Been thinking about the rules for advanced screens.
#1: advanced screens should subtract 1 per level from every damage roll
instead of ignoring rolls of 6 for level 1, 5 or 6 for level 2.
Original reason was just copying the existing rules for screens protecting
against Phalon plasma bolts, which also rolled one or more D6 per bolt. The
maths
works out to be an average of -1 per die roll.
First problem is that the amount of damage absorbed can vary wildly, and it
will be much more effective (from the defenders POV) against small salvos than
large ones. With a lot of dice the damage converges to average, but with only
a few dice it becomes much more likely for the average damage to be much more
dramatically reduced. (In the worst case, you roll all sixes for damage and do
nothing.)
Second problem is that it is counter to the expected FT rule mechanics that
high rolls are better than low, eg you wishing to roll 4s rather than 6s. With
any other weapon, even against heavy screens, a player who rolls lots of 6s
feels good about it. I don't want to break this.
#2: how much mass should they cost?
This I'm still not sure about. You think 5% per level with x 4 points is too
cheap. Mmm, yeah. But I also think that 10% per level is too expensive.
I just did a quick analysis of what percentage of mass various FB1 ships
devote to 'passive defence', screens, armour, or extra hull.
NAC ships are mostly 9 to 11% (the Vandenberg heavy cruiser is the highest).
The NSE, as you are well aware, don't spend more than 5% on any ship. (The
most 'defensive' FSE design turns out to be the San Miguel destroyer, with a
whole 5.8% spent on armour.)
The NSL ships turn out to be 8-12%, not really very
different from the NAC. (The best protected is the Markgraf cruiser on 12%.) I
guess the mechanism of armour absorbing lots of early hits gives them the
reputation/actual effect of being better.
The ESU have the highest percentage on defence. The Tibet and Beijing cruisers
are 12% and 13%. The Manchuria and Rostov are 15% and 16% IF you count the
extra hull boxes, which can be considered as a sort of inferior armour. The
Komarov maxes defence out at 20%!
UNSC ships only have screens at best, like FSE. I estimate that the advanced
hulls are equivalent to
2.5% of armour per row (30% / 4 = 7.5%, 30% / 3
= 10%) so 'gain' another 7.5% by paying extra points.
OK, the best protected ships in FB1 spend only 15% or 16% of mass on passive
defences. And it's OK for an advanced technology ship to gain another 5% of
'mass' by paying extra points.
Given these, I don't feel comfortable about making a ship with level 2
advanced screens spend 20% mass on it.
How about 8.3% per level, mass divided by 12? Points cost to remain at mass x
4?
cheers,
> Hugh Fisher wrote:
> Been thinking about the rules for advanced screens.
Sorry, I can't find the original post so I'll have to ask a stupid question:
Does this -1 apply to beam dice as well as to straight-D6 damage rolls?
(The reason I ask is that a -1 modifier to a beam die roll is identical
to
level-2 standard screens. IOW, if these advanced screens use the same -1
DRM against both beam dice and D6 damage rolls, this has some rather obvious
implications about what the system needs to cost.)
> I just did a quick analysis of what percentage of
How do you define "extra" hull? Specifically, how do you compare, say, "extra"
hull boxes on the 4th hull row of an ESU capital ship with Mass spent on
armour or screens? It is by no means a 1:1 relationship, like.
> NAC ships are mostly 9 to 11% (the Vandenberg heavy
Actual effect, not just reputation... against non-Kra'Vak opponents.
Anything that delays the first and second threshold checks has a big impact
on the ship's combat power, whereas delaying the third check and/or the
destruction of the ship *without* also delaying the first two thresholds
mostly just prolongs the ship's death throes. (Which is why NSL-style
armour schemes don't work very well against the Kra'Vak: heavy K-guns
can inflict thresholds *without* first destroying all the armour.)
> UNSC ships only have screens at best, like FSE. I
The UNSC ships only 'gain' about 4% "extra armour" from their 3-row
hulls, not 7.5%. Those boxes on the 2nd and 3rd rows aren't worth a "full"
armour box.
> Given these, I don't feel comfortable about making
If they're too cheap at 4xMass and you don't want to increase the Mass
further, you'll have to increase the Cost/Mass ratio <shrug>
Regards,
Oh snap, I sent this to the wrong address. Sorry everybody.
(It does explain why I didn't get a reply from the person I intended to send
it to.)
cheers,
> Been thinking about the rules for advanced screens.
OK, background is that I've been designing experimental new rules. The plan
was to do some playtesting before sending them out to a wider audience in the
hope that the really bad ideas would get weeded out beforehand and thus I
wouldn't look too foolish.
But now I already look foolish :-) on this so may as
well explain myself fully.
Advanced screens are those that can protect against beams and other weapons as
well, eg Langston Fields from the Mote in Gods Eye.
Against beams, grasers, fighters they work just like standard screens.
SMPs use beam rules against advanced screens, torpedo
fighters -1 per die per level.
For the first playtest I just copied the Phalon plasma
bolt vs screen rule, so a level-1 advanced screen
negates damage rolls of 6, level-2 rolls of 5 or 6.
This seems like a bad idea, better is -1/-2 per die
roll.
In the first playtest they were the same 5% of mass but cost mass x 4. This
is, at least in the opinion of a regular FSE player, too cheap, and I'm
inclined to agree. (We are planning another test with different ship designs.)
In an earlier version they were 10% of mass/level
and cost x 4. The previous message was a rough back of the envelope
calculation as to why this was too much, assuming that FB1 ships are
'canonical' for the GZGverse.
Thanks Oerjan for responding.
cheers,
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Thu, May 29, 2008 at 5:19 AM, Hugh Fisher <laranzu@ozemail.com.au> wrote:
> Advanced screens are those that can protect against
Langston fields were very peculiar pieces of kit. The tuffleyverse analog
would be ships with a phantom first row of damage. While the field is
operating, the ship takes no damage, but a first level threshold check is made
whenever the phantom row is filled (to model burn through). If the Langston
field generator fails a threshold, while the filed is active, the ship is lost
with all hands in a cataclysmic explosion. Ships with Langston fields also
have a heat track with one box per row. Each time a threshold is inflicted,
one box is ticked. One box on the heat track is regenerated each turn. If a
threshold is inflicted, while no empty boxes are available
> Richard Bell wrote:
> Langston fields were very peculiar pieces of kit. The tuffleyverse
There's a short story by Don Hawthorne (IIRC) in one of the 'War World'
collections set in the Mote universe that has a lot of descriptions of space
combat. Langston fields can be burnt through in a small area by a temporary
overload, either from a beam or missile warhead, that causes damage to the
ship without collapsing the field.
cheers,
Here's my take on the Langston Field in Full Thrust (NOT play-tested):
SHIP DESIGN
All ships have 10% (fragile) hulls. This reflects that in the Mote universe,
typically ships' hulls are quite fragile RELATIVE TO THE WEAPONS IN USE. You
can't buy more (or less) than a 10% hull.
Hull boxes are represented by circles in a single row on the bottom of the
SDS.
Langston Field Generators are sized exactly like Screen Generators: 5% of ship
mass, with a minimum size of 5 mass.
A ship with a Langston Field Generator may buy Langston Field boxes at a cost
of 1 mass, 2 points (These represent upgrades to your Field Generator). These
are square and are arranged in 4 rows as usual. A ship that has a field
generator but no boxes does not generate a sufficiently powerful Field to have
any effect for military purposes.
Assign DCPs as usual, with this exception: half of your DCPs are allocated to
your Langston Field Boxes, and the rest go below in the
Hull Circles. These will represent crew lost in burn-throughs.
You may add multiple Field Generators. Additional Field Generators do not have
any effect beyond redundancy. However, this is important enough that you
should strongly consider adding it (see below).
Hull Armor does not exist in the Mote universe. Neither do fighters, Needle
Beams, screens, and many other systems. Beam Batteries in the Mote universe
are primarily laser batteries, though other weapons exist. Shuttlecraft are
available exactly as in my previous post on small craft: one free shuttle per
DCP, with restricted launch rules. Submunitions, MT Torpedoes and SMLs are all
used, though in Imperial terminology they are all referred to as Torpedoes.
DURING PLAY
For the most part, actual Full Thrust play is unaffected. Damage all goes to
the Field Boxes (do not count the penetration effects of
weapons like K-guns or P-Torps). Threshold checks represent damage
from burn-throughs. However, check at each threshold only ONCE.
(example: a ship marks off the last of its first row of Field Boxes, then
makes a threshold check. It then radiates energy, "healing" some of its first
row of Field Boxes back. If it is damaged again, it does NOT need to make a
threshold check until it takes enough damage to lose all of its second row of
Field Boxes).
In certain scenarios, ships take damage due to environmental effects
(drive plumes, for example, or sun-diving). DCPs are NOT lost and
threshold checks are NOT required due to damage from these sources because the
more diffuse energy is absorbed without the possibility of
burn-through.
Every turn, a ship "heals" a number of Field Boxes equal to the number of
generators aboard (to a maximum of three).
There are two catastrophic situations that can happen to a ship. If all of a
ship's Field Boxes are marked off and the ship takes more damage, then the
Field collapses. If all of a ship's Langston Field generators are disabled
(perhaps from threshold checks), then the Field collapses. If the Field
collapses, take the number of the ship's total Field Boxes and apply them as
damage to the hull circles. If this doesn't kill the ship outright (it usually
does), then take another threshold check (use the threshold value of your LAST
row of field boxes, minus one).
A ship may surrender at any time, according to the scenario being played.
Colors are important with the Langston Field. Players must accurately indicate
a ship's current color if asked. Draw a line dividing each Field Box row in
half (if there aren't an even number of boxes, the line should be slightly to
the right). Mark each area as follows:
Black ###|### Red
Orange ###|### Yellow
Green ###|## Blue
Violet ###|## Indigo
OOOOOOOOOO
# = Langston Field Box O = Hull Circle
| = dividing Line
In the example above, the ship is clearly around mass 100 (since there are 10
hull boxes). If its Field collapses from damage, it would take 22 points of
damage to its hull (far more than enough to kill it).
On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 3:17 AM, Richard Bell <rlbell.nsuid@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 5:19 AM, Hugh Fisher <laranzu@ozemail.com.au>
wrote:
> Advanced screens are those that can protect against
Naval
> combat is complicated that when a ship surrenders, it is only lightly
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't a Lanstrom field just the same as regerating armour over a ship with not
many hull boxes.
You equip a ship with a lot of armour and then in the end phase each can
recover its damage absorbant ability on a number say 5+.
Then you get ships that can initially block a lot of damage but then need to
retire from the battlefront to shed excess enery and if they don't they go
splat pretty quickly. Especially if you enforce a hull box limit of 20% of
ships mass.
It is mentioned in "The Mote In God's Eye" (cf. Ch.14) that the
*normal-space* engines of MacArthur made use of some features of the
Langston Field, but it is explicitly stated that the interstellar Alderson
Drive and the protective Langston field around a ship are quite separate (cf.
Ch. 24). The book describes how the Moties had discovered and rediscovered the
drive many times, but never seen field before the arrival of MacArthur and
Lenin, and this is a major plot point.
In the sequel "The Moat Around Murcheson's Eye" Horace Bury's personal ship
Sinbad has an Alderson Drive, but is not fitted with a Langston Field
generator until after Bury's visit to Sparta. The book makes clear (cf. Ch 5)
that private ownership of Langston generators is tightly controlled in the
empire generally, and *banned* within the Sparta system.
It's the old story. Any sizeable interplanetary spacecraft would potentially
be an extremely dangerous weapon (We have already seen what mere airliners can
do...). One cannot imagine any government, let alone a moderately
authoritarian one like the Empire Of Man, letting starships wander around
populated areas without reserving the capability to blow them instantly into
tiny little pieces if their trajectory even *began* to look funny.
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> n tailby wrote:
Not really, because you're not modelling an important aspect of the
Field -- local overload leading to burn-throughs, /i.e./, energy leak
equivalent to a threshold check causing partial damage before the Field is
"full". Your idea is more akin to a ship equipped with the Field and the Motie
thermal superconductor, which minimised the effect of
burn-throughs. To paraphrase a character from TGH/TMAME, ships still die
but they don't get hurt (as much).
Phil
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don't semi AP and AP weapons simulate the local burn through perfectly? A beam
weapon burns through and the reroll does damage directly to hull as do plasma
torpedoes and K guns.
So 2 ways to beat a langstrom field roll massed dice to overload it or use AP
weapons to bypass it.
[quoted original message omitted]
I would say no, because there aren't any weapons with AP effects attested in
the book. Also, every ship in the CoD universe uses the Langston Field as its
defense; there'd be no reason for anything other than AP weapons if one was
invented. The Field absorbs all kinds of
energy-- including kinetic, proportional to the (cube? fourth power?)
of the incoming energy. In the book, burn-throughs seem to happen
mostly from torpedoes, whereas most of the energy you pump into the Field
comes from the laser batteries.
That's why I like threshold checks for modeling burn-throughs.
Rob
On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 4:18 AM, john tailby <John_Tailby@xtra.co.nz>
wrote:
> But don't semi AP and AP weapons simulate the local burn through
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> Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 4:18 AM, john tailby <John_Tailby@xtra.co.nz> wrote:
> But don't semi AP and AP weapons simulate the local burn-through
That's fourth power of the /velocity/ of an incoming particle -- so
non-photonic radiation from a nuke (which is what the torpedoes are)
gets absorbed more readily the hotter it is. Since we know that the Field
absorbs photons, too, we can assume that the rest of the radiation
is absorbed as well.
Robert has a point: the only ship weapons that we've seen are laser "guns" and
torpedoes with thermonuke warheads, and nothing punches through the Field the
way that, say, a needle beam does FT screens. In
fact, most FT weapons don't really match up with CD/EoM-style space
combat, and it's an interesting question as to whether something like a
K-gun (and related technologies) would be effective against a
Field-equipped ship. My first instinct is to limit EoM-type ships to
standard beams and SMLs and/or SMRs, with PDSs to cope with (some of)
the salvo missiles.
> In the book, burn-throughs seem to happen mostly from torpedoes,
I agree. With only the example of /Lenin/ against /MacArthur/ and the
battles around the Mote in TGH to go by, one gets the impression that ship
combat is a fairly slow business when both combatants have Field technology,
punctuated by brief periods of mad activity when a
burn-through is achieved and some actual damage is done -- both in terms
of change in ship's status and as DC parties madly rip out and replace damaged
system modules.
In fact, I do wonder why the primary armament of the Imperial ships is their
lasers; again, given the examples of combat that we see in the
books, I'd be inclined to reduce the number of guns in favour of a /lot
/more torpedoes, as they are the weapons that seem to cause the most
burn-throughs. Lasers pump energy into the Field, but that does nothing
to the target until it overloads the Field or unless a tight enough
focus can be maintained to cause a hot spot and burn-through. Okay, the
supply situation is an obvious counter-argument, as is the use of the
lasers in combat against ground forces and installations, but I'd think a
Torpedo Battleship, intended for Fleet operations, would be a useful capital
ship.
Of course, that all changes when the thermal superconductor comes into use;
then, it's a case of pump as much energy into an opponent's Field
as quickly as you can, to overload it completely. Burn-throughs don't
damage the target, they just make it hotter -- right up until the
superconductor fails, and then it's fried spaceship time!
Phil
I agree on pretty much all that. I was trying to remember how it
worked, so I looked it up. From "Building the Mote in G-d's Eye" (page
458 of the paperback):
"Our second key technological building block was the Langston Field, which
absorbs and stores energy in proportion to the fourth power of
incoming particle energy: that is, a slow-moving object can penetrate
it, but the faster it's moving (or the hotter it is) the more readily it is
absorbed.
(In fact it's not a simple fourth-power equation, but our readers
surely don't need third-order differential equations for amusement.)"
Bad assumption.:)
Here's a link to the original beginning to Mote:
http://www.webscription.net/chapters/0671741926/0671741926.htm
OK so here you see how beams and SMLs interact in a combat environment. Lasers
give you the most power pumped into the enemy's Field over time. Torpedoes
give you disposable burst damage. So you use your lasers to get an enemy into
the middle colors, and then when
his field is holding alot of power, try to score some burn-throughs
with your torpedoes. In this fight, the Defiant used torpedoes at the
beginning also, probably because he knew he was outgunned and wasn't going to
hold anything back. Notice that Lenin did much the same thing.
On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 12:30 PM, Phillip Atcliffe
> <atcliffe@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> That's fourth power of the velocity of an incoming particle -- so
gets
> absorbed more readily the hotter it is. Since we know that the Field
> Robert has a point: the only ship weapons that we've seen are laser
> I agree. With only the example of Lenin against MacArthur and the
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3y.html#forcefield
scroll down to Langston Field