Zack's Missile Fix

I'm not going to get sucked into an argument with you, since you're just trolling and making stuff up like you do every time you decide to reply to me.

In any case, my point stands: let's wait for Zack to present something before we decide what he has to say doesn't work. All he's given us is a bunch concepts and ideas rather than the actual meat of what he'd like to see happen. I'd like to get his first draft before the "haha screw Zack" crew gets too deep into their normal routine.

raz said:

I'm not going to get sucked into an argument with you, since you're just trolling and making stuff up like you do every time you decide to reply to me.

In any case, my point stands: let's wait for Zack to present something before we decide what he has to say doesn't work. All he's given us is a bunch concepts and ideas rather than the actual meat of what he'd like to see happen. I'd like to see his first draft before the "haha screw Zack" crew gets too deep into their normal routine.

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I'm making stuff up? Go read the pack power armor thread.

let's see how Zack would implement it himself

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Hmmmm... There isn't really any text that NEEDS to be added anywhere to implement this. We just direct the NTSE mods to treat missiles as independent vehicles now. Of course we should write this down somewhere, and I imagine it would look like this, placed in the new submissions area:

https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=guide:damage_rating_v3#new_submissions

=== Missiles and support craft ===
A starship or other vehicle can hold as many missiles and support craft as can reasonably be attached or otherwise stored internally.

== Missiles ==
Missiles, torpedoes, and projectiles that can independently maneuver in on a target without need for a launcher count as their own small vehicle. This means that they follow the above DvR 3 rules like any other vehicle. Their warhead or impact damage counts against their total amount of weaponry they can carry for their size.

For example: an 8 meter long torpedo would count as a 'teir 7, light mecha' vehicle that can hold a single Tier 10 warhead or 8 Teir 7 warheads.

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We may also want to go in and make an additional change of more exactly defining the size requirements for the lower teirs. I don't think we need to go and explore smaller tiers... it may be a bit too much text to say that you could fit a Tier 1 war head in a bullet.

Tier 1 .2m
Tier 2 .5m
Tier 3 1m
Tier 4 2m
Tier 5 3m
Tier 6 4m
Tier 7 10m


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Again, I would prefer to also have rules for 'how much X can Y hold' as I feel leaving it up to a person's whim is not good rule making. BUT the size rules do mitigate that somewhat and solve the 'swarm of tiny missiles killing capital ships' problem. I consider this a 'fix' for the question of how the NTSE is suppose to handle missiles on ships, and we can wait on a proper balance fix for later in regards to 'how many missiles is appropriate'.

Zack said:

https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=wip:indigo_class_escort

Another user is going to run the gauntlet of trying to get missiles approved on a ship!

The proposed missile fix would give pretty straight forward guidelines as to how strong the missiles this ship carries would be under DrV3. You'd see a fairly heavy reduction in the damage output of the missiles, and the end result is that this missile spam would still be very dangerous for mecha-scale and really small ships, but less so for larger starships.

Considering that all of these missiles range between ~2-4 meters I would think that makes sense. After all missiles around that size are largely used for anti-tank and anti-plane duty already. Some of the small anti-ship missiles also are just a bit bigger than 4 meters.

Compare this to the heavyweight IRL anti-ship missiles that clock in around 10 meters.

The missile fix would also allow Arieg to put as many missiles as he wants on the craft, but ultimately leave that up to the NTSE to decide what is and isn't acceptable. This is mitigated somewhat by getting rid of tiny-anti-ship missiles and I think is ultimately a better solution than mandating how many missiles you can have on a ship at this time.

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Zack said:

Hmmmm... There isn't really any text that NEEDS to be added anywhere to implement this. We just direct the NTSE mods to treat missiles as independent vehicles now. Of course we should write this down somewhere, and I imagine it would look like this, placed in the new submissions area:

https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=guide:damage_rating_v3#new_submissions



We may also want to go in and make an additional change of more exactly defining the size requirements for the lower teirs. I don't think we need to go and explore smaller tiers... it may be a bit too much text to say that you could fit a Tier 1 war head in a bullet.

Tier 1 .2m
Tier 2 .5m
Tier 3 1m
Tier 4 2m
Tier 5 3m
Tier 6 4m
Tier 7 10m

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Why is this system of yours, @Zack, even being applied to the submission @Arieg created? Unless I'm missing something fairly important, to the best of my knowledge concepts unapproved by the NTSE cannot be applied to anything related to the submission rules, correct @CadetNewb and @Ametheliana?

Yeah, I think it's a pretty poor choice of example to be honest. And as Syaoran pointed out, missile size isn't everything - power can vary a lot based on what's in the thing.

Arieg has run into one of the problems this fix is intended to solve, namely: How do we treat missiles on the NTSE?

In the past missile-spam has been used heavily and nearly every ship has some kind of disposable-missile-type weapon. In this specific case Arieg has a lot of missiles on his ship with all of them having DvR2 stats.

How do you treat having 224 SDR 4 missiles? If you treat each missile as one weapon and scale the DR then you're only going to be able to carry a handful of missiles. If you scale to DvR3 and allow 224 missiles for one 'weapon' slot then you're allowing potentially fleet-busting alpha strikes from single ships. If you want to say 'Well you get X missiles at Y DR for a ship of Z tier' then you're going to have a lot of math or look up tables to deal with. Finally if you go by 'Whatever the NTSE feels is appropriate' you're going to end up with wildly differing ideas on what is acceptable.

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For those who don't like the size scaling, consider that a small missile can pack a lot of power into a small area, but a big ship with a big shield generator can pack way more power into its shield than a small missile can into one point on that shield. Ultimately you're going to need bigger weapons to deal with bigger shields, this is already in place with guns / lasers / ect using the Teir system and it makes sense that if we're going to use the DvR3 tier system we might as well keep using it for things like missiles.

Zack said:

Arieg has run into one of the problems this fix is intended to solve, namely: How do we treat missiles on the NTSE?

In the past missile-spam has been used heavily and nearly every ship has some kind of disposable-missile-type weapon. In this specific case Arieg has a lot of missiles on his ship with all of them having DvR2 stats.

How do you treat having 224 SDR 4 missiles? If you treat each missile as one weapon and scale the DR then you're only going to be able to carry a handful of missiles. If you scale to DvR3 and allow 224 missiles for one 'weapon' slot then you're allowing potentially fleet-busting alpha strikes from single ships. If you want to say 'Well you get X missiles at Y DR for a ship of Z tier' then you're going to have a lot of math or look up tables to deal with. Finally if you go by 'Whatever the NTSE feels is appropriate' you're going to end up with wildly differing ideas on what is acceptable.

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For those who don't like the size scaling, consider that a small missile can pack a lot of power into a small area, but a big ship with a big shield generator can pack way more power into its shield than a small missile can into one point on that shield. Ultimately you're going to need bigger weapons to deal with bigger shields, this is already in place with guns / lasers / ect using the Teir system and it makes sense that if we're going to use the DvR3 tier system we might as well keep using it for things like missiles.

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We don't count every bullet or mass driver projectile as its own weapon. What DR counts is 'weapon systems'. I already said this in a previous post too. He has a lot of silos yes. But NTSE can set some restrictions on fire rate and max DR per target if they choose to. But simple fact is we don't count any other weapon by it's ammo, why do you assume we count missiles that way?

You say DRv3 should be used on missiles, okay then let's do that. No where does DRv3 give size restrictions on weapons. So it's up to the judgement of the NTSE if the weapon is an appropriate size. So let's do the same thing with missiles, a weapon.

If you actually wanted to apply DRv3 to missiles we'd have been done a long time ago.

Also size is not actually an issue for damage potential. Because it's not about how big the missile is, what needs to spread the damage is the explosion. And even if the explosion is 'small' if it is an explosion designed to spread the damage about like through a shockwave or such, as long as the shockwave is generating enough power to cause structural failure, and spread that failure it'll still work. Size of explosion is also hardly a concern to shields because shields work off energy reserves. They are depleted based on how much energy is consumed mitigating the damage. Yeah it probably would be -easier- to knock down a shield if you spread the damage across the whole thing, but that does not mean a tiny attack can't generate enough power to force it to fail as well.

I agree with Syaoran on this one. Missiles aren't like other weapon systems, and frankly, trade off endurance for being able to do a lot of burst damage. Unlike various cannons and directed energy weapons, they can all launch at once, but in return, can also be shot down and only have a limited amount on hand.