Don't like that idea.. The mass of an item should not change because the mass of an ship increases.. its really unrealistic.

And btw if you are silly enough to get into an battle with an (x)light (which won't survive an singel volley of weapons fire) then its your choice...

An light will take as much as time to build an heavy ship, it needs more maintaince, its more often below 100% integ and it get shot down in a first volley.. Its just not cut out to be an warship.

BUT its a fast way of getting some last defenses online. Refit an existing trader and you get one more chance of holding off the enemy.. If you go into offensive battles with it, won't be surprised to get some special designed counter ships showing up.

I think we need to avoid changes that would require existing ship and bp redesign

Basically torps are at this moment just like Missiles.. You shoot them and they hit the same round, but they are considered to be lower speed / heavier weapons..

Why not introduce the same system as was used for the Fighters?? You launch them in round 1 and they hit in round 2, if they hit. You might even make them selfthinking, engage the nearest ship which can be reached independent of the targetting by the main weapons.

Slower ships get the mass of the torpedo's behind them, so they need more PD systems to defend..

My basic problem with all the new rules is that current designs are now obselete... How are you going to solve that issue??

That's the concern David started the tread with yes, and it's not necessarily a matter of configuration. Torp ships are already forced to be faster than the target thus they are harder to hit anyway before you start any other configuration tweaks.

It could easily spark off an escalation of combat speed. Your torp ship is faster than my ship so you can hit it, so I need to make my ship faster so you can't. Then you make your ship faster again, etc. Before long, the design/counter-design game will have us fielding ships made up of 80% or more combat engines and make your designs obsolete as fast, or possibly even faster than mechanics changes.

Isn't this spped thing also a bit counter-intuitive? Wouldn't it be harder to fire a torpedo from a fast ship than a slow one? (You'd have to account for you own ship's movement as well as the target's, a targetting nightmare I'd have thought? It's easier shooting a target from a solid stance than on the run...)

It's not the mass of the item per se, it's extra support structures/hull reinforcements required to fit the item (the item is the same size, it just takes more space in different hulls).

It's not actually that unrealistic, I can think of one real life example right off the top of my head.

Take a standard size computer Hard Disk Drive. In some computer cases it will fit right in the bay as is, in other cases it requires little bars fitting to the sides, in yet others it requires a cage type affair to hold it in. (I know this for a fact it's part of my job and I just fitted 16 of them yesterday.) The drive itself is the same size, but you need to add more to it to fit in different cases, thus it is effectively slightly bigger in some cases.

That's the sort of thing I was suggesting as a justification/explanation for a games mechanic/solution.

But it was just an idea, not sure I entirely like it myself, it just seemed to solve the problem fairly simply

I totally fail to see the problem. This issue has been addressed before with the 1g differential between ships removing the usefulness of (x)light hulled ships from using such weapons (as such ships were deemed as game winners). In addition, the changes in combat speed means that it is pretty much impossible to get a combat speed of over 7 (and dodge over 10) so these ships can still be hit (provided that you have ships configured correctly).

As Geoff has mentioned, the DTR has developed a configuration which fitted in the rules even before the aforementioned changes were made. I fail to see why we should be penalised for developing a configuration which currently is successful. Indeed, there are a number of ways to overcome this configuration without changing the game and it is up to people playing the game to work this out.

If torpedos get changed for this reason then you have set a precidence for rule changes if any other configuration appears to be better than other ones.

Nik

Its not about DTR its about it being stupid.

I can see what you are saying but its not an intent to screw up anyone, its jsut something i don't like.

A possible suggestion has been to have a 'approach to close range' flag which gets a ship to come cloes to itys target. This approach would take 2 rounds and on round 2.5 the ship being approached would get a free round of fire on the attacker.

At long range the torp negative would be -6 per g

When the attacker had got the close range the profile of both attacker and defender would be tripled (?) At close range the torp negative would be 0.
Basically this would require a fast ship to launch torps, and it also opens up the possiblity to hits things with rail guns etc.

Also approach would not be possible if you were not faster than the target if it was singluarly targeting you or if it was targeting something else then 1/2=2/3s speed.


Its a bit ropy but it has some sence in it - unlike the difference of combat speeds.

once you start factoring in range - even a "short/long", there will be some validitiy to having all weaponry affected in some way (good or bad)

Dan

Well this is the thing - its relatively speaking covered by x3 profile.

Well starbases can not use torps now as the combat speed diff should not account from tractors factors.

The idea is not to force you to launch torps at close range, so you can fire at platforms/starabses just as before from long range and experience the -6 per g of the SB/Platform, which is still zero

Its implict now, if you can not hit them you don't fire. That might be worth extending to a general min to hit percentage before you fire at a target ?

It may be worth extending the range idea to cover that whole issue.... ie range could be L/M/C (x1/x2/x3) to profile. It makes small ships very interesting, before i would not have liked it but now naval officers cost 10k, sending 100 10 hulls ships makes slightly less sence than before.

BTW this is a discussion and i'm not even 50% resolved on the torps.

I don't quite see why it is stupid, but apart from which I am sure that there are a lot of other things you consider stupid in the game but will probably not correct. Torpedos work fine without unbalancing the game at the moment, so why change it to something else which will make torps almost obsolete (like normal missiles have almost become). There are a lot of other things which would benefit from your time far more than changing something you don't like even if it is not broken.

Nik

Would not have put this thread here if it was As nik says there are other things that need time spent on them, so why bother with this.....

Most would agree that different weapons are different - they already are in the game to a large extent.

Your view on the accuracy of missiles Vs beam weaponry depends on your view of the scales involved within combats - if your view is that the distances involved are large, it is possible to argue that missiles/torps (able to track the target when they're closer) should be more accurate than beam weapons (which aim at the spot that your targetting computers think the target will be at when the beam hits). The speed of light is not infinite, merely very fast

The talk on range being intoduced to combat - even long, medium, close - would make a lot of difference to tactics with different weaponry...

Dan

Since the targeting Computers are presumably tracking the target ship I suspect it would need to be a ship going at a high fraction of the speed of light to avoid being hit once a target lock has been obtained. the main defence against beam weapons is armour, hull type and scintillators, not dodging.

As for ranges, 100's of kilometers would seem to be reasonable for a missile or direct fire weapon engagement, as I was told when I complained about my capital ships failing to scan each other as they moved into a location, .."space is a big place"

The introduction of ranges would indeed require a lot of tactical changes, back to the learning curve for all of us

Geoff

So some of us like big missiles

One thing to consider about treating Torps as SF is that they don't come back, so if this were introduced (hopefully not) they should be able to fire rounds 1,2 & 3 and hit, or miss, rounds 2,3,4.

Geoff

If the target gets destroyed before the torp hits home, it will seek a new target.
You could even think about weapons that get fired and just looks for the nearest target which they can attack.. and that way an ship with lots of torpedo's launcher can act as an protector for smaller ships, while the smaller ships try to move inside their own range... maybe beam weapons..

Due to the high number of possible torpedo launcher on board starbases, they would be able to create an 'screen' of torps, which would hunt enemy ships.

xlight / light hulled torpedo ships have their place in the game. They are currently of no use against heavy hullers as the heavy hullers are generally faster, so will not see active combat unless for specific situations. Theywill have a role to play against ground installations or platforms that have not been setup correctly and for the unscrupulous against cargo ships.

Strongly against! When you start treating hulls differently (like, only allowing torps to be fired form HH ships) the whole fabric of the game is torn apart.

Aside from my above suggestions I think perhaps torps, and/or their launchers, should be more expensive to build. That would make xl/l hulled throw-away torpedo ships too expensive to use.
Which reminds me: XL/L ships, too, are replenished much slower under the new ship building rules. This also goes a long way to alleviate the problem.

Unfortunately, there are already several precedents set for treating hulls differently - ISR 1 Drives can only be mounted in Heavy Hulls, Cloaking devices are dependent upon the surface area of the ship (which corresponds to Hull Type in most cases), the amount of armour that can be mounted on a ship depends upon Hull type, etc...

If the number of torpedoes launched by a ship in a round of combat were based along the lines of 1/(2*Hull Integrity Modifier) then I think we would see far fewer instances of XL/L Torpedo carriers. This would represent a "Batteries Bearing" aspect within the game that limits the overkill use of Torpedoes without:

1) restricting them to a single Hull Type;
2) changing their damage amounts/costs/mass;
3) significantly changing the implementation of the combat program;
4) or, introducing a raft of new techologies.

Just a thought.

Cheers,

Rich Fanning
aka
Lord Lawrence Scrimm
CIA Intelligence Director