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Capital Ships and How to Make Them Work

Exhack

Exhack

Inactive Member
There's been a formal disconnect between reality and the design of capital ships for some time on SARP, and I'd like to rectify this by just tweaking the rules for their deployment a little. In fluff, ships are described as having up to a meter of armor, kilometers of hardened substructure components and redundant reactors, engines and life support systems. Many of them feature workshops and fabrication bays that make them nearly completely self-sufficient, and the numbers universally describe them as being expensive symbols of national pride.

So why do they suck?

The answer can be largely derived from the way we represent the SP values of starships on the site. For every 10 SP a ship has, its size is doubled, with certain egregious exceptions on the part of certain authors. This has had the result of placing implicit diminishing returns, which is further compounded by the fact that all ship classes are overarmed and underarmored. Because of that, it's generally more practical to just keep to smaller classes since the investment of a larger ship will always be wasted.

But this makes very little sense, as pointed out before, since the setting fluff describes these larger capital ships as being more heavily constructed than smaller vessels. Why should they be weaker, pound per pound, than a smaller ship? Well, it certainly makes a degree of sense in the scope of SARP's own preference for smaller vessels, it doesn't make a lot of sense.

As an alternative to keeping on the same trends with larger classes and making the same mistakes, I propose that beyond 30 SP, the SP of a ship is doubled every time the size is doubled. This is to represent the vastly increased mass of those vessels, but not without cost.

All ships with an SP of 60 would logically cost twice as much capital ship limit as those with 30, and ships with 90 SP would cost three times as much! This is to reinforce the notion of supermassive vessels being large investments without making them complete wastes of resources. It also allows a fleet to flesh itself out with 'hero units', and since most of the old 'big ship' classes are being phased out, the small core of large vessels will become a fairly important strategic asset in battles.
 
I prefer the current system because the point of the size guidelines is to keep people in the current ranges of length and SP (10-50) instead of creating an arms race to make the biggest behemoth.
 
This system is mostly meant to be fix to the way that capital ships seem to have the same armor mass as escorts, not a means of enabling people to rush out behemoths randomly. It even penalizes people for doing so, since those more powerful ship classes would carry penalties to the ship cap.

The problem remains the diminishing returns between class increases are extremely egregious, especially in light of the overarmed chassis that have been put up ever since the DR system was stratified into classes and 'shield piercing' and 'total annihilation' weapons were nerfed. A gunship or frigate is 100% tougher than a gunship with about 800% the mass and volume (assuming you double the size), while a cruiser is only about 50% stronger with the same 800% increase. It becomes worse at 40 and 50 points, because the DR/SP system doesn't do a good job of gauging the importance of armor and structural strength.

Just think of it this way.

Assuming that damage represents 'mass destroyed or made unusable', a gunship with 20 SP sustains a 5 SP hit, it loses about 25% of its mass, or about 400 cubic meters if it measured 100 by 20 by 20.

By contrast, a capital ship in the 40 SP category taking a 5 SP hit only loses about 12.5% of its mass, which amounts to an insane 1 464 843 cubic meters of hull and chassis if it measured something like 750 x 125 x 125 meters. In terms of proportionality, this doesn't even follow square cube law, which is the de-rigeur constraint on the durability of three dimensional things.

Making capital ships proportionally tougher in regards to their size beyond a given threshold shouldn't destabilize the game in the long run. Numbers of capital ships will decrease in fleet if people want to build beyond the 30 SP cruiser in proportion to just how large people plan on making their ships, and new ship submissions will be under intense scrutiny. It's not like someone would really be stupid enough to devote their entire 100 points of capital ship limit to build a 38x10^30 SP ship that is about 669 quadrillion lightyears long.

With the effective 25 km limit on all ships and space stations, it means that ships will never get beyond a hypothetically massive 480 SP, while facing separate issues like having a 96 day build time and costing 16 ship cap to build. Both the Iori and Zodiac space stations more or less fall under these guidelines already, capping roughly around their appropriate SP to size ratios if you use the system presented here.
 
Exhack said:
It's not like someone would really be stupid enough to devote their entire 100 points of capital ship limit to build a 38x10^30 SP ship that is about 669 quadrillion lightyears long.
Click to expand...


Never underestimate the stupidity of some people.
 
That doesn't look so bad, but I would remove the super star fortress category.
 
The DR and Shields systems for the site are based around having the largest ship size at 50. There is no reason to go beyond that unless we want to have another 'lets all build super-ships' round.
 
That's a good point, so I edited the chart to clarify the effect on shields.

For the stats tables, all ships of 50 or more SP would use the 50 SP chart.
 
To be honest, this suggestion has nothing to do with attrition of design.

It is entirely to do with making established scifi ideas work within the bounds of the SARP to aid the narrative and set relative positions and ideas for roleplayers

A large ship is representative of a given fleet. It provides commands, communications, repair, material storage and the heavy fist of aggression. It is large, massively symbolic and slow. It is the secret king of the fleet chess-board.

Simply put: If the expectation of the fantastic and a sense of wonder is one of the cornerstones of science fiction that separates it from other genres of fiction, what do we gain from intentionally breaking it?

The only ones who lose out are ourselves.
 
Honestly I could see HNI fitting the Super Star Fort catagory. :\ The thing is MASSIVE. Besides, I'd wager if anyone even attempted to build one, let alone design one to be put through the NTSE we'd be all over it and scrutinizing from every angle. I also think one of the key factors for making much larger ships is the OOC time put into it. Which means you won't be fielding massive numbers at anyone time let alone if you have little to no ship cap to back it up. Each one is a serious investment. And a Super Star Fort is more like what we used to use on the few old sci-fi sites I lurked before coming here. Prestige Ships. They are massive undertakings but with equally large strings attached. They took forever to make, and you had to pull off a hell of a convincing argument to even consider having it as well as the resource backing (I.E it wasn't feasible with just one planetary system).

In this case it'd take a year and some change. OOCly to make one. The ends may not justify the means in making one for war that is already on your door step, and I am sure it'd be such a huge undertaking that such a feat would drain a lot of resources. Let alone if it actually falls in combat. It'd be a huge morale blow within itself.
 
This seems like a good idea for the most part. The sizes and vessel types seem to match nearly everyone's concept. The Ship Cap thing is a nice touch also.

I would personally lengthen the Build Times since only a few nations would be able to build like that (Nepland and the Yammies), but that's my only problem with it.

Overall, with a little refining, this could work out better.
 
I see problems with this suggestion - I see where it is going and why, but I'm not sure it's making a fix without baring other problematic issues. If a fix is to be made, I'd appreciate it being a solid, long-lasting and consistent one.

* * *

The first is that it greatly lessens weapon lethality versus the larger ships. Some could say that's exactly the point, but the end result will be that the very best weaponry SARP can offer that you can load out on a warship will do even more trivial amounts of damage than they had.

Back when I established this, I tried to fix a guideline that would establish that the best kind of armament a vessel would field would cap out at the size class of the vessel (similarly to the average absorb threshold for shields). Ideally, the main guns of Plumeria gunships would've inflicted SDR3 and not SDR5 because I was promoting a 'lethality potential intent' in equipping a ship with a weapon instead of saying 'aether does high damage because its aether'.

Unfortunately, I was overruled there. Wes couldn't imagine his Plumeria main gun not being the best thing ever in existence or that an aether cannon could come secondplace-or-equal to anything else in a scheme were SDR1 could be a low-power aether turret or a light railgun turret and SDR5 could be a massive aether shock array or a spinal positron railgun.

If such would've been implemented in the first place, larger ships would feel a lot larger. Because larger vessels can field larger weapons, they would have a much easier time cracking the protections of large ships, and the smaller weapons of smaller vessels would in turn take longer to take them down.

Also...

The SP/size present values are arbitrary and I understand how more materials/larger size could be construed as 'better' in the toughness department, but we have to remember that we're talking about spaceships. Spaceships, even when armored, are pretty fragile. You don't have to smash them entirely apart in science fiction to destroy them - attacking choice spots can result in the engines blowing up, the vessel folding in two because its centerline took too many hits, or dramatic structural damage causes a bunch of decomppressions which ultimately destroy the ship.

In the light of the above paragraph, I'd claim that ship size is tied, but not necessarily equal to the total amount of abuse a ship can take. The way I thought of it, a ship size value (say, size 5) would be able to sustain 10 times the damage potential of the average weapon expected out of that size class (SDR5) 0 thus it takes 10 SDR5 hits to go through 50 SP.

That way, I made sure that SDR1 was major for the 10 SP ships, and that SDR5 was also major to 50 SP ships. I find it's a shame that I was never heeded there because if I had done so, many people whom have raised concerns from giant mecha having similar weapons to power armors would've been avoided (the same goes for proper size differentials as Exhack expressed it here).

* * *

Another problem I see is that I really don't feel the values for 'ship count' are appropriate. I actually applaud the attempt to do so, but I find the values chosen incongruous.

If there's this determination to tie SP more closely to actual ship length, then I think the 'ship count' values need to be more closely tied - with a ship count of 1 being equal to 10 SP.

A 30 SP cruiser with this in mind would be worth the ame construction resources/maintenance costs as three 10 SP frigates.
 
Except it would mean we could field proportionately smaller fleets per-system. Which may fuel land grab attempts. As it stands though with the current buildup limitations battleships count as '1' on the capital ship cap. With what Ex outlined it is higher and emphasizes a little more thought being put into your builds. And on how precious larger ships are without severely tapping the ship cap. Though maybe there is room for a middle ground or possible alternative here to better it without more repercussions.
 
I don't find that convincing. Frigates, Escorts and cruisers are all worth the same value, but all the ships after that become incremented? I look at what's written for cruisers and it's clearly bigger and more or an investment than the ships preceding it.

Another thing that baffles me is how the cruiser classification no longer holds its sweet spot under that scheme. when a cruiser is 30 SP and a Heavy Cruiser 40 SP, the cruiser faces unfavorable odds, but it has a chance of winning. If a cruiser faces of against a 50SP battleship, it's doubtful it'll win, but it's still capable of being a threat.

Being reduced from 75% to 50% by comparison with the tier above is really significant, and not something the frigates and escorts suffer from in comparison to the Cruiser.
 
Look at it like this. Cruisers are a stepup from a destroyer. They are slightly bigger, a little more armored and carry some bigger guns. Most of the systems used between frigates, destroyers and cruisers are interchangeable. The only limiting factor is the cruiser 'mains' are bigger.

As for them being the same. Frigates and Escorts fall under the same purview of 'Escorts' on that category I thought. Since 'gunship' and 'frigate' are almost synonymous with each other on here if we use the Sakura and Plumeria as a benchmark. Although the latter has the firepower more in the range of a cruiser... However, where I used to RP cruisers were anti-destroyer and below but could still pose a moderate thread to higher tier ships if handled properly.

Heavy Cruisers/Battlecruisers were more in the vein of fighting battleships in small packs of one or two and the like while filling the role as your ship of the line. Their differences are that Heavy Cruisers pack a lot more firepower, armor and systems then a lighter cruiser design. So the SP should reflect this imo. But then again with the current system it is vague on 'Frigates and Escort' ship types as it goes, Escorts, Destroyers, Cruisers, Carriers/Heavy Cruisers, Battleship.

You face unfavorable odds in a head on attack with a ship that is larger then you are anyways. So you either need another of the class, or a larger ship. Unless you're a hell of a tactician and can pull off defeating a larger opponent. Either way you're getting the same thing with this system. And I do not think anything stops you from bumping up the SP increment a little to close the gap between cruiser and heavy if it is a big deal.
 
By frigate (or corvette), I meant what Exhack calls 'attack crafts'. I happen to strongly disagree with the name 'attack craft'.

I'll admit some of my objections are more personal. Wes has always favored light gunships but went and pit them against vessels that were many times larger. I remember when he wasn't enjoying the success he wished for that it was adviced (by people, including myself) that Wes could either pick smaller enemies, or upgrade ship chassis to be able to take on the bigger boys.

When I made Miharu, I targeted the cruiser niche especially to target that sweetspot for a plotship that could handle fast-paced skirmishes, but end up being viable in a battle against larger vessels (basically listening to my own advice). Of course the odds then are unfavorable (and the Miharu vs Takumi battle made a pretty blunt statement of that).

That perception is what is being turned upside down, and that's really what concerns me here - scares me, even. I really don't like the idea of the ships above the cruiser class to soak in three times more punishment - every weapon in use is basically going to do three times less damage on them.

An SDR5 anti-matter torpedo representing a 10% threat to a battleship will go down to 3.3%. That's a big change to me, in regard to a weapon which should be capable of being scary even for the big ships.

I suppose some of it is really an issue of pacing. Of me being comfortable where I am and me not seeing really how the fix truly benefits given the Cons that come with it.

...and I'll reiterate, tying maximum weapon damage potential on a hull to the ship size was a much more elegant way of establishing the might and resilience of the larger vessels than simply inflating their SP values. The DR system was made to have that included before Wes tore it out - of course it's not working quite right.
 
I agree with Fred but for a different reason.

Smaller ships give you a greater number of ships which means more and better interdiction. Larger ships give you more weapons, shields, and gear per SP sense the stat tables pay out better the more you put into weapons and shields.

Both have their uses and pound for pound a larger ship is going to be better than a smaller ship so this 'bigger ships aren't very good' thing is entirely imagined.

There is also no reason to go above 50 SP. We all agreed 50 was going to represent the largest ships and arbitrarily increasing that number serves no purpose other than to disrupt the rules systems we have built around the 50SP model. Worse yet is attaching SP to length in this manner when it is supposed to represent a combination of volume and resilience.



It would be far better for people to stop asking for special rules and start using their creativity. After all the greater than 50SP star fortresses can easily be brought into the current system by counting them as multiple 50SP components.
 
Weapons don't deal nearly enough damage for how they are described and the SP system doesn't have the depth I'd like but the proposed changes don't help anything.
 
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