Welp, I'm taking another shot at getting the ball rolling and hopefully I can make it stick this time heh.
So I figured might as well start off with a quick lil' post to easy back into things while I finish up some of more complex ideas.
For this quick post I'm gonna take another crack at making ships and vehicles you make in GURPS Spaceships a little more survivable.
Military Grade Armor (TL10+)
The stats for Nanocomposite, Diamondoid, and Exotic Laminate represent the type of materials that would be used in either civilian level vessels or "unarmored" style ships that are more like modern navel destroyers. This is usually do to cost since higher grades of armor materials are far more expensive. However, higher grade materials are available if cost isn't a major factor.Military grade armor doubles the dDR that a system of Nanocomposite, Diamondoid, and Exotic Laminate give buy cost 4 times as much. This armor also counts as laminate and doubles its dDR against shaped charge and plasma based attacks.
Do to the cost most large ships and vehicles are not going to be able to afford to cover the whole ship in the best armor and instead will only either only cover the sides likely to be hit in combat (such as the front hull for tanks or for ships meant to attack into their forward arc while approaching the enemy) or you can use my optional rules here to simulate adding armored belts to protect only specific sections of a ship.
Very interesting. As others have pointed out the armor in "Spaceships" is demonstrably inferior to that in battlesuits or tanks of the same TL, which makes sense for the 'tin can' sort of realistic spaceship but hardly for a space opera dreadnought like a Star Destroyer.
ReplyDeleteThough I think the greatest rift between cinematic sci-fi (space opera or not) and "Spaceships" is the latter's emphasis on kinetic kill weapons and point defense. With a few exceptions (Babylon 5 occasionally, and the newer Battlestar Galactica) beam weapons are clearly the premiere option. In Star Trek I would go so far as to say that kinetic weapons are apparently considered to be useless, as the only weapons ever used by anyone are beam weapons and anti-matter/plasma bombs.
Yeah, while I get wanting the books to be somewhat on the conservative side of realistic as its base assumption, it would of been nice if they offered more genre assumption based switches (though for Trek, weapons are so powerful that armor is almost useless and it takes shields to protect your ship).
DeleteMaybe something like, radical hard armor has 2× the dDR, super science armor has 5× the dDR, space opera has 10× the dDR and cosmic has 100× the dDR or more.