| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
masque
Captain
Joined: 16 Mar 2006
Posts: 626
Location: Houston, TX
|
 Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 5:12 am Post subject: |
 |
|
| atgxtg wrote: |
As for the 6D difference between fighters and capital ships, it exists so that players can't take out an ISD with, say, the Millennium Falcon. Especially in 2nd edition. |
The Millennium Falcon certainly could take out an ISD. Arvel Crynyd took out the Executor with an A-Wing.
Now, if you want the Falcon to survive, that's another story... 
_________________
Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid. |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
garhkal
Sovereign Protector
Joined: 17 Jul 2005
Posts: 14357
Location: Reynoldsburg, Columbus, Ohio.
|
| Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 5:40 pm Post subject: |
|
|
There is a difference between taking it out with your ship and havihng your ship take it out. The latter requires dinner and a movie first 
_________________
Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk! |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
jmanski
Arbiter-General (Moderator)
Joined: 06 Mar 2005
Posts: 2065
Location: Kansas
|
| Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 7:58 pm Post subject: |
|
|
It is possible for the Millenium Falcon to take out a Star Destroyer; however, it is not very plausible.
Scaling could be handled better, but I'm just not sure how.
_________________
Blasted rules. Why can't they just be perfect? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Orion
Lieutenant Commander
Joined: 16 May 2008
Posts: 146
|
| Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 2:55 am Post subject: |
|
|
| My problems with scaling can be summed up by this statement: A starfighters weapons should be able to hurt an ISD, not necessarily badly, but it should be unlikely that they would destroy it. Scaling handles the latter part very well but the former is unaddressed. The only solution I can see, at this point, is to compartmentalize capital ships so that starfighters can shoot a sections of them at their own, or at least closer to their own scale. The problem, is coming up with a system that is not overly complicated, either in its' use or in adapting existing material to it. Thus far, a workable system eludes me. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Lostboy
Commander
Joined: 22 Aug 2008
Posts: 384
|
| Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 4:52 am Post subject: |
|
|
An analogy of fighters vs capships would be hoth speeders vs walkers the speeders guns just could not crack the walkers armour by the same token fighter attacks would bounce off capital scale armour unless they are powerful enouph to do capital scale damage e.i. at least 7d fighter scale witch equals 1d capital scale.
This makes proton torpedos and concussion missiles the best choice of conventional weapons to damage capital ships, i nave used this combined with a capital scale hit location system for years and iv found it to be both balanced and realistic.
Hope this helps. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Orion
Lieutenant Commander
Joined: 16 May 2008
Posts: 146
|
| Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 5:32 pm Post subject: |
|
|
That analogy works nicely for supporting the rules, but unfortunately it doesn't work if you look at the first movie, where the X-wings are using their beam weapons to fire at the Death Star's gun emplacements and damaging them or the proton torpedoes that impact on the surface and cause internal explosions. Death Star scale is 24D, thats 19D starfighter scale damage to achieve 1D death star scale damage. Scale is not just toughness, but also size, very large objects are harder to destroy completely, but it's not necessarily harder to damage their components.
I would be interested in hearing about your capital scale hit location system. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
garhkal
Sovereign Protector
Joined: 17 Jul 2005
Posts: 14357
Location: Reynoldsburg, Columbus, Ohio.
|
| Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 5:52 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Then why not make gun emplacements scaled to the same as they affect. Eg a sf quad laser battery would be sf scale for damaging.
_________________
Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk! |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
jmanski
Arbiter-General (Moderator)
Joined: 06 Mar 2005
Posts: 2065
Location: Kansas
|
| Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 9:03 pm Post subject: |
|
|
There's a 1st edition rules companion chapter that deals with exactly this. The hit location is crude (it's 1st ed. after all).
| Code: |
Target Hit Modifier Damage Modifier
Hull 0 0
Sublight Engines -2d 0
Manuever -3d +1d
Fire Control -4d +2d
Weapon (beam) -3d 0
(missile) -2d -1d
Command -4d 0
Vital Location -2d -1d
|
The chart is actually for capital vs. capital combat, but it can be used by starfighters. Although this is not a good solution, it may be a good starting point.
_________________
Blasted rules. Why can't they just be perfect? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
atgxtg
Rear Admiral
Joined: 22 Mar 2009
Posts: 2460
|
| Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 1:48 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| masque wrote: | | atgxtg wrote: |
As for the 6D difference between fighters and capital ships, it exists so that players can't take out an ISD with, say, the Millennium Falcon. Especially in 2nd edition. |
The Millennium Falcon certainly could take out an ISD. Arvel Crynyd took out the Executor with an A-Wing.
Now, if you want the Falcon to survive, that's another story... |
If it worked this way, there would be little reason to waste resources on building ISDs. Star Wars uses pre-early WWII thinking on Capital ships. Otherwise the ISD would have gone the way of the Battleship on Earth.
It the SD were that vulnerable, the rebels could just throw a bunch of droid pilots into old freighters and send them on kamikaze missions. I don't suppose you have a copy of first edition where they do the piece of paper trick. If players are fighting Star Destroyers with a single fighter scale ship, they are doing something wrong.
If ROTJ it wasn't a single A-Wing that "took out" the Executor, but the combined firepower of several ships. The A-Wing crashing into the bridge was just the last straw. You don7t think all that "intensify forward firepower" was just over one A-Wing, do you?
Without scaling the falcon has much better chance than it should. Realsitially, sinking a battleship with freighteris possible, but it isn't too likely.
Star Warriors handled this beautifully with the damage pip system (as did the original Rules Upgrade). A system that could easily be worked into 2nd edition. The basic difficulty with d6 in this instance is that damage for capital ships is in the same game increments as for smaller ships. But not the same damage in actuality. Blowing up a 10m section of the Falcon probably cripples the ship, while the same hole might just be superficial on an ISD. Remember the ISD probably has something like 75,000 times the mass of the Falcon.
So light or heavy damage means a much more damaging attack, and there is no way to handle smaller amounts of damage.
Without scaling the Falcon has the same Hull (and Shields) of a Victory class SD. Obviously that isn't the case.
With scaling the Falcon does have a chance of taken out an ISD, even with a single hit. It is just extremely unlikely.
Now what does work against an ISD is groups of ships. Groups of starfighters firing missiles and combining fire can be a serious threat to an ISD. With the scaling bonus to hit, a half dozen X-Wings could conceivably fire 6 salvos of proton torpedoes
That said, there are other ways to handle the scale difference. It all depends on just what people think the relative strength of the raft should be. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Orion
Lieutenant Commander
Joined: 16 May 2008
Posts: 146
|
| Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 6:16 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| garhkal wrote: | | Then why not make gun emplacements scaled to the same as they affect. Eg a sf quad laser battery would be sf scale for damaging. |
While I admire the simplicity of your solution, it does not address the problem that I mentioned with the ISD, as all of it's weapons are Capital Scale.
| jmanski wrote: | There's a 1st edition rules companion chapter that deals with exactly this. The hit location is crude (it's 1st ed. after all).
The chart is actually for capital vs. capital combat, but it can be used by starfighters. Although this is not a good solution, it may be a good starting point. |
Thanks for the point to these rules, they may indeed prove to be a good starting point.
| atgxtg wrote: | If it worked this way, there would be little reason to waste resources on building ISDs. Star Wars uses pre-early WWII thinking on Capital ships. Otherwise the ISD would have gone the way of the Battleship on Earth.
It the SD were that vulnerable, the rebels could just throw a bunch of droid pilots into old freighters and send them on kamikaze missions. I don't suppose you have a copy of first edition where they do the piece of paper trick. If players are fighting Star Destroyers with a single fighter scale ship, they are doing something wrong.
If ROTJ it wasn't a single A-Wing that "took out" the Executor, but the combined firepower of several ships. The A-Wing crashing into the bridge was just the last straw. You don7t think all that "intensify forward firepower" was just over one A-Wing, do you?
Without scaling the falcon has much better chance than it should. Realsitially, sinking a battleship with freighteris possible, but it isn't too likely.
Star Warriors handled this beautifully with the damage pip system (as did the original Rules Upgrade). A system that could easily be worked into 2nd edition. The basic difficulty with d6 in this instance is that damage for capital ships is in the same game increments as for smaller ships. But not the same damage in actuality. Blowing up a 10m section of the Falcon probably cripples the ship, while the same hole might just be superficial on an ISD. Remember the ISD probably has something like 75,000 times the mass of the Falcon.
So light or heavy damage means a much more damaging attack, and there is no way to handle smaller amounts of damage.
Without scaling the Falcon has the same Hull (and Shields) of a Victory class SD. Obviously that isn't the case.
With scaling the Falcon does have a chance of taken out an ISD, even with a single hit. It is just extremely unlikely.
Now what does work against an ISD is groups of ships. Groups of starfighters firing missiles and combining fire can be a serious threat to an ISD. With the scaling bonus to hit, a half dozen X-Wings could conceivably fire 6 salvos of proton torpedoes
That said, there are other ways to handle the scale difference. It all depends on just what people think the relative strength of the raft should be. |
I've always thought of the ISD as a carrier, but I suppose you could look at it as a kind of hybrid Battleship/Carrier, as the Carrier's weapons have been scaled up to deal with other Capital Ships.
I was thinking about beam weapons, above, when I made my statement, but let's do a little number crunching using the falcon's missiles. They are fire-linked so the two of them do 9D against an ISD's 7D hull plus 6D scale dice, giving us 13D. There is a 1 in 36 chance that the wild dice will come up a 1 for the ISD and 6 for the Falcon. If you use the subtract the highest and wild method this reduces the ISD to 11D and the Falcon's missiles will have at least 10D. Using average rolls for the rest of the dice we end up with 39 for the ISD and 38 for the Falcon, so even with luck on your side the missiles do no damage what so ever to the ISD, which is pretty ridiculous in my opinion. If the ISD's roll only averages 3, instead of 3.5, and the Falcon averages a 4, you end up with 33 and 42 a difference of 9, which Heavily damages the ISD and if you reduce the ISD's average to around 2.6 and increase the Falcon's roll to around 4.3 you have a destroyed ISD. A single volley from the Falcon's missiles blowing up an ISD should be a one in a million shot, at least, but the rules have it much lower than that. I would rather have the rules not even take that shot into consideration, but instead have the Falcon's missiles consistantly cause damage of some kind to the ISD.
And since you mentioned shields, scaling dice don't scale the shields at all. An ISD without it's shields up has a hull code of 13D against starfighter energy weapons, but turning them on only gains you 3D, the same as if you were shooting Capital scale weapons at it. As it sits right now you could park an ISD in space with its shields up and have it do nothing but adjust shields, while an X-wing with young pilot, fired it's energy weapons at it until the pilot died of old age and the likely result would be no damage, at all, to the ISD, because your using 6D against 16D.
You seem to be under the impression that we have been discussing removing scales all together, but to my knowledge the only advocate of that method is Delkarnu. His idea does make sense, but I think it would be difficult to implement. I want to change the way scaling works to allow a more realistic damage model, because fighting Capital ships should be a slugfest. To use a WWII analogy, it should be like trying to sink the Bismark, it took 74 mins for her to go down and would have been longer but the Germans scuttled her, however she was unable to fight back after about the first 20 mins. Now, when you can damage a Capital Ship, it works more like the way the Hood went down, 6 mins and a gigantic explosion. (For those that don't know, the Hood's WW I design gave up deck armor for speed, so when the Bismark's shells hit her decks above the magazine, it was all over in an instant. Six minutes is how long they shot at each other before the fatal shot fell.) |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
atgxtg
Rear Admiral
Joined: 22 Mar 2009
Posts: 2460
|
| Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2009 3:06 pm Post subject: |
|
|
It isn't that the missiles do not damage, but that the damage isn't significant enough to matter. I've been on a WWII battleship where part of the deck had been blow to bits and replaced with concrete. The hole in the deck certainly "damaged" the Battleship, but didn't do enough damage to actually impair the ship's ability to move, fight, or stay afloat.
As for using the average numbers, then yeah, most of the time the Falcon isn't going to significantly damage an ISD. The same is true with blaster pistols and Wookiees, or TIE fighters shooting at the Falcon, or any other time where the Str/Body dice are greater than the damage dice.
But the thing is dice are random. Statically speaking the Falcon can damage the ISD, just that most of the time it won't. Which is how Lucas and company envisioned it. Star Wars combat is heavily patterned on WWII era combat, specifically before it was realized just what the full effect of air power was. So taking out a capital ship with a single fighter (oir freighter) is mostly a non option.
Even if you want to view an ISD as a carrier, carriers are big and all that mass and size makes them tougher to sink. You could literally shoot at one all day with a .50 cal, or even a 20mm autocannon without sinking one.
The chances of sinking a carrier, even without it'S fighter complement and escorts with a tramp freighter (even an up-gunned, up-shielded one) is slim. What really makes the Falcon dangerous is Han Solo. With his high skill ratings he makes the Falocn hard to hit, and can easily fire off a barrage of attacks ( that 6D scaling translates into 6 attacks a round at full skill and no pilot/dodge penalty, if desired).
What you could do is use the Body Point option from other d6 games if you wanted to have the ship get whittled down. That way you could see the ISD slowly losing Hull Points. But with the standard rules we only track significant damage.
Shields: Are you sure shields don't scale? They should. I have a hard time believing that a Droideka has more powerful shields than an X-Wing.
Likewise, I don't think that the TIE fighter's laser cannons really do the same damage as a pair of blaster pistols. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Rerun941
Commander
Joined: 27 Jul 2004
Posts: 459
Location: San Antonio, TX
|
| Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2009 3:40 pm Post subject: |
|
|
The other thing you are forgetting is combined actions rules. You don't take out an ISD with a single X-Wing. You take it out with a SQUADRON of X-Wings. And we're talking about a military engagement, right? So it's not unheard of for starfighter pilots to coordinate their attacks to "beat the scale differences" aka take out a Capital Ship.
The same was true during WWII. Commanders never sent aircraft out to attack battelships singlely or in pairs. They'd launch a squadron to make a coordinated attack. Split the enemy battleship's defensive fire, make coordinated strafing runs, etc.
What'd we see during the Battle of Endor? "Concentrate all fire on that Super Star Destroyer!" and visually... two A-Wings make strafing runs against the bridge deflector shields (combined fire) taking them out.
The scaling rules work just fine.
_________________
Han - "How're we doin'?"
Luke - "Same as always."
Han - "That bad, huh?" |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
atgxtg
Rear Admiral
Joined: 22 Mar 2009
Posts: 2460
|
| Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2009 4:52 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Rerun941 wrote: | The other thing you are forgetting is combined actions rules. You don't take out an ISD with a single X-Wing. You take it out with a SQUADRON of X-Wings. And we're talking about a military engagement, right? So it's not unheard of for starfighter pilots to coordinate their attacks to "beat the scale differences" aka take out a Capital Ship.
The same was true during WWII. Commanders never sent aircraft out to attack battelships singlely or in pairs. They'd launch a squadron to make a coordinated attack. Split the enemy battleship's defensive fire, make coordinated strafing runs, etc.
What'd we see during the Battle of Endor? "Concentrate all fire on that Super Star Destroyer!" and visually... two A-Wings make strafing runs against the bridge deflector shields (combined fire) taking them out.
The scaling rules work just fine. |
I avoided the combined action rules in art because they aren't as significant in R&E. With 6D being a very good commander, the max combined bonus is only +6pips=2D. It also works against the ISD now, since it can't coordinate 20 or 30 lasers to target one ship.
Personally, I think the +1 pip per "combiner" is fine, but the upper cap of 1 combiner per die should be one combiner per pip. That would give a squadron of a dozen X-Wings a +4D combine bonus (1 pip per fighter). |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
garhkal
Sovereign Protector
Joined: 17 Jul 2005
Posts: 14357
Location: Reynoldsburg, Columbus, Ohio.
|
| Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2009 5:49 pm Post subject: |
|
|
I always thought scaling DID affect shields as well as hull..
_________________
Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk! |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Grimace
Captain
Joined: 11 Oct 2004
Posts: 729
Location: Montana; Big Sky Country
|
| Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2009 8:31 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| garhkal wrote: | | I always thought scaling DID affect shields as well as hull.. |
You are correct in thinking that, garhkal. Shields ARE affected by scaling, just as Hull is.
This was very succinctly answered in the ISB Intercepts of Adventure Journal #15. Page 80-81.
I'll paraphrase.
Yes. Which demonstrates how difficult a Star Destroyer is to defeat. It takes a squadron of X-Wings or other fighters to penetrate the defense.
So a Star Destroyer would have 7D Hull (+6D scale difference) and 3D Shields (+6D scale difference), for a total of up to 22D rolled total.
Note that this is one reason why I don't like the R&E version of doing scales....too many dice. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
