Topic: Thoughts on limiting weapon mounts

[markc]

SM:P Vehicle Man.
A little rant, thoughts, but also some questions to keep the SM board hopping.
 I have been doing a lot of thinking about various space topics for a new campaign and this one sort of bothers me.
 The fact that you can mount any size weapon frame on any size ship, to me it seems broken. For example a small fighter mounts a weapon that is more than 1/3 its total mass. Even with advanced tech. this just bothers me. For example from WW2, a destroyer mounts a 5 inch gun as well as a Motor Torpedo boat [PT boat]. The PT boat can mount the 5in gun but it needs more bracing than the destroyer does simply because the destroyer has a bigger hull to absorb the recoil of the 5in gun.
 I was trying to come up with a chart that would have various ship sizes and the mounts they could carry. [SM:P does a wonderful job in that it gives a weapon mounts size and then you can look up the mark number for damage purposes.] The basic chart ideas are compact craft use compact mounts, small craft small mounts, medium craft medium mounts, etc for large and ultra large vehicles and weapon mounts. But from here I got a little stuck. Should the mass categories of the vehicles vary from tech level to tech level? Like the chart on page 101 of the SM:P Vehicle Manual? But instead have a break down chart for each tech level on the sizes of craft they can produce which will relate back to the weapon categories.
For example: A WW2 cruiser weighs between X and Y tons and that should relate to a medium mount on page 107 this give us a mark 12 weapon for the medium auto cannon. Now a short time later say in 2000 a destroyer the DD2000 which is in the small category and a tech level above the old WW2 cruiser [17 to 18] now a small mount is a mark 12. But if the DD2000 wanted to mount a small size weapon it should require a bigger weapon mount to stabilize the weapon. Say a factor of x2 or x3. In this way you could have the spinal mount type weapons from Traveler and various TV shows but also avoid the small gunboat mounting ultra large weapons, but they could mount a medium size weapon since they are in the small class of ships buy having a mount that is x3 as massive as required or they could have a large size weapon if they had a mount weighing x10 the chart listings.
Well any thoughts?
Thanks
MDC

[David Johansen]

Realistically the main restrictions on weapon mounts are surface area and recoil.  I seem to recall that the A-10 Wart Hog can just about come to a dead stop by firing its autocannon.  If you mount a howitzer on a tricycle be ready for significant damage to the frame.

I'm not sure that energy weapons have significant recoil to deal with but waste heat and cooling might take up a fair bit of room and the power requirements are fairly prohibative.  There's also the percentage of the vehicle's cost and its relative combat effectiveness to consider as limitations.  Is it worth putting that mega cannon on a jet bike that can't take a single hit from a pea-shooter?

[markc]

DJ,
 I agree with everything you said. I also remember the A-10 show that talked about the pilot?s comments on firing the "canon" in combat. And I also love the look of the ugly duckling that is the A-10. It is not right for every job but the job it is designed for it does without equal.

 I was looking at SM2's Star Strike and Armored Assault on PDF and noticed they use a tiered system for weapons. If it is mark 10-19 the weapon mount is ton x1 mass, for mark 20-29 weapon mount is x2 mass and it goes on up to mark 50. But they do not really use the tech level Mk idea that SM:P does but takes the view that they are in basically a single tech era and manipulate the various weapon factors in a Tec era..
 But IMO changing back to SM:P VM, it is not so much as the mark # for damage that does it but it is the weapons frame vs. the vehicles structural frame.
Thanks ,I will keep my thinking cap on until I find something I like.

MDC

[Oldgrue]

I can't see where the weapon/shiptype is really broken.

How many manned (or unmanned, for that matter) autocannons can realistically mounted on a ship shouldn't be based on size, so much as design.
A 20 - 50 mm autocannon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M242) isn't all that large.  Depending on the culture and warfare techniques, you could see some really exciting variations. 

Perhaps looking into the size of a weapon as a MK whatever would help.
Say reducing the size one costs 2.5 factorial (thus mk1 is 2.5x, 2 is 7.5x, 3 is 15x etc) and increasing (because players are devious) the size costs .8/mark (making a mark 5 sized weapon 1.4x cost, and ginormous.)  My players would look at how many small slots fit in a large slot, and see if they could get a higher yield from more  individual smaller weapons.

This way you can rein in the size of their weapons by hitting your players where it hurts: the wallet.

[markc]

 Oldgrue,
 
 I agree with you up to a point cutting holes in hulls can dramaticly reduct the structure of a ship. But you are right is it that different for a large hole or a number of small holes.
 I have been looking at the SS ship comp books as well as the AA vehicle comp and noticing that MIRC's in one case had a mk40 plasm rifle in its arm. Now it was approx a 1000 ton vehicle but I not sure I want to go that rout in my game. But I am in the thinking stage so all ideas are on the table at the moment.

 I am thinking I have to do a chart with the basic ship equipment vs type of ship to get the basics down and then go from thier. Also I was IMO trying to adopt more realism into the game. Such as ships have been designed aroud the guns they were to carry and in general you could not just drop a bigger weapon into the whole of a ship designed to hole 2 smaller weapons. If tec shrunk the size down. The engineers still have to deal with recoil, cooling etc. I do agree that quite a few US Navy ships have recieved upgrades with new weapons in place of older ones that have greatly extened their useful life today. But I do not know if I can say that you could drop 2 large rail guns in a US BB in place of the 3 15" cannons or for that matter 1 large rail gun in the turret. Or for aother example could you drop 1 15" cannon from a BB into a US CC of WW II?

 Thanks for keeping the thoughts coming!
MDC   

 

[Marc R]

Forget battleship mounts on destroyers. . .they put battleship guns into tanks. (Well, perhaps cruiser sized guns)

Mobile artilliary pieces "Self Propelled Howitzers" are heavy guns on a tank chasis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:M110-203-mm-howitzer-yuma-1975.jpg

A 203mm (8 inch) gun on just enough vehicle to move it around. . .essentially for this vehicle, the mount, the engine, the fuel tank, and the crew positions take up all available weight and cubage. (Ammo carried by an auxilliary truck that followed this unit around.)

That's a cruiser's main gun mounted on a vehicle that is essentially smaller than the weapon itself.

As long as you can fit everything you need into the space, no reason you can't have a wee vehicle carrying one giant spinal weapon or something similar. . . .of course, the example mobile gun is barely armored. . .I'd bet it offers protection to nothing more than frags or light small arms. . .

By this logic, non hyper capable craft could use the space and tonnage normally given over to the engine needed for H-travel to a big gun. . .they'd be the equivalent of the gun-boats of napoleonic times. . . .a rowed or stepped mast vessel that had one front pointing fixed gun, that tended to be really large for the size of the vessel. . .totally un-seaworthy, used only for close in port patrolling.

Or, for a more modern example. . .a boomer sub. . .a WWII aircraft carrier sized submarine that is essentially an engine, crew quarters, life support and a giant honeycomb of cells, each one of which contains a single shot ICBM. . .something like 70-80% of the entire submarine is just tubes filled with missiles.

But stuff like that. . .the mobile gun keeps away from danger, the gun boats used the coast or port for cover, and the submarine is a stealth weapon. . .

If you pack giant weapons into a small hull, the balance factor seems to be the "Sledgehammer mounted on an eggshell" problem. . .a boomer sub has loads of punch, but if it's a target, it will not actually take much punishment.

[markc]

LM,
 I do agree with some of your logic but in the cse of the gun on a chasse the gun usually uses the groud to stablize the weapon or it is tech advances that enable to weapon to be mounted on a smaller frame.

Thanks
MDC

[Oldgrue]

Let's look at aircraft then. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-35_Lightning_II)
F-35 lightning carries the same gatling gun as the AC-130. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_AC-130) The AC-130 is over 3 times the mass of the F-35.
The M-134 (dillonaero.com) can be mounted on a small pickup truck.

Since vehicles automatically have 2 hardpoints, just make the 'oversized' take up a second hardpoint.  Maybe make them take more hardpoints to compensate.

I think you're looking for a whole lot of extra effort chasing the relative size of a weapon in differing TL.  What's good for the players is fair game coming back to them.

[Marc R]

Also, I'm not sure how much smaller weapons really do get.

A 19th century battleship had a 9" main gun.

A 20th century battleship had a 12" main gun.

The reality is not that as the TL went up, the cannon all shrank 33%. . . .as steel got lighter and engines got more power to mass ratios the battleship got 50% larger. . .

It may be poor logic to compare 19th-20th century naval advances to what you get in early-mid-late starship tech, but it does seem like overall advances make for overall larger vessels, allowing for larger weapons, not shrinking weapons to fit into smaller vessels. (The same is true with planes, over time.)

[Oldgrue]

Only if we look at naval advances - but I suspect the displacement of the vessels jumped too.
Ground armor advances moved the feared 88 from 68 ton platforms (Tiger III) to 120 on a 62 ton platform (Leopard 2)
My above example for gatling guns, including the A-10's GAU-8 as well.

As the TL advances the kill power of a weapon continues to jump - with it the armor required to defeat it.  SM:P (i think) glosses over the cycle of obsolescence with projectiles.

Denying the size of weapons starts to guarantee that light attack craft become incapable of defeating larger craft.  As an example our wet navy in the US has rendered Battleships obsolete due to smaller ship killing platforms being available and extreme maintenance costs. Destroyers, Frigates, Cruisers, and the occasional Carrier rule the seas now.

Changing the balance of power in favor of larger vessels may require a rethinking of how warfare is performed in your game environment, as well as the escalation of countermeasures. I would think this would lead to mega-ships and the extinction of fighters.

[markc]

Oldgrue,
 I do agree that in some systems the fighter is obsolete compaired to the big ships. I was just watching Star Wars last night and it is a good example for the above case as they say the fighters weapons are too small to do damage or "they will never get through out shields". But I ask myself how do the fighters get through the shields to attack the craft? Like when young Anakin flys inside the droid controll ship and other examples.
 
 I think in my game I do want fighters to have a chance to attack and wound larger ships maybe even destroy them. Like you say when a small inexpensive craft takes out a larger craft that cost significantly more, you have to change you thoughts on military force projection.

 In SM:P the defination of the Quantum Drive and how it brings other ships along with it, is a big change IMO. Now you have 1 large ship that can move a few ships around with it so the other ships can be just as loaded as the defending ships with short consumabls.

MDC

[Oldgrue]

You might want to look at the Babylon 5 model of ship to ship combat then - fighters pick away at the surface systems,the larger ships operate as a carrier, force multiplier, and finally provide the killing stroke.

It seems that the Star Wars model of 'shields' ignores projectile/kinetic attacks. I'd presume because ballistic technology never kept up with energy weapons.  If this is the case, this allows for breaching pods, and daring  EVA activity trying to sneak onboard enemy ships.  Interestingly, this also leads to questions of the flight ceilings on a shield, and if the shields are transparent one way to energy weapons.  I can envision boarding actions solely for the purpose of gaining control of shield generators and changing their transparency as well as the possibility that weapon mounts need to be outside the shield perimeter.

[markc]

Oldgrue;
 Is B5 any better than RM2's SS and AS? Or Traveller Briliant Lance's? Or Battle Tech? Those are the space combat systems I have allready, but I have thought that I might pick up a new one to get some more ideas. I also think I will check with my gaming group to see what thay have.

thanks
MDC

[Oldgrue]

I'm only looking at the theory rather than the game engine.
I loved Agents of Gaming's B5 game.  Mongoose publishing's version I haven't seen yet, but it reaches its end of life at the end of the month.
In larger scale events, I might even suggest scooping up a copy of Full Thrust.

Well hush my mouth- It looks like the game engine might still be available.(http://b5wars.net/)

[Marc R]

Star Wars is actually a system that heavily favors fighters and small craft. . .which destroy large craft all the time. . (Like super star destoryers or death stars).

Robotech, B5 and Battlestar Galactica are also fighter-centric models.

Star Trek is the best "Battleship" model sci-fi. . .small craft are essentially irrelevant in Star Trek except against other small craft. . .Starship class vessels (Like the enterprise) are capable of mowing down fleets of small craft with near impunity. (In fact, if I recall the starship combat system for ST, it had escalating classes of weapons, where you could just ignore attacks below the threshold of your shields.)


In terms of starship design, I think the key variation is in how force fields are created.

In star Trek, a force field is a bubble shape, and vessels have layers of bubbles. . .so regardless of where or how you attack you need to penetrate vs the whole shield to do damage.

vs

Star Wars, where small craft like fighters have two shield zones (Front and Back) mid sized vessels like merchantmen tend toward 4-6 (Front/back, top/bottom, port/starbord), and large vessels and stations have sectors of shielding. . .like "Starbord Shield Generator Alpha. . .beta. . .gama. . .etc", "Bridge Deflector Shield Generator" etc etc. (The deflector shield generators are the geodesic spheres mounted on the outside of the hull that you see fighters blow up, before then attacking whatever componant or sector that shield generator protected.) There are missiles in SW, tending to be low yield nuclear devices with penetration aids.

If you build ships with one giant bubble shield you need to overwhelm in total, you tend to get battleships. . .if you build ships with lots of little overlapping shields that you can overwhelm in detail, or no force shields at all, you tend to end up with fighters.

[markc]

 To throw another into the mix that is not a pure shield, is Travellers sand caster. It uses charged sand to absorb, deflect amybe even set off and incomeing attack. I seen to remember the SC functioning for missile attacks in T but that is from memory of T in the 80's. When I did a glance at the newer rules it gave a been reduction modifier.
  But what ever I chose thier is a lot to think on and this is IMO one more area in which playing a future game you have to do a little bit more planing.
MDC

[Marc R]

very true, and the cycle OG mentioned above is very important, since SM does set up escalating technology levels, a lot can matter in specifics the GM sets as the current tech.

If the GM's decisions on where the tech is right now favors defensive tech you may see fewer but larger combatants in play.

If the GM makes the call that offensive tech is currently ascendant, than it's more likely that you will see smaller and more numerous combatants in play.

In terms of GMing advice. . .in playing scenarios where both assumptions were true:

Space combat was easier to GM with fewer, large vessels, but unless the PCs are high ranking bridge officiers, they don't really get to do much personally and feel left out of things. (And it's a lot easier for TV show producers to keep thousands of crewmembers off stage than it is for a GM, so roleplay possiblities within the crew become leigon.). . if your PCs are the gunnary crew of missile launcher starbord-34 they feel like bit players.

Space combat in the small but numerous scenario can be hard on the GM, but puts the players in hog heaven on one side, since they can be fighter jocks and right there in combat doing stuff. . .but the reason there are lots of small ships is that they are expendable. . .So you loose 10 fighters out of 100 and consider it a great victory . .but the potential to loose 10% of your PCs in a victory (Or 70-100% of them to a loss) can create it's own problems of high turnover of PCs. . .consider the use of fate points in this kind of scenario.

[Oldgrue]

You could just paint the ships with a space opera sense of scale. 
This might split the difference in the feels you're looking for.
Fighters suddenly have 5-10 person crews akin to small frigates.  By making them larger, the concept of a frigate gets worrisome to the players.

The upside of this is that warships can take on a completely different scales than civilian transports.  Not having to push meters thick layers of ablative armor around has got to be nice.

[markc]

 In the past what I did was a little of both as I allways try and have a test game so the players know how to design thier char. So I will have a ship to ship game, ranged combat game, ahnd to hand game and a pure skill game. In the Ship to Ship section I have fighter on fighter, fighters on biger ship and a big ship to big ship. This is so I amd they can see how deadly it is or what style they like and I can plan the rest of the campaign from there. Also in the past I have PC's run at least 2 char in a sci game as that allows one to be down healing and the 2nd to have some prime action. This also lets PC's switch off char if one mission is better suited to one of thier PC's compaired to the other.

 BTW, I also have Space Opera, GURP's and T2300 for ship to ship battle. Or I could go low tech and use the rules for RM2's Pirate or any other fatasy ship to ship combat.

 Thanks,
MDC
 

[Norin]

Markc It all depends on the scale of the campaign that you are planning on running, in Star Wars the scale is very personal, Anakin is the central character to the prequels and as a jedi fighter pilot he has to have the leet skillz to pwn all those droid starfighters and cruisers. In Babylon 5 which is IMHO the best modern depiction of space combat in both fleet level and star fighter level combat Star Fighters are designed to face other fighters and harass small cruisers, they are not even really a threat to ships like the Earth Federation Omega Class Destroyer.

I would not worry about chassis and weapon hard points as the GM you can always restrict access to equipment or have it be targeted by attackers should any weapon mounted to a particular ship be too powerful.

If you are running a type of campaign where the players are gadding bout the verse in a small freighter (a la Firefly or a ship like the millenium falcon, than most mega weapons will be more trouble than they are worth.

The weapons could be too obvious

"Gee, should we let that merchant vessel dock, y'know the one with the twin mounted particle death beam projectors"

Have insane power requirements

"If we divert all power from the life support and main lights as well as the primary lights and life support we should be able to fire mega-weapon once and keep our shields up for 20 seconds while the fusion reactors is under strain"