About weapon sizes. Paul and I ahve the rule in our campaign that capital weapons like Fc, HET are only allowed on BC and larger, making smaller ships more like escorts.

Yes, I know.  My problem with that rule is this:  In WW1/2 era ships, heavy caliber guns weren't limited from being used on lighter ships due to any arbitrary "rule", but because of real issues.  Like the force of the recoil during a broadside volley possibly being enough to flip the ship, or because the guns were simply too large to be physically mounted on the ship, or because the force of the guns firing would have torn the ship apart in some way.  I just don't see those as being issues for capital beam weapons in Starfire, which is why such a limitation seems arbitrary to me.  I suppose that a better argument could be made for cap missile launchers, though I'm not entire certain about that either.


I think that stronger arguments can be made for firing arc rules like those used in Ultra, where for beam weapons, the ship must be more than x3 the size of the weapon to be turret mounted, more than x2 the size of the weapon for a side mount, and ships that are only twice the size of the weapon or less, the weapon must be forward or rear arced (usually forward), i.e. a spinal mount.  (The restrictions on kinetic weapons are a LOT more severe.)

Of course, these ratios aren't particularly aggressive, and particularly not for 3E where beam weapon sizes tend to be more cookie cutter than in Ultra.  What I mean is that only an Escort (or EX) would be incapable of turret mounting the standard 4 hs beam weapon.  I  think that for 3E or Cosmic to get any real value out of this type of rule, the restrictions would need to be more aggressive, and it probably wouldn't hurt if the beam weapons weren't quite so cookie cutter in size since constant size makes for a constant result on the firing arc restrictions. 

However, there are some people who wouldn't like the idea of beam weapons no longer being so constant in size.  Partially out of tradition, but also in part out of what I see as a bit of laziness ... because they like the idea of plug and play with two standard sizes, i.e. 4 hs and 6 hs, since they don't have to mess up their ship designs if they want replace one type of beam weapon with another.  Of course, if you stick with whole numbers for weapon sizes, there's a rather severe limit to how much variation in size you have to work with.  Plus the fact that if one increased the size of a 4 hs weapon to 5 hs, you've decreased its overall effectiveness by decreasing the number of such weapons you can fit into a ship (by 20%) and questions of balance creep into the mix.

Actually Ian I think a to hit-bonus for an untargetted ship is a wonderful idea...

Matt

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"shoot til she pops" just means that you focus fire on a single ship and keep swapping targets as they blow up.  This is contrary to actual naval practice where you engage every target possible and only double up when you outnumber the enemy. 

I’m sorry, but I have to seriously, seriously disagree with you here.  For WW1/2 era naval combat, this sort of targeting was done for a very practical reason that would be completely moot in space-based warfare.  Ships of that era used the splashes of their misses to re-adjust their aim.  If multiple ships using fairly similarly sized guns were shooting at the same target, it’d be very difficult if not impossible to determine which splashes were linked to which ship’s guns.  This simply wouldn’t be a problem in STARFIRE combat, and therefore not a reason for ships not to group their fire.  So quite frankly, I see no reason NOT to gang up your fire, if that’s your desire.

The reason that it was dangerous to leave an enemy ship unengaged in WW1/WW2 was it enabled it to fire on you without being troubled by your fire, even near misses by a nearly one ton shell will cause the receiving ship to move, potentially spoiling your aim. An example of this was where Beatty's battlecruisers at Jutland failed to engage  Derflinnger for 10 minutes. Thus if you wished to carry the analogy into Starfire a ship not fired upon should have a to hit bonus. Probably not going to be a favorite of anyones .

Ian

This seems similar to the benefit that OWP's, SS's, and PDC's get in Ultra.

And this bonus may also be applied to these units as well (i.e. a BS0 received a -5 modifier, while a BS3 receives a -6, a BS5 receives a -7, etc.).

Also, it seems to me that this benefit will vary by weapon.  I won't write this idea off.  It's interesting, though it does infringe on the very interesting benefits that Ultra did give to immobile "bases" (those benefits differed by base "type", i.e. OWP vs. SS vs. PDC).

I should also note that I'm not an anti-ESF crusader like PaulM seems to be.  (I'm also not pro-ESF.)  I'm willing to listen however.  That said, I'm not sure that this idea would do anything to break up ESF.  The way I see it at the moment, it would only be a way to give some small advantage to larger ships over smaller ones for beam weapons.  It seems that this advantage is most felt at short ranges where damage increases quickly (and minor changes in effective range can quickly change damage) and at extreme ranges where the larger ship might gain some extra range on the weapon.  Regardless, an interesting idea.

I'm in two minds over this idea.

On one hand, I moderately dislike the ESF. On the gripping hand, I'm not in favour of this idea, as it is quite a change from 3e.....

Matt, could you explain what you mean by "effective range" in a bit more detail?

EDIT:  Do you mean something like this:  a BB shooting at a target that was 6 hexes away from its target would be effectively 4 hexes distant on the damage table (meaning that it'd do 2 points of damage rather than 1)?

Yep. A BB would be firing with either a different to-hit number and/or a different amount of damage per hit.

Using your example above, a CT would be firing at range 6 (with a to-hit of 8 and damage of 1 using F), while a BB would be firing at an effective range of 4 (with a to-hit of 9 and/or damage of 2 using F).

True. A real life analogy would be all aircraft armed with missiles of the same range, or all ships armed with missiles with the same range - which we all know isn't true.

What might be an idea to help break up the ESF, would be to add a bonus to either damage or effective range based on ship size.

I.e. a CT gets a -0 to the effective range, whereas a CL gets a -1 and a BB gets a -2 and a ML gets a -3, etc.

That way, you have a choice of sticking to ESF (and accepting that some of your ships are not at their optimal range), or splitting your ships up into smaller stacks (so that they are all at their optimal range).

Matt, could you explain what you mean by "effective range" in a bit more detail?

EDIT:  Do you mean something like this:  a BB shooting at a target that was 6 hexes away from its target would be effectively 4 hexes distant on the damage table (meaning that it'd do 2 points of damage rather than 1)?  Or if it was at 17 hexes from its target, it'd have an effective range of 15 hexes and would do 1 point of damage instead of 0?

The ESF comes about in any game that treats a cruiser as a frigate with more of the same weapons.  I first encountered it in Starfleet Battles.  It is a way to min-max the system and it works.  There is no argument against it since it is the optimal solution.  It maximizes your firepower for no cost to you the player.

I’ve gotta disagree with you here.  I don’t see that those two things are all that linked.  If you want to say that there’s a link between ESF and firing arcs, I can see where there’s an argument to be made there.  But not with ESF and “a weapon is a weapon”.  At least not that I see.

You can get rid of it not when you change hex sizes but when you change the weapons so that a force beam on a frigate isn't the same as a force beam on a battleship.  Nothing else will remove it outside of some sort of damage from exploding ships (probably the rest of the ships should take penalties to fire since their sensors are probably a bit overloaded by the ships exploding around them).

You are forgetting about firing arcs.  Those would have some impact on ESF, though I don’t think that the ones used in Ultra are aggressive enough to seriously impact ESF except for the tiny hull types (i.e. FG and below).

Your point about explosions blinding sensors is an interesting one.  And I think that one could say that you wouldn’t even need to require exploding ships to actually cause damage to other ships in the same tac hex to use this “blinding sensors” idea.  OTOH, given the nature of the way sensors supposedly work in Starfire, I’m not sure if exploding ships would blind such sensors.  Certainly, I doubt that blinding light would blind sensors that are designed to detect drive field emissions. 

As for the “a weapon on a DD not being the same as a weapon on a BB” thing, that’s just not Starfire.  It would completely change the nature of the game such that it would no longer be recognizable AS Starfire.  I’m sure that that wouldn’t bother you, but I suspect that it might bother a great many other people, not to mention the fact that it would make the game somewhat more complex, since nearly every weapon, or at least beam weapon, would need to come in at least 3 different sizes.  And that would just about triple the size of the to-hit and damage tables.

"shoot til she pops" just means that you focus fire on a single ship and keep swapping targets as they blow up.  This is contrary to actual naval practice where you engage every target possible and only double up when you outnumber the enemy. 

I’m sorry, but I have to seriously, seriously disagree with you here.  For WW1/2 era naval combat, this sort of targeting was done for a very practical reason that would be completely moot in space-based warfare.  Ships of that era used the splashes of their misses to re-adjust their aim.  If multiple ships using fairly similarly sized guns were shooting at the same target, it’d be very difficult if not impossible to determine which splashes were linked to which ship’s guns.  This simply wouldn’t be a problem in STARFIRE combat, and therefore not a reason for ships not to group their fire.  So quite frankly, I see no reason NOT to gang up your fire, if that’s your desire.

Also consider that with modern anti-ship missiles, their destructive power is such that it takes very few of them to destroy a ship, as opposed to Starfire missiles, which require a lot of hits (with regular nuke warheads) to destroy even a moderately sized ship. The nature of modern naval combat actually encourages the spreading of fire, whereas the nature of Starfire combat encourages focusing one's fire.
 

This is because un-engaged ships are significantly more effective then ones under fire. 

Again, I see this as more of a wet navy thing, though I wouldn’t totally discount it in space combat.  For one thing, I suspect that aiming is entirely done by computer, and I doubt that the computer is going to be made more nervous by its ship being under fire.  People will decide which ships to target.  Computers will aim the weapons at the given targets.

"shoot til she pops" also means ships either live or die and generally at most only one ship will be damaged.  This renders moot most of the damage control/damage repair and other rules that are in Starfire since they never get needed.  It also means you don't need a fleet train or a lot of logistic support since you have at most 1 damaged ship. 

I still hold that a major reason for “shoot til she pops” is ship design.  As long as an enemy ship remains an active combatant (i.e. has an active weapon), there’s no legit reason to not be shooting at that ship.  And if one sticks a beam weapon as the last system on the control sheet, “shoot til she pops” is only logical.  Why waste fire trying to bash down a fresh enemy’s shields and armor when there’s another enemy ship that has no S or A and is still a threat?

I can tell you this… unless there’s a legit strategic reason to do otherwise, I’m not wasting fire on S and W when there are damaged ships still firing on me!!!  Heck, even in the situation you describe below, where you have a losing fleet intent on inflicting damage, I still wouldn’t waste any fire on Shields, when there were ships whose internal systems were unprotected by S and A.

One thing I tended to do in the München campaign when playing an NPR that determined they were to lose was switch to firing on multiple targets to inflict any sort of damage since damaged ships are harder to deal with then destroyed ones.  Another time the 25 Rc equipped ships engaged the enemy multiple ships at a time since those damaged ships were less combat effective and I wasted less firepower in overkills even if the targeted vessels took two rounds to kill...so 25 kills ever 2 rounds rather than 12 kills a round.  I frankly think that designating fire should be done before shooting starts since it is supposedly semi-simultaneous...and missiles are certainly in flight for a good part of the 30s turn.

Requiring fire to be designated before starting the combat phase will just slow down the game further and make the game less and less playable for larger fleets.  I won’t disagree that it could have a positive effect on the game, but at a very high cost.  Too high a cost for many, if not most, players.

And if you were going to go this route, you should also require plotted movement or at least phased movement, rather than standard free movement.  And what the heck, if using phased movement, maybe roll separately for movement initiative (right before the movement phase) and combat initiative (right before the combat phase).  (Obviously, if using plotted movement, movement initiative is moot.)

And BTW, I would suggest that if you really like pre-plotted fire, there’s nothing stopping you from making it a house rule.  But I don’t think that it would really work out well for the core rules.