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The thing with missiles

You're all playing nice. Thank you.

As I may have said before, I've little metric to go for with missile speeds since I was planning to address this in my next ship-to-ship fight and figure out what worked and what didn't. I haven't come to that point yet.
With that, 0.6c seems a good place to start from, though I honestly don't have much of a preference. I just don't think it's a big deal to climb from 0.5 to 0.6

Anything power armor-sized or lower doesn't apply to the 8-weapon metric.
 
We could have all the missiles list their speed as 'fast' or 'med' or 'slow' and then link to a missile speed page.

We could then update the missile speed page to update all the new missiles at once.

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Scalability aside, .6 seems fine.
 
Concerning shipboard missile loads, is there a way we could setup some hard rule to differentiate between ready use systems and non-ready use? I like to use vertical launchers and the only real way to cap them was to say the ship could only handle X-number of launches per time frame. Though there are fears that it would be abused. A hard rule setup may help fix that.
 
I think saying that you have X launchers with Y missiles and have cargo space onboard for Z missiles should be fine.

I think it is kinda silly to do so though, since you could just bolt the missiles to the hull... Physics wise it is no different than having them in the cargo bay.

I'm really fine with ships having missile spam, it's just the arieg level of missiles is too much for me since you end up having high armor, High number, and tiny missiles.

I feel like a missile ship should have some big ads missiles if it wants to hunt big ships.
 
Fred said:
You're all playing nice. Thank you.

I was planning to address this in my next ship-to-ship fight and figure out what worked and what didn't. I haven't come to that point yet.
Click to expand...
Zack said:
We could have all the missiles list their speed as 'fast' or 'med' or 'slow' and then link to a missile speed page.

We could then update the missile speed page to update all the new missiles at once.
Click to expand...

Why don't we put these two things together? THe problem we have with missile speed is even though we've played with them a lot, no one has really given any thought to how fast they're going. Why not for now give them qualitative descriptors and then see what GMs do with 'Fast' missiles, or 'slow' ones, and see what kinds of tech are created, and then make a speed guide accordingly? I know it's not actually a solution but rather data gathering, but I think we just might not have the data we need for a solution that we're actually confident in as opposed to something we just hope will work.
 
Its more akin to where they're all in the VLS brick but the ship can only handle launching a certain ready use number before the system has to cycle.
 
Arieg said:
Its more akin to where they're all in the VLS brick but the ship can only handle launching a certain ready use number before the system has to cycle.
Click to expand...

As I've stated in a previous post, @Arieg, the problem with this is that's it's an in-universe restriction - which is specifically prohibited by the Submission Rules.



Zack said:
We could have all the missiles list their speed as 'fast' or 'med' or 'slow' and then link to a missile speed page.

We could then update the missile speed page to update all the new missiles at once.

---

Scalability aside, .6 seems fine.
Click to expand...

Surprisingly enough, I'm in agreement with @Zack here - 0.600c is, in my humble opinion, a good speed for "fast" missiles. The only issue I see arising is what we'll do once people start applying armor to missiles and invoking armor speed bonuses, hence in my humble opinion 0.600c should be the base speed for "fast" missiles - perhaps with 0.500c and 0.400c being the base speeds for "medium" and "slow" missiles?
 
Reactions: raz
I'd say the reason I wanted to re-examine the whole thing while finalizing my own plotship statistically is because I'm not convinced that our narrative actually goes with our numbers. A lot of us GMs go for knifefights around planets and asteroid belts and just toss off numbers like "we're going at 0.3c" in places where that speed doesn't match the distance or the environment.

How many of us think of our fights in term of visuals like Babylon 5, Star Trek, or Macross? I'm convinced that under these IPs, not a ship fights at that high a fraction of c, not one missile actually goes as fast as 0.4c. These metrics probably look more like Homeworld or Mass Effect instead.

There's the flipside that we should actually be trying to accurately portray these maneuverings at those speeds... but I keep reading our plots during most of the ship-to-ship fights, and that's not what I feel is the intended result. It's what I've grown to sincerely believe during my attempts to take a stab at this.

That's why, when I'm being asked numbers like that... I can throw out a value, but I'll admit I probably don't know what I'm talking about. Even though the planetary Hill Sphere FTL limitation is not the most consistent thing ever, it did do us the favor of moving engagement range to orbital distances, which are much more fathomable. I just haven't nailed my own sweetspot or even defined what my preferences were so I'd have something to disagree with other people with.

When I figured it out, I was likely going to houserule my own plot and test it out before making any bold claims of how right I was to undertake that course of action. But in the meantime, I don't know what I'm talking about.
 
As far as the hillsphere goes... is it your view of it or the stellar shadow (IE system sized deadzone)? Wes had things a little different and we need to nail that to the wall hard.
 
Well this is why I say we need more data. From my experience as well the ships aren't remotely moving at fractions of c during combat, it's also partly why one of my divisions was combat and 'opportunity' missiles. Really it'd make no sense to actually fight with any real 'maneuvering' at large fractions of c, because with the delay of reaction time, you make a move and by time the opposing ship can react to that move, you're totally gone.

So with no hard numbers at the moment, we can just let people keep doing what they're doing mostly, and pick up how they want missiles to behave in narrative and stat them accordingly.
 
About hill spheres:
Like I explained it, in the 101 thread... FTL drives are vulnerable to gravity shadows. At least, up to a certain point. Maneuvering in a star system is feasible, but once you hit a planet's hillsphere, you're essentially coming up to the shallower waters around an island and you need to slow down to watch out for shoals (and they are there, and if you don't slow down, there's a high likelyhood you might regret it).

Or, it's like, once you're in a star system, it's snowy, but the snow is not built up so high that you can't walk through it. But if you hit your driveway where there's a snowbank, you're unlikely to be able to run across it: you'll have to wade. If you keep running, you'll likely faceplant or something.
 
So its more akin to having to maneuver through shallows? Or an archipelago in a deep draft ship? I take it thats why a lot of SAOY vessels mount the slower FTL options?
 
This is mostly in hindsight, and fold's nonlinear nature doesn't help the metaphor, but yeah. More or less.
 
I think the short of it though is, form a position of the SM, Wes simply doesn't want us moving around in system with full FTL capacity. Where as why is good fluff, there's no real need to try and circumvent it.
 
.6 c means that for the average ship in the setting you'll only get one round of shooting(1 turn being 10 seconds) at the missile before it hits you if you do anything other than run away from the missile.

Going away from the missile at top speed, it'll take about 15 seconds for the missile to hit which means 2 rounds of shooting.

It benefits you slightly to maneuver using these numbers.

In terms of knock on effects for the setting, not much will change. Having lots of point defense weapons or staying outside of the FTL exclusion zone is still the best defense against missiles. Being fast doesn't really help you that much against missiles since there are only a few options for converting that speed into missile defense (like leaving the FTL exclusion zone).
 
So what are solutions to increase the endurance as far as the missile count onboard starships without enabling a macross missile massacre?
 

Are you implying this is insufficient?
 
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