pods (decoy buoys, for example). ((Of course, I suppose using ISF's perceived threat development rules, a TL6-8 race could develop its own SBMHAWK technology, though that's not exactly a defense against your enemy's missile pods, only an ability to respond in kind.))
G’Day Fred,
I’ve been checking both the Aurora and SDS forums daily, but I haven’t been posting much….
To address the ECM-3 point. ECM-3 includes a LOT more then just decoy mode. A DSB-?db wouldn’t have cloak, ECM-1, ECM-2, or ECCM. In fact, the decoy mode is also a “lite” version – as it lacks the ability to drop the deception mode and avoid missile salvo’s that way.
So I don’t see a problem with this (extremely) basic version of decoy mode turning up a TL or two before ECM-3.
As to a ship-borne version turning up, that too make sense. Personally I would include cloak with the decoy mode (to avoid a massive step up between this “lite" ECM-3 and the full ECM-3).
As to “threat response” development, I can see two reasons why DSB-?db would be developed – a fighter-led WP assault, or a SBMHAWK pod attack. So developing either fighters OR SBMHAWK pods would spur the development of DSB-?db…..
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Hi Matt, this reminds me I have something to do for you...*sighs*
On buoys, the problem is that the attacker just needs to sequence his fire. So he knows that there are say 30 base 4's on the other side of the WP but he figures that is a load of malarky so he sends through 400 pods plus 30 pods. The 30 pods fire in turn 2 and take out the majority of the targets that don't have point defence (the buoys) and the next turn the remaining pods fire on the surviving targets.
At this point, the real joy is that the defender can now force the attacker to expend pods against non-existant targets. Basically waste money trying to kill things that are not there. But the defender always has the advantage with podfire because he knows where the attacker will be during an attack. He can see the enemy ships as well so he has hard targetting data. The attacker is always going to be dealing with fuzzy data (at least for things that are not solo games) so has to accept that some pods will be wasted.
The effect of the SBMHAWK is to just stop the use of warp point defence bases (outside of fighter equipped ones) and turn the battle into a fight largely involving AW, fighters and armed small craft (warp capable on the attackers side). The attacker gains entry into the system but if the defender has sufficient pods simply looses his ships to pod waves. If the defender has sufficient pods to destroy the entire assault fleet before they can breach the mine fields (and I don't mean just one ring but multiple rings)...they win. If the attacker can survive the defenders podstorm (possibly by simultaneous transit) they loose ships to the grinder but break in. At this point the battle goes into a either a deepspace battle or the defender retreats to the next WP to rinse and repeat. At some stage the attacker gains ambam launching pods and can pre-open lanes which complicates the issue for the defenders but the whole thing moves further and further from battles between ships to just who can pile up the most small crap, the attacker or the defender.
As far as I am concerned pods and lacs destroyed the herringswine books and the equivelent in starfire does the same thing.
So far as I can see the problem they are supposed to fix isn't an issue in a real game. Then they introduce exactly the same sort of stalemate (but now the defender no longer requires active effort and planning) that they were intended to alievate. In situations were you have a monopoly they are, if deployed in sufficient numbers, an I WIN button par excellance. If both sides have them their primary effect for the attacker is to force the enemy to conceed him the warp point...the threat is as good as the reality. For the defender they open up a lot of silly bugger things that they can be used for.
In our game one of my assault BB's takes 100 HS of constuction capacity and 2200 MCr (more or less) to build. For that I can build 92 SBMHAWK1 pods (and that only take 46 HS of construction capacity) or 58 SBMHAWK2 (with now only 29 HS capacity of a 20% increase in missiles). How do you balance one against the other?
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Paul, a problem that I have with your posts at this point is that you've expressed your opinion that you personally don't like automated weapons in general (as well as fighters and presumably gunboats), but you have yet to give a logical justification for why some form of automated weapons wouldn't exist.
I'm of the opinion that automated weapons are simply too logical a technology to not exist in the game. Oh, I suppose that one could say that WP transits permanently fry the systems of automated weapons. But it seems to me that that explanation wouldn't hold water because it'd also wipe out the idea of courier drones, not to mention possibly making it difficult to wonder why the electronics on starships don't also get permanently fried. Beyond that, such an explanation would only hold true for automated weapons intended for transiting WPs. It wouldn't hold true for AW's used in a defensive role at WP's, or for that matter, offensive AW's used in situations not involving WP transits.
So at this point, I think that it's incumbent upon you to try to give us a logical reason beyond personal preference for why automated weapons (and perhaps armed small craft as well) should not be able to exist in this space warfare environment.
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To address the ECM-3 point. ECM-3 includes a LOT more then just decoy mode. A DSB-?db wouldn’t have cloak, ECM-1, ECM-2, or ECCM. In fact, the decoy mode is also a “lite” version – as it lacks the ability to drop the deception mode and avoid missile salvo’s that way.
So I don’t see a problem with this (extremely) basic version of decoy mode turning up a TL or two before ECM-3.
Yes, I understand that ECM3 is a "swiss army knife of ECM goodies". But two of those goodies, ECM1 and ECM2 are known quantities. So it's only cloaking, deception, and ECCM that are new to the mix. And for what it's worth, deception and cloaking seem to me to be rather closely related, given that both represent a manipulation of the drive field to adjust what an enemy's sensors perceive. So if one wanted deception alone, would that really be of a lower TL than all of the goodies in ECM3? Is ECM3's TL11 justified by the 5 HS combination of those 5 goodies or is it justified by it being the TL when cloaking, deception, and ECCM become possible? I don't have a good answer for that question, though I somewhat tend to lean towards the latter explanation.
As to a ship-borne version turning up, that too make sense. Personally I would include cloak with the decoy mode (to avoid a massive step up between this “lite" ECM-3 and the full ECM-3).
I tend to agree with you on the idea that cloak and deception to hand in hand, though I'd probably suggest that they should be TL11 technologies. I have to admit that I'm not a big fan of the ECM3 swiss army knife approach. Oh, there are certain aspects to the swiss army knife that make some sense. Cloak and deception tend to for long range usage, while ECM1 is an all-combat ranges usage and ECM2 is a close combat range usage. The synergy between cloak/deception and jamming is quite good since it'd be highly unlikely to have any need to use cloak (or deception) and jamming at the same time. ECM1, OTOH, is probably worth installing separate from ECM3 simply so that you don't have to choose between jamming and ECM1 once you start closing the range. Also, I could see wishing that ECCM was split off into a separate unit, since it could be a technology that you'd want to use a lot in combat, but having it in a swiss army knife requires you to either choose which tool to use or mount more swiss army knives.
As to “threat response” development, I can see two reasons why DSB-?db would be developed – a fighter-led WP assault, or a SBMHAWK pod attack. So developing either fighters OR SBMHAWK pods would spur the development of DSB-?db…..
I think that you're missing one thing on fighters. Yes, if they're not mounting fXr, they're going to be rather myopic. However, they were launched from a carrier that could very well have Xr mounted and know which of those targets were real and which were decoys, though I suppose it may depend on exactly WHEN in the series of events in a carrier led assault that knowledge could become available.
That is, on turn 1, the carriers make transit and their Xr units (if they had them at all) are disrupted by transit effects. On turn 2, sensors are back up, but do they sense which targets are decoys or real soon enough to let their fighters know before the carriers do a U-turn back into the WP? If one was being rather nasty, one could say "no" they don't have enough time. However, the issue could be made moot, if the attacker included some Xr equipped warships in the assault wave or simply had some of the fighters carrying fXr. (Heck, who knows ... every carrier might have 1 of its squadrons be a recon squadron with internally mounted fXr.)
So, it seems to me that the value of decoy buoys against fighter led WP assaults is problematical and likely very temporary, since it's easy enough to counter without any new tech once you learn about the decoys.
Also, there are a number of options for "counter tech" against fighters. An upgraded version of point defense with enhanced anti-fighter performance, anti-fighter missiles, or fighters of your own are 3 obvious possibilities. On top of that, if you're getting sliced and diced by fighter lasers, one might argue that better armor is a legit anti-laser counter tech option. Counter-tech development is a real can of worms because one could probably argue that there might be legit counter tech options for a lot of different weapons in the game, and perhaps counters to various defenses as well. And what is a legit counter tech may be a highly subjective thing, with different people having different opinions. I'm not outright against the idea of counter-tech development, but I am wary of it and its implications.
Decoys buoys are probably much better against SBMHAWKs, since the pods aren't going to be able to tell which are decoys and which are real targets. OTOH, as Paul correctly pointed out (and was described in The Shiva Option), the way to deal with decoy buoys is to simply fire a small wave of missile pods that would spread its fire amongst all the potential targets, and let the real targets easily survive and the decoys get blasted. Of course, with enough time and money, the defender could emplace a LOT of decoy buoys and simply turn on another batch of them once the first batch was nuked. And once the attacker got smart to this, he could just fire wave after wave of small attacks to try to burn off the decoys before firing the real bombardment. Of course, then I suppose the question becomes who ended up spending more money on that little shell game, the attacker or the defender? (And a really smart attacker might even use only cheap nuke missiles to smoke out the decoys rather than ones with AM or AAM warheads, since the decoy will be just as dead from 1 nuke hit as it'd be from one AAM hit.)
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At higher tech levels their main effect is to force the defender to keep their ships back from the warp point or to operate in deception mode or cloak nearly continously. And that is allowed in the rules. Not to mention that even as early as in the theban war it was routine to do so. In ISW4 both sides operated extensively under cloak. As for the TFN not using pods defensively...*sigh* to put it mildly the TFN isn't populated by the sharpest spears in anyones armoury.
Yes, well, I won't disagree with you on this point. These are the same guys who didn't consider using Energy Beams and Cap Energy Beams against the Thebans and their composite armor. Sure, maybe in WP Assaults, it might be better to skip shields and got for the armor. But in deep space engagements, where the opening phase of any battle will involve fighter strikes and missile bombardments, unless you're using laser torpedoes (which didn't exist during the Theban War), you're probably going to have knocked down a lot of ships' shields before you get into beam range. And at that point, those E-beams would come in mighty handy.
The idiotic part of this is that the things pods would be good for "minesweeping" you don't get for a long time. I don't see why you can't strap an AMBAM to a SBMHAWK1 and tell it to blow up after moving through the warp point. Or for that matter why telling it to fire the missile at a specific point in space on the other side is so hard to do.
Paul, I agree with you on this 100% ... 1000%. In fact, I'm not entirely sure if I were developing SBMHAWKs whether my first choice wouldn't be an AMBAM version or even a CAM version over a longer range version. And for that matter, I don't particularly buy into the idea that one needs separate versions for different missiles, at least as long as the missiles in question were of the proper size for the pod. And for that matter, even if they weren't, would it be such an incredible technological leap to simply make a slightly bigger version of the missile pod for AMBAMs rather than SBM's? It just cannot be that tough!
Anyways, you're absolutely correct. Missile pods would be perfect for minesweeping, since you wouldn't have to either a) risk any minesweeping ships going into the fields to sweep mines that hard way, or b) have ships using their Wc launchers for minesweeping if they're coming under fire from enemy missile fire, or c) (the ultimate worst case) pre-AMBAM2, using XO-mounted AMBAMs and risking the total loss of a ship to a single laser buoy hit on an XO rack carrying an AMBAM. Option "C" is stupid. Option "A" is highly risky. And Option "B" can be a waste of perfectly good magazine space for AMBAM2's, as well as a mis-use of perfectly good warships, if a minesweeping missile pod existed.
Ultimately what makes the pods dangerous is that they fire in a single group. This makes no sense since they would all target the same ship...as they all have the same target program running. The only way to spread fire is to communicate their target choices to each other and then adjust. However, even saying they fire in 6 pod data groups doesn't change the outcome at the end it only makes it take more pods.
Actually, I think that there's a slight flaw in your argument above. One, I'd say that all pods in the same hex and with the same target type (i.e. SD, BB, BS4, etc.) might ... might target the same unit. But if your pods were split into different groups, whether by intent or by the random chance of an unsurveyed WP's grav stresses, I think that pods in different hexes, even with the same target type, might end up targeting different ships. Two, it would seem that a wise admiral (player) would target multiple hull types, if he knows that the defender uses multiple hull types. Not only that, but one might intentionally give ones' pods different movement orders to spread them out and force them to spread their fire.
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I think one problem of automated weapons is not their existance, but their cost efectiveness compared to buld times for ships. I can emplace automated weapons very quickly.
But if, to counter that, they would cost nearly as much as the ships they can destroy, they would be used way more selectively. Then their advantage would shrink to being emplaceable very fast, and the lack of maintenance cost.
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I think one problem of automated weapons is not their existance, but their cost effectiveness compared to buld times for ships. I can emplace automated weapons very quickly.
But if, to counter that, they would cost nearly as much as the ships they can destroy, they would be used way more selectively. Then their advantage would shrink to being emplaceable very fast, and the lack of maintenance cost.
Starslayer, I don't mean to be a wet blanket, but AW's are supposed to be a lot cheaper and quicker to build than things like ships. That's the reality of things, whether we're talking about AW's in starfire or their modern day equivalents. And complaining about it seems to fly in the face of reality.
I would suggest that the lack of maintenance cost is a better whole to close, since it's a lot more logical to me. Requiring AW's to pay maintenance would a) reduce the funds available to buy more AW's and b) make it more difficult and expensive to keep increasingly large active forces of AW's.
Another problem of AW's that doesn't get talked about enough is the ridiculous ease with which the CFN rules allow them to be moved from their shipyard to the destination system to be placed. Allowing the CFN to do this work avoids the entire calculus of requiring an empire to invest in minelayers, and in having enough of them to move one's mines, buoys, and/or missile pods. The CFN allows one to move nearly unlimited numbers of them. But if one requires actual military ships to do the work, one has to invest in their construction, maintenance, or paying to demothball them in time of war, and to have enough of them to move useful numbers of AW's. And even then, you're not likely to be able to move as many as one's CFN. I actually think that requiring military vessels be used to move AW's would go a long way in preventing ridiculously large and fast buildups of AW's in the game.
Another thing that could help on the SBMHAWK front would be to make all SBMHAWK pods single use only, so that one has to build new pods after every use. Doing this would make SBMHAWKs more costly, and it would make using them a bit slower since you'd have to build new ones after expending the old ones, since it would prevent you from increasing the size of your supply of pods.
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Paul, a problem that I have with your posts at this point is that you've expressed your opinion that you personally don't like automated weapons in general (as well as fighters and presumably gunboats), but you have yet to give a logical justification for why some form of automated weapons wouldn't exist.
I'm of the opinion that automated weapons are simply too logical a technology to not exist in the game. Oh, I suppose that one could say that WP transits permanently fry the systems of automated weapons. But it seems to me that that explanation wouldn't hold water because it'd also wipe out the idea of courier drones, not to mention possibly making it difficult to wonder why the electronics on starships don't also get permanently fried. Beyond that, such an explanation would only hold true for automated weapons intended for transiting WPs. It wouldn't hold true for AW's used in a defensive role at WP's, or for that matter, offensive AW's used in situations not involving WP transits.
So at this point, I think that it's incumbent upon you to try to give us a logical reason beyond personal preference for why automated weapons (and perhaps armed small craft as well) should not be able to exist in this space warfare environment.
Why is it possible to make a buoy that can fire a beam weapon even only once ever 30 min that does the damage of a 4 HS (plus one assumes the power generators in the ship itself) weapon system? Why can you do so with a primary beam and yet not for the needle beam or a capital beam? If you want a "IDEW-F" make a fort that looks like HsFQs and be done with it. All DSB are the same size at 25 csp (making them 1/25 of a HS) whether they are armed or not...that is utterly illogical. IDEW and IDEWa are the same size but perform completely differently.
Fighters and other armed small craft are not airplanes engaging ships in the water. And even so by 1943 shipboard AA defences made such attacks exceptionally expensive in terms of planes, in modern situations do not even think about closing on a battlegroup with your planes armed with iron bombs, they will be blown out of the sky. They are instead some form of armed speed boat (E-boat, PT-boat, etc) which the ships should be able to swat from space without much in the way of effort. There is no reason you can't shoot at fighters with beam weapons with the same to hit as starships. Point defence should be significantly more effective against them since they aren't that much more robust (any amount of damage will mission kill the fighter after all) and they are a larger target. Fighter have no advantages in space combat. Gunboats are just nuts. The point defence suite they mount is bigger than the gunboat itself and why can they datalink and ast2 and pn2 not?
As for mines, I created mines for my first starfire game when we were playing with maybe 2nd edition rules...and they had a pathetically low chance to hit the ship, but did a lot of damage if they did. Space is large afterall. The current version is even more effective then modern land minefields...where to be honest there are fairly efficient ways to breach them. I'm not sure about ship based mines but they are mainly designed to defend fixed harbor entrances or areas where the space is limited.
There is no logical justification for missile pods. They aren't big enough for fire control...yet the missiles aren't degraded in performance even though they recieve no guidance (they fly the whole way on onboard systems) if I fire a HAWK missile into my ships blind spot it is -5 to hit SBMHAWK missiles or not. The pods are hard to engage, they are difficult mine targets when the game says otherwise about fighters and pinnances. To carry 3 missiles in XO racks would require 15 HS of ship yet you can seemingly stick 3 in a pod the size of a pinnance. Why can't I stick missile pods to my hull or arm my pinnace with full sized missiles? The SBMHAWK2 is 10csp larger than the SBMHAWK1 and is both faster and carries twice the missiles...that is rather difficult to accept from an engineering point of view...especially since the SBMHAWK 3 is a further 10 csp larger but only carries an additional 2 missiles. The required holds per size rating of small craft is also foo-bar since pn2 and ast2 aren't larger than the original version they just need more space (for whatever reason) to re-arm them...but consider that a SBMHAWK is about the size of a pinnance yet instead of taking 2-3 H to move it is packed in several to the H. Also consider a crated fighter is 20 csp...really??? 1 H per fighter uncrated and 25 to the H crated...that is astounding packing. Apparently the amount of wasted space in a fighter is astronomical.
I have to admit that I came up with, in that first game, also a way to fire missiles from "frames" though these things were immobile and I think they fired like 3-5 missiles. They were one use throw away systems for defending warp points.
My main point is that that the AW aren't logical outcomes of developing technology...they are anomalies. They are in reality something cludged into the game system and then the players have to sort out the whole mess of confusing rules that apply to them but not ships. Also even though things are possible in buoys/AW/SC...the ship board technology doesn't gain anything from it. An F1 squadron at 0 range can do 18 points of damage with fL...1 HET can do 8...less than half....or why can't I put fL on a buoy? I would like a buoy that fires like one much better than one that does 3 pts of damage every half hour.
At the end of the day fighters exist because "all space games have to fighters", mines exist because they are used in navy's today, buoys and pods exist because someone thought they were neat ideas I would guess. Logic had nothing to do with any of it.
Also the fact is the build rate for buoys is the same whether I build a navigation buoy, a communications buoy, a armed buoy or a sensor buoy...that is illogical. The build rate of a SBMHAWK is also fixed at 0.5 HS per item. Odd a pinnace takes me 1 HS, an armed pinnance/pn2 is 1.5 HS. There is no logical rhyme or reasoning behind the build rules for AW. The result of the current rules is that you can build them in job lots as a standard TL9 SY will have a build rate of 28...that is 280 buoys or 56 sbmhawks or 28 minefield patterns. Even if you have only 3 SY's with your advancing or defending fleet you can do a good job keeping your forces in AW... Even SYM are pretty impressive: 90 buoys, 18 sbmhawks, or 9 patterns of mines at TL9.
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Paul, I hesitate to reply to the details in your post (though I will do so to some degree). The problem I have with your post here is that I was looking for logical justifications for why AW's shouldn't exist, and you seemed to based your arguments more on why the existing AW's were bad or questionable or whatever, which really wasn't what I was looking for. I agree that the existing 3E AW's are flawed in various ways, but that isn't a logical justification to my mind for why AW's could not exist IN SOME FORM and not necessarily the 3E form.
Why is it possible to make a buoy that can fire a beam weapon even only once ever 30 min that does the damage of a 4 HS (plus one assumes the power generators in the ship itself) weapon system? Why can you do so with a primary beam and yet not for the needle beam or a capital beam? If you want a "IDEW-F" make a fort that looks like HsFQs and be done with it. All DSB are the same size at 25 csp (making them 1/25 of a HS) whether they are armed or not...that is utterly illogical. IDEW and IDEWa are the same size but perform completely differently.
The problem with the needle beam regarding its use with beam buoys is that it is IMO an illogical weapon in 3E to begin with. Either you use an Needle Beam (couple with Xr)
against an unshielded target to target an individual system (or system type, I don't recall at this hour), or it acts like a 1 dp force beam. That seems rather lame to me. But for the purposes of buoys within existing 3E rules, it'd be a relatively useless weapon.
As for cap beams, a problem is that IDEW's only become able to generate sufficient power to fire a single standard sized beam once per interception turn at around TL11 (+/- 1 TL). Within that limitation (and within 3E's rules), one might argue that within a few TL's, one might see a DSB capable of mounting cap beam weapons, well at least the 6 HS ones. A problem though might be the sensor range of the buoy's own sensors, given that some cap beams have ranges greater than 20 tac hexes.
As for your thought about a small mini-base, compared to IDEW's it might be a better option insofar as those mini-bases would be able to fire every turn, rather than only every 60 turns. However, from a role playing PoV, those mini-bases would be deathtraps for personnel, unless one could come up with a way to run the mini-bases remotely (say, from large base or ship using a system somewhat like DCS). The point of armed buoys is sort of to be an unmanned mini-base so that you don't have to risk personnel on such inherently vulnerable units.
Regardless of these points, nothing here argues against the possibility of reasonably logical, well-designed armed buoys.
Fighters and other armed small craft are not airplanes engaging ships in the water. And even so by 1943 shipboard AA defences made such attacks exceptionally expensive in terms of planes, in modern situations do not even think about closing on a battlegroup with your planes armed with iron bombs, they will be blown out of the sky. They are instead some form of armed speed boat (E-boat, PT-boat, etc) which the ships should be able to swat from space without much in the way of effort. There is no reason you can't shoot at fighters with beam weapons with the same to hit as starships. Point defence should be significantly more effective against them since they aren't that much more robust (any amount of damage will mission kill the fighter after all) and they are a larger target. Fighter have no advantages in space combat. Gunboats are just nuts. The point defence suite they mount is bigger than the gunboat itself and why can they datalink and ast2 and pn2 not?
Sigh. I think that anyone who's ever played knows that Starfire's fighters are not like aircraft relative to wet navy vessels. It says so in the 3E rules, as I recall.
As for there being no reason why you can't shoot at fighters with beam weapons with the same to-hit as starships, I disagree. It's an underlying assumption of the game that you cannot do so, probably because fighters are simply considered too small and too nimble to be targeted thusly. You may not like the assumption but that's what it is.
As for GB's, I don't disagree with you. I don't like PD on GB's or on any smallcraft for that matter. I would suggest that PD mounted on those craft should probably be considered as a single laser cluster without any counter missiles, but should have its own special PD anti-missile and anti-fighter numbers to reflect that. Having said that, I still wouldn't like PD on any smallcraft. Furthermore, I agree with you about datalink and ast2 and pn2 ... except to say that I don't like that the ast2 and pn2 have those darned fXO racks either. I don't think that general purpose smallcraft should be armed at all. By making them armed, it then begs your entirely logical question as to why shouldn't ast2 and pn2 have datalink.
As for mines, I created mines for my first starfire game when we were playing with maybe 2nd edition rules...and they had a pathetically low chance to hit the ship, but did a lot of damage if they did. Space is large afterall. The current version is even more effective then modern land minefields...where to be honest there are fairly efficient ways to breach them. I'm not sure about ship based mines but they are mainly designed to defend fixed harbor entrances or areas where the space is limited.
Minefields were actually part of 1st edition's STARFIRE III: EMPIRES strategic rules, and were in roughly the same form as in 3E, IIRC.
Wet navy mines are designed to be used at choke points, like harbor entrances (or in Starfire, warp points).
There is no logical justification for missile pods. They aren't big enough for fire control...yet the missiles aren't degraded in performance even though they recieve no guidance (they fly the whole way on onboard systems) if I fire a HAWK missile into my ships blind spot it is -5 to hit SBMHAWK missiles or not. The pods are hard to engage, they are difficult mine targets when the game says otherwise about fighters and pinnaces. To carry 3 missiles in XO racks would require 15 HS of ship yet you can seemingly stick 3 in a pod the size of a pinnance. Why can't I stick missile pods to my hull or arm my pinnace with full sized missiles? The SBMHAWK2 is 10csp larger than the SBMHAWK1 and is both faster and carries twice the missiles...that is rather difficult to accept from an engineering point of view...especially since the SBMHAWK 3 is a further 10 csp larger but only carries an additional 2 missiles. The required holds per size rating of small craft is also foo-bar since pn2 and ast2 aren't larger than the original version they just need more space (for whatever reason) to re-arm them...but consider that a SBMHAWK is about the size of a pinnace yet instead of taking 2-3 H to move it is packed in several to the H. Also consider a crated fighter is 20 csp...really??? 1 H per fighter uncrated and 25 to the H crated...that is astounding packing. Apparently the amount of wasted space in a fighter is astronomical.
Again, Paul, you're only poking holes in why existing systems aren't well designed and consistent, not stepping back and arguing against why missile pods could not be a logical system even if well designed and properly sized, etc.
My main point is that that the AW aren't logical outcomes of developing technology...they are anomalies. They are in reality something cludged into the game system and then the players have to sort out the whole mess of confusing rules that apply to them but not ships. Also even though things are possible in buoys/AW/SC...the ship board technology doesn't gain anything from it. An F1 squadron at 0 range can do 18 points of damage with fL...1 HET can do 8...less than half....or why can't I put fL on a buoy? I would like a buoy that fires like one much better than one that does 3 pts of damage every half hour.
I disagree with your opening sentence. I'd say that they are logical concepts that were simply poorly designed for the game. I've seen nothing here to argue against AW's not being logical developments, nothing at all other than reasonable arguments about why the existing systems are badly designed within the game ... which is an entirely different kettle of fish, in my book.
At the end of the day fighters exist because "all space games have to fighters", mines exist because they are used in navy's today, buoys and pods exist because someone thought they were neat ideas I would guess. Logic had nothing to do with any of it.
Fighters exist because all space games have to have fighters? Oh the horror!!! That's hardly a logical argument against the concept not being justifiable. Come on, you can do better than that, can't you?
Also the fact is the build rate for buoys is the same whether I build a navigation buoy, a communications buoy, a armed buoy or a sensor buoy...that is illogical. The build rate of a SBMHAWK is also fixed at 0.5 HS per item. Odd a pinnace takes me 1 HS, an armed pinnance/pn2 is 1.5 HS. There is no logical rhyme or reasoning behind the build rules for AW. The result of the current rules is that you can build them in job lots as a standard TL9 SY will have a build rate of 28...that is 280 buoys or 56 sbmhawks or 28 minefield patterns. Even if you have only 3 SY's with your advancing or defending fleet you can do a good job keeping your forces in AW... Even SYM are pretty impressive: 90 buoys, 18 sbmhawks, or 9 patterns of mines at TL9.
Again, an argument about why existing AW's are badly designed, not an argument to justify why well designed AW's could not logically exist.
Seriously, Paul. You've gotta step up your game here. ;)
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Can I jump in here, even if I am still a Newbe at Starfire?
Fighters:
This is a space combat game. From a realistic point of view (I assume that is what is being asked for?), fighters in space simply don´t make sense - period.
A space-fighter is just a small ship. It is as nimble as its power to mass ratio allows
(yes, I know, SF assumes reactionless drives, but if we think that concept through to the end, nothing will ever hit anything, realy, because if I can move a hundered km in any direction in the blink of an eye, my ship will _never_ be where you are shooting your laser beam at once that beam reaches that point).
You could trade some mass (mostely defenses/weapons mass) for more engines and make the fighter more nimble, but then you would have a fighter with basicly no armament at all.
I guess, what I am trying to say is:
If a fighter devotes 50% of its mass to engines and I build a ship which devotes 50% of its mass to engines, those two units will behave exactely the same in the "nimble" departement.
Now, I am not arguing against fighters in SF, but, IMO, there is no logic/realism involved in space-fighters at all (or not for special rules for them, anyway).
IDEW/Pods:
I agree that there is no logical reason that IDEW/Pods should _not_ exist. There are, as Paul pointed out, logical reasons that IDEW/Pods should not exist the way they are _now_.
I´ll use the IDEW-F as an example.
Now, a regular F is size 4.
Given that the IDEW-F only has half range and damage, I think it reasonable, that it would be half that size too (damage being a function of range (or energy density/whatever) here, basicly).
As the power generater is a lot smaller too, lets reduce the size again by 50% (this is assuming that the power generator isn´t the major but neither a negligible part of the gun), leaving us at a weapon-size of 1 HS.
As is, an IDEW-F has a size of 1/20 HS, which, francly, is pretty stupid.
If that weapon is realy only 1/20 HS, I will build a ton of DD/BS-1 with 240 (space equivalent of 3 standard F) of those, put them close in to a WP and annihilate anything coming through. Who cares, that each gun can only fire every 30 minutes. Each DD/BS-1 will dish out an insane amount of damage, before every gun has fired. After that, I will gladly let the DD be blown away, as it has already killed 3 SDs.
Once we get to the Advanced IDEWs, it gets even more ridiculous (a weapon with the same performance (aside from ROF) as the regular one, but with only 1/80 the size? That´s what I call miniaturization :).
So, my suggestion would be:
Increase the size of IDEW/Pods - at least to 1 HS and increase their cost - not sure by how much, but looking at the real world, building something the size of a car that can handle one megawatt is not that tough and probably rather cheap. Building something the size of a cell phone, that can handle one megawatt, oh boy, that is gonna be expensive, if at all possible!
Hm, an easy mechanic could be:
Half size (i.e. 2 HS) --> double the cost
Quarter size (i.e. 1 HS) --> 4 times the cost and so on.
Basicly, giving you the choise of how large you want your IDEWs to be. If you are willing to pay a ridiculous amount of money, you can still get your 0.05 HS IDEW. It would be crazy, but you _could_ do it.
Ok, I admit, I haven´t realy thought this through. Perhaps a starting point.
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Can I jump in here, even if I am still a Newbe at Starfire?
Feel free! :D
Fighters:
This is a space combat game. From a realistic point of view (I assume that is what is being asked for?), fighters in space simply don´t make sense - period.
A space-fighter is just a small ship. It is as nimble as its power to mass ratio allows
(yes, I know, SF assumes reactionless drives, but if we think that concept through to the end, nothing will ever hit anything, really, because if I can move a hundred km in any direction in the blink of an eye, my ship will _never_ be where you are shooting your laser beam at once that beam reaches that point).
You could trade some mass (mostly defenses/weapons mass) for more engines and make the fighter more nimble, but then you would have a fighter with basically no armament at all.
I guess, what I am trying to say is:
If a fighter devotes 50% of its mass to engines and I build a ship which devotes 50% of its mass to engines, those two units will behave exactly the same in the "nimble" department.
Now, I am not arguing against fighters in SF, but, IMO, there is no logic/realism involved in space-fighters at all (or not for special rules for them, anyway).
Saying it doesn't make it so. ;)
IDEW/Pods:
I agree that there is no logical reason that IDEW/Pods should _not_ exist. There are, as Paul pointed out, logical reasons that IDEW/Pods should not exist the way they are _now_.
Except that wasn't the question that I asked of Paul. I asked him for a logical justification why they shouldn't exist at all, NOT what's wrong with the existing ones. (Not that I mind him detailing what he sees at their flaws.)
I´ll use the IDEW-F as an example.
Now, a regular F is size 4.
Given that the IDEW-F only has half range and damage, I think it reasonable, that it would be half that size too (damage being a function of range (or energy density/whatever) here, basically).
As the power generator is a lot smaller too, lets reduce the size again by 50% (this is assuming that the power generator isn´t the major but neither a negligible part of the gun), leaving us at a weapon-size of 1 HS.
As is, an IDEW-F has a size of 1/20 HS, which, frankly, is pretty stupid.
If that weapon is really only 1/20 HS, I will build a ton of DD/BS-1 with 240 (space equivalent of 3 standard F) of those, put them close in to a WP and annihilate anything coming through. Who cares, that each gun can only fire every 30 minutes. Each DD/BS-1 will dish out an insane amount of damage, before every gun has fired. After that, I will gladly let the DD be blown away, as it has already killed 3 SDs.
Once we get to the Advanced IDEWs, it gets even more ridiculous (a weapon with the same performance (aside from ROF) as the regular one, but with only 1/80 the size? That´s what I call miniaturization :).
You're forgetting one thing. 1st gen IDEW's only get to fire once per interception turn. Aside from any question of miniaturization, they don't have the powerplant available that a shipboard beam weapon does. They seem to have a big battery or capacitor, and a small powerplant that requires 1 Int Turn to recharge before the buoy can fire again... which pretty much makes IDEW's into something that can only be used once per battle.
Aside from that, I will readily agree that beam buoys do appear to be undersized. Of course, I'm not really keen on beam buoys that only get to fire once per battle either. Oh, explosive laser buoys are one thing. You expect them to be one shot deals. But it'd be nice if buoys that didn't explode to power their beam weapon could fire a bit more often. (In Ultra Starfire, beam buoys can fire every 5th turn, which seems reasonable enough.)
So, my suggestion would be:
Increase the size of IDEW/Pods - at least to 1 HS and increase their cost - not sure by how much, but looking at the real world, building something the size of a car that can handle one megawatt is not that tough and probably rather cheap. Building something the size of a cell phone, that can handle one megawatt, oh boy, that is gonna be expensive, if at all possible!
Hm, an easy mechanic could be:
Half size (i.e. 2 HS) --> double the cost
Quarter size (i.e. 1 HS) --> 4 times the cost and so on.
Basically, giving you the choice of how large you want your IDEWs to be. If you are willing to pay a ridiculous amount of money, you can still get your 0.05 HS IDEW. It would be crazy, but you _could_ do it.
Ok, I admit, I haven´t really thought this through. Perhaps a starting point.
Don't worry about it, hawkeye. I appreciate the input from another voice.
Another option might be to create smaller, shall I say, fighter scale beam weapons for beam buoys that could fire more often, but be significantly less powerful. Of course, a flip side to this is that fighter scale beam weapons for buoys would also be significantly shorter ranged than their full sized counterparts.
A key point here is how often do that beam buoy weapons fire.
Another might be what sort of range should one reasonably expect out of a beam buoy.
Anyways, that's all I have for now. Thanks for your input, Hawkeye! Feel free to do so again. :)
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Saying it doesn't make it so. ;)
I should have said
From a realistic point of view (I assume that is what is being asked for?), fighters in space as they are depicted in most movies and in many games (including SF) simply don´t make sense
[bold part added] i.e. anything a space fighter can do, a space ship can do too.
but, IMO, there is no logic/realism involved in space-fighters at all (or not for special rules for them, anyway).
The bold part, was what I was getting at. Space Fighters are fine, as long as they are treated as just realy small space ships. No special rules required.
You're forgetting one thing. 1st gen IDEW's only get to fire once per interception turn.
This
As the power generator is a lot smaller too, lets reduce the size again by 50% (this is assuming that the power generator isn´t the major but neither a negligible part of the gun), leaving us at a weapon-size of 1 HS.
and this
Who cares, that each gun can only fire every 30 minutes. Each DD/BS-1 will dish out an insane amount of damage, before every gun has fired. After that, I will gladly let the DD be blown away, as it has already killed 3 SDs.
was meant to adress that ;)
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Yikes! The embedded quotes got nuked!
I should have said
[bold part added] i.e. anything a space fighter can do, a space ship can do too.
The bold part, was what I was getting at. Space Fighters are fine, as long as they are treated as just really small space ships. No special rules required.
If that were the case, fighters would be all but useless. And given that fighters are intended to be a superior weapon in Starfire, forcing fighters to just be small starships and be targeted on the normal starship vs starship weapons table would make them useless, and thus is a non-starter.
This
and this
Who cares, that each gun can only fire every 30 minutes. Each DD/BS-1 will dish out an insane amount of damage, before every gun has fired. After that, I will gladly let the DD be blown away, as it has already killed 3 SDs.
was meant to address that ;)
Sorry for missing that.
The thing is that some of the underlying pseudo-science of 3E apparently assumes that drive fields attenuate beam weapons to some degree ... which is why fighter beam weapons cannot be mounted on starships. Their beams are designed to work through a much weaker fighter's DF, not a starship's DF. (Of course, it would be a fair question to ask why couldn't a fighter beam weapon work just as well on a buoy, which should also have a weak drive field. And I think that the logical answer would be that ftr beams probably should be able to work well enough on buoys since DF attenuation shouldn't be an issue in this case.) The same thing is true of fighter ordnance, like fR and fighter missiles. They're designed to function through a fighter's weaker DF rather than a starship's vastly stronger one.
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The thing is that some of the underlying pseudo-science of 3E apparently assumes that drive fields attenuate beam weapons to some degree ... which is why fighter beam weapons cannot be mounted on starships. Their beams are designed to work through a much weaker fighter's DF, not a starship's DF. (Of course, it would be a fair question to ask why couldn't a fighter beam weapon work just as well on a buoy, which should also have a weak drive field. And I think that the logical answer would be that ftr beams probably should be able to work well enough on buoys since DF attenuation shouldn't be an issue in this case.) The same thing is true of fighter ordnance, like fR and fighter missiles. They're designed to function through a fighter's weaker DF rather than a starship's vastly stronger one.
Um, if a starships drive field would prevent a fighter weapon from firing from the inside out, how come, then, that the fighter weapons can hurt a starship trough that drive field from the outside in?
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Um, if a starship's drive field would prevent a fighter weapon from firing from the inside out, how come, then, that the fighter weapons can hurt a starship through that drive field from the outside in?
LOL, that's a great question, hawkeye. I didn't write the pseudo-science stuff for 3rdR. I'll have to go back and read it more closely to see if that fine point is addressed. ...
OK, here's what the pseudo-science on this topic says.
Large spacecraft drive fields do affect weapons fire of all types, including beam weapons. It takes a very powerful weapon to overcome the resistance, and for beam weapons, the diffusing effect of their own drive field. A fighter or small craft can deliver damage similar to a large spacecraft weapon using much less energy, since its own active drive field produces less interference. Since drive fields are generated at a distance from the spacecraft, but this distance is usually much less than the distance to the target of the weapon, any interference with the weapon's path or focus while heading away from the firing unit will have more effect on the power of the weapon than such diffusion effects from striking the field just prior to hitting the target. Thus, any fighter weapon which would be mounted on a large spacecraft would fail to do effective damage.
The key point seems to be what's in bold face. Seems sort of lame, but in some many words, the interference seems to be worse going out than coming in.
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LOL, that's a great question, hawkeye. I didn't write the pseudo-science stuff for 3rdR. I'll have to go back and read it more closely to see if that fine point is addressed. ...
OK, here's what the pseudo-science on this topic says.
The key point seems to be what's in bold face. Seems sort of lame, but in some many words, the interference seems to be worse going out than coming in.
Why not just say the weapons are calibrated to the field's harmonics?
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Hawkeye (and everyone else), it took a while but it finally sunk in as to what I think was meant in the pseudo-science quote. So let's try this again.
Large spacecraft drive fields do affect weapons fire of all types, including beam weapons. It takes a very powerful weapon to overcome the resistance, and for beam weapons, the diffusing effect of their own drive field. A fighter or small craft can deliver damage similar to a large spacecraft weapon using much less energy, since its own active drive field produces less interference. Since drive fields are generated at a distance from the spacecraft, but this distance is usually much less than the distance to the target of the weapon, any interference with the weapon's path or focus while heading away from the firing unit will have more effect on the power of the weapon than such diffusion effects from striking the field just prior to hitting the target. Thus, any fighter weapon which would be mounted on a large spacecraft would fail to do effective damage.
When the quote refers to "interference" it should be read as "attenuate". If the drive field attenuates a beam on the way in, the distance left before the beam hits the target is minimal and the attenuation will also be minimal. But a beam that is attenuated on the way out (from the ship where the beam was fired), the distance from the firing unit to the target unit is vastly greater and the beam will have had all that distance to have its effects reduced by attenuation.
Thus, it is entirely logical that a less powerful beam weapon fired from a unit with a less powerful drive field attenuating the beam can still produce damage that's in a somewhat similar scale to a more powerful weapon fired from a unit with a starship grade drive field. By this same logic, if you could fire a starship grade beam weapon from a fighter, it might arguably be even more powerful and destructive than when fired from the starship because the fighter's far weaker DF would have caused less attenuation of the beam's effects. Furthermore, this is probably also why the beam weapons fired from buoys may be as destructive as starship grade weapons but at a far less size ... because the buoy's own tiny station-keeping drive causes far less attenuation than a starship's own DF.
All that gobbledy-gook said (which does now seem quite logical to me), I think that one could still question whether beam buoys and their beams are too small for their effect, or alternatively whether beam buoys should be limited to fighter-scale beams and keep the buoys at the same size. Of course, the initial beam buoys show up a few TL's before fighter weapons, so it'd probably be more logical to simply upscale the buoys to a size that made some more sense within the paradigm I described above.
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Look lets cut through the "organic byproducts normally found on the south side of a northward proceeding male bovine" can we.
Starfire's technology is magic. And should be treated as magic: there may be from time to time logical consistancies in how things are causaly related but often enough they just occur.
There is no logical reason for the existance of pods because I can't trace any engineering chain of development that lets me develop them at TL9 and not TL8. That they require a HAWK missile implies they have to be after TL8 but that is all. There is no justification that a pod fired missile is not given a -5 to hit exactly the same way as a missile fired into a blind spot is. I can not from any sort of engineering or laws of physics principle determine why a SBMHAWK1 has 3 missiles, a SBMHAWK2 has 6 and a SBMHAWK3 has 8, and so on.
The same is true of IDEW. How come I can do that and not minuratize my main guns on a ship? I don't know. Why can they fire every 30 min...what happens if I made their capacitor bank larger?
And so on. The rules in 3rdR grew out of a game that was never intended to be anything but scenarios you fought. The whole empire development thing is a cludge on top. 4th edition attempted with varying degrees of success to develop a basis but at the end of the day for that to work you need to establish the rules of reality and live with the consiquences and that is never done. Instead the effort was made to make the psuedobabble justify the existing rules...work that does not as the green rubber muppet might say.
I have no interest in discussions on the "logic" of magic since it is fundamentally illogical or else it would not be magic. The same is true of Starfire's technology. Strikefighters exist because they exist and that is because someone thought they were a neat idea based on the popularity of Star Wars. They have the rules they do because that makes them like air craft fighting ships because someone else thought that was a neat idea for the ISW3 scenarios. Pods, IDEW, MF and Gunboats exist for the same reasons and if the game was nothing more than fixed scenarios this would be completely acceptable since the force mix is given and I would assume balanced. But in starfire campaigns that external balancing doesn't exist and the internal balancing doesn't seem to be "optimized."
In 4th Edition a lot of effort has been made to fix some or most of these issues. It is why I inevitably suggest it to anyone who is a new player. It is still magic but it is more like Ars Magica's magic where there is a system involved rather than just random stuff happening when you wave your hands such as in D&D. The UTM was a start to do this with Starfire 3rdR and they did a good job on things like missile effects/costs or ECM or tractor beam rules but they didn't do anything to change the development costs and other things that affect campaign play in 3rdR.
The point isn't so much if the AW or armed SC are not logical...you can if you want them to exist, justify them. At the same time you can logically justify their lack of existance...but given there is no coherent laws to the starfire universe, how do you say which is correct definitively? It is like arguing about the whichness of why. I personally don't think strikefighters are sensible, and I have said so multiple times, but I still use them in Starfire (I'm a rigillian fan boy I guess). The SCN can't use fighters but they can use apn and gunboats and will do so. My personal opinion does not change how I deploy something in the game...that is based on how it effectiveness can be maximized. I do though from time to time get my panties in a knot about if this is at all good for the game. But that comes about because I think it is not, not because I don't like a system. I like IDEW and MF (at least when I am defending) but that doesn't mean I don't see there is a problem if they are too easy to build and deploy.
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The whole "the drive field affects weapon fire ..." thing is not supported by the game mechanics.
Beam weapons do fixed damage regardless of the state of the drivefield of the unit firing. A ship at full power does x damage at range y. A ship at station keeping mode does x damage at range y. A base does x damage at range y. A space station does x damage at range y. A pdc on a moon does x damage at range y. A ship with no drive field present does x damage at range y. IDEWa which have no drive field do x damage at range y. A drive field down ship firing on another drive field down ship/base/moon PDC doesn't change the situation any either. Nor is a fighter laser employed by a drive field down small craft any more powerful then that of a drive field up small craft. Fighters for some reason or another cannot drop their drivefields if memory serves. Gunboat equiped fL do exactly the same damage as fighter equiped fL even though the drivefield of the gunboat is considerably stronger than a fighter (based on detection range). Fighter generation does not affect the fL damage even though I would assume each generation of fighter has a stronger drive field (as the fighters are faster). Nor is pn2/apn fL fire any different than fighter fire even though the pinnances have also a stronger drive field (as it can protect the pinnance in a warp transit). A ship with tactical (J) engines does x damage at range y.
Summary: a beam weapon, with the execption of the fG, does the same damage at the same range against any eligable target regardless of the state of the two objects drive fields (firing object or target object).
I still don't see why I can not mount a fighter laser on a IDEW buoy. Then I have a system that fires every turn and does 1 pt of laser damage to a target inside of 4 hexes from the buoy.
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Look lets cut through the "organic byproducts normally found on the south side of a northward proceeding male bovine" can we.
Starfire's technology is magic. And should be treated as magic: there may be from time to time logical consistancies in how things are causaly related but often enough they just occur.
There is no logical reason for the existance of pods because I can't trace any engineering chain of development that lets me develop them at TL9 and not TL8. That they require a HAWK missile implies they have to be after TL8 but that is all. There is no justification that a pod fired missile is not given a -5 to hit exactly the same way as a missile fired into a blind spot is. I can not from any sort of engineering or laws of physics principle determine why a SBMHAWK1 has 3 missiles, a SBMHAWK2 has 6 and a SBMHAWK3 has 8, and so on.
As for missile pods, HAWK, and blindspots, I'd probably say that missile pods should probably have blind spots lust like starships and probably say that pods would only target units not in their blind spots, and leave it at that. The only reason I can imagine for not having blind spots on missile pods is that with so many pods, it may just be easier to ignore blindspots when firing hundreds of pods worth of missiles... which would obviously be a gameplay reason, not a science based reason.
As for the # of missiles per pod, I tend to agree with you. But in an environment where pods fire volleys of unlimited sizes, pod size doesn't really seem to be much of an issue on combat itself. Now, if pods were firing in "squadrons" of limited numbers of pods, then obviously pods with larger missile capacities would be of greater value, as would being able to link greater numbers of pods. The one limitation on pod capacity that does come to mind is how many missile tubes can one build into a missile pods while keeping the pod small enough to continue to be considered a "small unit".
The same is true of IDEW. How come I can do that and not miniaturize my main guns on a ship? I don't know.
I explained my this was the case in my previous post. You may not like the pseudo-science BS, but it's the operative PS-BS in the game and it does provide the reason within the game for why you can't use, for example, fighter beam packs in starship XO racks. (I see that you've addressed this in a follow-on post. I'll address your follow on points there.)
Why can they fire every 30 min...what happens if I made their capacitor bank larger?
I agree that in real life, this is a VERY legit question. But this is a p&p game, not a computer game, and we can't support a model where someone just comes along and wants to build a slightly larger buoy with a larger capacitor to get better beam buoy performance. We'd end up with many dozens, ir not hundreds, of variations of every weapon in sight when people wanted to tweak this or that detail about their favorite weapon. At some point, you have to say that enough's enough and rule that will only be limited variations of weapons to try to keep some sanity in the game.
And so on. The rules in 3rdR grew out of a game that was never intended to be anything but scenarios you fought.
This simply isn't true. Task Force Games published a set of strategic rules for 1st edition (STARFIRE III: EMPIRES), so clearly they intended for strategic rules to be a part of the game, long before DW wrote 3rd edition.
I have no interest in discussions on the "logic" of magic since it is fundamentally illogical or else it would not be magic. The same is true of Starfire's technology. Strikefighters exist because they exist and that is because someone thought they were a neat idea based on the popularity of Star Wars. They have the rules they do because that makes them like air craft fighting ships because someone else thought that was a neat idea for the ISW3 scenarios. Pods, IDEW, MF and Gunboats exist for the same reasons and if the game was nothing more than fixed scenarios this would be completely acceptable since the force mix is given and I would assume balanced. But in starfire campaigns that external balancing doesn't exist and the internal balancing doesn't seem to be "optimized."
Incorrect. I know exactly why GB's came to exist because I invented them. Not in their final form, but my idea for GB's and their reason for existing was the basis for the GB's that came to be written into the ISW4 rules. I created the idea for gunboats because I did not want ISW4 to be a repeat of the Theban War where only one side had fighters and the other had no fighters or a decent counter tech. And since we had decided that Bugs couldn't do fighters for physiological reasons, the idea for a somewhat larger, multi-being craft that could be a less than perfect counter to fighters came into being.
Furthermore, I'd say that to some degree, various technologies came into being because DW was "telling a story" within the game, and the various technologies were elements in that story, so to speak. But i'd also say that because if this, sometimes things appeared at TL's that seem more linked to where they fell in his "story" than they do with where they would more logically seem to belong relative to our understanding of the overall tech tables and so forth.
Missile pods might be an example of this, and there are probably others. Heck, if you were to ask why one couldn't develop a CAM pod at TL9, it would be a very fair question to me. Or for that matter, why are pods so missile specific? Why shouldn't any 3 csp missile be able to be launched from a missile pod that can fire 3 csp missiles?
In 4th Edition a lot of effort has been made to fix some or most of these issues. It is why I inevitably suggest it to anyone who is a new player. It is still magic but it is more like Ars Magica's magic where there is a system involved rather than just random stuff happening when you wave your hands such as in D&D. The UTM was a start to do this with Starfire 3rdR and they did a good job on things like missile effects/costs or ECM or tractor beam rules but they didn't do anything to change the development costs and other things that affect campaign play in 3rdR.
That's because the UTM is strictly a technical manual that doesn't go into other areas that would have been nice to see tweaked and improved. (I won't comment any further on this point as it's a rathole that's best avoided for reasons I think any veteran of the Starfire List would understand.)
The point isn't so much if the AW or armed SC are not logical...you can if you want them to exist, justify them. At the same time you can logically justify their lack of existence ... but given there is no coherent laws to the starfire universe, how do you say which is correct definitively?
I won't disagree with this statement, except to say that the EC18 pseudo-science article does provide for the most part the "laws" that govern 3E tech. You may not think that they're coherent. That's your choice. But they do exist.
It is like arguing about the whichness of why.
That's a cute turn of a phrase. Kudos. ;)
I personally don't think strikefighters are sensible, and I have said so multiple times, but I still use them in Starfire (I'm a rigillian fan boy I guess). The SCN can't use fighters but they can use apn and gunboats and will do so. My personal opinion does not change how I deploy something in the game...that is based on how it effectiveness can be maximized. I do though from time to time get my panties in a knot about if this is at all good for the game. But that comes about because I think it is not, not because I don't like a system. I like IDEW and MF (at least when I am defending) but that doesn't mean I don't see there is a problem if they are too easy to build and deploy.
Have you ever considered trying to create a set of house rules for something mirroring 4E-style AWs into your campaign to replace the 3E ones? Or does your use of SFA prevent you from doing this?
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The whole "the drive field affects weapon fire ..." thing is not supported by the game mechanics.
I didn't say that it was a perfect and thoroughly well thought out piece of pseudo-science. I just copied what was in the EC18 article. ;)
Beam weapons do fixed damage regardless of the state of the drivefield of the unit firing. A ship at full power does x damage at range y. A ship at station keeping mode does x damage at range y. A base does x damage at range y. A space station does x damage at range y. A pdc on a moon does x damage at range y. A ship with no drive field present does x damage at range y. IDEWa which have no drive field do x damage at range y. A drive field down ship firing on another drive field down ship/base/moon PDC doesn't change the situation any either. Nor is a fighter laser employed by a drive field down small craft any more powerful then that of a drive field up small craft. Fighters for some reason or another cannot drop their drivefields if memory serves. Gunboat equiped fL do exactly the same damage as fighter equiped fL even though the drivefield of the gunboat is considerably stronger than a fighter (based on detection range). Fighter generation does not affect the fL damage even though I would assume each generation of fighter has a stronger drive field (as the fighters are faster). Nor is pn2/apn fL fire any different than fighter fire even though the pinnances have also a stronger drive field (as it can protect the pinnance in a warp transit). A ship with tactical (J) engines does x damage at range y.
I will say that I think that the above paragraph sort of provides its own answer. The game cannot seriously attempt to provide different damage lines for the same weapon in multiple firing scenarios, because you'd end up with pages upon pages of damage lines.
So I suppose that I'd say that at some point, one has to accept that things are less than perfect and move on because it's a game, not a NASA simulation.
I still don't see why I can not mount a fighter laser on a IDEW buoy. Then I have a system that fires every turn and does 1 pt of laser damage to a target inside of 4 hexes from the buoy.
While conceptually, this might be possible...
a) I don't think that buoys would have the power generation capacity of a fighter that could allow them to fire every single turn (maybe every 5th turn?). After all, they only need station keeping drives.
And before you say, why can't you mount in better power generators, I've already answered that in the previous post. We can't allow seemingly infinite variations on weapons of the game would be thousands of pages long. Furthermore, there are game balance issues to consider and I'm not sure that allowing a beam buoy that could fire a fL or a fL2 once a turn every turn would be good for game balance.
b) Given that fL is a TL9 item, such a buoy could not exist until at least TL10. That said, it wouldn't be unfair to wonder why a laser that was functionally equivalent to fL, though not truly a "fL" module, couldn't be developed at an earlier TL strictly for beam buoy use. Of course, if this was done there would be someone asking why couldn't they mount that weapon on their starships, particularly their small starships. It's a never-ending circular complaint.
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You can't seriously be telling me that the EC18 BS explains something when the explaination fails to be accounted for in the rules of the game are you? This is exactly what I meant by there are consiquences and inevitably the consiquiences are ignored. If this than that...only the "than that" never is taken into account. Which makes the "if" rather more or less "because that is the way it is." So you are back to magic: it works that way because that is the way it works.
It was that starfire III set of campaign rules that I first played starfire under but the basic game was intended to be played with scenarios for which it is relatively balanced. As I recall we didn't even have courier drones and the SM had to introduce his own system (drone launcher or something like that) he was plenty miffed whent he official one came out. Up to 4thE the campaign rules were special sause added on top of the scenarios...4thE is written from the point of view of a player based campaign.
If you were the originator of the GB then how is it not what I said? You had a good idea (or bad one if you don't much like 5000 GB battles) and said ok lets give them: "speed this, and weapons that and endurance whatever and ..." It isn't like anyone seriously sat down and worked out if such a beast was possible under starfire engineering. The values of things are chosen for balance or other reasons not because technology limits you to something. They could have had speed 10 and an endurance of 5 days for example if that had been acceptable balance wise. Is there some reason you can't mount 2 CAMs on them rather than 4 AFHAWK or SMs? If you look at an aurora fighter/pinnance/small craft/parasite/battlerider they are designed exactly like a ship, they follow exactly the same rules as a ship, they are only constructed using fighter factories if they are small enough rather than shipyards. But beyond that one thing they follow the same rules as a ship. That is what doesn't happen in Starfire where all the AW are anomalies that show up out of the blue heaven with special rules to cover them.
Back on pods...I'm not talking about firing in the pods blindspot...I mean the pod provides no guidance and the missile is flying the whole distance with its terminal guidance package. When a ship does this with a HAWK missile (by firing into its blind spot) the missiles are -5 to hit...when pods do it there is no -5 to hit. Why? It can't be the pods provide guidance because it is clear that if 1 SBMHAWK pod is presented with 3 eligable targets it engages all three targets with a single missile...and the pod doesn't have Mx of any sort. Nor is there a rules about over target limit...so either a pod has Mx built in...and M3 costs more than the pod..or else is it isn't providing guidance, which I have to admit seems to be the way they are supposed to work since otherwise you don't need "HAWK" missiles. The rules suggest that the missiles are flying under their HAWK system, which gives a -5 to hit when not used in conjunction with shipboard fire control and updates; except when this is done by a pod.
If "x" then "y" would be my preference...not if "x" then "y" except in the case of "w" or "z" or "a" or "b" where use "v." In starfire w,z,a, or b is likely to be a small craft, or AW.
My point about pods has always been about game balance. I'm not serious about the fL on an IDEW...I'm using that to point out that if you want to say "logically" these things should exist you open yourself up to the fact that "logically" things should exist that perhaps never occured to you and that when you see them cause you to go "Oh MY GOD NO!!" My arguments have been largely that most of these AW end up being bad for game balance when the only thing limiting them is money to build them. I've been asking for ways to make them more "balanced" not arguing they should not exist. If I think they are sensible or not is a different matter but not what I am talking about...they exist in the game.
And yes because we use SFA we have some issues that show up due to the limitations of Steve's software. It isn't so easy to change stuff, though Starslayer can modify a fair number of things. And ultimately what I was asking was for peoples input for house rules to make the pods less devasting I WIN buttons when the RM unleashes them on the unsuspecting infidel. I thought this was abundently clear...
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Heh, well, Steve provided ways to add weapons and tech systems to the tables.. just woe to you if the next update came out. And seeing how TRP and LWH are disapearing from magazines again.. amunition and some other things don't fare quite as well.
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You can't seriously be telling me that the EC18 BS explains something when the explanation fails to be accounted for in the rules of the game are you? This is exactly what I meant by there are consequences and inevitably the consequences are ignored. If this than that...only the "than that" never is taken into account. Which makes the "if" rather more or less "because that is the way it is." So you are back to magic: it works that way because that is the way it works.
It was that starfire III set of campaign rules that I first played starfire under but the basic game was intended to be played with scenarios for which it is relatively balanced. As I recall we didn't even have courier drones and the SM had to introduce his own system (drone launcher or something like that) he was plenty miffed whent he official one came out. Up to 4thE the campaign rules were special sauce added on top of the scenarios...4thE is written from the point of view of a player based campaign.
I'd say that a very large portion of the new tech introduced by DW in 3E started out as house rules in his own campaigns. I have a rather fair amount of his old tech stuff from back then that he sent me that I also used in my own games.
Also, I don't know if you realize it or not, but both the 3E tactical and strategic rules were written as a single combined set of rules. They were sold as 2 separate products because Task Force Games wanted to do so to make more money selling them separately, rather than as a unified whole. But DW did write them as a single product.
If you were the originator of the GB then how is it not what I said? You had a good idea (or bad one if you don't much like 5000 GB battles) and said ok lets give them: "speed this, and weapons that and endurance whatever and ..." It isn't like anyone seriously sat down and worked out if such a beast was possible under starfire engineering. The values of things are chosen for balance or other reasons not because technology limits you to something. They could have had speed 10 and an endurance of 5 days for example if that had been acceptable balance wise. Is there some reason you can't mount 2 CAMs on them rather than 4 AFHAWK or SMs?
Because on GB's those inline racks cannot be combined for mounting items larger than a single inline rack's capacity. Simple as that. Those inline racks are like a tube. You can mount four 0.25 csp items or two 0.5 csp items or one 1 csp item. But you cannot combine the capacities of two inline racks together. That would be like wanting to fire a double sized (call it 2 csp) wet navy torpedo and wanting to be able to launch it from a 1 csp torpedo tube. It can't be done. A 1 csp torp tube can only fire ordnance that's 1 csp or smaller, and you can't combine the capacities of two tubes to fire something larger. And the same is true of inline GB racks.
(And yes, the idea of a 5,000 GB battle is appalling.)
As for the GB, honestly, I don't particularly like it in its official form. It's too too easy to hit for my taste, and I don't like that it mounts point defense. (I simply don't like PD on anything smaller than a starship.)
As for working out "if such a best was possibly under Starfire engineering", Starfire is a GAME, not a NASA simulation. I'm not interested in needing a physics degree to know if Force beams are possible, or having to be a rocket scientist to figure out of gunboats are possible.
Back on pods...I'm not talking about firing in the pods blindspot...I mean the pod provides no guidance and the missile is flying the whole distance with its terminal guidance package. When a ship does this with a HAWK missile (by firing into its blind spot) the missiles are -5 to hit...when pods do it there is no -5 to hit. Why? It can't be the pods provide guidance because it is clear that if 1 SBMHAWK pod is presented with 3 eligable targets it engages all three targets with a single missile...and the pod doesn't have Mx of any sort. Nor is there a rules about over target limit...so either a pod has Mx built in...and M3 costs more than the pod..or else is it isn't providing guidance, which I have to admit seems to be the way they are supposed to work since otherwise you don't need "HAWK" missiles. The rules suggest that the missiles are flying under their HAWK system, which gives a -5 to hit when not used in conjunction with shipboard fire control and updates; except when this is done by a pod.
Actually, IIRC, pods are not allowed to split their fire.
As for your line of reasoning regarding HAWK and a lack of guidance, I see where you're going, but missile pods' usefulness would drop considerably if all of their fire was at -5 to hit. Thus, there must be some other factor below the radar screen that we're not seeing (which could be nothing more than handwavium, of course).
If "x" then "y" would be my preference...not if "x" then "y" except in the case of "w" or "z" or "a" or "b" where use "v." In starfire w,z,a, or b is likely to be a small craft, or AW.
I agree with you ... to a degree. I don't like lots of little rinky-dink exceptions and tech systems that are so complex that one needs multiple pages of rules just to make them function as intended. The original "Dx" is one example. Its original "partial datalink" capability required a lot of rules to make it function. Cloaking in ECM3 is another example. Pages of rules just to cover what really shouldn't need to be such a complex system. Or SBM's with their silly loiter mode rules. Just give me a 2nd generation cap missile with an upgrade to a range of 40 hexes instead.
But I don't really see fighters as an exception. I'm not bothered by them requiring slightly different combat rules than starships, and if it takes a little bit of handwavium to get fighters into the game in a useful way, then so be it. It's a game, not a NASA simulation.
However, I will agree that AW's seem to be a mish-mash of messy rules are rife with your w,z,a,b exceptions. Of course, to some degree, there's little choice because AW's are just that ... automated. And the rules must cover how that automation works for targeting those weapons.
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Sorry for the delay in combing back to you.
If that were the case, fighters would be all but useless. And given that fighters are intended to be a superior weapon in Starfire, forcing fighters to just be small starships and be targeted on the normal starship vs starship weapons table would make them useless, and thus is a non-starter.
And that was the point, I was trying to make. Once you start to apply logic to the starfire rules, a lot of things would simply not make sense or be useless. But you (and me too, make no mistake about that) _want_ fighters to be there _and_ for them to be useful, so logic has to take a backseat.
When the quote refers to "interference" it should be read as "attenuate". If the drive field attenuates a beam on the way in, the distance left before the beam hits the target is minimal and the attenuation will also be minimal. But a beam that is attenuated on the way out (from the ship where the beam was fired), the distance from the firing unit to the target unit is vastly greater and the beam will have had all that distance to have its effects reduced by attenuation.
I am with Paul on this.
If this is the case (and you adress the bouy problem yourself in the part I cut from the quote), then not only buoys, but also bases, PDCs and ships with their drivefield down should make more damage.
And again, I am not arguing to introduce more rules to adress that. I don´t want a rule to cover every single eventuality. I have fun with 3rdR as is right now (even if some things don´t make a lot of sense) but it was you who asked for logical reasons for some things to not be possible.
I stand by what I said about buoys. It is simply unlogical that I can build a weapon for a buoy, that does regular damage, but is only 1/80 the size of that regular gun (not to mention that the buoy has also to carry some form of target aquisition gear, sensors and a frame to hold all that stuff.
If a force beam is 4 HS, then it is 4 HS, no matter where it is mounted.
I could see shaving off 1 HS for the fact that the buoy has a much smaller power plant and uses a large battery to power the gun, but not more (there is that _big_ battery and there still is a power plant, and of course, there still is the beam itself, not to mention the sensor/targeting gear).
If you ask me, how useful size-3 bouys would be, I can´t answer that, as I don´t have a lot of experience with them, but probably a lot less than now. The logistical effort to move hunderts of them around lets me shudder, as my standard FT-6 can now transport some 12 or 13 bouys per trip.
A similar thing with mines. A MF patters is supposed to be 50 individual mines. Those mines have a fusion warhead, an engine, that allows them to move 37.500km (half a tactical hex, assuming the MF is in the center of the hex), they also have station-keeping drives, short range sensors and a target aquisition/navigation system (otherwise, how can they hit a moving starship?)
Those 50 mines take up 0.2 Hull Spaces - realy? Why then is my regular Gun/Missile launcher, which is basicly the targeting system + launch rail for the missile, 3 HS in size? If the targeting system can be made so small, I´ll put them on my missiles and strap a couple thousand on the ouside of my small escorts - Macross missilestorm, here I come :)
Of course, that would totally break the game, so I don´t want that either ;)
The point is: We want some things to be there and be useful, therefore they are in the game in a way that makes them useful, logic has not a whole lot to do with that. We might come up with arguments, why things are as they are, but that only comes in _after_ those things are already there. If you want stuff to stick to logic, it would have to be the other way around :)
And I say it again: Game balance beats laws of physics - as long as it is not too blatant, of course.
Because on GB's those inline racks cannot be combined for mounting items larger than a single inline rack's capacity. Simple as that. Those inline racks are like a tube. You can mount four 0.25 csp items or two 0.5 csp items or one 1 csp item. But you cannot combine the capacities of two inline racks together. That would be like wanting to fire a double sized (call it 2 csp) wet navy torpedo and wanting to be able to launch it from a 1 csp torpedo tube. It can't be done. A 1 csp torp tube can only fire ordnance that's 1 csp or smaller, and you can't combine the capacities of two tubes to fire something larger. And the same is true of inline GB racks.
Ok, then _my_ race will build their gunboats with a single, size-4 rack (basicly, a huge tube and the gunboat is build around it, similar to how the A-10 is build around the GAU-8), giving me all the flexibility I can ever want ;)
Of course, if we follow that wet-navy example, launching below-size ordnance goes right out the window, because I am pretty sure, you can´t launch a 53cm torp through a japanese long-lance 61cm tube ;)
As for your line of reasoning regarding HAWK and a lack of guidance, I see where you're going, but missile pods' usefulness would drop considerably if all of their fire was at -5 to hit. Thus, there must be some other factor below the radar screen that we're not seeing (which could be nothing more than handwavium, of course).
And there is your reason why pods, for logical reasons, shouldn´t exist :) because "there must be some other factor" is just hadwaving "it is as it is because that is how it is"
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You are correct pods are not allowed to split their fire. My mistake it has been a while since I looked at the rules.
I would have assumed that the ISF and 3rd started as a single rule set given the numbering of things. I didn't know that since the first rules I owned (rather than borrowed) were 3rdR and ISF.
As far as tech goes I developed a great deal for that campaign some which is oddly familier to me. The 2xdamage from anti-matter missiles...at the time I felt pretty jipped by only getting 2x damage. I also had an anti-proton beam that did 64-32-16-8-4-2-1 damage. Plus anti-matter power generators for more powerful shields and weapons. Then I ripped off black globe generators and shields that were impervious to all attacks (you could knock them down but no bypass them). The problem with any of this stuff in Starfire is that you don't have a clue why something is what it is and so how do you extrapolate?
I just sent Starslayer my first thought on the F2, F3 and E2 and E3 (advanced 4 HS beam weapons). But how do you determine what is an acceptable range, damage, and cost increase? You can't because there is no logical relationship between these things. 4thE took this to the extreme and produces what I tend to think of as bland but nourishing gruel as I believe everything got spreadsheeted to death over damage per HS per MCr.
As for GB inline racks...I have no idea what they are. They are described as some odd sort of organized Xo racks and I can't see why I can't stick a CAM on them. It would certainly be more useful then 4 SM for anti-shipping use. Against Dz or better point defence you need a 5000 GB strike to accomplish anything as you only get leakers through since 16 missiles will not overwhelm a datagroup composed of a ship larger than a FG. Zi/Dz nerfs big time fighter missile and command datalink would render it impossible to engage with SM from GBs. Ripple firing fMs assuming that you can then launch 64 fM's per data group...but I don't think ripple fire works that way for fM...if it did then I'd say at least then you have a chance to hit something. But sending in fighters with fRAM is going to cost you a lot of fighters sending in GBs for fR attacks...I'd doubt you will get much back from them unless you snow the defender under in GBs...so we are back to 5000 GB strikes.
As far as hitting things goes it is no more difficult to hit a fighter than a starship. The early fighters are not faster than CTs fully loaded. The GB is only slightly faster than some fighters. Hitting anything at 0.25 LS requires highly accurate pointing systems and missiles could care less as they are standoff weapons anyway. But GB are considerably easier to hit than fighters under the current rules. The point defence is pretty non-sensical but it helps to avoid them dieing in job lots to CM fire. The pinance and assault shuttle get the "equivalent" of a point defence to represent their onboard weapons while the GB gets a real Dxz and that is a bit hard to accept. I've used PGBs and they died fairly brutally and I rather doubt the more advanced ones do any better. But given they are about the size of an EX I don't see why this should not be...killing swarms of EX is also not that hard.
I don't find swarm weapons of any nature make enjoyable battles, personal taste.
As for the -5 to hit reducing the effectiveness of pods...yeah they would would they not. Strange but true it is pretty damned ineffective to be firing into your blindspot with your Wa...it makes "-HAWK" a bit of a joke (As in "Homing All the Way Killer" the last word should be Klutz or Komik or Katastrophe or anything basically but a word that implies the missile will hit something) and I'm thankful that it doesn't add to the price of missiles. I'm not even sure it is worth 5000 MCr to develop it even. 50 MCr maybe but not more. It is an utterly worthless technology so far as I can see...and AFMHAWK is even more of an absurd joke... -5 off the fighter to kill chart generally leaves you a 0 or less to hit.
As far as a simulation or needing a degree to play the game. You most certainly don't. But if you are developing the game you generate more consistant rules if first you work out the laws of the universe and then apply them...like say, for example, good SF writers do...CJ Cherryh had a nice article on how she did tech development for her Alliance history books.
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You are correct pods are not allowed to split their fire. My mistake it has been a while since I looked at the rules.
Don't worry about it, Paul. I had the benefit of having read the SBMHAWK rules a couple of days ago and remembering the one bit of trivia. ;)
As far as tech goes I developed a great deal for that campaign some which is oddly familiar to me. The 2xdamage from anti-matter missiles...at the time I felt pretty jipped by only getting 2x damage. I also had an anti-proton beam that did 64-32-16-8-4-2-1 damage. Plus anti-matter power generators for more powerful shields and weapons. Then I ripped off black globe generators and shields that were impervious to all attacks (you could knock them down but no bypass them). The problem with any of this stuff in Starfire is that you don't have a clue why something is what it is and so how do you extrapolate?
I know what you mean. I'm very, very hesitant to introduce anything that sounds too cheesy (not to mention too imbalancing).
I'm a bit wary of using any sort of anti-matter generators, because it seems like it would be like removing CRAM from magazines... You'd have a system in your ship which could destroy the entire ship if hit. Now, on one hand, if the system was a single central generator that you could stuff deep in the bowels of your ship and wasn'tt like to get hit until the ship was all but destroyed anyways, well that might not be too bad. But Starfire has assumed for quite some time (at least back to 3rdR) that all weapons, etc. mounted their own local power generators. So, if this remained true, and each weapon was upgraded to include a local anti-matter generator, one could argue that any hit on a beam weapon might blow up the ship, and that seems rather unacceptable. So either one assumes that any form of anti-matter generator must be a central system deep within the ship, or that no one develops AM generators because they feel that they're too great a risk on a starship. Of course, one could also rationally argue that there's always someone willing to take that risk, at least as long as the likelihood of a catastrophic failure is reasonably low. Frankly, it's an issue that I think that I'd prefer to sidestep, and find other rationales for improved beam performance, such as better fusion power plants, better lensing for focusing the beams, more powerful beam emitters, etc.
I just sent Starslayer my first thought on the F2, F3 and E2 and E3 (advanced 4 HS beam weapons). But how do you determine what is an acceptable range, damage, and cost increase? You can't because there is no logical relationship between these things. 4thE took this to the extreme and produces what I tend to think of as bland but nourishing gruel as I believe everything got spreadsheeted to death over damage per HS per MCr.
Yes, Marvin did put all that stuff in spreadsheets, and I think that it's a good starting point and the spreadsheets are a good tool. But I agree with you that the 4E weapons are rather bland, and that's something that I want to avoid, if at all possible. I don't particularly like how 3E beam weapons are so cookie-cutter in size, with standard beams being 4 HS and cap beams being 6 HS. This started shifting some with the 5 HS 2nd Gen HET Laser.
I should point out that one shouldn't fiddle with the sizes of the beam weapons just because it looks neat to have beams of varying sizes. Adjusting their sizes is a useful way to promote some semblance of balance. That said, I certainly don't intend on going as far as in 4E where you see weapons fractional sizes. That is going too far, IMO.
As for GB inline racks...I have no idea what they are. They are described as some odd sort of organized Xo racks and I can't see why I can't stick a CAM on them. It would certainly be more useful then 4 SM for anti-shipping use. Against Dz or better point defence you need a 5000 GB strike to accomplish anything as you only get leakers through since 16 missiles will not overwhelm a datagroup composed of a ship larger than a FG. Zi/Dz nerfs big time fighter missile and command datalink would render it impossible to engage with SM from GBs. Ripple firing fMs assuming that you can then launch 64 fM's per data group...but I don't think ripple fire works that way for fM...if it did then I'd say at least then you have a chance to hit something. But sending in fighters with fRAM is going to cost you a lot of fighters sending in GBs for fR attacks...I'd doubt you will get much back from them unless you snow the defender under in GBs...so we are back to 5000 GB strikes.
I don't see why you don't understand the description I gave you for inline racks. It's not that complicated. BUT!!! ... having said that, I agree with you 100% that a pair of CAM's would be much more useful than 4 SM's. Fighters and GBs simply cannot fire large enough volleys once datalinked point defenses become available, particularly after command datalink is available. 6 ships worth of point defense is a daunting target even for command DG's of capital ships. Fighters and GB's don't stand a chance with fM's, and are currently left with the only option of either ramming a FRAM assault down the enemy's throat or maybe trying to knife fight with fP or fL2 at around 3-4 hexes.
I think that giving fighters and GB's an option for a CAM-like "torpedo" like weapon would give them a better hope of survival. FYI, I think of fR's as more like bombs that WW2 dive bombers would use rather than torpedoes. And in an environment where ships are defended by AFMs, Dx(z) and Z2, FRAM strikes are pretty much suicidal. Fighters really ought to have a better (and less suicidal) ordnance option than fR's.
As far as hitting things goes it is no more difficult to hit a fighter than a starship. The early fighters are not faster than CTs fully loaded. The GB is only slightly faster than some fighters. Hitting anything at 0.25 LS requires highly accurate pointing systems and missiles could care less as they are standoff weapons anyway. But GB are considerably easier to hit than fighters under the current rules. The point defence is pretty non-sensical but it helps to avoid them dieing in job lots to CM fire. The pinance and assault shuttle get the "equivalent" of a point defence to represent their onboard weapons while the GB gets a real Dxz and that is a bit hard to accept. I've used PGBs and they died fairly brutally and I rather doubt the more advanced ones do any better. But given they are about the size of an EX I don't see why this should not be...killing swarms of EX is also not that hard.
EX's don't exist in my mind. There's never been even the slightest chance that they'd exist in Cosmic.
Also, there will be no point defense on any pn, ast, or GB in Cosmic. If pn's and ast's need some sort of "weapon" to represent their ability to support ground troops, I think that it'd be best that they either have some innate ground attack value, as well as the ability to drop "bombs". (More can probably be done on that front.) But they won't have any "weapon' that lets them engage in space based combat.
As for GB's, I don't like how easy they are to hit. Oh, I suppose that one might argue that GB's are some sort of seriously inferior cobbled together sort of technology (from the historical PoV, rather than our PoV). But at this point I can't say what I'll do to address this, because I need to deal with fighters first, then adjust GB's accordingly.
I don't find swarm weapons of any nature make enjoyable battles, personal taste.
I certainly don't like swarms of starships, and have always intended on tweaking the rules to favor larger ships, such as having a single per-HS cost for warships and doing away with the 4 HS rebate in the construction rules.
Also, this is a big reason why I've always been very hesitant to include rules for allowing multiple ships to safely transit a WP if their total HS size was below the HS capacity of the WP, because it only serves to incentivize the use of swarms in WP assaults.
As for the -5 to hit reducing the effectiveness of pods...yeah they would, would they not. Strange but true it is pretty damned ineffective to be firing into your blindspot with your Wa...it makes "-HAWK" a bit of a joke (As in "Homing All the Way Killer" the last word should be Klutz or Komik or Katastrophe or anything basically but a word that implies the missile will hit something) and I'm thankful that it doesn't add to the price of missiles. I'm not even sure it is worth 5000 MCr to develop it even. 50 MCr maybe but not more. It is an utterly worthless technology so far as I can see...and AFMHAWK is even more of an absurd joke... -5 off the fighter to kill chart generally leaves you a 0 or less to hit.
Actually, I thought that part of HAWK technology was that if a member of your datagroup could see the target your blindspot (i.e. wasn't in its blindspot), you took no penalty. Essentially, handing off the targeting of ships in one's own BS to a datagroup member that could see the target cleanly. Of course, the only way to be able to hand off targeting in this way would be to keep the ships in one's datagroups spread out, which might be nice for anti-ESF, but a pain for people who prefer to keep a DG's ships in the same hex for simpler maneuvering.
I suppose that a simplification of the HAWK tech rule would be to do away with the blind fire penalty, and only keep the hand-off rule. Or scrap HAWK tech completely, which wouldn't really be that great a loss...
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Sorry for the delay in coming back to you.
No prob. I'm just glad to have more people being willing to comment.
And that was the point, I was trying to make. Once you start to apply logic to the starfire rules, a lot of things would simply not make sense or be useless. But you (and me too, make no mistake about that) _want_ fighters to be there _and_ for them to be useful, so logic has to take a backseat.
I agree that trying to take logic too far on the Starfire rules exposes flaws. OTOH, I don't think that it's a good thing to use that as an excuse to ignore logic entire in this regard.
I want fighters, though I do intend on tweaking them to try to address a few of their less than perfectly logical points. Believe it or not, I enjoy these discussions. I don't mind having people point out flaws in some of the tech systems or rules, as long as we can all be agreeable in our discussion. Knowing where some flaws are, even if I'm aware of some of them, is a good starting point for figuring out how to tweak things to try to fix or minimize those flaws.
I am with Paul on this.
If this is the case (and you address the buoy problem yourself in the part I cut from the quote), then not only buoys, but also bases, PDCs and ships with their drive field down should make more damage. And again, I am not arguing to introduce more rules to address that. I don´t want a rule to cover every single eventuality. I have fun with 3rdR as is right now (even if some things don´t make a lot of sense) but it was you who asked for logical reasons for some things to not be possible.
No problem, hawkeye. No problem at all. And I was glad to have Paul point out that glaring hole in the pseudo-science. I'm trying to think of a way to deal with that hole, whether by tweaking the pseudo-science, or tweaking fighter beams, etc.
I stand by what I said about buoys. It is simply unlogical that I can build a weapon for a buoy, that does regular damage, but is only 1/80 the size of that regular gun (not to mention that the buoy has also to carry some form of target acquisition gear, sensors and a frame to hold all that stuff.
If a force beam is 4 HS, then it is 4 HS, no matter where it is mounted.
I could see shaving off 1 HS for the fact that the buoy has a much smaller power plant and uses a large battery to power the gun, but not more (there is that _big_ battery and there still is a power plant, and of course, there still is the beam itself, not to mention the sensor/targeting gear).
If you ask me, how useful size-3 bouys would be, I can´t answer that, as I don´t have a lot of experience with them, but probably a lot less than now. The logistical effort to move hundreds of them around lets me shudder, as my standard FT-6 can now transport some 12 or 13 buoys per trip.
It's comments like this, hawk, that may me wonder if buoys should use beams that are scaled to fighter size, power, and range, rather than starship size, power and range. That way, smaller buoys can feel more rational.
The point is: We want some things to be there and be useful, therefore they are in the game in a way that makes them useful, logic has not a whole lot to do with that. We might come up with arguments, why things are as they are, but that only comes in _after_ those things are already there. If you want stuff to stick to logic, it would have to be the other way around :)
I think that logic here is useful, but it shouldn't be the "end all and be all".
And I say it again: Game balance beats laws of physics - as long as it is not too blatant, of course.
Ok, then _my_ race will build their gunboats with a single, size-4 rack (basicly, a huge tube and the gunboat is build around it, similar to how the A-10 is build around the GAU-8), giving me all the flexibility I can ever want ;)
Cute... a 16 csp mega-inline rack! Seriously though, I could see someone in the canonical history wondering why they can't replace the 4 inline racks on a GB with 2 larger racks capable of launching 2 csp ordnance such as a CM or a CAM2. This then gets into the question of what's really needed to launch missiles in the Starfire universe. Is a launcher just a mass driver that kicks the missile out of the ship and beyond the DF's threshold before the missile's drive kicks in ... in which case one might argue that if said missile was floating in space, it might be able to fire up its drive and perform normally. In which case, one might argue that you could put a CM or a CAM2 in a 2 csp GB inline rack and use it normally... except for the on question as to the details of how the missile launches from the GB. Not sure if GB's have the internal equivalent of fXr or not, which would be an issue for CM's, but CAM2's would make really great weapons for GB's.... though in their present, easy to hit, form, it'd still be difficult to get CAM's into range. But the thought of GB-launched CM's would be a nasty one ... except for one thing now that I think of it. A 4 ship squadron of GB's could only fire 8 CM's, and most targets at their TL would probably not have much problem with a volley of 8 CM's. OTOH, 8 CAM2's (with AAM warheads, of course) that could not be intercepted (and with AAM warheads) would be great ... for any GB's that survived to get into range to fire them.
Of course, if we follow that wet-navy example, launching below-size ordnance goes right out the window, because I am pretty sure, you can´t launch a 53cm torp through a japanese long-lance 61cm tube ;)
Well, I see no reason why one couldn't create an adapter that would let you put that 53 cm torp in the 61 cm tube. Of course, I don't know that engineering that goes into torps and their tubes, but I'd assume that those who do are smart to figure something out.
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Well one problem with the "generator is in the weapon HS" is that it begs the question why is a BB hull more expensive than a CT hull? Carrier hull or freighter hull cost difference seem to be based on some sort of systems being available. But it is hard to understand why a BB hull cost is different than a bases and different than a CTs if everything is included in the system.
As for anti-matter destroying the ship...*sighs* that is like fusion plants blowing up. The amount of anti-matter you are talking about undergoing a fizzel would release its energy slowly and not cause the ship to explode. Fundamentally I was thinking about this...there exists a whole crap load of stupid rules about P and N dealing with why ships can't be destroyed during WP transits with AM weapons. The simplest solution is to not allow either system to destroy a Mg. Fundamentally punching a small hole (which is what both systems do) will not 99% of the time do anything (any more than punching a hole in a hold does so). It is certainly a lot simplier, not to mention "logically sensable" then all the backflips and cludges that are done to stop something happening by employing handwavum arguments most of which seem to fail the giggle test.
But carrying AM in XO racks may have been something you want to avoid in starfire 2nd edition...by 3rdR I don't see why there needs to be a big deal about it. It might even make AMBAM worthwhile if that was removed. The game changes utterly once you include Ai, S0, Dz and Zi into the mix. The changes to Dx and the inclusion of Dz make command datalink a not so exciting system. That battle in Justin between the TFN BC battlegroups and a datagroup of SDs would never have gone the way it is written. The SDs had 5 Dx on each SD...that is 15 Dx or 75 shots with the ability to triple up. At long range the BCs could fire no more than 29 CMs or SBMs. The datagroup of SDs could eventually return fire with 30 CMs (if not more) against I believe 18 Dxz on the BC BGs. Dx used to be limited compared to Dxz but the reality is not with the 3rdR point defence rules. If they were mounting Zi then those SDs probably would have hammered the BCs into the ground. The Dz and Dx reduce substantially the advantage of the Command Datagroup. It is further reduced by its over all huge size and the fact that the command ship sticks out like a sore thumb and why it would not be instantly targeted is beyond me.
The biggest difference those 4 systems make is in fighter or gunboat combat. The fM basically gets the nerf bat big time. Comparatively the TFN from the Stars at War is a TL4 race in modern Starfire, in so far as fighter combat is concerned.
I think that the ground attack value of both pinnances and assault shuttles should rise with each tech level, and I really don't understand why it would be that useful for missile intercepts. I guess to protect assault shuttles from AFM launched by PDCs. Though I doubt most players bother with planetary assaults so I can't see that it matters. I would rather just give them the equivelent of a fG (turret mounted) for dog fighting and leave it at that.
The -HAWK does allow you to hand off...at a -1 to hit but requires you be manuevuering your ships indepenantly (which may occur) but in general I would say most people use one counter to represent all ships in a datagroup. From time to time the ability to use targeting data to fire hands off mode may be useful but it is hardly enough to get excited about. Even a -1 to hit on AFM leaves you with lots of fire and little accomplished...though Kurt always reports what seem to me to be astounding rates of kills with both AFM as well as with AFMc. But I don't know how many launchers he is firing exactly.
As far as fighters go the fM was a good weapon until the 4 systems above came along. Now so long as any ship in the data group can see you the Dz covers each other. Zi makes it so that you can't even knock a ship out of the defence and S0 and Ai push the number of hits you need up signficantly. It was in the past possible to just do enough damage to knock ships out of link then come back and finish the job with launches in the blindspot...now you have to kill that ship that attack run. This makes fRAM attacks nearly a requirement which means that you contionously attrit your fighter force. Overall the effectiveness of fighters takes a nose dive. fL is a lone light in the darkness but it vanishes once Al shows up. Bascially you have to use your fighters solely as battleline support units rather than as a solo strike (excepting when you significantly outnumber the enemy force). Factor in cost and they are not so much of a revolution. GBs are even worse off since they don't have the special to hit chart that gimps fire against fighters. They attrit even harder and it is nearly impossible to have a mobile force with enough of them to matter (you have to be using them from ground bases).
I'm fairly sure no one realy wanted to butcher the command datalink or fighters but un-intended or not they wielded the nerf bat but good for both those systems.
As far as the F2, F3, E2 and E3 go they are 4 HS systems I am just updating them with damage/range. It is just a pain to figure out what the drop off should look like but what I proposed to Starslayer was:
TL11:
F2 (4HS/50 MCr) 6-5-4-4-3-3-3-2-2-2-2-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 (Rmax = 18)
E2 (4HS/65 MCr) 6-5-4-4-3-3-3-2-2-2-2-2-1-1 (Rmax = 13)
TL14:
F3 (4HS/60 MCr) 8-7-6-6-5-5-4-4-3-3-3-2-2-2-2-1-1-1-1-1-1 (Rmax = 20)
E3 (4HS/95 MCr) 8-7-6-5-5-4-4-3-3-3-3-2-2-2-2-2-1 (Rmax = 16)
It might be better to do F3 7-7-6-6-5...or 7-6-6-6-5... due to concerns over out performing the Fc3 at point blank range but I'm not sure 1 pt more matters given the 10 hexs further range it allows. It looks more or less ok so far as I can see. The E series is 6 hexs shorter ranged, while the F series is 7 or 10 hexes shorter ranged then the comparable capital weapon. Over most of the range band (except at very short range where the damage is comparable) the 2xFcx or 2xEcx outperformes significantly the 3xFx or 3xEx...so I feel I am not going overboard. This allows in our game DD, CL and CA to remain competative as they can't mount capital weapons.
I would be happy if EX were limited to being J'Rill specific attack ships but EX with Pg are popular and they infest most exploration forces in games. I hate the EX with a passion and I have exactly 4 of them...couriers but I am the exception in this from what I can tell.
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Well one problem with the "generator is in the weapon HS" is that it begs the question why is a BB hull more expensive than a CT hull? Carrier hull or freighter hull cost difference seem to be based on some sort of systems being available. But it is hard to understand why a BB hull cost is different than a bases and different than a CTs if everything is included in the system.
Not so worry about BB hulls costing more than CT hulls. It's long been my intention to make warship hull types have the same per-HS hull cost regardless of size.
As for anti-matter destroying the ship...*sighs* that is like fusion plants blowing up. The amount of anti-matter you are talking about undergoing a fizzle would release its energy slowly and not cause the ship to explode. Fundamentally I was thinking about this...there exists a whole crap load of stupid rules about P and N dealing with why ships can't be destroyed during WP transits with AM weapons. The simplest solution is to not allow either system to destroy a Mg. Fundamentally punching a small hole (which is what both systems do) will not 99% of the time do anything (any more than punching a hole in a hold does so). It is certainly a lot simpler, not to mention "logically sensable" then all the backflips and cludges that are done to stop something happening by employing handwavium arguments most of which seem to fail the giggle test.
I'm certainly up for adjusting P and N damage. I guess the question though is what systems would you think that penetrating weapons like P or N (or a laser-based equivalent) wouldn't destroy, but only cause a mildly inconvenient hole to appear.
But carrying AM in XO racks may have been something you want to avoid in starfire 2nd edition...by 3rdR I don't see why there needs to be a big deal about it. It might even make AMBAM worthwhile if that was removed.
Honestly, this isn't a change that I'd make. I've always liked that putting missiles with AM warheads in XO racks represented a near suicidal risk. As for making AMBAMs worthwhile, my answer is what it's always been. The overly large AMBAM was a stupid weapon from the very beginning. If I were the head of TFN weapons bureau, I'd want to know what idiot thought it was a good idea to design an anti-matter tipped missile that could only be mounted in XO racks.
The game changes utterly once you include Ai, S0, Dz and Zi into the mix. The changes to Dx and the inclusion of Dz make command datalink a not so exciting system. That battle in Justin between the TFN BC battlegroups and a datagroup of SDs would never have gone the way it is written. The SDs had 5 Dx on each SD...that is 15 Dx or 75 shots with the ability to triple up. At long range the BCs could fire no more than 29 CMs or SBMs. The datagroup of SDs could eventually return fire with 30 CMs (if not more) against I believe 18 Dxz on the BC BGs. Dx used to be limited compared to Dxz but the reality is not with the 3rdR point defence rules. If they were mounting Zi then those SDs probably would have hammered the BCs into the ground. The Dz and Dx reduce substantially the advantage of the Command Datagroup. It is further reduced by its over all huge size and the fact that the command ship sticks out like a sore thumb and why it would not be instantly targeted is beyond me.
The biggest difference those 4 systems make is in fighter or gunboat combat. The fM basically gets the nerf bat big time. Comparatively the TFN from the Stars at War is a TL4 race in modern Starfire, in so far as fighter combat is concerned.
Not to be critical, but you've said this before, and I've largely agreed with you on this before. Dz simply does not belong at TL7 and should never have been added. S0 and Ai at least make some sense if one thinks that you shouldn't have to wait until TL9-10 to see some improvements in shields and armor, though I don't dismiss those changes' impact on fighter performance. And of course, Zi makes all datagroups far more resistant to damage, though it too is a logical system.
The unfortunate problem here is that the confluence of these system adds up to really hurting fighter performance, as you accurately point out. Removing Dz would probably be the more effective change, though removing Zi would help fighters in a role that works for them, i.e. slicing and dicing with fighter lasers until they take out the target's datalink (TL3 version) and then moving on to another target. In this role, fighters are sort of hamstringing their targets, rather than trying to destroy them.
The one caveat that I'd have is that I don't like the original version of Dx because i think that it was too complex. An upgraded version of point defense shouldn't require a full page to cover its rules, which was just about the case with the original version of Dx because simulating partially datalinked PD isn't simple. I think that Dx would be a better system is it was just an upgraded version of "D" without any datalink or partial datalink capability, plus Di's level of anti-fighter performance (and only 1 shot, not 2 or 2 shots merged into one gawd-awful powerful shot as in the 3rdR version).
I think that the ground attack value of both pinnaces and assault shuttles should rise with each tech level, and I really don't understand why it would be that useful for missile intercepts. I guess to protect assault shuttles from AFM launched by PDCs. Though I doubt most players bother with planetary assaults so I can't see that it matters. I would rather just give them the equivalent of a fG (turret mounted) for dog fighting and leave it at that.
Honestly, I don't want to give pinnaces and assault shuttles even the slightest space based combat capability whatsoever. I don't want to see ast's being used as a cheap defense against fighters and gunboats. In my view, any combat capability they have should be purely for supporting planetary invasions.
The -HAWK does allow you to hand off...at a -1 to hit but requires you be maneuvering your ships independently (which may occur) but in general I would say most people use one counter to represent all ships in a datagroup. From time to time the ability to use targeting data to fire hands off mode may be useful but it is hardly enough to get excited about. Even a -1 to hit on AFM leaves you with lots of fire and little accomplished...though Kurt always reports what seem to me to be astounding rates of kills with both AFM as well as with AFMc. But I don't know how many launchers he is firing exactly.
Well, the thing with AFM's and AFMc's is that they don't have a particularly high to-hit to begin with, so a -1 is a pretty serious penalty. Then again, I suppose that you are firing into your blindspot and perhaps should feel a little luck that you have a shot at all. Still, I suppose that one could simplify the HAWK tech in a couple of different ways. One could remove the -1 hand-off penalty, though this would only be good for people who maneuver their datagroups' ships separately rather than as a group. And/or one could remove the ability to fire blind into the blindspot entirely, or on the flipside, I suppose that one could reduce the blind fire penalty to something like -3 or -2. But to some degree that would seem to reduce the game value of blind spots and maneuvering, if one could fire blindly into one's blindspot without much a penalty.
As far as fighters go the fM was a good weapon until the 4 systems above came along. Now so long as any ship in the data group can see you the Dz covers each other. Zi makes it so that you can't even knock a ship out of the defence and S0 and Ai push the number of hits you need up significantly. It was in the past possible to just do enough damage to knock ships out of link then come back and finish the job with launches in the blindspot...now you have to kill that ship that attack run. This makes fRAM attacks nearly a requirement which means that you continuously attrit your fighter force. Overall the effectiveness of fighters takes a nose dive. fL is a lone light in the darkness but it vanishes once Al shows up. Basically you have to use your fighters solely as battleline support units rather than as a solo strike (excepting when you significantly outnumber the enemy force). Factor in cost and they are not so much of a revolution. GBs are even worse off since they don't have the special to hit chart that gimps fire against fighters. They attrit even harder and it is nearly impossible to have a mobile force with enough of them to matter (you have to be using them from ground bases).
Lots of good points, Paul. And yet, S0 and Ai aren't illogical systems. The problem seems to be that the fighter AS IS seems to be too weak unless starship technology is intentionally prevented from advancing in some logical areas, like Shields and Armor, etc. So it seems that one is left with two general options. Either prevent starship technology from improving in the areas you point out, or increase the ability of fighters to cause damage, mostly in the area of ordnance, since fighter beams already seem more than powerful enough. The only other option is to increase the use of a weapon like the fighter primary, which I know you seriously dislike, but does provide a way for fighters to cause significant damage without being hindered by increasingly strong shields, armor, and point defenses.
I'm fairly sure no one really wanted to butcher the command datalink or fighters but unintended or not they wielded the nerf bat but good for both those systems.
Well, in command datalink's defense, it was a Dave Weber system and it does fit into the mix of systems as he intended. So if Z2 does really hurt fighters, for better or worse, it did so with his knowledge and intent.
As far as the F2, F3, E2 and E3 go they are 4 HS systems I am just updating them with damage/range. It is just a pain to figure out what the drop off should look like but what I proposed to Starslayer was:
TL11:
F2 (4HS/50 MCr) 6-5-4-4-3-3-3-2-2-2-2-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 (Rmax = 18)
E2 (4HS/65 MCr) 6-5-4-4-3-3-3-2-2-2-2-2-1-1 (Rmax = 13)
TL14:
F3 (4HS/60 MCr) 8-7-6-6-5-5-4-4-3-3-3-2-2-2-2-1-1-1-1-1-1 (Rmax = 20)
E3 (4HS/95 MCr) 8-7-6-5-5-4-4-3-3-3-3-2-2-2-2-2-1 (Rmax = 16)
It might be better to do F3 7-7-6-6-5...or 7-6-6-6-5... due to concerns over out performing the Fc3 at point blank range but I'm not sure 1 pt more matters given the 10 hexes further range it allows. It looks more or less ok so far as I can see. The E series is 6 hexes shorter ranged, while the F series is 7 or 10 hexes shorter ranged then the comparable capital weapon. Over most of the range band (except at very short range where the damage is comparable) the 2xFcx or 2xEcx outperformes significantly the 3xFx or 3xEx...so I feel I am not going overboard. This allows in our game DD, CL and CA to remain competitive as they can't mount capital weapons.
I honestly don't like capital beam weapons the way they're done in the game. I don't like that you can get more damage from an equal # of HS of regular beams over cap beams. I think that true capital beam weapons should outperform regular beams in every way. Of course, I also tend to think that true capital beam weapons should be rather larger than 6 HS. To me, comparing a 4 HS beam to a 6 HS beam is not unlike comparing a 5" gun to a 8" gun on WW2 naval ships. I tend to think that true cap beams should be equivalent something like a 12-16" naval gun compared to the 5, 6, or 8" guns carried by destroyers and cruisers. Of course, in Starfire terms, such weapons would end up being quite large, perhaps 12 HS or more, which would put a serious crimp on the size of ships that could mount them. But any ship that could comfortably mount multiple beams of this size would probably be an honest-to-goodness Capital Ship!
As to your house rule beams above, I'd have to input them into my spreadsheet to have a good sense of their power. But at a glance they seem VERY powerful. But still, in a campaign where you are by house rule preventing non-capital ships from mounting "capital" weapons, it's probably not a big deal.
I would be happy if EX were limited to being J'Rill specific attack ships but EX with Pg are popular and they infest most exploration forces in games. I hate the EX with a passion and I have exactly 4 of them...couriers but I am the exception in this from what I can tell.
I hate the EX with a passion as well, but I intend on outright removing them from the game. But if there's a perceived need for small "courier boats", I could see coming up with a largish smallcraft that has a lot of endurance, very little cargo/passenger capacity, WP transit capability, and a good strategic speed, which could fill this role.
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While you can say a ship blows up from a hit on an AM armed missile in an XO rack, there is no reason it has to be the case. The amount of anti-matter in a missile is small.
As for P and N the following systems should not be affected by them: H, Q and Mg. Mg if you want to complicate things could have: a percentage of the missiles rendered inoperable, a chance the Mg doesn't work anymore (feed system is destroyed) or a very small chance you cause a warhead to detonate. Or any combination of course. But all three of those systems are largely empty space. The magazine has missiles in it but most of the missile won't explode if hit so you would need a lot of luck to get that happening. The N is too similiar to the P to make it worth bothering about I would just have a P and nothing else that does that job...and no fP and no IDEW-P.
The Dx and Dcx should fire twice as Di or Dc (respectively) and nothing more. Firing twice is enough. The later generations of Dcz don't gain a range increase, as that gets absurd. You probably have to give the Dcz a smoother to-kill chance though.
As far a missile intercepts go Dz and Dx when installed on the target ship function as per the existing rules, datagroup members loose two shots for Dz and 1 shot for Dx due to the limitations of a non-command datalink data transfer with no doubling or trippling possible (or something that makes it more difficult to double or tripple up so that the Dxz is an actualy improvement). When protecting a ship from fire from its blind spot they loose the shots, they can't double up/tripple up plus the base interecpt number drops by 2 for Dz and 1 for Dx. That doesn't take a bloody page and preserves the value of command data link. The Zi system should take either 2 HS or 3 HS given a Z2 is 2 HS and is functionally identical to a Zi plus is higher tech level. Or is Z2 3 HS? whatever Zi should be +1 HS over Z2
As far as Ai, S0, Dz and Zi being logical developments. The Ai and S0 are logcial technologicial improvements, but if you put them in the game you damned well look at what they do. In this case you re-visit fighter missiles and remove the BS craptastic to hit table they have (since pods have no negative modifiers to the missile chance to hit). Dz and Zi are neither logical technological improvements nor must they be done without putting in some limitations (see above for a suggestion as to how they could have been done better) they exist because someone thought they were neat ideas without looking at the game balance as a whole. If you put them in then you need to allow fighters to carry more missiles, have better missiles, and have better to-hit on those missiles. The fM gains the most from AM technology after all as the warhead size drops.
I could live with HAWK as currently written if it came with some bonus, better chance to hit at long range or something. But the point for me is I've fought battles where I had it and frankly never used it. Either that is due to play style or it is just something that only shows up once in a blue moon. It is just that the way the rules are written you would think the system is a lot better than it is in reality yet so far as I can see there was no change to it for 3rdR so it is as it always was this way.
However since we are supposed to be talking about pods... They are the best defence of a gunboat attack known...and once they get CAMs they pretty much render close combat attacks but gunboats suicidal. The only weapon system the pods don't seem to be (as yet) able to render null and void is the fighter. Although theoretically the CAM armed ones (SBMHAWK4&5) should be capable of engaing fighters at close range with sprint missile fire (not sure if they can infact target fighters). Basically 1 pod per GB armed with LT1 or LT2 warheads and that is the end of the stand off GB attack. Once you get the ability to fire CM it is even better since you need but a single hit to take out the GB and with a pen-aid, CM, and LT2 you do 1 pt of damage with a -5 to the intercept chance.
Against fighters pods work defensively by blasting their carriers out of existance when the carrier comes back to recover the fighters in the middle of a fight...or else when it pokes its head through the WP if the pod rollers activate in the first turn. Actually I'm not even sure that the deployment ship has to activate (this I need to check) because if it doesn't have to be active to issue orders to the pods then kiss the carriers good bye round one. It would even be worth sending pods through the warp point to engage the carriers on the other side since you know how many there were and where they are (running one assumes from the warp point).
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While you can say a ship blows up from a hit on an AM armed missile in an XO rack, there is no reason it has to be the case. The amount of anti-matter in a missile is small.
I agree that "there is no reason it has to be the case". However, if the amount of AM is enough to cause double or triple the damage of an equivalently sized nuke, then that should be enough to take out the ship.
Also note that i've never supported the change to the rules where when a ship's DF was down, that a single nuke could destroy the ship entirely. So if a single nuke could destroy an ship not protected by a DF, how much more dead would that ship be from an AM explosion ON THE HULL?
As for P and N the following systems should not be affected by them: H, Q and Mg.
Ok, makes sense.
The N is too similar to the P to make it worth bothering about I would just have a P and nothing else that does that job...and no fP and no IDEW-P.
It doesn't matter that N is similar to P. N is a particle beam weapon and P is a force beam-derived weapon. I want to support this sort of differentiation. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that laser-based weaponry should also have this sort of weapon. To me, it's about flavor. You don't like how 4E made weapons bland. But I can think of nothing blander than merging all penetrating weapons into a single code and losing all flavor and differentiation between them.
The Dx and Dcx should fire twice as Di or Dc (respectively) and nothing more. Firing twice is enough. The later generations of Dcz don't gain a range increase, as that gets absurd. You probably have to give the Dcz a smoother to-kill chance though.
While it's "possible", I don't see why Dx and Dcx should get 2 Di or Dc shots. For D to the Dx upgrade, I think that merging D and Di with a single shot, plus some slight anti-missile improvement is more than sufficient for for an upgrade. Dc to Dcx is a bit trickier since there is no "Di" equivalent to Dc. Then again, I'm not entirely fond of "Di" anyways. I could easily see going from D to Dx without the intermediate Di step.
As far a missile intercepts go Dz and Dx when installed on the target ship function as per the existing rules, datagroup members loose two shots for Dz and 1 shot for Dx due to the limitations of a non-command datalink data transfer with no doubling or tripping possible (or something that makes it more difficult to double or triple up so that the Dxz is an actual improvement). When protecting a ship from fire from its blind spot they loose the shots, they can't double up/triple up plus the base intercept number drops by 2 for Dz and 1 for Dx. That doesn't take a bloody page and preserves the value of command data link. The Zi system should take either 2 HS or 3 HS given a Z2 is 2 HS and is functionally identical to a Zi plus is higher tech level. Or is Z2 3 HS? whatever Zi should be +1 HS over Z2.
In the UTM, "Zi" is 1 hs, and in ISF, Z2 is 3 hs. Just checked both. :)
As far as the rest, it's too complex for my taste. For starters, I think that all PD regardless of generation should be able to triple up because PD at 4 on 6 with tripling reasonably closely mirrors the unrevised 3E "D" intercept performance, IIRC. Also, I'm not entirely sure of the value of being able to protect another ship's BS in your DG. Oh, I'm not doubting that being able to do so has value. It's just as we discussed earlier, people probably tend to maneuver their DG's as a single unit in a single hex, which means that protecting each other's blind spots is a moot point for those people. OTOH, I suppose if you're fighting a running missile duel, you could arrange for each of the 3 ships in a DG to end the movement phase on different headings to protect each other.
As far as Ai, S0, Dz and Zi being logical developments. The Ai and S0 are logical technological improvements, but if you put them in the game you damned well look at what they do. In this case you re-visit fighter missiles and remove the BS craptastic to hit table they have (since pods have no negative modifiers to the missile chance to hit). Dz and Zi are neither logical technological improvements nor must they be done without putting in some limitations (see above for a suggestion as to how they could have been done better) they exist because someone thought they were neat ideas without looking at the game balance as a whole. If you put them in then you need to allow fighters to carry more missiles, have better missiles, and have better to-hit on those missiles. The fM gains the most from AM technology after all as the warhead size drops.
Oh, I don't know that Zi isn't logical. Trying to protect an important, but vulnerable is hardly illogical. That said, it is a development with considerable repercussions. Still, I'm not sure that people should expect datalink to remain such a vulnerable system, when it's so obvious that decreasing that vulnerability should be a priority for any navy.
But I agree about the effect on fighters and their missiles. They need help. Improved to-hit #'s for fM's would be a start, but I tend to think that the effect would be marginal, given that you're already going to be limited in the volley size often against targets protected by Dxz/Dcz with Z2. More missiles helps, but one would almost have to make the fighters larger to justify it, i'm thinking. Changing AM so that fM1's can use AM would be a help so that what few hits they do get do more damage.
But another thing that could help fighters (and gunboats) would be a CAM-like weapon (i.e. a "torpedo") that couldn't be intercepted and had a range of say around 5-8 hexes. Even if it was twice the size of an fM with a base 1 dp warhead, it'd probably still be worth carrying if it had good to-hit #'s and the ability to use AM and AAM warheads. (FYI, I think of the fR as more like the bomb dropped by a WW2 dive bomber than a "torpedo".) Fighters need a weapon that doesn't require them to make suicide runs to point blank range.
I could live with HAWK as currently written if it came with some bonus, better chance to hit at long range or something. But the point for me is I've fought battles where I had it and frankly never used it. Either that is due to play style or it is just something that only shows up once in a blue moon. It is just that the way the rules are written you would think the system is a lot better than it is in reality yet so far as I can see there was no change to it for 3rdR so it is as it always was this way.
The idea of enhanced long-range to hits is interesting, though it might be better if it was embedded into the to-hit #'s of next gen missiles that come after a certain point on the tech table, rather than as a strap-on. I'm not particularly fond of all the missile strap-ons. They just seem to complicate matters, IMHO.
However since we are supposed to be talking about pods... They are the best defence of a gunboat attack known...and once they get CAMs they pretty much render close combat attacks but gunboats suicidal. The only weapon system the pods don't seem to be (as yet) able to render null and void is the fighter. Although theoretically the CAM armed ones (SBMHAWK4&5) should be capable of engaing fighters at close range with sprint missile fire (not sure if they can infact target fighters). Basically 1 pod per GB armed with LT1 or LT2 warheads and that is the end of the stand off GB attack. Once you get the ability to fire CM it is even better since you need but a single hit to take out the GB and with a pen-aid, CM, and LT2 you do 1 pt of damage with a -5 to the intercept chance.
Against fighters pods work defensively by blasting their carriers out of existance when the carrier comes back to recover the fighters in the middle of a fight...or else when it pokes its head through the WP if the pod rollers activate in the first turn. Actually I'm not even sure that the deployment ship has to activate (this I need to check) because if it doesn't have to be active to issue orders to the pods then kiss the carriers good bye round one. It would even be worth sending pods through the warp point to engage the carriers on the other side since you know how many there were and where they are (running one assumes from the warp point).
Yes, true, if a defender can get a bunch of pods thru the WP to attack the attackers massing near the WP, it could be devastating, particularly on carriers. And CAM pods would probably best, since one would assume that the ships ARE massing close to the WP. Yes, a truly nasty tactic. Of course, if an attacker saw a bunch of pods close his entry WP, he might be tempted to shift his fire to them, or if he has fighters in-system, he may task them to taking out as many pods as possible. Lots of options on both sides.
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Paul, at this point, I want to mention to you that over on the SDS board, I've made an announcement that I'm shifting the direction of Cosmic and have dropped my adherence to the Canon History. I'm doing this because it was becoming increasingly difficult to do what I want to do with Cosmic and yet stay true to Dave Weber's history. So, Cosmic will move forward with its own story to tell, its own history.
So in doing this, I am freeing myself of many of the limitations caused by historical adherence, such as automated weapons being as they are in 3E or various other things. This will allow me to fix a number of things that need fixing or tweak things I think need tweaking. For example, I can make some changes to fighters to make them more potent and not so nerfed by the defensive tech of the time. I can do things with automated weapons to make them less uber-deadly and somewhat more logical. And there are many other things as well, that I won't go into at this time.
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The game does not require that a ship be destroyed by an anti-matter explosion. It is especially odd that it happens because a drive field down missile strike is easily survivable. Nothing in the rules say the missiles on the racks are destroyed, they are just rendered in-operable...or the rack is rendered inoperable. The questions are: is if the rule is good for the game, is the rule compatable with the other rule (rule changes), and is the rule still necessary? Leaving aside the rather funny AMBAM situation..."Yes cpt starcrusher, we here in R&D have determined that mine sweeping is a dangerous thing for you to be doing so we have come up with a system that makes it suicidal and you have been chosen to field test our latest version of the 'advanced minsweeper blowing up from Anti-matter missuse' missile system...we call it AMBAM for short." "Yes indeed cpt starcrusher the missile will destroy you and your crew if the enemy posseses the most basic type of warp point defences any race we have encountered has or if they hit you with sufficient fire to take down your shields." "Yes we think we are brillent too."
The only precision weapon the game should have is the P. In 4thE terms the Ep and Lp should not exist, the advantage of the F-chain is the P. The other weapons introduce, in the same way as the N, contradictory nonsensical rules, and of course the E and Ep suffer the most while the Lp becomes the wonder weapon. If you want to differentiate the weapon chains you can't balance them into gruel in this way.
I have no idea why the original Dx gets 2 shots, probably because the amount of fighters you are facing is going up and up. I have no objections to it having two shots and I don't see why it is something that needed folding into a single roll anyway. It isn't like you don't roll lots of dice when playing starfire anyway. Dcx has the problem that it gets a 1 range increase over Dc and Di and that is not justifiable. It probably should get its own chart but not a range boost that makes it better than AFM for crying out loud. The Dx is a development of the Di, without the Di you don't get the Dx. The bugs in ISW4 should have started with the Dz system, which would have saved a lot of stupid rules that are there about their anti-fighter effectiveness. That also fits more with the fiction that Webber wrote.
If you want to keep to the original time line I don't see why you could not. The main value for that is that it allows you to write interesting scenarios. But if you feel constrained then more power to you for doing your own thing.
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The game does not require that a ship be destroyed by an anti-matter explosion. It is especially odd that it happens because a drive field down missile strike is easily survivable. Nothing in the rules say the missiles on the racks are destroyed, they are just rendered in-operable...or the rack is rendered inoperable. The questions are: is if the rule is good for the game, is the rule compatible with the other rule (rule changes), and is the rule still necessary? Leaving aside the rather funny AMBAM situation..."Yes cpt starcrusher, we here in R&D have determined that mine sweeping is a dangerous thing for you to be doing so we have come up with a system that makes it suicidal and you have been chosen to field test our latest version of the 'advanced minesweeper blowing up from Anti-matter misuse' missile system...we call it AMBAM for short." "Yes indeed cpt starcrusher the missile will destroy you and your crew if the enemy possesses the most basic type of warp point defences any race we have encountered has or if they hit you with sufficient fire to take down your shields." "Yes we think we are brilliant too."
I guess that I have to disagree. I don't think that a DF down hit by a nuke or AM warhead is particularly survivable at all. DF's force nuke and AM warheads to detonate around 1 km from the hull of a ship. If DF's are down, missiles will detonate much closer to the ship and cause vastly more damage. Having a nuke or a an AM warhead explode on the surface of a ship or in a magazine should be utterly catastrophic.
Now, I probably won't make normal missile strikes against DF down targets be 100% catastrophic, and will probably stick with some nasty multiple of damage. But I see explosions on the surface of the ship or in a magazine as definitely being catastrophic.
But that's just my view. ;)
The only precision weapon the game should have is the P. In 4thE terms the Ep and Lp should not exist, the advantage of the F-chain is the P. The other weapons introduce, in the same way as the N, contradictory nonsensical rules, and of course the E and Ep suffer the most while the Lp becomes the wonder weapon. If you want to differentiate the weapon chains you can't balance them into gruel in this way.
I don't believe in precision weapons. Not in the least. I don't believe that you can target a specific system or type of system at the ranges in question, possibly against moving targets.
What I do believe in are penetrating weapons ... weapons that can easily slice, blast, or whatever thru normal passive defenses, i.e. ignoring them, but without any ability to target anything other than the ship in general, same as any other beam weapon.
As for P vs N vs Lp, I disagree completely. I'm not defending the details of 4E's penetrating weapons, only the variety they help create.
I have no idea why the original Dx gets 2 shots, probably because the amount of fighters you are facing is going up and up. I have no objections to it having two shots and I don't see why it is something that needed folding into a single roll anyway. It isn't like you don't roll lots of dice when playing starfire anyway.
I think that Marvin merged it into a single die roll for just that reason, to reduce rolls. However, in doing so, statistically the to-hits are accurate, but it makes Dx look like a wonder weapon against fighters.
Dcx has the problem that it gets a 1 range increase over Dc and Di and that is not justifiable. It probably should get its own chart but not a range boost that makes it better than AFM for crying out loud. The Dx is a development of the Di, without the Di you don't get the Dx. The bugs in ISW4 should have started with the Dz system, which would have saved a lot of stupid rules that are there about their anti-fighter effectiveness. That also fits more with the fiction that Webber wrote.
Actually, I'd have said that the Bugs should have probably started with only plain old "D". It would have explained their general anti-missile and anti-fighter weaknesses in a very simple, straightforward way.
As for "Di", I see it more as a software upgrade than an actual system, as the problem is more one of needing to provide better fire control targeting of targets different from missiles. But that's just me.
If you want to keep to the original time line I don't see why you could not. The main value for that is that it allows you to write interesting scenarios. But if you feel constrained then more power to you for doing your own thing.
Paul, the problem for me is that a number of the things I'd like to do, such as a major overhaul of AW's, some significant tweaks to missiles (dumping most strap-ons, replacing the SBM with a much simpler 2nd gen CM, etc.), and other things, would run seriously counter to how the tech table looks in the novels. For example, 4E style buoys do not have the same ability to bottle up an attacker on the WP that 3E mines do. And the 4E equivalent to missile pods don't have the ability to fire as a single massed volley. I'm not arguing whether it's a good thing or not. Only that reducing their effectiveness is seriously counter-canonical. Also, replacing the SBM with a 2nd gen CM is counter canon as well. As would be making the T/ST planet ratio 50/50 (to use a simple sysgen example). As might also be the case with some idea that I've been brainstorming regarding fighters, in line with our discussions on how they've been so weakened.
And honestly, I do like the canon history, and don't really want to mess with it. I could, if I chose to do so, but then there'd be a gulf of difference between what the scenarios might look like if I were to rewrite those scenario products and what's in the novels. I'm not sure that I'd be comfortable doing it, but I suppose that some veteran players might not mind that. Another problem I can foresee is that after any changes are made, how would they change the outcomes of scenarios? or would scenarios have to be manhandled into producing the intended outcomes? And lastly, I wouldn't know if there'd be any legal issues if the scenarios were significantly changed to reflect the new state of the rules and technologies. Obviously, starting with a new history makes this last concern moot.
But also starting with a new history has the value of it being my own work, my own creation, rather than me messing around with someone else's.
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Uhm no statistically the hit rolls are anything but accurate. If you look on SFA you will notice an option to reduce PD effectiveness by -1, that came from me pointing out the average of 90,70,50,30 is 60. The Dx anit-fighter chart over-estimates the kill chance but denys the defender the 25% chance of killing 2 fighters. Arguments about reducing the die rolls I find amusing given the number of dice we used to accumulate to do major battles.
You have the F which works well with missiles and skips nothing. You have the E to skip armour and the L to skip shields, neither of which work well with missiles (excepting the L and LTx). At some point a penetrating weapon is just more valuable. I swiss cheesed the assaulting Rigillian escorts with the Pc's from the bases when playing "Wall of Fire, Wall of Steel." As passive amounts increase the value of that goes through the roof. These were not "precison hits" any more than the carrier killer bases or ships would be. The Auger bug design is a perfectly sensible late game assault ship...its Pc's will destroy anything near the warp point regardless of the level of passives. But I see no reason to have 3 flavours of the same weapon...since a penetrating laser, energy beam and force beam are identical in effect unless you do the 4thE sillyness which makes the Lp the icing on the "lasers are better if only slightly" cake.
I can understand back before the advanced passives were in play that the point of the rule was to limit the use of anti-matter on XO racks or fighters to prevent an alpha strike wipe out effect but that is no longer the case as anti-matter has been toned down in damage and better point defences and passives have made even XO launches less dangerous. It is a game rule that was put in place to prevent a problem that no longer exists due to other changes so far as I can see.
Di is according to the description a point defence where the anti-missile missiles have been removed to add in more laser systems. I'm not a big fan of the system as I see no reason why regular point defence systems would find fighters anything but big, slow, easy to kill targets but whatever. It is clearly not a software update. I just find the name a bit ironic..."improved point defence" ...yeah sure.
As for canonical...I assume you have Webber's permission to use his universe? If you don't have it (in writing) from him, it is likely a good thing you have stopped considering using the official history in cosmic. I'm not a lawyer but I would be very very very surprised if you could use even the timeline in ISF without permission and not face eventual consiquences. Marvin got really lucky when he released ISW4 that Webber chose not to go after him legaly (you could say he got lucky that Webber is a reasonable guy...nice guy...whatever). At least my assumption is that it was Marvin as I can't see who else it could have been at that point...but if not him than someone else got really lucky.
Also the aftermaths of those battles...after I started playing starfire regularily the first thing that became apparent is that the aftermath of the scenario is written utterly without any relationship to the battle outcome probable based on the game rules. We played a number of stars at war scenarios...I don't recall a single one where the battle outcome was similar to what was written. One of the most absurd involved slow, laser armed cruisers fighting faster force beam armed ships. We only tried to play one ISW4 battle so I can't say for those...they are too big to actually fight out. The one we tried was the first real battle of ISW4 (the one where the TFN task force first encounters the bug plasma guns) so it is a small one and it was just too much. Stars at War is an entertaining mini-novel...and the stories in it are interesting in themselves (such as the one about the TFN task force investigating the missing ships at the start of ISW3) that lead to interesting scenarios but the outcomes bear no relasionship to the game mechanics. But this is pretty much largely true of Crusade and the two ISW4 books...they are set in the starfire universe but they aren't starfire the game.
As I said more power to you on your use of your own history. I don't know if it is still available but C.J. Cherryh had on her website a very good essay on technological development that I would highly recomemend for bedtime reading.
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Well, I see no reason why one couldn't create an adapter that would let you put that 53 cm torp in the 61 cm tube. Of course, I don't know that engineering that goes into torps and their tubes, but I'd assume that those who do are smart to figure something out.
Yeah I thought about some kind of sabot (is this the correct english term?) too.
Where it gets realy wired is, when we start trying to shoot severly smaller ordnance out of a single tube at different times.
I could see putting 4 sidewinders into a sabot and into a single tube and launching them all together, but firing one after the other? I´d realy like to see that - from a save distance ;)
Ok, now back to Starfire :)
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Uhm no statistically the hit rolls are anything but accurate. If you look on SFA you will notice an option to reduce PD effectiveness by -1, that came from me pointing out the average of 90,70,50,30 is 60.
I was talking about the statistical accuracy of combining the 2 fighter-kill shots into a single shot, not Dx's anti-missile performance. I 100% agree that 4 on 7 for "D" is too high. It also doesn't really leave a lot of room for upgrades when the TL3 version starts out so capable. I've already intended on having TL3 "D" start with a 4 on 6 performance. Heck, if anything, one could argue that a 60% performance is a little high, given that the unrevised 3E's version of "D" had a performance of only 50%, when it used all 5 of its shots.
The Dx anit-fighter chart over-estimates the kill chance but denys the defender the 25% chance of killing 2 fighters. Arguments about reducing the die rolls I find amusing given the number of dice we used to accumulate to do major battles.
Paul, Have you done a statistical check on the probabilities of taking 2 shots using the old Di Fighter Kill line against a single target to produce the likelihood that the fighter will be killed? I have, and I can tell you that the Dx to-hit line in 3rdR DOES accurately represent those probabilities. The only range where there's a slight error is at range 4, where the to-hit on 3rdR's version of Dx is "3", when technically it should be "2". However, it's clear to me that given that the to-hit at range 3 was 4 and the to-hit at range 5 was 2, that Marvin wanted to smooth the to-hit curve with a '3' at range 4, which I think is not unreasonable.
As for denying players the chance for shots at 2 different targets, I agree, it is a loss. I understand why marvin did it, but i hate how it produced a single to-hit line that was so ridiculously over-powered. Of course, I don't think that Dx (or Dcx) should have ever gotten 2 fighter-kill shots to begin with. ;)
You have the F which works well with missiles and skips nothing. You have the E to skip armour and the L to skip shields, neither of which work well with missiles (excepting the L and LTx). At some point a penetrating weapon is just more valuable. I swiss cheesed the assaulting Rigillian escorts with the Pc's from the bases when playing "Wall of Fire, Wall of Steel." As passive amounts increase the value of that goes through the roof. These were not "precison hits" any more than the carrier killer bases or ships would be. The Auger bug design is a perfectly sensible late game assault ship...its Pc's will destroy anything near the warp point regardless of the level of passives. But I see no reason to have 3 flavours of the same weapon...since a penetrating laser, energy beam and force beam are identical in effect unless you do the 4thE sillyness which makes the Lp the icing on the "lasers are better if only slightly" cake.
I wouldn't say that E-beams don't work well with missiles. if missiles can strip the shields of a target as an E-beam ship is closing to beam range, it will save said E-beam ship from having to knock down those shields before it gets a chance to start skipping Armor. But you're 100% correct about Lasers not having any synergy with missiles, except perhaps laser torps.
As for penetrating weapons, yes, as the density of passives increases, so too does the value of penetrating weapons. (BTW, at least ion 3E, it's worth noting that N-beams cannot penetrate shields.) I think that this is a reason why in 4E, penetrating weapons don't automatically just outright ignore all passives, or E-beams ignoring armor, ot lasers ignoring shields. They can ignore some passives before the density of those shields forces them to do some damage to passives. Honestly, I'm not sure if this is or is not a good idea for Cosmic.
Of course, with lasers, you have anti-laser armor, which doesn't exist in 4E, and Ebeams may have to contend with overload dampeners (if mounted), which also don't exist in 4E. But nothing stops primaries as we well know. So, yes, as passives get more dense, the value of ignoring those dense passives becomes greater. Hence the value of fighter primaries (whether you like them or not). fP are a deadly upgrade to fighter fire power, and perhaps an unbalancing one.
As for not seeing any reason for different flavors of penetrating weapons, well, I do. Flavor. 4E assumes that weapons development will occur in some very distinct tech trees, which is a logical historical concept (though it can complicate things). But 3E never used that concept. Within the paradigm of tech trees, it makes all the sense in the world to me to have a flavor of penetrating weapon for each of the basic beam weapons trees (L, E, and F). it also allows someone who is roleplaying their race and has focused on, say, particle beam technology (of which E-beams are a part) to develop a penetrating beam based on that technology, rather than have to give up role-playing and meta-game his empire into developing a weapon outside of said empire's greatly preferred area of beam weapon technology. That is why I support having multiple penetrating beam weapons. And it's a reason that I find to be highly logical.
I can understand back before the advanced passives were in play that the point of the rule was to limit the use of anti-matter on XO racks or fighters to prevent an alpha strike wipe out effect but that is no longer the case as anti-matter has been toned down in damage and better point defences and passives have made even XO launches less dangerous. It is a game rule that was put in place to prevent a problem that no longer exists due to other changes so far as I can see.
No, this is absolutely 100% not true, Paul.
The reason that anti-matter on XO racks explodes and destroys the ship is because I told Dave that that's exactly what would happen!!! He already had included rules for AM magazine explosions taking out the ship, but he'd overlooked the fact that the same thing would happen when AM-tipped missiles were destroyed in XO racks. There was never a word of discussion about the impact of the rule regarding fighter strikes, etc. It was entirely 100% about realism (at least within the pseudo reality of 3E as Dave Weber and, to a lesser extent, I perceived it).
I know, I was there. I discussed it with Dave over the phone and he was aghast that he'd overlooked the danger of XO mounted AM missiles, which he corrected quickly.
Di is according to the description a point defence where the anti-missile missiles have been removed to add in more laser systems. I'm not a big fan of the system as I see no reason why regular point defence systems would find fighters anything but big, slow, easy to kill targets but whatever. It is clearly not a software update. I just find the name a bit ironic..."improved point defence" ...yeah sure.
What description are you reading for Di? Here's the description right out of unrevised 3E.
IMPROVED POINT DEFENSE (Di)
The strikefighter threat created dreadful problems for fleet defense officers, and one response was the creation of "Di" by modifying the sensors and software of a standard "D" to provide enhanced anti-fighter performance.
There's nothing in there about removing the counter-missiles. Nothing at all.
As for the "Di" name, well, you can't really blame that on Dave Weber, since it was created in 1st edition's STARFIRE II: STRIKEFIGHTER, before DW arrived on the Starfire scene.
As for canonical...I assume you have Webber's permission to use his universe? If you don't have it (in writing) from him, it is likely a good thing you have stopped considering using the official history in cosmic. I'm not a lawyer but I would be very very very surprised if you could use even the timeline in ISF without permission and not face eventual consiquences. Marvin got really lucky when he released ISW4 that Webber chose not to go after him legaly (you could say he got lucky that Webber is a reasonable guy...nice guy...whatever). At least my assumption is that it was Marvin as I can't see who else it could have been at that point...but if not him than someone else got really lucky.
Actually, SDS doesn't need Dave Weber's permission to use the game history. Only the characters are his. The history belongs to Starfire. This has been discussed before.
As for ISW4, it was actually written by Dave Weber. The problem was very much an honest one, not any attempt by Marvin to hose Dave. TFG had passed along the manuscript to Marvin when he's bought the rights to Starfire, and I think that Marvin had wrongly assumed that DW had been paid for the work, or whatever. Could DW have sued? Probably, but the legal costs would have almost certainly outweighed any potential return that could have gained. This was actually all explained in a post by DW in some newsgroup posting over 10 years ago... DW never blamed Marvin for the oversight from what I understand.
Furthermore, even when I'd intended on working within the Canonical history, I wasn't going to do anything with the Terrans, Orions, Gorm, etc. My focus would have been on the Star Union (my creation) and its various conflicts with totally new races, both in the past and moving forward. (Well, except for the First Crucian-Arachnid War, which of course would have included the Bugs...)
But still, I won't say that you're entirely wrong insofar as using a new history would make moot even the slightest potential for legal issues. That's not my reason for doing it, but I won't deny that it's a convenient secondary effect.
Also the aftermaths of those battles...after I started playing starfire regularily the first thing that became apparent is that the aftermath of the scenario is written utterly without any relationship to the battle outcome probable based on the game rules. We played a number of stars at war scenarios...I don't recall a single one where the battle outcome was similar to what was written. One of the most absurd involved slow, laser armed cruisers fighting faster force beam armed ships. We only tried to play one ISW4 battle so I can't say for those...they are too big to actually fight out. The one we tried was the first real battle of ISW4 (the one where the TFN task force first encounters the bug plasma guns) so it is a small one and it was just too much. Stars at War is an entertaining mini-novel...and the stories in it are interesting in themselves (such as the one about the TFN task force investigating the missing ships at the start of ISW3) that lead to interesting scenarios but the outcomes bear no relasionship to the game mechanics. But this is pretty much largely true of Crusade and the two ISW4 books...they are set in the starfire universe but they aren't starfire the game.
I appreciate the feedback on these things Paul. I think that the problem you point out is due to a lack of proper playtesting.
I can tell you this... the battle between the Bugs, Alliance SF19, and the Star Union at the very start of The Shiva Option should play out very much like described in the book, and I'll tell you exactly why. I created a scenario for that battle, then played it out, and wrote up what happened and passed it along to Dave Weber, who accurately portrayed the battle's results as I described them to him... including how the opening volleys from the Crucian SDF's destroyed 3 out of the 4 Bug command datalink ships. I randomly chose which BC's were targeted and as luck would have it, 3 of the command ships get targeted. No favorites were played by me when I played out the scenario.
Regardless, the best way to make sure that scenarios turn out the way you script them is to play them out to verify that things work as you want them to. And then make whatever adjustments are necessary.
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Yeah I thought about some kind of sabot (is this the correct english term?) too.
Where it gets realy wired is, when we start trying to shoot severly smaller ordnance out of a single tube at different times.
I could see putting 4 sidewinders into a sabot and into a single tube and launching them all together, but firing one after the other? I´d realy like to see that - from a save distance ;)
Ok, now back to Starfire :)
Actually, this is relevant to Starfire. In 3E, one is allowed to fire 1 csp ammo out of cap missile launchers (Rc) which are meant to fire capital missiles (2 csp) and SBM's (3 csp). Some people oppose this, others don't. I'm undecided. The only 1 csp munition that Rc's would want to fire would be AFM's. Whether they should be allowed to do so is a different question.
Off Starfire, the idea of shotgunning multiple smaller missiles out of a large missile tube all at once is used in the more recent Honor Harringgton novels where Manty capital missile launchers have the ability to fire "rounds" that consist of multiple counter-missiles that they fire to thicken their defensive fire. I can tell you that this will not be in Cosmic.
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My memory of the Di is wrong. I'm not sure from where or why it is in my head as being that way, but it most certainly is. On the other hand if it is software update why does it cost 10 MCr more per unit? Why does it degrade the anti-missile performance? You are talking about a system capable of engaging supersonic sea skimming missiles being tasked with hitting an armed cesna aircraft...why do you need to do anything? Fighters to a missile point defence are large, slow, easy to kill targets.
The Dx in 3rdR is +16% over the 2xDi and removes the not insignificant chance you will get two kills at range 0 and 1 (where the fighters are going to be while doing fR strikes). It occurs where and why you said. But there is no justification for doing it in the first place. There is no justification for making it "smooth." It is just another one of the many changes put in that have long term effects. On dice numbers: a bug SD group requires 30 dice to fire its missiles. If its Dx is used in anti-fighter mode you require 15 with 3rdR and 30 with 3E. But so what? You roll 30 dice each and every time it fires its main weapons. I have no idea why they fire twice, but why change the rule? Is it bad they fire twice? Dice rolling is part of what makes board games fun. It only becomes un-fun when you get to the situation of 4thE where most activities end up being: "roll many dice and accomplish nothing."
F&Missiles always work together (does not matter who fires first), E&Missiles work well if the E can fire after the missiles, but if the target has been hit by E's and then must be re-engaged solely by missiles the armour belt has to be chewed through. L&Missiles (outside of the LTx) is the worst case as the missiles don't contribute until they remove the very thing the laser is skipping. That just about all weapons work with E's if the E's are in range is true...well except for the E&L which some of my partners have on their ships...*sighs* That is one combination I've yet to find a way to make work.
Overload dampners are not much of an issue since carrying sufficient numbers of them to stop even a long range E strike is extremely mass expensive for the defender. They are only something that has practical value to asteroid forts, very large bases and space stations. A ship just can't carry enough of them to make a siginificant difference in combat...the only thing they stop is long range E-sniping from small ship datagroups (single E per ship). There are always special circumstances but generally the O is not worth bothering with unless the ship in question has lots of space available so that you can mount 30 O or something like that and completely block even a point blank attack. And even 30 O faced with a SD datagroup mounting Ec would not make that much impact at close range. 12+ Ec just does a lot of damage...you would be better off buring them out and getting a single turn of no damage.
Back to anti-matter missiles destroying ships. I just removed what I wrote because at the end of the day what I said all along is "it is not required to happen but it is a game and you can write the rule as you want." And that hasn't changed. Starfire isn't reality.
The comment about the legal issues is not about what happened (as Marvin was neither trying to do anything illegal nor was Webber a jackass about the situation), but what could happen to you. So long as Webber or anyone else holds the copywrite on the material, without written permission using that material opens you up to legal action where you can be stiffed with the legal fees of the court proceeding. The goal of going to court isn't always about making money...it is as often about costing the other person money and seeing whose pockets are deeper.
As for firing smaller missiles from Rc why not? BAM-R is one possibility. SM with HARM warheads is another. AFM is the most common one though. There may be some other things you would do depending on the missile space requirements: SM with LT2 may be as good as anything else for killing GBs and you can carry more of them in your magazines. A Wc should be able to fire a SM in sprint mode but acording to the rules not...they also don't list the BAM-R for the Rc or Wc but I assume that is more an oversight then anything else. But most of this is game balance not technology based.
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My memory of the Di is wrong. I'm not sure from where or why it is in my head as being that way, but it most certainly is. On the other hand if it is software update why does it cost 10 MCr more per unit? Why does it degrade the anti-missile performance? You are talking about a system capable of engaging supersonic sea skimming missiles being tasked with hitting an armed cesna aircraft...why do you need to do anything? Fighters to a missile point defence are large, slow, easy to kill targets.
My assumption would be that standard point defense is designed to deal with things that are moving at upwards of 60-80% of light-speed and may find dealing with much slower targets difficult for their programming to handle. Also, I think that there's an underlying assumption that fighters are going to be bobbing and weaving far more than missiles as they enter PD engagement range, and that this makes them difficult targets. Of course, that may be a flawed assumption (not that I made the assumption, but that a fighter bobbing and weaving would really matter to PD).
The Dx in 3rdR is +16% over the 2xDi and removes the not insignificant chance you will get two kills at range 0 and 1 (where the fighters are going to be while doing fR strikes). It occurs where and why you said. But there is no justification for doing it in the first place. There is no justification for making it "smooth." It is just another one of the many changes put in that have long term effects.
Oh, come on. Of course, there's justification for making it smooth. I'd do it in a heart beat rather than have the to-hit # drop precipitously from range 3 to 4, if I could smooth out the degradation of the to-hit #'s. After all, it's no less arbitrary than the original to-hit line. Besides, I hardly think that the tweak of a single range's to-hit # matters all that much, compared to the question of having merged 2 shots into 1.
On dice numbers: a bug SD group requires 30 dice to fire its missiles. If its Dx is used in anti-fighter mode you require 15 with 3rdR and 30 with 3E. But so what? You roll 30 dice each and every time it fires its main weapons.
I'm the wrong guy to rant at. I don't disagree with you on this. There's already a lot of die rolling, so it didn't seem to me that merging Dx's 2 shots into 1 really mattered much at all when you're talking about the kind of #'s of die rolls inherent in a a datagroup of 3 SD's. :)
I have no idea why they fire twice, but why change the rule? Is it bad they fire twice?
Why change the rule? Because I think that Dx would be better as a straight up system upgrade of D, without the presence of a "Di" system, where the system's anti-missile capabilities improve and the anti-fighter capabilities improve, but not too much. I think that an increase from 1 shot to 2 shots (or 2 shots merged into 1) is too great an improvement over Di. That's why I'd change it.
Also note that if the Di system was removed, the entire issue discussed at the top of this post becomes moot, or seems to be.
F&Missiles always work together (does not matter who fires first), E&Missiles work well if the E can fire after the missiles, but if the target has been hit by E's and then must be re-engaged solely by missiles the armour belt has to be chewed through. L&Missiles (outside of the LTx) is the worst case as the missiles don't contribute until they remove the very thing the laser is skipping. That just about all weapons work with E's if the E's are in range is true...well except for the E&L which some of my partners have on their ships...*sighs* That is one combination I've yet to find a way to make work.
One note, which isn't true for WP battles, is that when I'm thinking of these synergies, I tend to think of missiles getting used for a number of turns by themselves until the ships enter beam range. So which weapon fires first or not is less of a concern in that instance. I'm thinking that at least some ships will have had some or all of their shields knocked down as the forces close. And even in this instance, F's and E's work better with missiles. In the L/M combo, the closing ships are battering down shields that their lasers aren't even going to bother with, whereas in the F/M and E/M combos, any shields knocked down by missiles as the ships close the range will be that much less work for F's and E's once they enter beam range.
Overload dampeners are not much of an issue since carrying sufficient numbers of them to stop even a long range E strike is extremely mass expensive for the defender. They are only something that has practical value to asteroid forts, very large bases and space stations. A ship just can't carry enough of them to make a significant difference in combat...the only thing they stop is long range E-sniping from small ship datagroups (single E per ship). There are always special circumstances but generally the O is not worth bothering with unless the ship in question has lots of space available so that you can mount 30 O or something like that and completely block even a point blank attack. And even 30 O faced with a SD datagroup mounting Ec would not make that much impact at close range. 12+ Ec just does a lot of damage...you would be better off burning them out and getting a single turn of no damage.
Yes, I agree that OD's are of somewhat questionable value, give that E-beams often aren't all that common. One might say the same thing about Anti-Laser armor, except that laser weapons are more common than E-beams, given that lasers also occur in laser buoys, laser torps, and are the primary fighter beam weapon. On the whole, OD's are probably a system best used on starships only when you're faced by a race you know to be heavily using E-beams.
The comment about the legal issues is not about what happened (as Marvin was neither trying to do anything illegal nor was Webber a jackass about the situation), but what could happen to you. So long as Webber or anyone else holds the copywrite on the material, without written permission using that material opens you up to legal action where you can be stiffed with the legal fees of the court proceeding. The goal of going to court isn't always about making money...it is as often about costing the other person money and seeing whose pockets are deeper.
Ah, OK. Point taken. But I suppose that it's all moot since it's my intention to create a new history.
As for firing smaller missiles from Rc why not? BAM-R is one possibility. SM with HARM warheads is another. AFM is the most common one though. There may be some other things you would do depending on the missile space requirements: SM with LT2 may be as good as anything else for killing GBs and you can carry more of them in your magazines. A Wc should be able to fire a SM in sprint mode but according to the rules not...they also don't list the BAM-R for the Rc or Wc but I assume that is more an oversight then anything else. But most of this is game balance not technology based.
You make a good point about using SM/LT2's to kill GB's. If you're trying to shoot at something where one hit kills the target, if a smaller, cheaper missile gets the job done as well as a larger, more costly missile, there's plenty of reason to want to use the smaller, cheaper missile.
The point about firing smaller missiles from larger launchers comes down to the fact that some people look at it sort of like how Hawkeye described firing a smaller torpedo from a larger torpedo tube, and think that it just can't be done. I'm not saying that that's my view, just pointing out that others have that view. Personally, this isn't a big issue for me.
The more important concern for me is that I simply don't buy the rationale that one needs a special launcher to fire sprint-style missiles. Launchers are just catapults, mass drivers that eject their missiles into space at which point the missiles' drives engage and send the missiles on their way. There should be no difference in the type of launcher required for a sprint style missile vs a long range missile. Which is why I think that the idea of the "gun-missile launcher" is wrong. I'm of the opinion that the Rc should be able to fire sprint-style missiles, and that a standard size R (though probably not an IND-2 version) should be able to fire SM's in sprint mode.
Is this a significant paradigm shift from how 3E presents it? Yes. But unless I have some overwhelming reason why I shouldn't do it, it's a paradigm shift I intend to make.
At the same time, I intend to shift away from calling "sprint" style missiles "sprint missiles" and "CAMs". And switch over to calling them "torpedoes". That is, "missiles" would be long ranged interceptable weapons, "torpedoes" would be short ranged non-interceptable weapons.
I should make it clear that I'm not going to just cut and paste the 3E tech tables verbatim. I intend to make some tweaks along the way to tell a different story with different assumptions, while at the same time keeping a 3E feel, if not the exact copy of the 3E tech tables. This isn't to say that most of the stuff won't exist. It will. But some stuff will be tweaked and massaged and so forth. To me, in a way, the tech table is part of the "color palette" used to tell the story. And I want to tell my own story, not Dave Weber's story. And that means making some tweaks.
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My assumption would be that standard point defense is designed to deal with things that are moving at upwards of 60-80% of light-speed and may find dealing with much slower targets difficult for their programming to handle. Also, I think that there's an underlying assumption that fighters are going to be bobbing and weaving far more than missiles as they enter PD engagement range, and that this makes them difficult targets. Of course, that may be a flawed assumption (not that I made the assumption, but that a fighter bobbing and weaving would really matter to PD).
LOL, this remindes me of something I read somewhere:
Apparently, survivors of the Bismark stated, that they didn´t hit the attacking Swordfish Torpedoplanes, because they were too slow and their AA-guns allways lead the planes by way too much :)
The point about firing smaller missiles from larger launchers comes down to the fact that some people look at it sort of like how Hawkeye described firing a smaller torpedo from a larger torpedo tube, and think that it just can't be done. I'm not saying that that's my view, just pointing out that others have that view. Personally, this isn't a big issue for me.
I have a bigger problem with the fact, that I can put 4 fighter missiles in a single gunboat rack and fire one after the other. As I said, I can picture putting the four missiles side by side and launching ´em all together - not easily, but I could convince myself it would be possible to do :). But launching one of them after the other?
Ouch, that will be a tough one on the engineering side, I´d guess.
The more important concern for me is that I simply don't buy the rationale that one needs a special launcher to fire sprint-style missiles. Launchers are just catapults, mass drivers that eject their missiles into space at which point the missiles' drives engage and send the missiles on their way. There should be no difference in the type of launcher required for a sprint style missile vs a long range missile. Which is why I think that the idea of the "gun-missile launcher" is wrong. I'm of the opinion that the Rc should be able to fire sprint-style missiles, and that a standard size R (though probably not an IND-2 version) should be able to fire SM's in sprint mode.
Hm, if a missile launcher is indeed "just" a massdriver, then this would absolutely make sense.
SMs would be similar to WW2 torpedoes, which could be set to either high speed and short range or slow speed and long range.
At the same time, I intend to shift away from calling "sprint" style missiles "sprint missiles" and "CAMs". And switch over to calling them "torpedoes". That is, "missiles" would be long ranged interceptable weapons, "torpedoes" would be short ranged non-interceptable weapons.
Ah, so it´s more like:
GM are your torpedoes and SM are your missiles, requiring you to divide your magazin space between the two, if you want to have the option to fire both types?
This actually makes even more sense. Doubling the range (GM to SM) should be a factor of the missile, not the launcher at the ranges we are looking at.
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LOL, this reminds me of something I read somewhere:
Apparently, survivors of the Bismark stated, that they didn't hit the attacking Swordfish Torpedo planes, because they were too slow and their AA-guns always lead the planes by way too much :)
Well, I suppose that that might be a decent parallel, though of course, PD fire in this case would be more automated.
I have a bigger problem with the fact, that I can put 4 fighter missiles in a single gunboat rack and fire one after the other. As I said, I can picture putting the four missiles side by side and launching ´em all together - not easily, but I could convince myself it would be possible to do :). But launching one of them after the other?
Ouch, that will be a tough one on the engineering side, I´d guess.
Well, you can only ripple-fire only 3 items of ordnance from an inline rack, not all 4. Still. it's really not much different from Box Launchers from ISW4 being able to fire their entire load all at once.
Hm, if a missile launcher is indeed "just" a mass driver, then this would absolutely make sense.
That's all they've ever been to me, mass-driver catapults. The huge point is that missile drives are just another form of starship inertialess drives. When you engage the drive, you don't carry over any inertial that may exist prior to turning on the drive. So it wouldn't matter if one launcher catapulted its missile with greater speed than another. Both missiles would lose all of the inertia the instant they engaged their drives to speed off towards their targets.
So to me, the launcher doesn't care whether the "missile" is a long range guided missile or a shorter ranged torpedo. It's just a cylindrical mass that the launcher has to load into its launch tube and then eject from the ship.
SMs would be similar to WW2 torpedoes, which could be set to either high speed and short range or slow speed and long range.
In a way, yes, though don't assume that SM's will remain as is. I might go with only single mode ordnance. In this instance, SM = Standard Missile, and ST = Standard Torpedo. After all, TL2 does seem a bit early to be giving such a nice little toy as a dual mode missile.
Ah, so it´s more like:
GM are your torpedoes and SM are your missiles, requiring you to divide your magazin space between the two, if you want to have the option to fire both types?
This actually makes even more sense. Doubling the range (GM to SM) should be a factor of the missile, not the launcher at the ranges we are looking at.
Yep, GM's would be torpedoes and SM are long range missiles (well, "long" range when they first appear). And at TL5, when the Rc shows up, there'll likely be a CM and a CT (Capital Torpedo) for the Rc to use. And as you correctly point out, you'd have to decide how to divide up your magazines and how many torpedoes and how many missiles to carry. I think that it'd probably be unwise to not have at least some torpedoes, just in case. But that'd be a decision players would have to make.
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Actually, I don't think starfire missiles have a problem with exhaust, as they are all launched by electromagnetical catapults. So they may be stacked in the GB tubes like the Metalstorm bullets.
Speaking off.. where is my close range fR laucher wich copies metalstorm capacites? :) I mean... wall of rockets?
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Actually, I don't think starfire missiles have a problem with exhaust, as they are all launched by electromagnetical catapults. So they may be stacked in the GB tubes like the Metalstorm bullets.
Speaking off.. where is my close range fR launcher which copies metalstorm capacites? :) I mean... wall of rockets?
LOL! Close range? More like knife-fighting range!
And a launcher for fighter grade munitions is quite unlikely, not that I thought that you were actually serious. ;)