Aerospace and "lawn dart" checks

[guardiandashi]

I was commenting on the Union sized raiding force and someone was claiming that LAMS got thresholded by anything and everything (they don't per strategic ops pg 110)

and as I was driving home from the grocery store, I had a thought.
what if you changed the minimum damage to trigger a control roll to be the threshold value?  Would that make fighters in the ground attack role too dangerous?

thoughts and comments.

My reasoning is that if you can't trigger a threshold then the damage is minor enough that it just shrugs it off, after all especially in the case of aerospace fighters these are heavily armored combat vehicles, and in some cases are effectively weapons and guns attached to a block of armor :P

[Daryk]

If you want to restrict effective AAA to gauss rifles, I suppose that could work...

[Robroy]

Are you talking strictly LAMs? I don't know about them, don't use them, but for ASFs hey there is an optional rule for that, advanced atmospheric control rolls rules, StratOps, pg. 97.

[Atarlost]

The problem with those rules is that they wreck the ASF counters.  It's not quite as bad as Daryk would make it, but two thirds of common AAA platforms become useless with only the large lasers on the Rifleman being effective. 

[marcussmythe]

Pardon the confusion -

But AA machines were AA machines long before there was a lawn dart rule.

Are Aircraft so dangerous in the ground attack role that the law  dart rule in its current (much derided from what I’ve read) form is necessary to prevent their dominance?

My understanding of the lawn dart rule’s impact is that everyone had basically abandoned strafing, and the use of large, well armed and armored ASFs, for ground attack, prefering light machines with one good punch as ‘they are going to be lost to a lawn dart check, so why bother’.

This on the surface seems counter-intuitive, but Ive not played a lot woth Air-to-Ground in the modern rulesets.

[Robroy]

ASFs used to be real dangerous as they used to strafe everything 3 hexs wide the hole length of a map. Now it is a much smaller area, so that and the control roll both seem a little excessive, so I use the optional rule.

[guardiandashi]

Pardon the confusion -

But AA machines were AA machines long before there was a lawn dart rule.

Are Aircraft so dangerous in the ground attack role that the law  dart rule in its current (much derided from what I’ve read) form is necessary to prevent their dominance?

My understanding of the lawn dart rule’s impact is that everyone had basically abandoned strafing, and the use of large, well armed and armored ASFs, for ground attack, prefering light machines with one good punch as ‘they are going to be lost to a lawn dart check, so why bother’.

This on the surface seems counter-intuitive, but Ive not played a lot woth Air-to-Ground in the modern rulesets.

I'll admit I haven't really played much aerospace (for a number of reasons)
but as mentioned by Robroy, I think the "lawn dart" check on ANY damage seems rather excessive to me. now I will admit I was just tossing ideas out but my understanding of the whole point of the threshold was to represent the point at which enough damage gets done to potentially break something, mess with controls (flaps thrusters or similar) etc.  if you don't hit it hard enough to cause those issues then why would the fighter be potentially loosing control and crashing.

as another point why is it that all the piloting checks automatically have the fighter heading into the ground? if failed,

I know it would cause another check, but what would make sense to me is to make it a 1d6 chart to see which way the pilot "flinches"
so as an example,
1 straight ahead (or gains the listed number of levels per the control roll)
2 up and right
3 down and right
4 down (same as current)
5 down and left
6 up and left

now the side checks could be either 1/3 down/up and 2/3 to side, or 2/3 down/up and 1/3 sideways which might make them potentially survivable.

I am not sure that you would necessarily want to both increase the control check and add the random movement, as that might be over reacting and make aerospace a little too survivable in the ground attack role, but as it is I think there was an over reaction, being an aerospace fighter and going in to attack ground forces should be kind of dangerous, but should not IMO be a death sentence.

[maxcarrion]

Personally, I like the control roll rule, it effectively massively increases the danger to air assets in a way that requires planning and tactics over just adding more armour. 

Some of the classic anti air weapons (LB-X firing cluster, AC-2 firing flak) become effectively useless, other common anti air (LRMs, AC5 firing flak) can only bring down the lighter armoured aircraft.  Monsterous ground attack dropships and super heavy fighters would become the order of the day as they could shrug off most ground fire while pouring massive damage out in return.

Air to Air battles would become slog fests even at low altitude, light ASF would be all but extinct as medium lasers would be little threat to the flying bricks that dominate the skies, it would basically completely change the paradigm of in atmosphere operations to the point where a single well designed heavy fighter could take apart most 3025 medium mech lances worth 2 or 3 times it's BV as AC2, AC5 and LRMs do little damage, AC10 and Large Lasers struggle to make range - only the PPC can really reliably force a control roll as the only weapon that has both range and sufficient cluster damage and the smaller clusters of hits are going to take a long time to sand off that thick armour.

As it stands your ASF have rolls on the current battlefield but fly into the middle of a company of mechs, strafe a bunch of targets and fly out isn't it.
  - High altitude bombing - load up on bombs and drop them from altitude 6+ is pretty safe
  - Missile fire - Arrow IVs can be mounted under wing and are my favourite use for ASF
  - Obviously, air superiority, keep their air units away
  - Nibbling at the edges, picking off the vulnerable.  Strafing works if you target infantry, BA and bug mechs as they can't effectively return fire, a light fighter with short range energy weapons can make a nasty mess and might well get away with it.  Striking is safer and more useful against anything that might shoot back, still best not to do it in the middle of a heavy concentration of bored anti air mechs but coming in while they're heavily engaged with ground troops and they have to make some tough decisions about how much fire to send your way.  It's risky but I'm quite comfortable an ASF can pay it's BV back this way as often as not.

[Cannonshop]

Looking at the pros and cons here, how about if we add in the sliding thresholds? aka as armor is ablated, the threshold shifts downward, and you round down at each transition?

for example, a facing with 53 points, would have a threshold of 5, and 48 points thresholds at 4, and so on (for a modified lawndart check?)

thus, a "massively armored brick" with 50 points per face at the start, can expect to make a lawndart check on the first 5 point hit, and his next one is on a 4 points or higher hit, followed by another, and then it goes to 3 points and so on?

[idea weenie]

I'd prefer a method of lawn dart check based on mass of airborne unit, rather than armor.  For example, a 100 ton ASF that is a flying brick, and an ASF that is multi-gun special are both hit by an AC/2.  The result should be the same for both (ignoring any armor penetration)

What would be a way to reduce rolls is simply adding all damage the ASF received that turn, dividing that by the minimum needed to get that lawn dart check, and applying the extra as a penalty to the lawn dart roll (FRN, FRD, FRU?).

But at the same time, I would allow for lower values than threshold on the armor.  Perhaps tonnage divided by 20, FRU is the threshold for lawn dart checks?  So an 85-100 ton ASF has its lawn dart check start at 5, and if it takes 8 pts of damage, assuming FRN, it uses the extra 3 pts of damage as a 1 pt penalty to the lawn dart roll.

This allows the AC/2 units to still serve as air defense, since every little bit will help.  It also helps ASF as larger craft don't have to worry about a single LB-X pellet making them perform a lithobraking maneuver.

This will need tweaking:

• The divisor (20 tons, 25 tons, or?)
• FRU, FRD, or FRN when dividing the vessel's mass by the divisor to determine its lawn dart threshold
• FRU, FRD, or FRN when dividing excess damage by the Lawn dart threshold
• 1 pt penalty for each excess, or 2 pts?

You could have other penalties for other types of craft; Conventional Fighters, Aerodyne Small Craft, Spheroid Small Craft, Aerodyne Dropships, Spheroid Dropships

[maxcarrion]

I'd prefer a method of lawn dart check based on mass of airborne unit, rather than armor.  For example, a 100 ton ASF that is a flying brick, and an ASF that is multi-gun special are both hit by an AC/2.  The result should be the same for both (ignoring any armor penetration)

What would be a way to reduce rolls is simply adding all damage the ASF received that turn, dividing that by the minimum needed to get that lawn dart check, and applying the extra as a penalty to the lawn dart roll (FRN, FRD, FRU?).

But at the same time, I would allow for lower values than threshold on the armor.  Perhaps tonnage divided by 20, FRU is the threshold for lawn dart checks?  So an 85-100 ton ASF has its lawn dart check start at 5, and if it takes 8 pts of damage, assuming FRN, it uses the extra 3 pts of damage as a 1 pt penalty to the lawn dart roll.

This allows the AC/2 units to still serve as air defense, since every little bit will help.  It also helps ASF as larger craft don't have to worry about a single LB-X pellet making them perform a lithobraking maneuver.

This will need tweaking:

• The divisor (20 tons, 25 tons, or?)
• FRU, FRD, or FRN when dividing the vessel's mass by the divisor to determine its lawn dart threshold
• FRU, FRD, or FRN when dividing excess damage by the Lawn dart threshold
• 1 pt penalty for each excess, or 2 pts?

You could have other penalties for other types of craft; Conventional Fighters, Aerodyne Small Craft, Spheroid Small Craft, Aerodyne Dropships, Spheroid Dropships

This doesn't really work, it "could" work for ASF but doesn't scale well at all

By this system, in order to force a control roll on a Leopard you need to do it 95 damage.  To force a Mammoth to make a control roll you need to do 2600 damage.  These aren't really realistic or usable figures and make a mockery of air defence - I would say that large craft aren't necessarily more stable in flight than a heavy fighter is let alone 500 times more stable.

It's also very dangerous to apply an open ended control roll penalty on a reasonably small multiplier.  For example a fighter with 4 medium lasers hitting a 40T ASF with all 4 does 20 damage and probably 4 threshold crits too but 20/(40/20) = 10, that's a control roll with a +9 modifier.  Basically this system would have light and medium fighters falling out the sky from every scratch while dropships required tac nukes

[Atarlost]

Why should dropships lawndart?  A LGR slug is 2.5% of the weight of a Sabre or 0.6% of the weight of a T-bird.  It's only 0.004% of the weight of an Avenger or 0.0007% of the weight of a Triumph.  At some point your weapons just don't carry enough momentum to effect the target's movement directly. 

Making light ASF more vulnerable to lawndarting than they are already is problematic, but making dropships immune seems entirely reasonable. 

[maxcarrion]

Why should dropships lawndart?  A LGR slug is 2.5% of the weight of a Sabre or 0.6% of the weight of a T-bird.  It's only 0.004% of the weight of an Avenger or 0.0007% of the weight of a Triumph.  At some point your weapons just don't carry enough momentum to effect the target's movement directly. 

Making light ASF more vulnerable to lawndarting than they are already is problematic, but making dropships immune seems entirely reasonable.

Mostly because the game has already ignored physics repeatedly to make a good game and "adjusting" the rules to make PWS like the Avenger outright better than all other units  in the name of realism is a really odd place to draw the line and a terrible game balance choice - without lawn dart checks attack dropships will dominate everything else, magic ablative armour and a steadfast ignoring of aerodynamics and reaction mass leaves you with gigantic hypersonic flying tanks that can dogfight with the manoeuvrability of a jet fighter and can pack enough armour that even a GR to the rear can't reliably damage internal systems.  Why would anyone put a walking tank on the ground when they can put a flying one in the air that's 500 times faster, 14 times heavier and packs 5 times the firepower that is not significantly threatened by any ground fired weapon in existence.

We simply do not have analogues to dropships in real life, the physics is complete fiction, but I'm pretty sure if you hit a 440T Boeing 747 with a 2.6kg RPG-7 HEAT round there would be at least a chance that the big plane would be in trouble ;)

[UnLimiTeD]

The lawn dart check, a bit excessive as it might be, is supposedly simulating atmospheric control surfaces being scratched or blocked.
We can assume that the moving parts on the outside of an ASF are a lot more susceptible to outside interference than the main hull, which, as stated, is usually a block of armour with vent holes for thrusting.
As such, the armour thresholds are meant to simulate impacts on the hull breaking something inside.
Gameplay wise, I find it to be rather fair - the whole concept of strafing is silly, anyways, I could see that work if every singular weapon could only hit one target. 
Heavy fighters already rule the black sea, with vectored thrust there's no need to have weapons aft, and mobility is overrated unless you manage to generate evasion modifiers that make you unhitable.
The one point of contention I have is that, fluff-wise, there are supposedly unaerodynamic ASFs who use raw thrust to maneuver in atmosphere. Those can still fly, if not very efficient, and any regular fighter, even with damaged controls, should still be capable of falling back on that.

[guardiandashi]

The lawn dart check, a bit excessive as it might be, is supposedly simulating atmospheric control surfaces being scratched or blocked.
We can assume that the moving parts on the outside of an ASF are a lot more susceptible to outside interference than the main hull, which, as stated, is usually a block of armour with vent holes for thrusting.
As such, the armour thresholds are meant to simulate impacts on the hull breaking something inside.
Gameplay wise, I find it to be rather fair - the whole concept of strafing is silly, anyways, I could see that work if every singular weapon could only hit one target. 
Heavy fighters already rule the black sea, with vectored thrust there's no need to have weapons aft, and mobility is overrated unless you manage to generate evasion modifiers that make you unhitable.
The one point of contention I have is that, fluff-wise, there are supposedly unaerodynamic ASFs who use raw thrust to maneuver in atmosphere. Those can still fly, if not very efficient, and any regular fighter, even with damaged controls, should still be capable of falling back on that.

the problem with that as I mentioned is that is that is if you are being even somewhat realistic, the "lawn dart" check actually has NOTHING to do with damaging controls, its just a mechanism to abruptly kill fighters when they would just shrug off the damage.  One thing to remember is fighters weather conventional or aerospace really have nothing in common with modern fighters, other than that they fly.

as a point what are most fighters made out of?  aluminum, possibly some titanium, various composite materials etc.  none of which are really armor.  heck one of the aircraft that is the most survivable (ever) to enemy fire actually hitting it is the various incarnations of the warthog, because it can do things like keep flying with 1 (of 2 ) engines completely non functional, ~1/2 of the wings shredded and the tail all shot up, and still make it back to base.  and the only part that I would actually call armored on the plane is the pilots "tub" that the pilot is inside.

on the other hand aerospace fighters and to a lesser extent conventional fighters are actually armored, so their "skins" would be a LOT more resistant to damage than we can reasonably imagine.

As another point why is it that the only possible effect of these failed control checks is to drive the aircraft down which usually results in it hitting the ground? That also argues against the argument that it represents any damage to controls and being anything other than a mechanism to kill fighters easier.  Its why I suggested that it should be replaced with a "random movement" effect that causes the fighter to move up or down or to the sides which would have just as much effect on disrupting the ground attacks as the current mechanism, it just wouldn't be an automatic death sentence for the aircraft if it takes ANY damage, and fails a control check.

as far as taking damage, I would actually also be ok with making the threshold check being linked to total damage taken during the round much like a piloting check for battlemechs for taking 20 or more damage in a single round.  possibly with a cumulative penalty (option) based on total damage taken, like the +1 per 20 damage taken.

as it is currently if I remember right, lets say I am doing a ground attack with a stuka, a 100 ton aerospace fighter with fairly heavy armor, and I attack a lance that has a couple aa mechs, and they hit my fighter with a variety of weapons, none of which can actually penetrate my armor, but I get hit with a couple ac 5's firing flack and some LB-x autocannons firing cluster, and every single hit cause a chance to one shot kill me even if I had armor that reduces the damage (like ferro lam) that's what I am saying is a bit excessive.

[marcussmythe]

Well, it is important to remember that the -real- purpose of the Lawn Dart Rule is the same as the real purpose of the massive vehicle critical chart, or the death of the warships...

Its to keep Battletech mech-centric.  If by some error rules are created that make anything a threat to the Battlemechs absolute primacy of place at the center of the battlefield, later rules will correct that.

So ultimately the point of the lawn dart rule is to protect the product of “Battletech”, and in that role it makes sense.

[Atarlost]

The lawn dart check, a bit excessive as it might be, is supposedly simulating atmospheric control surfaces being scratched or blocked.

That is represented by rolling a 12 for hit location followed by at least an 8 and whichever entry for the relevant facing in the crit table reads "avionics." 

[nckestrel]

That is represented by rolling a 12 for hit location followed by at least an 8 and whichever entry for the relevant facing in the crit table reads "avionics."

Avionics is the electronics, not the control surfaces.

[Atarlost]

Avionics is the electronics, not the control surfaces.

Not the way the charts are written.  There would be no wing/avionics slot if it weren't being used in a more expansive meaning in the crit table. 

[Thunder]

@guardiandashi
Rule reminder.  Only 1 lawn dart check per turn when hit.  Extra attacks that hit dont cause additional control roles.

[TigerShark]

The lawn dart rule makes fielding Aerospace units on a ground map impossible. This was probably tested using Intro Tech rules and not anything beyond. Take a look at the TN numbers, even at Long Range, for a unit with flak:

4 (Gunnery) + 4 (Long Range) + 2 (Attack Against Side) - 3 (LB-X Flak) = 7

And that's if you're truly at long range. If your AA is doing its job, it's hugging your valuable target by no more than 2 hexes of distance. In which case the above number is a 5. And this isn't even counting Clan-quality weaponry, like a HAG/40, which still gets this flak bonus. Or the long-range LB-2X. This is just a bog standard LB-10X. Adding StratOps' threshold rule is mandatory for fielding Aero vs ground targets. The AAA against Velocity rule needs to be re-written, IMO, since a faster fighter can incur a +5 or +6 penalty, essentially making it invincible. Should be ~1/2 this number, IMO, though others will disagree, I'm sure.

Regarding LAMs... they're weak enough without trying to add the "PSR with 1 damage point" rule from TW. Try fielding 'Mechs who take 180 damage every time they fall. How fun would that game be? lol Yes, Aero are strong on these maps. But the rules should be tweaked a bit to at least make it a fair interaction.

A 5 piloting Aero shouldn't have to face a TN 6 PSR just for taking a single hit of an AC/2. Even removing the "Atmospheric Operations" penalty would, at least, help mitigate this. Even if you kept the TW AAA rules as-written.

Aerospace fighters suffer no penalty to Piloting skill rolls while flying in an atmosphere. Conventional fighters, or those with the Atmospheric Flyer quirk, receive a -1 bonus to PSRs, while non-Aerodynes such as spheroid Dropships receive a +1 penalty. Fighters with the "Poor Atmospheric Performance" Quirk (such as the Hellcat) incur a +1 penalty to all Piloting rolls.

[Atarlost]

Does it help on ground mapsheets to allow aerospace fighters to fire at range?  Something like a T-Bird could fire its LRMs from outside the range of most AA and turn away at low speed or possibly pull an immelman which while also a piloting check only has the consequence of not making the maneuver.