Starships - Should Large Ship Hitting Smaller Ships be Harder?

[BhelliomRahl]

Planning a Star Wars game and reading the rules for ships with larger sizes provide a bonus to the OCV of ships attacking them.

I was wondering if there should be a penalty for large ships to hit smaller vessels.

Because at present the Death Star could hit a single person as easily as it hits a planet which to me seems a little off.

Was thinking of applying the Size OCV bonus as a penalty to larger ships when attacking smaller ships. 

Was wondering what people's opinions and ideas are?

[dmjalund]

Have large weapons have a range penalty based on it"s own size, this will apply to targets even inside this range, outside this range apply range penalties normally.

[LoneWolf]

Robot Warriors had a size class stat for mechs.  I don’t have a copy of Robot Warriors, but from what I remember combat between the same size class ran as normal, but there were modifiers for different size classes fighting each other.   

[unclevlad]

Depends on the weapon system.  Rather than the Death Star, consider a Star Destroyer or Super Star Destroyer.  There are many different weapons systems, for different purposes.  The main gun is for capital ship combat, where you're firing against ships of similar size.  There may be large guns designed to take out smaller ships of the line.  There's a massive number of anti-fighter weapons...far, far shorter range, but much faster to track.  If space navies use missiles, there'll be a couple layers of anti-missile defense...some to disrupt enemy control, others to intercept.  

 

The weapons for targeting fighters and missiles should have MUCH higher OCVs, plus high RoF...because most will miss.  They generally won't even try firing the big guns against tiny targets;  their tracking systems aren't up to it, and the energy to fire means they don't have much RoF.  And it's like using a shotgun slug to kill a housefly...if it hits, sure, the fly's vapor, but it isn't good resource allocation.

[Christopher R Taylor]

 

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Robot Warriors had a size class stat for mechs.  I don’t have a copy of Robot Warriors, but from what I remember combat between the same size class ran as normal, but there were modifiers for different size classes fighting each other.   

 

I think that's the right approach, it even had movement differences for the sizes

[Hugh Neilson]

If a weapon is designed to hit a massive target, how much OCV does it need?  An X-Wing has many levels of Shrinking compared to a Star Destroyer.

[Doc Democracy]

9 minutes ago, Hugh Neilson said:

If a weapon is designed to hit a massive target, how much OCV does it need?  An X-Wing has many levels of Shrinking compared to a Star Destroyer.

 

This is really only true if you consider the Star Destroyer as an individual entity.  Would an individual standing on the Star Destroyer be similarly penalised? Or an individual manning a gun station on the Srar Destroyer?

 

I am with @unclevlad on this, there are different systems to combat different types of threat.  The main guns might not find it easy to track and take out an X-wing but some if the lesser gun batteries will be well-placed to do so.

 

What might also be true is that Star Destroyers are so impervious to the weaponry of X-wings they do not carry those secondary batteries, leaving them to their tie-fighter colleagues to mop up...

 

 

[unclevlad]

5 minutes ago, Doc Democracy said:

What might also be true is that Star Destroyers are so impervious to the weaponry of X-wings they do not carry those secondary batteries, leaving them to their tie-fighter colleagues to mop up...

IIRC from the original, that wasn't the case.  Certainly we know the Death Star had plenty of anti-fighter systems.  Fighter to fighter is preferable, by and large, for engaging attacking craft further away from the main ship.  It also avoids sectional overloads, where there are more attacking craft targeting a small area than the defenses can handle.

 

But note that even the Rebels had different types of assault ships, including bombers.  X Wing laser cannons are probably not strong enough to do structural damage...but could maybe take out some target types.  The bombs are potentially rather nastier.  And there's likely vulnerable areas...fighter bays, how about the bridge itself?  (Ignoring the fact that there is NO reason for the bridge to be so exposed.)

 

[Gauntlet]

I would definitely say yes, as it gives fighters a chance, but at the same time I make it based on the size difference.

[Doc Democracy]

7 hours ago, unclevlad said:

IIRC from the original, that wasn't the case.  Certainly we know the Death Star had plenty of anti-fighter systems.

 

I was scratching my head trying to think of an x-wing attacking a Star Destroyer. Not sure I can still identify such a scenario.

 

I deliberately omitted the Death Star which is such a strange beast anyway - the Death Star almost makes my point, those bombers have no chance of doing anything significant, even the crashes on the surface seem trivial.  The defence systems were almost trivial and it required the tie-fighters to hunt them down.  Almost like everything was set up for the drama rather than any kind of simulation!  😄

 

7 hours ago, unclevlad said:

Ignoring the fact that there is NO reason for the bridge to be so exposed.

 

Though a conceit repeated across so many SF franchises.

[Gauntlet]

But a lot of it is also based on situation and amount of time. If having enough time and no defending fighters, eventually those attacking fighters can bring down the Death Star, even without having a tiny place to shoot through for an automatic kill.

[Doc Democracy]

I don't know if I agree with that.  I don't think any practical number of x-wings would have taken the Death Star in the absence of the crucial exhaust port.

 

Unlike the Battlestars, there were not the same bays to disable.  The Battlestars always looked vulnerable in ways the Star Destroyers did not.  Indeed I think the Cylon Base ships were also vulnerable in the absence of fighter support.

[Christopher R Taylor]

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Though a conceit repeated across so many SF franchises.

 

Like how the shield generators always seem to be outside the shields, or how everything has a self destruct mechanism, something that does not exist in anything in real life, that I am aware of.

[Hugh Neilson]

15 hours ago, Doc Democracy said:

 

This is really only true if you consider the Star Destroyer as an individual entity.  Would an individual standing on the Star Destroyer be similarly penalised? Or an individual manning a gun station on the Srar Destroyer?

 

This brings another question - the combination of the weapon and the gunner(s). Some standard personal weapons have OCV modifiers.  Why not starship weapons?  If a capital ship has an OCV of -20 due to its size, either it is always hit by the other capital ships or there must be an OCV penalty to their guns.

[unclevlad]

5 hours ago, Gauntlet said:

But a lot of it is also based on situation and amount of time. If having enough time and no defending fighters, eventually those attacking fighters can bring down the Death Star, even without having a tiny place to shoot through for an automatic kill.

 

I gotta agree with Doc.  Fighters can do surface damage, but the Death Star is ludicrously, ridiculously, massive.  Remember, it's almost 100 MILES in diameter.  That means its surface area is about 80,000 square kilometers.  That's the size of South Carolina.  The volume is about 2 million cubic kilometers, or 2 * 10^15 cubic meters...a convenient unit for density, as a cubic meter of water has a mass of 1 metric ton.  If 0.1% is structural material, we're still talking a total mass in the TRILLIONS of tons.  World steel production in '23 was about 2 billion tons.

 

So...ok, if we have unlimited fighters, unlimited ammo, and unlimited time, they could do it...if you also assume the Death Star had no shielding.

 

So...yeah, I shouldn't have mentioned it, cuz the Death Star is a plot device.  Rationality has no place.

[Doc Democracy]

1 minute ago, unclevlad said:

Rationality has no place.

 

We should have a meme for this, it is a card we should wave every so often.

 

😁

[unclevlad]

56 minutes ago, Hugh Neilson said:

 

This brings another question - the combination of the weapon and the gunner(s). Some standard personal weapons have OCV modifiers.  Why not starship weapons?  If a capital ship has an OCV of -20 due to its size, either it is always hit by the other capital ships or there must be an OCV penalty to their guns.

 

Range mods come into play, even invoking megascale.  Capital ship guns should be engaging other capital ships at VERY long ranges.

 

Plus, capital ships still have to be moving it fairly substantial velocities...simply because they have to, to get anywhere.  Hero doesn't do velocity-based DCV very well...but that's Hero, trying to keep things manageable.  It's a game, not a simulation.

[Tom Cowan]

you could also look at it as scale of the weapon.  Scale it up, get range and damage but take a OCV hit.

your big ship is going to need 16" cannons and 5" cannons and .50cal guns

[Gauntlet]

3 hours ago, unclevlad said:

 

I gotta agree with Doc.  Fighters can do surface damage, but the Death Star is ludicrously, ridiculously, massive.  Remember, it's almost 100 MILES in diameter.  That means its surface area is about 80,000 square kilometers.  That's the size of South Carolina.  The volume is about 2 million cubic kilometers, or 2 * 10^15 cubic meters...a convenient unit for density, as a cubic meter of water has a mass of 1 metric ton.  If 0.1% is structural material, we're still talking a total mass in the TRILLIONS of tons.  World steel production in '23 was about 2 billion tons.

 

So...ok, if we have unlimited fighters, unlimited ammo, and unlimited time, they could do it...if you also assume the Death Star had no shielding.

 

So...yeah, I shouldn't have mentioned it, cuz the Death Star is a plot device.  Rationality has no place.

 

I'm not saying that one fighter can go in and destroy the Death Star. I am saying that if the Death Star has no real defenses up and is attacked by a full unit of X-Wings, eventually the fighters would be able to destroy it. If you can damage something, then eventually (key word eventually) you can destroy it. If that was not the case then the Death Star would not bother having any anti-fighter guns and would not bother sending out fighters. Technically a person in a small boat with a .50 Machine gun and unlimited ammo would be able to sink a Destroyer (assuming of course that the Destroyer doesn't act against him and the person has an unlimited amount of time).

[unclevlad]

A full unit wouldn't scratch the Death Star.

Make it a few thousand X-Wings with a month of solid attacks, and I'd buy it.  

You have anti-fighter guns because, even if you can't be destroyed, you don't want to have to replace a whole bunch of stuff that's kept topside.  Things like sensor arrays used by the targeting systems linked to the bigger guns, for example.  There's a big difference between "can't be destroyed" and "can't suffer notable degradation."  

[Chris Goodwin]

On 8/5/2024 at 2:53 PM, LoneWolf said:

Robot Warriors had a size class stat for mechs.  I don’t have a copy of Robot Warriors, but from what I remember combat between the same size class ran as normal, but there were modifiers for different size classes fighting each other.   

 

Here are the Size Class and Ground Scale rules updated for 4th-6th edition. 

 

Edit to add:  If anything, this works better under the latter editions than the earlier ones.

 

The basic idea is that your first range increment (to hit them) is based on the target's size.  A human size target's (Size Class 1) first range increment is 8m.  The first range increment of a Size Class 4 target (roughly the size of an X-wing) would be 64m. 

 

As per normal rules, the penalty to hit a target in the first range increment is -0, then it's -2 per doubling of distance.  This takes the place of the OCV bonus (for attackers) or DCV penalty (for targets) based on size. .

 

And I should note that +1 Size Class is equal to +3 SIZ stat for Vehicles.

 

Edited August 6 by Chris Goodwin

[Duke Bushido]

Man, this is a way complicated question to ask....

 

First, let's look at a couple of things.

 

 

On 8/5/2024 at 4:35 PM, dmjalund said:

 

Have large weapons have a range penalty based on it"s own size, this will apply to targets even inside this range, outside this range apply range penalties normally.

 

This is the closest to my own thoughts, but we will get there in a minute; I promise.

 

 

On 8/5/2024 at 4:53 PM, LoneWolf said:

Robot Warriors had a size class stat for mechs.  I don’t have a copy of Robot Warriors, but from what I remember combat between the same size class ran as normal, but there were modifiers for different size classes fighting each other.   

 

 

Right.  It was roughly analogous to the CV bonuses and penalties as presented in Shrinking and Growth in the Champions rules of the day.  And I had very few complaints with it regarding mechs, as there arw, at least within a given campaign, limits to the size differentials likely to be encountered, etc.

 

But here is the thing with "large starships:"  if a big ship had a problem hitting small ships and small ships get bonuses to hit big ships, no one in their right mind would build a big ship.  Why waste resources on a ship that absolutely cannot defend itself against a swarm of cheap fighters that simultaneously cannot miss your undefendable ship?

 

Besides, the fiction- while filled with David-and-GoDeath Star scenarios, does _not_ support this.

 

Look at the Death Star: it didn't just have a big ol' planet buster fun.  It's surface was bristling with small turrets that gave the impression (by scale and use and general success rate) of being designed _specifically_ to wipe out waves of small fighters.  Even the trench run started with some pretty heavy return fire (especially in the old vector graphics video game!), and there is no way they were planning to have to fend off a dreadnaught in that thing.

 

Look at the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica and the point defense guns that threw what I conservatively estimated to be seven billion tons of bullets at every wave of Cylon Raiders (and kudos to the writers for apparently having the same question I did when I was a kid: why would robots be tied up flying ships when at that tech level, you could have robot ships?).

 

So, going back to @dmjalund's comment:

 

Yes.  This is exactly what I do if I am bothering to  stat out a ship:  I assign a size class to ships (fairly easy, given the way I build vehicles), and a size class to a particular weapon.  Apply the CV modifiers based on the differences in these classes.

 

_However_, the only was to enforce this in terms of "point defense guns for fighters are useless against dreadnaughts" or even "fighter guns are useless against the Death Star" is to apply these same classes to damage and defenses.

 

Without going too  far off of the rules (seriously: I wouldnt bother sharing homebrew stuff here except for explanation or possible inspiration), let me guve you this example.  Fair warning: our vehicle rules arw home brew becauae we needed them before there were actual official vehicle rules.  When official rules were finally published (Champions II), we found ours to be reasonably similar, but where they were different, we preferred ours, so we never adopted any of the official rules.

 

Size Class is a function of Growth. (Again: homebrew.  Just accept it for this example).  Every three levels of growth (this is not going to make much sense if you learned the game from 6e) yields eight times the volume (twice as wide; twice as deep; twice as tall- and the CV modifiers) and, in our rules, is considered a size class.  Class 1 is man-sized (motorcycle, exoskeletal flight pack, etc).  Three levels of Growth yields class II; six levels yields Class III, etc.

 

Build weapons the same way (roughly).  Start with a man-portable weapon (say a rifle) and apply Growth or shrinking or whatever to get that weapon to the size class you want.

 

_Alternatively_, build a weapon and declare the size class for which it is intended.

 

Each size class the target has above the rating of the weapon reduces the damage by 3 DC.  This means a pistol is useless against a locomotive, for example.  (Class 1 versus Class 8 )

 

Targetting is handled similarly, using the CV bonuses and penalties: a planet buster gun was probably not built to track and lock on to a single fighter.  You can obviously play with these CV modifiers until you are happy, or ignore them completely completely in favor of letting the damage modifiers settle things.

 

On the other side of this, a VBC (very big cannon) versus say...  A helicopter.  Yes; size class CV penalties make it hard for that gun to target a helicopter, but the damage modifier works both ways-  if a class 12 cannon manages to tag a class 5 Helicopter...  Well, each weapon size class over the target adds 3DC to the damage.

 

It sounds more complex than it is; in play, it goes pretty quickly.  More importantly, the source material supports it: two destroyers slug it out, trading thunderous volleys, shuddering under the imapcts and fighting on, but one start shot hits a small trawler, and it is _vaporized_, period.

 

As for reducing damage against extremely large targets-  well, that holds up in the fiction, too- the lone fighter who slips through the firefight and slides  behind the moon to turn and start a new run only to see a massive mother ship, and he gapes in abject terror...

 

 

Or the ever classic "look at the size of that thing...!"

 

 

Anyway, it's just an opinion; do with it as you will.

 

 

[LoneWolf]

I only played Robot Warriors a few times, and don’t really remember the rules that well.  What I do remember is that the vehicles were built with mass units not points like normal champions.  From what I remember the cost in MU scaled up so larger vehicles tended to have much higher armor values and their weapons did a lot more damage.  This meant smaller scale vehicles had a harder time damaging the larger vehicles.   So, attacking a vehicle that was too many sizes larger was usually a waste of time.  When the larger vehicle used and area of effect attack, they actually did not have trouble hitting, because the smaller vehicle could not get out of the area.  

[dmjalund]

as for size based damage classes, I consider Damage Negation of 1DC for every x8 mass (i would consider another xMass Number)

[Gauntlet]

The way you are all stating is that small craft have no chance of even damaging a larger ship. So should an Apache Attack chopper go up against a Destroyer then it has no chance of even damaging the Destroyer. But then again in real life a Destroyer will be extremely worried about an Apache as they have enough firepower to absolutely sink a Destroyer, yet they are tiny in comparison. In Star Wars the Death Star was the size of a moon, yet they still considered a small group of enemy fighters to be a threat and launched their own fighters to take care of them. Even on absolutely huge ships there always are ways to significantly damage them: sensor arrays, launch bays, external sections of the engines, external weapon systems, plus a ton of other ones. The only reason the Death Star had to be destroyed by a shot in a small hole was simply bad writing, nothing else. 

 

Now, am I saying that fighters will easily destroy the Death Star, absolutely not, even with a overwhelming huge attack force they will take a great number of casualties (at least over 50%). But there is absolutely no way the Death Star can ignore them as they are a threat, especially should they have a full-sized attack force, something the Rebels simply did not have. Yet even their small number was enough for the Death Star to feel that launching their own fighters was required.

Edited August 8 by Gauntlet
Had to add small item.