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Rejected Submission [Submission Rules] Armament Limitations

F

FrostJaeger

Banned Member
  • Faction requires art: Nope.
  • Contains unapproved sub-articles? Nope.
  • Contains new art? Nope.
  • Previously submitted? Nope, though it contains elements from this and this.
Well, here you have it, ladies and/or gentlemen. The expanded, fleshed-out, more-thoroughly-explained (no offense @Fred) replacement/re-installment/I don't even know because I typed this up at 4 in the morning for DRv3's weapon limitations.

I'd like to thank @Arbitrated, @META_mahn, @Talarn, and the rest of the SARPChat Discord server for acting as reviewers/moral support/editors/etc. and @Fred for creating the basis of the system in the first place, but, uh, yeah, that's pretty much all I have to say due to being really, really tired at the time of writing.

As before, would @Wes, @Doshii Jun, @Fred, @Ametheliana, and @CadetNewb (plus anyone else who has constructive criticism) mind looking at this thing (or a derivative of it, anyways) one more time?

Also, one other minor request @Wes: Would you lock and/or move the original thread to the "Rejected or Abandoned Submissions" sub-forum, please? In my opinion, this submission kind of, uh, supersedes the older one in terms of purpose and scope.

P.S.: @Zack My apologies for not replying to the 4th Elysian Empire submission in a more timely fashion; I'll be doing so tomorrow - and it's something I'll do my best to be more "on top of" in the future.
 
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As a PLAYER of Star Army, I am using the checklist and provided submission guide to give my opinions in as unbiased a way as possible.

This review is for: DRv3 Weapon Limitation Remake

The submitted article is/has…
[ Y ] A very high level of overall quality
[ Y ] A general topic sentence under the title header
[ N/A ] Artwork (Required for new species; Strongly recommended for vehicles and hand weapons)\\
[ Y ] Needed and/or useful to the setting
[ Y ] In the proper format/template
[ ] Proofread for spelling and grammar
  • Fire Breath is two words.
  • I unfortunately have no choice but to send out the fighter jets; Comma's should be after "I" and "Unfortunately"
    All edits made to ease submitters work load. Grammar standard used as Grammarly, American Standard Grammar, Critical Errors only.
[ Y ] Easy to read and understand (not a lengthy mass of technobabble)
[ Y ] Wikified (terms that could be a link should be a link)
[ Y ] No red and/or broken links
[ N/A ] Reasonably scientifically plausible
[ Y ] Reasonably neutral point of view

The submitted article is/does not…
[ N ] Overpowered (or cutting tech for a faction with little or no roleplay)
[ N ] Obtusely redundant
[ N ] Contain copy pasta descriptions of systems or interior compartments
[ N ] Unauthorized by faction managers or player-controlled corporation
[ N ] Contain references to IC events that have not occurred (SM must authorize retcons)
[ N/A ] Use second-person language (“you” or “your”) unless it is an instructional guide aimed at players.
[ N/A ] Use bombastic language (“virtually immune,” “nearly indestructible,” “insanely powerful,” “horrible effects”)
[ N ] Use an unbalanced header/text ratio (many headers but sections are one-liners)
[ N ] Use major unapproved sub-articles that should be submitted separately
[ N ] Lacking Detail
[ N/A ] Images hosted on sites other than stararmy.com (Photobucket, Imageshack, etc are not allowed)

The article has…
[ N/A ] Speeds in compliance with the Starship Speed Standard, if applicable
[ Y ] Damage Capacity and Damage Ratings in compliance with the DR Guidelines
[ N/A ] The in-character year of creation/manufacture. (Should be current year. Future years not allowed).
[ N/A ] The Standard Product Nomenclature System, if applicable.


Summary
Note here if any serious issues are present. These are the issues that will hold up approval.
** No real issues I can see.

Status: N/A

Notes
Question.

Say I have 6 tier 9 missiles on a tier seven craft? They are single shot missiles, and I am allowed to have 8 single shot missiles before I am considered to be at 1 tier 9 missile. Does this mean that I will be at whatever 1/4th of a T9 would be? OR would the rules expect me to round missiles up to 9 or down to 4 to be at either T9 or T8?
 
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Looked it over, my only thing is the "single tube reloading' system and 'single use system' It doesn't really account for re-loadable salvo launchers. This one is a for mech use and just an example, but how would we treat this?
 
I'm in agreement with most of the raw data in the article. It looked to me like the most significant difference to my past work was that you allowed more single-shot missiles per 1/8 weapon budget than I did.

I previously was trying to hit a sweet spot for fightercraft and I realized with Arieg's submission that it might end up a little lean for larger vehicles; here I get the sense that fighters are now spoiled missile-wise so that ship can have more missiles. I am not opposed to this change, I just note the difference.

I noticed the tables that were made. I think that's an excellent addition! It reminds me a bit of the point-buy stat system in D&D and it's explained in the same sense.

This said, I have issues with the formating of the page (I do realize it was done in the wee hours of morning, in a 'typing as I think' kind of way). There's an overload of underlining which defeats the point of underlining (which is emphasis of important information). While the examples involve witty tongue-in-cheek reading, they're entertaining only for the first read-through; afterwards they just become a long unweildly read that obsfuscates the point. Overall, I find that the article could gain much by repeating itself less and going for much more concise information.

My belief is that the conversion table is too useful to keep at the bottom of the article. I encourage raising its position in the article and relying more heavily on it to convey the message of how much hardware a vehicle can carry. Then once the base concept is out in the open, start covering exceptions. At the end of the article, list the examples.

I have reservations given the way ordonnance that deliver submunitions is handled. I do agree that the amount of submunition should be equivalent to the missile launched (a Tier 6 missile could deploy eight Tier 3 submunitions).

The multiple-barreled limit to turrets. Weren't we treating that as a rate-of-fire deal? But your article's disclaimer mentions Rate of Fire is not taken into account. Was that to combat multiple-component weapons?
 
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Fred said:
The multiple-barreled limit to turrets. Weren't we treating that as a rate-of-fire deal? But your article's disclaimer mentions Rate of Fire is not taken into account. Was that to combat multiple-component weapons?
Click to expand...

This actually does raise a question that didn't come to mind. The original DRv3 stated that damage was now indicative of a shot count. Every bullet fired would do Tx amount of damage. This made a significant amount of sense despite the lack of tiers to account for various bullet sizes and types and such but this is an RP site so we don't need to be that technical.

Is the Damage still per shot? Is that going to be a change? If so, then there are quite a few articles that I had to go over to make sure my stuff made sense on a per shot basis and not a per post basis, that I will have to go over and correct.
 
Edto Xar'Sivaree said:
This actually does raise a question that didn't come to mind. The original DRv3 stated that damage was now indicative of a shot count. Every bullet fired would do Tx amount of damage. This made a significant amount of sense despite the lack of tiers to account for various bullet sizes and types and such but this is an RP site so we don't need to be that technical.

Is the Damage still per shot? Is that going to be a change? If so, then there are quite a few articles that I had to go over to make sure my stuff made sense on a per shot basis and not a per post basis, that I will have to go over and correct.
Click to expand...
The damage is still per shot. The DRv3 dictates how to calculate damage and such. This is just a guide that uses the damage potential of weapons to tell you how much you can have, it doesn't actually change the mechanics of how weapons work.
 
This.... seems to severely limit the single use ordinance capacity of a starship..... I ran one of my future destroyers/light cruisers ( https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=wip:k784frommdestroyer ) through this and got the following results.

It is a tier 12 'heavy' starship.

  • Its 'spinal' weapons are a pair of 850mm rigid mount plasma cannons which are Tier 12 Heavy Anti-Starship for 2 points.
  • It has four primary twin gun mounts which are 205mm plasma cannons at Tier 11 Medium Anti-Starship for 2 points
  • It has two twin gun tertiary mounts which are 105mm plasma cannons at Tier 10 Light Anti-Starship for 1 point.
  • Its point defense system consists of sixteen quad 50mm plasma cannons at Tier 8 Medium Anti-Mecha for 1 point
Gun systems use a total of 6 points, now since I tend to use vertical launchers my remaining two points can be expended on 16 equal tier pieces of ordinance.

This ship employs three primary launching systems.
  • The first is an eight tube missile mounting on the quad 50mm point defense system which will employ a light anti-mecha/fighter missile of the SALH or SARH type.
  • The second is a common use vertical launch system centered around a 905mm launch cell, each individual launch array has 12 armored covers that protect 16 launch cells each, giving each individual system 192 launch cells. The Project K784 has six launcher arrays for a total of 1,152 launch cells.
  • Finally the ship employs a two shot torpedo launch system consisting of two arrays, each array has six armored covers with four torpedo tubes each, each tube can fire twice before needing to be reloaded if using the largest torpedo available (An ICBM sized monster). So if loaded with said large torpedo they have a total of 48 shots before a lengthy reload process.
Considering devastating anti-ship torpedoes in this setting are smaller then most air to air missiles today (For example the KE-Z1 series is a mere 2.25m long and 500mm wide) the potential loading possibilities on ships due to our size scales (this ship is a hair over 400 meters long, the modern day Arleigh Burke class destroyer is 155m long and can pack up to 96 launch cells in its Mk41 VLS and it can't mount them anywhere due to it being a boat) I think we need to think of a way in how to regulate them in a more fair manner rather then lumping them in with gun systems which effectively have unlimited ammunition in most cases. I believe I'll resuggest putting expendable high fatigue weapon systems (IE missiles and torpedoes) in their own point system separate from the main count of 8.
 
This system is no more limiting than the 8 slot system we were using before <.< It's actually giving more freedom to ships that use missile systems. And putting Missiles on a separate system is again, a bad idea, because it makes missiles super useful, and causes the situation where there is literally no reason not to have missiles on a ship, since it uses a different system.

Please don't come in here pitching the same agenda you have been, that has constantly been told it wont work. We're in the discussion phase yes, but that doesn't mean something that was already a bad idea suddenly has become a good one.
 
Syaoran said:
This system is no more limiting than the 8 slot system we were using before <.< It's actually giving more freedom to ships that use missile systems. And putting Missiles on a separate system is again, a bad idea, because it makes missiles super useful, and causes the situation where there is literally no reason not to have missiles on a ship, since it uses a different system.
Click to expand...

Which they should be considering they reach out beyond the effective range of the gun systems and there is literally no reason not to have missiles on a ship most just chose not to do it favoring the knife fighting close range combat. Once again the same argument applies, missiles can be intercepted, they are single use in which once they're launched they're gone and can't be simply 'recharged' or reloaded like a rail gun round. So they shouldn't be employed in the same metric as systems which functionally have unlimited ammunition especially if your looking to severely limit the number a ship can mount.

Syaoran said:
Please don't come in here pitching the same agenda you have been, that has constantly been told it wont work. We're in the discussion phase yes, but that doesn't mean something that was already a bad idea suddenly has become a good one.
Click to expand...

This is going to effect me severely and until I feel its not going to nerf what I intend to primarily use to the point of mediocre or uselessness I'm going to post my ideas.

Edit: But to be perfectly fair and honest I do not think this additional 'point' set should extend below the starship tiers, this is something that should exclusively be for them due to the scale and what they can possibly carry.
 
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Firstly the 'effective range of guns' is purely limited by our targeting systems, theoretically in space things could go forever. It's a matter of time till impact as I discussed with you before. And you want to know what travels faster than a missile? Energy weapons in this setting(the majority of them having a speed of c or close to it). So unless you're going to tell me that a ship would have a better targeting system that it only uses for aiming missiles and not for long range fire as well, then no missiles do not exceed the effective range of guns by anything other than players choosing to not have them go that far.

Also conventional guns can be 'intercepted' too, just no one really does it. Also yes one use missiles are one use, and they should receive some kind of benefit, which they do in this system. But just because they're used differently doesn't mean they should not be counted as 'weapons'. Or should we stop counting melee weapons in the weapon limit because there are downsides to using them as well when compared to 'unlimited guns'? No we shouldn't, and I don't see you pushing for it either.

And by your logic of "There is no reason not to use missiles" then by that you're just a fool for picking to use something clearly disadvantaged at the moment as your primary weapon.

What missiles as a whole need are -reasons- to choose between the varying systems or a gun. In other words whatever we do to 'buff' missiles can not -exceed- the down side, it needs to match it so that it does not become a better option than others. And Frost is on the right track, but before we continue we need to figure out how it handles each type of weapon system and compare and make tweaks to balance them out with each other and other weapons.
 
Syaoran is right on the level that Frostjaeger's implementation favors single-shot missile twice more than mine did.

I don't support putting the missiles on a different level of calculation.

This said, this seems to consideration tied to rate of fire more than anything else. Before Zack comes in with an 'I told you so', we still end up with the same problem: we still don't have any way of regulating rate-of-fire and Arieg's approach rests solely on that. We have no way of equating the value of an alpha strike (fire all missiles) versus sustainability (being able to rely on a weapon throughout the an entire skirmish).

However, focusing on this kind of granularity will end up restricting a lot of ship design freedoms. It's essentially shooting ourselves in the foot. Ideally, we want to stop extreme outliers, not creative differences.

Going the way of Arieg's argument essentially opens the following can of worms: it means that we have a pool for consumables. All consumables. Ammo, shuttles, everything. But then, what happens when we have someone making a carrier, wanting less weapons but more hangar/supply space for his fighters? How are we going to handle the give and take? How are we going to handle the cries of unfair/foulplay that have been implied by people like Zack?

Either you end up fudging the detail, or you end up going too far. We could of course just improve the numerics behind the system to accomodate Arieg.

What does he need for his cruiser?
  • 8-missile racks per 16 point-defense turret, hitting at least for Light Anti-Mecha. That's 128 one-shot missiles that are Tier 7.
  • 1,152 launch cells, each being 900mm wide. They are supposed to each fire a Tier 14 anti-capital torpedo. (WTF)
  • And then what seems like normal torpedo launchers, except they fire Tier 15 anti-capital torpedoes.
...on a heavy starship. Tier 12, like Arieg said.

I am not going to mince words: this is utterly ridiculous.
It pushes on overpowered to an extreme degree. That simply cannot be allowed to happen, and I believe the NTSE would be in its right mind to deny the submission as overpowered.
It is so overpowered and there's not even a way to accomodate that, not on precedent, not on previously built ships. There are starbases less well armed than this.

I believe the best we can do is up the single-shot launchers to a 20 units per same tier at an extreme, which would herald the death of the single-tube torpedo system in revelancy. But even that wouldn't meet Arieg's objective, and it would raise the wall of weapon potency far above what the Plumeria, Eikan and Sharie warships can do (which were the baseline on which the 8-same-tier weapon budget was built).

The only feasible way to move forward to allow what Arieg wants to implement while protecting the revelancy of other creations is to go the route Wes suggested: the limitation is based on weapons fired at one time, not weapons you can carry total. A solution that might accomplish the goal and be inclusive, but not one that can be policed in plots - and therefore, IMO, ineffective.
 
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We have replaced a one line rule with pages and pages of text. This is a textbook example of what a bad rule looks like. I don't think new players are even going to read this much less use it due to its size. A bunch of seemingly pointless additions are also added in like limiting the number of barrels on turrets.


There is a much simpler solution, and that's just put back the original rule. The missile problem was already being solved in Arieg's ship thread anyways we just need to keep heading along that path.



And Fred, how are you calling Arieg's suggestion this utterly ridiculous when you're the one who removed the restrictions in the first place?
 
The 8 same-teir limit is a good rule, sure. It is written simply, is easy to understand, and we can FAQ out most of the problems with that rule such as the missile thing which gets solved by cleverly re-classifying certain weapons. Coincidentally, it also makes VLS missiles work more realistically by limiting their rate of fire.

This is a lot of text to replace what should be just a few lines in the DRv3 article. It should be written much more simply.

Then we're throwing in a bunch of sub-rules that don't make sense like limited the number of barrels on a turret.
 
Zack said:
We have replaced a one line rule with pages and pages of text. This is a textbook example of what a bad rule looks like. I don't think new players are even going to read this much less use it due to its size. A bunch of seemingly pointless additions are also added in like limiting the number of barrels on turrets.


There is a much simpler solution, and that's just put back the original rule. The missile problem was already being solved in Arieg's ship thread anyways we just need to keep heading along that path.



And Fred, how are you calling Arieg's suggestion this utterly ridiculous when you're the one who removed the restrictions in the first place?
Click to expand...
The missile problem did not come to a conclusion in Areig's submission, a ruling on his ship was given, but that wont give a solution to future submissions and every other problem there is with missiles. Also the original rule is here, but there was a -bunch- of things that were not in the original rules that needed to be addressed that are here now.

And for the last time, Fred did not remove the restriction, he simply took it off of DRv3 and allowed for a separate 'ship building' system that can be held separately from DRv3, so now they're not limited by each other and we can do things right. If you push this now here as well, I'm going to report you.
 
To clarify, that is what removing a thing means.

The DRv3 thread is the perfect place to put that restriction, since that is the page people have to look at anyways when writing up their ships.

If Fred didn't want it on the DRv3 page, he could have broken that out into a separate page. But that did not happen. Instead we end up in a situation where we're playing Jenga with rules where parts are being knocked out entirely rather than fixed.
 
You have some issues Zack. The moment the rules were 'removed' someone came up and put the rules on a separate page just as you said. Now they're expanding it. It's been less than a week. And Fred knew when the removal was finalized that someone was putting up a new set of rules. No one is just going around removing rules willy nilly. The DR limit did not belong on the DRv3 page because that is about specifying damage. Not about how you build your ship. Once there was enough need for weapon restrictions to warrant its own page it got it. The same thing will likely happen with speed if we have enough need for it to have its own page.

And Missiles aren't the only thing, there's melee weapons, non-damaging 'weapons', using weapon systems to do things like fire probes instead. There are a lot of things that have come to light or be realized that need to be addressed when thinking about how much a weapon 'cost'. And a little sentence isn't gonna cut it. And saying "We can make an FAQ"...that's just dumb. This -is- an FAQ just formatted differently. But some of the headers actually -are- questions with the answer below them.
 
There's no need to report Zack. If he just keeps rethreading old arguments and repeating himself, just don't respond to him and reply to posts that are actually constructive. Endorse what you think contributes to the topic. By allowing yourself to be bogged down in a circuitous argument he is bringing from elsewhere, you're allowing him to derail the point of the thread. You're adding fuel to the fire.

This said, I do have to give him credit on one thing: this article is pretty bloated.
 
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