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Damage Rating Revision Discussion

Fred said:
The CFS is essentially a "Combined Field System". There seemed to be little harm in saying that a shield system would protect from Scalar, Xaser and space rocks all at the same time.
Click to expand...

Not everyone has the luxury of the combined CFS or CDD. A faction with a cure-all system has some sort of massive leaping advantage over a faction which uses indivdiual systems in tandem, now that they're supposedly not permitted to be activated at the same time.
 
Okay, I see Tomoe's point about needing to run more than one shield at once. I'm going to change the rules to allow multiple shields, but with the same total shield SP/threshold as one-shield ship.

Example:

Single Shield Ship:

20 SP (Threshold 2)

Double Shield Ship:

10 SP (Threshold 2)
10 SP (Threshold 2)

Ships with more than one shield system are able to have their engineers transfer power from one shield to the other through roleplaying.

This way regardless of the shield setup, ships get the same number points in the end. People also get to keep their multi-shields this way.

Here's the edit:
=== Multiple Shields ===
Ships are allowed to use more than one type of shielding at once, but the total SP shall not exceed the SP of a regular shield system. For example, a ship with one shield system might have 20 SP (Threshold 2), while a dual shielded ship could have two shields that are 10 SP (Threshold 2) each, or 5 SP and 15 SP. Again, the total SP should not give multi-shield ships an advantage.

Ships with more than one shield system can still used their complete SP on damage to one shield; to do so, their engineers must transfer power from one shield to the other through roleplaying.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the suggestion, Tomoe.
 
All active Star Army starship class pages have been updated to the new DRs. STV, Mindy series, and Daisy have been updated as well. I haven't got to the various armor accessories nor all of the individual starship weapons pages just yet.

Special thanks to Jake for updating the various personnel weapons articles (10mm pistol, NSP, etc).
 
Fred, the railguns are not light weapons, they are moderate. Aside from the giant cannon they are the only wepaon the Plumeria has and RP has shown them doing great damage time and time again. Thus they should stay DR 3.

Edit: Changed Plumeria arsenal from 6 to 2 of these cannons as a compromise.
 
That allows the Irim to look the part of a heavy gunship because it has more and I see you sort of switched around the Irim's cannons for the Chiharu's.

No more complaints here.
 
Wes said:
Okay, I see Tomoe's point about needing to run more than one shield at once. I'm going to change the rules to allow multiple shields, but with the same total shield SP/threshold as one-shield ship.
Click to expand...

So does this mean the Mindy's shield arm projector thingy is essentially useless, since it draws all its strength from the "main" shield?
 
The CFS on the Mindy is primarily for propulsion. It has 0 DR, so it still falls within the rules.
 
I'd argue we should have called it a CDD in the first place then, but I suppose it also serves as what protects the Mindy from hazards like scalar radiation.
 
I know the old DR system didn't take size into account, but this new system overcompensates.

While the base SP for big ships has shot up considerably, giving them HUGE shielding and hull strength advantages, there is no trade off for smaller ships.

I think, at the very least, we need a speed penalty for the more massive vessels. By decreasing the top speed by 0.025c for every higher size class, this could be a way to do it. That would make the largest, heaviest armored battleships go at 0.275c. Perfectly reasonable in my mind.

Currently the speed penalties follow armor only, which I find unreasonable -- size is just as much a part of mass as armor type, sometimes much more so.

Another thing is the massive disadvantage smaller ships have in the way of structural integrity. I'm thinking SP should go up from 20 for class 1 ships, in increments of 5. That puts the highest SP as 40 for size 5.

A stop-gap measure would be to restrict doublers and triplers to Size 1 and Size 2 ships. Unfortunately, with those systems as rare and short duration as they are, it is not the most desirable solution.


We need a trade off of some kind here, to give smaller ships some sort of benefit. Otherwise, there's no point in using those ships at all.


Edited typo
 
I don't want to sound snarky or anything, but I'm really curious. Do we ever actually fight at anything even closely resembling the top speeds of most of our ships?
 
I dunno, possibly only in set instances...but as it is, slower ships can't even escape the larger ones at STL speed, much less fight.

There's no trade-off with the armor and hull gains on the large ships, and that's a big problem for the little guys.

I mean...heck, a cruise ship does maybe 25 at top speed and a jet ski around 80, according to what I'm finding on the net.
 
The problem is that this isn't water. In space, it's the ships with the largest and most powerful engines that have the highest top speeds. However, smaller ships have much less mass to get moving, and would therefore have faster acceleration. If everyone has the same speeds, the smaller ship has the advantage of faster acceleration, and so, while he might be pushing .1c, you're already at .35c and half an AU away.
 
Toshiro, mount a cannon on a speed boat, and go attack a US Navy destroyer.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

Done already? Wasn't a long fight, was it?

The same principal applies here. Smaller ships can't stand against larger ones. Case in point, a Tolchok or a Sharie would beat a Plumeria or Vampire so viciously that it would stop being funny in mere minutes.

I really don't think we should curtail the system to allow gunships and the like to be anywhere near the staying power of a capital ship. It doesn't make sense from a practical or realistic perspective. If anything, I think the SP differences between classes should be increased.

However, I do think that making smaller vessels a bit faster makes sense, although it doesn't make much of a difference in combat. However, your proposal of decreasing speed by .25 c for every size class up is ridiculous, not only because we'd be reaching negative speed by the time we hit cruisers, but also because gravitic drives, provided they have enough power, really don't care how big whatever they're moving is. Since most nations have gravitic drives, or at least engines that can get their ships moving damn fast in a short amount of time, having that drastic a reduction would be rather nonsensical. Maybe a decrease of .015 or lower would be better.
 
Eep, sorry. I meant to put 0.025. That would put the biggest ships with the thickest armor at 0.275.

And I'm not saying they should be equal, I'm saying there has to be a trade-off.

Sure, a huge ship should be able to win in combat, but it should NOT be able to keep pace with a smaller ship. The smaller ships at minimum need the ability to outrun these ships.


Simple fact is that the system, for whatever reason, has become seriously unbalanced toward the bigger ships, and the smaller ones need to have the chance to at least opt out of combat or dodge slower attacks/stay out of the line of fire.

All the big ships have to do is throw up an Anti-FTL field, and the tiny ships are currently out of luck.
 
In regards to the new DR system:

A potential exploit I see is weapons spam. It appears that weapons are mostly limited by "type" (plasma, nuclear, etc) as opposed to size. Therefore a ship can maximize its DR output by strapping on tons of smaller guns instead of a few, very heavy cannons.

Will we be making DR accommodations for those who quality over quantity in terms of weapons, or is DR going to be locked in by weapon type? (e.g., smaller turret-mounted railguns always doing the same DR as a giant spine-mounted magnetic accelerator cannon)
 
Shields have mitigation effects, where they ignore weapons beneath a certain threshold. Even if you shoot 9001 Point Defense Weapons at a small gunboat, it still won't do anything.

This is seen in that a gunboat would have shields of 10 (1), while the PDW fires SDR 1 blasts. The result? The weapon fails to penetrate the shields because of weapons mitigation.
 
The concept of mitigation so far was that it was the amount of damage a shield could stop per hit, with the excess going through to the ship's armor. Every point of damage the mitigation of a ship stops reduces the shield total. Any it doesn't stop reduces the ship's structural points.

However, anything that's rating 4 or less on the mecha weapon scale would *plink* or *bzzt* harmlessly on a starship-grade target.

As for weapon limitations, this goes more in the realm of ship building, but I'd consider any ship bearing enough weapons to do half its SP in same-grade damage to be well armed. The closer your weapon loadout damage potential gets to the ship's SP total, the more it can be considered an attack ship bristling with weapons for its size.

Current designs exceeding their own Structural Point totals, can be balanced from the get go in a couple of ways. Some involve accepting to tone down certain weapons to the mecha-scale so to maintain point-defense firepower without having these weapons be significant on the ship-scale. Another is to consider having some of those weapons have a much slower charging time to limited cycling use, or to have them be single-shot in a fight or limited to a few shots (if the ammo restriction is significant).

It wasn't my goal to make policy on how to build ships with this, as I felt it ought to remain fairly freeform as long as common sense applied. I'd note the above suggestions inconvenience me too: most of the Mishhuvurthyar ships are bristling with weapons. I'd need to give them a huge overhaul or simply scrap them (including the flagship type, which is quite guilty of the exploiting abuse Jess pointed out).

Also, just as food for thought: I'd imagine that a weapon with a high damage output is much more likely to deal more compromising damage on a target than a weaker one. You can go and fire 1 damage anti-ship weapon on a cruiser target and it will be able to take it - however, a GM could easily interpret that such blows would be surface hits, not penetrating deeply to damage the more delicate internal workings of the ship - effectively, the armor is doing its job of protecting the insides of the ship. Still, pile these hits up and it's quite possible to deal the opposing vessel death through hundreds of papercuts.

A more powerful weapon, though, is much more likely to punch through deeper and damage the internal systems, decreasing the ship's performance, damaging weapons/power systems/engines/shield emitters and such. The current scale has a level of lethality suggesting that a ship can take 10 hits of a same-class weapon before being crippled/destroyed... but if you end up using a stronger weapon than that, of course it's going to smart more. Shields so far double a ship's staying power, though more reliably so as long as the said ship fights something its size-class or smaller.
 
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