Johannes replied to me: > Am i correct to assume, that fights in hyperspace are not possible?
Hello Johannes, as GURPS Space defines it, the normal hyperspace isolates ships from real space and from each other. The ability to communicate or fight in hyperspace is an optional variant. > What keeps ships from staying in hyperspace indefinitly and shooting > torpedos there? I'm assuming that they can't fire in hyperspace. They could hide there, but that would concede the battle zone to the other side. No big deal in a deep space engagement, but possibly fatal in a planetary defense or invasion scenario. > And attract a cloud of enemy torpedos meanwhile, hovering > about them and waiting for them to come out of hyperspace, so they can > finalize their attack. They don't have to leave hyperspace in the same place they had entered it. In fact, usually ships move a very long way, it may be difficult to do SHORT jumps. > An alterantive torpedo scenario: > > * Beam weapons are not good, either tney never get developed, or there is > some special armor against them. Vehicles has an optional rule for aiming in deep space, using 10-minute turns. VE187. If you get a situation where than 600 seconds of aiming are simply too long, beam accuracy will suffer a lot. This can be solved by mainframes running targeting, but if the missiles are allowed to dodge, killing them will be difficult. > * Torpedos maneuver well enough that there is little chance to get them > with point defence weaponry. E.g. they use hyperdrive to jump within close proximity. > * One hit one kill regardless of size torpedos, but maybe they are just > disabling the ship (equivalent to an EMP, though it technically should not > be one, so no one can come up with RL defences against EMP) making it more > playable (the pcs may survive a hit, there are still reasons for boarding > parties ect) That's the problem with big nukes. > * The primary defence against a torpedo is sending out a decoy, that gets > killed by the torpedo. The decoy needs to apeare to be the size of the > ship it decoys for. Due to technobabble reasons with ultratech sensors > only a fixed amount of illusionary volume can be gained. So a small partol > ship needs roughly torpedo sized decoys, a death star might need decoys > that are 10% of it's volume. That technobabble would be new to the rules, right? > So there will be a maximal practical size for military ships. Trade ships > for save areas might still get larger. > > A screen scenario: > > Screens do defend normally against the first hit in a turn, only half as > much against the second and so on. > > If you have one large ship fighting against many small ships, chances are > good that the large ship is hit often each turn, while good maneuvering > can always put ships that have not yet been hit that round into the line > of fire. The force screen rules on VXii20 use the usual 'energy level' rules, but screen DR scales approximately with the cube root of the ship's mass, while beam damage scales with the square root. I wonder if that might be enough, as long as the range advantage of big ships is taken out of play e.g. by jumping in and out with hyperdrive. Mike wrote: > Yes, if they only carried rockets, then as per the ships during WW2 that had > nothing but rockets to do barrages. Consider the current German corvettes (1,810 tons) and the old fast attack boats (261 tons). The weaponry is similar, but the fast attack boats were just ASuW units for use in the Baltic or North Sea, while the corvettes go for peace keeping and war on terror into the Med and the Indian ocean. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braunschweig_class_corvette http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_class_fast_attack_craft Regards Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
