Full Steam - Playtest and Breakthrough!

A couple of months ago I did a playtest of Binhan's Wet Thrust rules as it
applied to the Russo-Japanese War. The playtest report can be found in
the archives. In essence, the big problem was lethality. The system was just
too lethal. While long range gunnery was okay, short range was shredding
cruisers and the smaller ships.

I think I've found a way around this problem.

I was thinking a bit about Wet Thrust/Full Steam recently. I have been
redoing
my Russo-Japanese War stats for the game General Quarters. This got me
back on
the Wet Thrust/Full Steam track. With the release of the FT Fleet Book,
I
thought it might be interesting to try converting Wet Thrust/Full Steam
to the FT2.5 (i.e. Fleet Book) rules. But there's still that nasty deadliness
problem. A beam weapon does damage to an unshielded spaceship 50% of the time.
This is just too high for historical naval battles.

Then it hit me: why use six sided dice?

By integrating different sided dice to the existing beam rules, an easily done
thing, the probabilities completely change. From 50% on a 1d6, you get a 75%
chance of damage on a 1d4, 37.5% on a 1d8, 30% on a 1d10, and 25% on a 1d12.

I'll cut to the chase. Using the Fleet Book construction rules, I designed a
small scenario of one battleship and one cruiser per side. The following is a
set of notes for creating the ships and a playtest report.

SHIP DESIGN

I used the Fleet Book's mass rules for creating a ship. I took the historical
ship's tonnage and divided it by 100 to get the FTFB mass. I then used the
mass to figure out the number of damage boxes on the ship. Funny enough, when
it came to adding weapons to the ship the FTFB mass wasn't THAT far off.

Example: the Fuji had a listed mass of 12,533 tons. I misread the listing (all
stats are from Conways All The World's Fighting Ships, 1860-1905) and
used the tons from her sister ship, the Yashima. The Yashima's tonnage was
12,320 so I gave the Fuji 123 mass points. An average hull has 30% of its mass
as hull boxes, giving 37 hull boxes. In the FTFB rules, ships have a maximum
of 4 rows
of hull boxes, so the Fuji has 10/9/9/9 hull boxes.

Damage control parties were assigned as per the FTFB rules.

For armour, I took the average thickness of hull armour in inches, divided by
2 and gave that many hull boxes (all ships had nickel/steel armour).
Fuji had 5 boxes, the Borodino had 3.

For thrust/speed ratings, I took the ship's top speed in knots and
divided by
6. I allowed half-inch fractions.

Finally, the guns. I used FTFB's 6 fire arcs, instead of the old 4 fire arc
system. I plotted the guns as batteries. The Fuji had 10 batteries of 6" guns,
and two batteries of 12" guns. The 12" guns were two guns per battery, while
the others were single guns per battery. This meant that a 12" battery could
only fire at one target, but it rolled twice as many dice as usual. I ignored
any guns smaller than 3".

Guns were treated as beam batteries, with the following modification:

- a roll of 1 indicated a hit for two points of damage, and a reroll for
extra damage
- a roll of 2 indicated a hit for one point of damage
- a roll of 3 indicated a hit for one point of damage
- a roll of 4 or greater was a miss

The prevalent calibres of this era were 3", 4.7", 6", 8", 10", and 12". The
larger guns were treated as Class 3 batteries (36" range = 1 die, 24" = 2
dice, 12" = 3 dice), the intermediate guns (6" and 8") were treated as Class 2
batteries, and the smaller guns as Class 1 batteries. Instead of rolling 6
sided dice, though, the 12" guns rolled 8 sided dice and the 10" guns rolled
10 sided dice. Likewise, the 8" guns rolled d8s and the 6" guns rolled d10s.
In the small calibre, the 4.7" rolled d8s and the 3" rolled d10s.

Finally, to better represent armour, I gave battleships level 2 screens and
cruisers level 1 screens (I didn't actually call them screens, I just listed
them as combat modifiers).

In the end, 12" guns on the Fuji have a 25% chance of hitting a ship at long
range and doing damage, a percentage that is quite close to that listed in
other games I have for this period.

OTHER RULES

I kept the other rules to a minimum. I moved the ships in keeping with naval
vessels and not with the FT rules. This needs to be fleshed out a bit, but I
required that the battleships had to move 1.5" before they could make a 30
degree turn, while the cruisers could do the same after only 1" of movement.

I also required that the ships have an unobstructed line of sight to each
other. In other words, when measuring from the front funnel of the firing ship
to the front funnel of the target, no part of another ship can pass through
this line. Line of sight was important, as you had to be able to see your
shots dropping on the target in order to correct.

PLAYTEST

For the playtest, I had the Japanese ships Fuji (battleship, 2x2 12"
batteries, 10x1 6" batteries, speed 3, 5 armour, 10/9/9/9 hull, level 2
screen equivalent) and Idzumi (cruiser, 8x1 6" batteries, speed 3, 0 armour,
3/2/2/2
hull, level 1 screen equivalent) versus the Russian ships Borodino
(battleship, 2x2 12" batteries, 6x1 6" batteries, speed 3, 3 armour,
11/10/10/10 hull, level 2 screen equivalent) and Pallada (cruiser, 8x1
6"
batteries, speed 3.5, 1 armour, 5/5/5/5 hull, level 1 screen
equivalent).

The edge goes to the Russians as the Russian ships are bigger, however the
Japanese ships have more guns to bear. This should be a close battle.

Both fleets started at the table edge with the battleship in line in front of
the cruiser. They were lined up almost opposite each other. Both forces began
to close at top speed. The battleships started firing at long range. Borodino
did minimal damage to the Fuji, but Fuji did a good amount of damage to the
Borodino, so that before the ships had hit 24" range, Fuji still had not taken
a hull hit (armour absorbed most of it) but the Borodino was half way through
her first damage track.

At this point, the Russians made a crucial error. The Japanese turned to
starboard in an attempt to cross the Russians' "T". The Russians did not
respond until the following turn. This meant that the Japanese got turned
first unmasking the Idzumi from behind the Fuji. The Fuji fired a broadside at
the Borodino, who responded. However, the Pallada was still screened by the
Borodino and could not fire. Idzumi fired on the Borodino. The Borodino
crossed its first threshold line. The only thing hit was the engines, slowing
the Borodino to 1.5" per turn.

This was a crucial problem, as it allowed the Japanese to jump ahead. Fuji and
Idzumi continued to pound Borodino as the range rapidly closed. Both ships
fired full broadsides, while the Pallada--once it became unmasked--could
only fire forward guns at the Idzumi. Fuji outpaced Borodino and turned once
more. The Fuji had finally crossed the Borodino's T. Fuji was firing full
broadsides at Borodino while Borodino could only fire 1 12" battery and 1 6"
battery back at Fuji. The pounding commenced.

Borodino split its fire between Fuji and Idzumi, while Pallada concentrated on
the smaller Japanese ship. Idzumi crossed two thresholds at once, lost two
batteries and half her speed. The following turn, the Idzumi took a
devestating hit from Pallada and was sunk.

Borodino was not long for this world. Another broadside salvo from Fuji at
close range knocked out Borodino's forward 12" battery. One turn later, the
Borodino took on water and began to sink. This left a damaged Fuji to take on
the undamaged Pallada. The two ships manoeuvred and traded shots, but the
Pallada was no match for the Fuji's 12" guns. With one devestating shot
(a
total of 10 points of damage), Pallada's magazines exploded and she sunk
beneath the waves. (Note: in a campaign game or properly set up scenario, the
Pallada would have tried to escape the battle. With her greater speed and the
disposition of the ships when the Borodino was sunk, the Pallada stood a good
chance of escaping.)

The entire battle took about 25 minutes of real time to play, but that was
with verbal movement orders, not written. The results were far more
"realistic" than the first playtest. The hits at long range were few and none
too damaging, but they set up the slugfest to come. Damage seemed to be
modelled relatively accurately.

The game was decided by the mistake on the Russians' part. If the Borodino had
turned at the same time as the Fuji, or if it had turned away from the Fuji,
not towards, the Pallada would have been unmasked sooner and the battle would
have been evened out. As it was, a tactical mistake was the Russians' undoing.

THINGS THAT NEED MORE WORK

On the whole, I'm quite happy with how this turned out. The game had the right
feel for the period, if a little more beer-and-pretzels than General
Quarters and other game systems. There are some areas that need to be fixed,
expanded, or explored.

Movement rules need to be ironed out for this period. While the FT movement
rules worked okay in the first playtest, I felt that they didn't capture the
period correctly. This isn't difficult to change.

The 4.7" guns as class 1 weapons may not be accurate. Another option is to
make 4.7" guns equivalent to Class 2 beams but have them roll 12 sided dice.

While the armour seemed to work, it is very "gamey". The armour rules are fine
for FT where you have starship armour blown away by high-tech weapons.
For this historical period the armour rules don't have the right feel. Another
option is to use varying strengths of hull to represent armour. Strong hulls
would be battleships, average would be armoured cruisers, weak would be
protected cruisers or light cruisers, and destroyers, and very weak would be
used for civilian ships. This would also give Binhan very strong hulls for his
WWII battlewagons. If I incorporate this, I would probably do away with the
level 1 and level 2 screen idea. Instead, ALL shots would do one damage on a
roll of 2 and two damage (and a reroll) on a roll of 1. Rolls of 3 and above
would be a miss.

The battle was over relatively quickly, but for a large engagement like
Tsushima the game might bog down. I'll have to try a relatively large
engagement. One way of speeding things up is to half the mass and half the
number of batteries firing. This means less dice are thrown at a time, making
it easier to resolve combat. The same number of turns (on average) would be
needed to sink a ship but the turns would be over quicker.

Torpedos weren't modelled. They weren't a major factor in the Battle of
Tsushima (1905) until after the Russians were mostly defeated, but they did
have their place. I'll have to come up with reasonable torpedo rules.

This system opens itself up to a number of die modifications using the FMA die
shift idea. For instance, more than one ship firing on a target caused a lot
of confusion when it came to correcting shots. A simple idea I had was to have
players declare which ships will be fired on by more than one ship. A marker
(in this case a green marker) is then placed beside these ships. Any ship
without this marker can only be fired on once in the turn. Once it's been
fired upon, a red marker is placed beside it to indicate that no other ship
may fire on it. Any fire aimed at a ship with a green marker is shifted up one
die type (thus the Fuji's 12" guns would roll d10s if both the Fuji and Idzumi
were firing on Borodino).

This idea can be extended further. Poor visibility or night battles could
shift the die type up. The Japanese had much better gunnery technique at
Tsushima, so the Japanese could shift their die type down by one type when
firing at close range. These are just two ideas for die type shifts.

So, there you have it. All comments are welcome, particularly by those who
want to try this out. With Binhan's original Wet Thrust rules and some
concepts I have here, we might have the makings of a fun and fast paced naval
game that's still reasonably accurate.