• If you were supposed to get an email from the forum but didn't (e.g. to verify your account for registration), email Wes at stararmy@gmail.com or talk to me on Discord for help. Sometimes the server hits our limit of emails we can send per hour.
  • Get in our Discord chat! Discord.gg/stararmy

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.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
This suggestion has been closed. Votes are no longer accepted.
This still appears to put absolute caps on weapon amounts, and creates a system to game. Aside from all the frustration that comes with that, it doesn't address the root of the problem, and doesn't serve the purpose we need submission guidelines to serve--it doesn't tell us what a ship is or what it can do. All this is tangential to that.

Enough data to visualize what tier of armament a ship of a given tier can equip is good to have, but what we really need to do is start with describing how effective ships are in their role, and then work backward to determine what sort of equipment allows this. That way, we'll never have to worry about a ship's design being 'too good'. We'll only end up with a ship that's 'too good' if we set out to design one in the first place.

I think getting submitters to pin down what they expect a ship to be able to do would be a much more expedient route to ensuring that submissions are balanced and reasonable than putting restrictions on weapon counts. We need to accept that a ship isn't 'better' just because it has more or bigger weapons before we can get out this mire.
 
That sounds like an horrible idea to me, Navian. I don't fancy designing according to cookie cutter molds.

The implementation of the article itself seems to serve its base purpose okay enough. It adds the mention for single-shot missiles - allowing for those in the first place - and gives a numeral higher than the one I gave before (it is, therefore, more generous), I can live with that.

The article needs a big cleanup. I still think the conversion table was a great idea (though I'm not convinced we should count anti-personnel as missiles and go that far down). but the text could use slimming down. There are, among other things, too many examples, and those we have are not enough to the point.
 
There's no 'cookie cutter molds' involved, unless you have very rigid definitions of ship roles. It's not as though I'm suggesting that all missile defense cruisers, for example, should be exactly equivalent, no matter who builds them. Instead, you'd be filling out a ship's technical specs to be consistent with the description of what the ship can do. Every faction has their own ways of doing things, including organizing their fleets, so I'd expect each ship to have its own article describing its role, not one for each set of vaguely equivalent ships. That gives plenty of room to put a unique spin on things.

By starting with a description of what the ship can do--what it's meant for, and how good it is at that--we can avoid ever having to worry about a ship's weapons systems being 'too effective' based on their number and power. We'll have already decided how effective they are, and if the loadout seems to be inconsistent with the described impact it has, either we can come up with an explanation for the discrepancy, or scale the weapons up or down until the design seems consistent with its intended role.

One nice thing this would enable would be that we could set out from the beginning to design extraordinary ships, instead of only finding out on inspection (or after launch) that they might not work out as expected. Although real militaries have to face bogus designs sometimes, the authors of fictional ones shouldn't have to unless they're included intentionally. Ideally, the only time we'll discover unintended consequences of ship designs is when we use them in ways that we never anticipated--not when we're designing them, and certainly not the first time they're used in direct conflict between player factions.

Our goal for ship design is to create ships that work for sci-fi RP, so we should decide what we want to do with them first and how they can do that second. The way we've been doing it is deciding how they're designed first and then trying to figure out how to use them second, and that's just not doing the service ship submissions are supposed to be doing for us. Instead it's getting us talking about point buy rules.
 
To start off, I sincerely apologize to everyone participating in this thread for not replying in a more timely fashion; IRL stuff, a thoroughly enjoyable JP with @Ametheliana, and the insidious devil called Galactic Civilizations II consumed most of my free time yesterday. Anyhoo, without any futher ado...


Syaoran said:
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?
Click to expand...

It would all depend on what kind of ammunition the launcher in question was loaded with due to said launcher's ability (assuming I'm interpreting the article correctly) to fire multiple missiles at the same time.



I've fixed this as best as I could by removing as much of the "flavor" text as possiblee, which should (hopefully) make the examples a lot easier to read.


I moved the conversion tables above the aforementioned examples but kept the Tier Chart at the bottom of the page, given that it's solely there for reference purposes. Should I remove it completely...?

Fred said:
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).
Click to expand...

No offense, but would you mind elaborating on this a bit further @Fred?

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...

I've removed the mentioning of "Rate of Fire" from the disclaimer - and yeah. The multi-barreled limitation to turrets and the other rule regarding components are both included specifically in order to prevent metagamers from abusing the definition of a "weapon system" by sticking four autocannons, eight mini-missile launchers, and eight missile launchers on a single point defense turret (then claiming that since everything's in a single turret it only counts as one weapon system) or by slapping a dozen guns on a single oversized turret and using the same argument.


I'm not going to mince words, either: the starship @Arieg displayed calculations for in the above quote is the perfect example of why these rules are necessary. Something that blatantly overpowered, in my opinion, has no place whatsoever in Star Army's setting.


The eloquently-written post @Fred made in response is something I agree with wholeheartedly; further elaboration from me regarding the points it raises would only be restating what was already said.

Fred said:
Syaoran is right on the level that Frostjaeger's implementation favors single-shot missile twice more than mine did.
Click to expand...

That being said, however, a bit of explanation is also required regarding what led me to double the original ratio of 4 single-shot uses per same-tier weapon. It's simple, really - while experimenting with NSN starships, I found that even after nerfing the Tier 6 DART and BOLT mini-missiles down to Tier 5, all of the aforementioned starships could carry only carry enough for a few Fortress Point Defense Systems or Extended Rack Systems. Raising the ratio to 8 single-shot uses per same-tier weapon helped the issue somewhat, but still required me to reduce the ammunition capacity of the former's missile system from 70 to 50; similarly, the latter only worked if I shrunk its payload down to 200 mini-missiles (from an original amount of 240). Although obviously imperfect, the only other alternative would've been to raise the ratio all the way to 16 single-shot uses per same-tier weapon - which was a value that was simply too high for me to feel comfortable with utilizing, given how irrelevant it would've made single-tube torpedo launchers.

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



Do you have any recommendations as to how I can debloatify it? Apart from removing the aforementioned Tier Chart, I honestly can't think of anything else that could be removed...
 
You know. Making things more complex isn't better, it is worse.

Simplicity should be the goal.

If you are going to do all of this, just make sarp a dice game.
 
A design is only overpowered if it's approved as such. The number and size of the weapons on a ship does not, on its own, determine how powerful the ship is. It could be useless. We're not just bashing numbers into each other, and even if we were, those equations don't include half of the numbers that would be involved in the final calculation. Attempting to balance ships against each other by having them point-buy their weapons only encourages the kind of thinking it's meant to be a solution to.

If the design is implausible, because there wouldn't be enough room on the ship for the other systems that allow it to even reach the battlefield, that's a separate problem. But it's not physically impossible to create a ship that has ten times as many guns as it should, it should just have negative consequences--incredibly poor range and accuracy, as well as other limitations such as fragility, vulnerability, and slow movement. Instead of saying 'this is overpowered because it has too many guns', we can say 'if it has this many guns, it's a costly and ineffective design that shouldn't ever get past the prototype stage--is this what you meant to create?'

Or we can just find out what they mean to create first and then find out how to make it work. If they actually want to make an overpowered design, that can be addressed on its own. The whole isn't equal to the sum of its parts, we shouldn't be deciding how powerful a ship is by extrapolating directly from its arsenal.
 
I feel like I'm saying the same things over and over here, and that seems to be because I'm being ignored while people raise the same points to refute over and over. So, let me try to boil this all down. These armament rules limitations are like an umbrella. 'You need an umbrella, it might rain!' Sounds reasonable so far. But, in this metaphor, the 'rain' is overpowered ship designs, and as we all know, those can blow in from the sides if they want to, they don't have to rain down from the sky--this isn't a perfect shield. So, if we go outdoors, and leave ourselves subjected to these all the time, we'll still get wet. The umbrella only stops the rain if it's polite enough to fall on top of it.

If we don't want to get wet--if we don't want overpowered ship designs in the RP--we can try and struggle with an umbrella, and fail, or we can just get indoors. This means we just don't leave ourselves exposed to the elements in the first place. That's what the NTSE forum is for, it lets in some fresh air, but not all the wind and rain. By using this forum, we can recognize when people are trying to sneak things in, and when their motivations are inappropriate. We can calm down overexcited creators and encourage them to wipe off their boots, take off their coats, and sit down rather than bring it all in dripping wet with them, because we don't want submissions that put a damper on everyone else's fun.

If it's not doing its job, let's examine why. Yes, new guidelines can help. But they should be helping the NTSE do its job; they should be making sure we have a secure shelter from crazy ideas. We don't need a flimsy shield that seems to assume we don't have any control, that whatever falls out of the sky is going to come right at us unless we attack it preemptively. We don't need this kind of solution. Let's all calm down and remember that guns don't have power in the SARP universe, writers do. Once we've gotten that down, we can start using that to sort out which designs will win based on which ones we want to win, instead of treating them like their weapons have a life all their own, and can do what they want in our RP unless we forbid them. Does that explain the underlying problem with the fears driving these weapon cap guidelines?
 
Navian, most of your posts usually read as insightful. All are good arguments.

The problem, though, is that they aren't solutions. "What you're doing doesn't work, do something else" is likely what people read in between the lines.

Compounding that is how while you express inclination, most of the people reading - myself included - probably don't even know how to even get started with said proposal. Not to mention diverse schools of thought, like Zack wanting something clear-cut so that he can deliver what he wants in a more straightforward fashion, Mods like Cadetnewb wanting the same to have a clear metric to adhere to, and the people that spout the vapid "we don't need rule, too much trouble" when rain - as you've said - does happen.

So, personally, it's not that I'm ignoring you. It's that I feel I don't have much traction in the direction you're proposing. I'm kind of sensing that there's this idea, but no legwork behind it, and because of that it falls in the pile of 'many differing opinions without them standing out'. I won't say that Frost has all the perfect implementation, but the legwork is much more tangible to follow.

* * *

As for what Frost said, I'm not sure I'd be of much help. My contribution would be practically just chopping everything up until it'd be back to what I wrote, because I actually don't like most of your exceptions. But this isn't my effort alone now, and I'm reluctant to push my weight around considering what you've invested in this so far. Basically, I feel biased and I don't want what might be my failings to burn you.
 
Well, I did say what the 'something else' is, and I can do it again... Each faction has its own design philosophy. Ships for that faction should confirm to it both for thematic reasons and because, practically speaking, their fleets will work better--and we'll need fewer articles--if they share more tech between ships. What we need to do, then, is write down what those design philosophies are, give examples of appropriate tech and exemplary ship designs, and create guidelines to steer writers toward creating designs that will fit, to start.

We'll also want to elaborate on what roles are already filled, what ships need to be updated, and what new roles need to be filled, so that designers have an easier time knowing what sort of submissions are needed and which ones would cause more problems than they'd solve. Before we can do this, we should probably write down what the factions' strategic goals are, because without knowing those we can't figure out what fleets and therefore what ships and technology they need.

We need to know who's expecting to go up against who (and consider what match-ups are possible) before we can practically consider any potentially unbalanced match-ups, which is what we need to do to ensure that overpowered ships don't exist, or at least don't cause problems unexpectedly (in cases where we do permit them temporarily or in a certain niche.)

All this is a lot of work, but in the meantime, we can start by writing guidelines that point us in the right direction--basically, tell us what to do in a general sense--even though we don't have all the specifics yet. Since game-style caps and limitations give us the wrong impression, and prohibit designs that would be acceptable if the system wasn't to be gamed, I don't think using them to solve the issue is better than nothing. For this submission, I'd suggest more general guidelines that tell us what we should be doing rather than what we can and can't do. We can get to the hard stuff later, after we've figured out what we want and defined what we're willing to allow. It's not just about numbers.
 
We want-
We need-
We should-

I don't intend to come across as mean, but this is the foremost reason why I don't relate with the concepts you're offering. You envision an idea, and you seem pretty certain it's a winning equation, but I don't see it.

Because you haven't shown me it might work. So, we end up with this monumental task, and with no idea of how to get started to make this successful.

Navian, if you want to sell this, you'll have to build this foundation. I sure am not in your head, seeing how that's the answer to our problems. It's not like haggling around in the NTSE and basing on precedents is exactly new.
 
Haggling around and basing on precedents is something we want to avoid. We have some explicit rules against it and we've been discussing adding more, because it keeps the NTSE staff from doing their job. Every time they do it, they're told 'but so-and-so got away with it so I should too', or just an endless stream of arguments until someone whose job is supposed to be to say no finally caves in and says 'yes, okay' without their requirements being met.

What I'm proposing is a structure that provides more information to make everyone's jobs easier. If writers know what to write, it's much easier to call them out when they refuse to comply. You can point to an article and say with authority, 'This isn't how your faction designs ships, they do it this way.' or 'This isn't what your faction wants, but it could be adapted to serve this purpose, which is something they do.'

We already do this to an extent with the rules against new forms of FTL or dimensional travel technology and the ship speed limit, we just don't have specifics that we can apply to each faction, so anywhere ships have an attribute that varies wildly by doctrine, like firepower, we struggle because we can't apply the same rules to everyone without being unfair or coming up with weird equations. We don't need to come up with the same rules for everyone, though, unless we quantify firepower in such a way that its meaningful to declare one faction's ships numerically superior to another, not because we decided they should be but because the designs just ended up being that way due to how the designers approach using the system.

So... let's not do that? By keeping ships' abilities qualitative and relating them to each other on the basis of how we want them to interact, rather than simply relying on the DR stats of their components, it remains possible to come up with ship design guidelines that are internal to each faction and organize the ships available within them, the same way a real navy would and the same way Wes has already been doing with Yamatai, without having to worry about the numbers not adding up when ships of different factions interact.

We get started by just... providing relevant information. That's what guidelines are for. I'm not sure how to boil it down any further than that. One place to start as far as 'relevant information' goes, the first and most important data point, is what the largest weapon a ship can carry is if the ship is essentially just a mobile gun. I'd make that a tier 14 gun for a tier 12 ship... so I wouldn't expect a tier 12 ship to have 8 tier 14 guns. This is assuming a weapon that works at normal ranges, with normal accuracy, that faces normal defenses, and that can fire indefinitely, though, weapons that have special advantages or disadvantages really ought to differ from this.

I don't think pinning down all the data points for general use will be feasible, though. If you really want to go forward with this general slots and points approach rather than take a step back and try to figure out how to implement my suggestion above, then I suggest assigning virtual tiers to modify the effective tier of a weapon based on how much the modification is expected to alter how effective the ship is... whenever it's used for whatever it's used for. We could have a big chart for everything from short range plasma weapons to interceptable cannon fire, and probably a whole half of it for many different varieties of missiles... I'm not sure how you'd estimate the value of area-effect weapons, though, unless you assume that AoEs are effectively single-target in space combat, but I'm not sure that's reflected in the RP.
 
This, to me, is not too complicated or too bloated. I even did the math for the fighter loadout example, though it should be pretty intuitive as it's just adding and multiplying by two if you look at it the right way. So, I read it, even fact-checked it, and found it to not be too bloated.

I think that the way that Fred did the Erla VANDR is worded differently enough from the way it's outlined on the wiki that it'd be cool to see the math behind it on a wiki article somewhere. Something such as the table I made that is linked above would be a nifty addition, but I understand if you don't want to put something like that up there. The tier conversion tables are basically outlining just that, without showing the math involved for the additions. I also know that you have your own form of getting to the weapon allotments and even being able to see that may help the situation, though you're also a pencil and paper sort of mathematician, Frost, so idk if that will really work.

Sorry for taking my time reviewing this, I realized I should wait for community input before giving my own.

I find no spelling, grammar, formatting, or any similar problems with this article. I intend to do a checklist on this tomorrow if @CadetNewb doesn't have anything to say about it.
 
*is pinged (in the hour of need)*

I'll be honest. Right off the bat, I knew this was an article that I would not for the life of me want to touch with a 9-foot long dory while hiding behind a hoplon, and having read this thread, I was not wrong.

Anyways.

The thing is, excessively complex and heavy rule-sets are only going to get in the way of why we're all here; to roleplay. I know Frost put a lot of work into this, but this is only going to make things that much more difficult for players to make tech, and my job that much harder as a tech mod, and it's already an unpleasant job to begin with. However, I think Navian is on to something, though, as Fred pointed out, they haven't quite gotten there yet. Right now, it looks like the primary issue would be the nature of missiles and how they are used. Though it was my own fault that the 8 Weapon rule was initially implemented out of similar and very same concerns, I don't think it's the way forward.

Rather, I suggest something else entirely regarding missiles in specific; why not define the nature of missiles directly? Attack this problem at the root? I see some people worrying that such a barrage of missiles is massively OP, but I don't see that at all. I mean, you can just shoot them down; even the Mass Effect-verse has the G.A.R.D.I.A.N. system. A massive barrage of missiles that blots out the local star might be intimidating, but not if it's suddenly swept aside by countermeasures. When that happens, the tables are turned, and the guys that just launched them all need brown pants.

Basically, what I'm suggesting is that we specifically define the SP and Shields that missiles can use in relation to their damage output. It simply and efficiently gets rid of the missile problem in its entirety I believe. Though this may leave some concerns regarding torpedoes, considering their Star Trek origins and style, I simply suggest that they are beefy, powerful and tough to the point they give no f*ks, travel in simple paths, and can only be stopped by a lot of firepower so most folks don't bother and just take it. And like a Neko Girlfriend, are ultra high maintenance/expensive. In this suggestion that I make, missiles are simply a trade-off. Where directed energy and even kinetic projectile weapons are more expensive than their munitions, missiles are more expensive than their launchers.

You do run the risk of breaking the bank in return for its potentially huge payoffs if it all hits, but that comes with the aforementioned limitations.
 
I'd like to make a quick comment on missiles.

There are a lot of shenanigans that can be done with missiles regarding shooting them and defending against them. I don't think we should be worried about power-levels as much as we should the two classic missile use cases on the extreme ends.

1: The missile destroyer with VLS

2: The torpedo bomber with one massive missile.

I think most of the solutions put forth end up really gimping one or the other.
 
To be honest, I think both should remain viable.

The missile destroyer is a specialized ship with specialized weapons and can be countered with a similar platform; the PT boat on steroids. Basically, a point defense ship, though, even normal ships can simply hunker down together and combine their fields of fire to ward off missile destroyer barrages. Meanwhile, the torpedo wielding fighter-bomber itself gives us a very, very, very important and classical mechanic that can be played on both sides by the players.

 
There is something that needs to be pointed out. One thing about missiles that hasn't really been said. While yes people can shoot down missiles. Using that as a reason to say massive salvos are not OP is a bit of an issue. Because there's one thing about SARP missiles that is pretty common, but it's overlooked because everyone is only thinking about starships. SARP Missiles can be fired are a pretty close range and still work, a range that shooting them down wouldn't really work. This isn't much of an issue with starships because it just simply isn't done, but PAs fire missiles are a pretty close range and I would think fighters do it too if tactics aren't that different.
 
Yes, getting in close makes it much harder to intercept, but that also introduces the whole mechanic of....not letting them get close?

If your point defenses are good enough at range, and their missile barrage that devastating at close range, it becomes a game of "Stay away from the Kung-Fu Master"
 
Since this submission is an addendum to the DR guidelines, then I don't really see a problem with it. The people who don't even look at the rules until asked to adjust in accordance with them will continue to do so and the people who want hard-and-fast numbers to look at while designing will get something helpful.

Win-win all around.
 
It's easy to write off with that, but we're not talking about a range that's actually all that close in terms of actual distance. It'd still be far enough that PAs aren't engaging with melee weapons. You'd need some serious surpressive fire skills to hold someone out of a range that a missile spam would become uninterceptable. I would love to say that Missile spam isn't an issue. But there are some clear things that just 'letting it happen' can cause problems with so it's best we don't just gloss over that.
 
Raz, some additions to the rules/guidelines are simply not worth having, and this one, in its current form, is quite possibly one of them.

Now, I'm starting to come under the impression you're most worried about power armor combat rather than ships. Is that right Syaoran? In the case of power armor combat, point defenses are already present on many common systems such as the Hostile and Daisy. It's just that they don't always see that much use since, well, I'm guessing people forget about them. Even if they don't, additional hard-kill measures can likely be added to suits as well using modules and the like. If missile spam is honestly that much a concern, bringing along a floating point defense platform like an anti-missile droid isn't out of the question either I believe. It's even been done already, with some PA sporting those by default. But forgotten.

Does that help address your concern?
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register
Cookies are required to use this site. You must accept them to continue using the site. Learn more…