What is broken with the Aerospace Rules?

[SCC]

So if Aero has a flaw in BT it's that it, like basically EVERYTHING in the setting, bends the knee not only to the 'Mechs, but also a 'Mech only game that players can knock out in an afternoon, and so everything exists to support that, the pre-dominate way to move forces around is in DropShips sized for games of this size (Lance to Company) and this is done because raids, which explain (but not really) why there is fighting going on, and anything that threatens to make raids difficult or not make sense isn't allowed, change that and things might change.

[Giovanni Blasini]

That’s…a pretty good assessment actually.

[marauder648]

Having played B5 Wars, you could in theory redo the Aerospace system to work like it did in B5Wars.

Fighters would still be dangerous but wouldn't be as absurdly survivable as they are at the moment when walloped by capital weapons.

For example in B5 Wars the Yolu Utan class heavy fighter was one of the most heavily protected fighters in game that wasn't a Vorlon fighter and they had 5 points of armour up front and 15 points of life per fighter (and ALL fighters came in flights of 6).

Lets say you're an EarthForce Starfury firing at a Utan, your guns do D6+4 damage, so to even hurt that you've got to roll at least a 2.

A Vorlon heavy fighter has also got 15 chunks of health (think of it as a Btech mechs structure, once its gone, its dead) and 'only' 4 points of armour. But its then got its adaptive armour which lets you put up to 2 points of armour into a weapon class you're being shot at, and a 1 point shield, giving you potentially 7 points of armour against incoming fire. And if you don't pen the armour, you do no damage.

When it comes to Capital ships we'll use the Light, Medium and Heavy laser for comparison.

Light - 2D10+7 damage with a range penalty of -1 per hexes. with a ROF of 1 shot every 2 turns
Medium - 3D10+12 damage with a range penalty of -1 per 2 hexes with a ROF of 1 shot every 3 turns
Heavy - 4D10+20 damage with a range penalty of -1 per 3 hexes. with a ROF of 1 shot every 4 turns

Each weapon would have a + to hit targets of different sizes or a - to hit if they were not made to do such a job, so using the heavy laser as an example you'd get a +3 to hit a capital size ship, +2 to hit a medium sized ship (white star etc) and -4 to hit if you wanted to shoot at fighters.

To shoot at a target, you took their profile, so lets say you're an EA Omega shooting at a Narn G'Quan class heavy cruiser. You have 8 points of sensor rating, meaning you can split those points any way between shooting and defensive jamming. Giving you a + to hit for each point you put in or a - to hit for each point your target put in ECM.

The Narn ship has the same sensor rating and a frontal profile of 15. Lets say they're 20 hexes away too. And you want to be really sure you hit, so you put 6 of your 8 points of sensors into targetting keeping 2 on defensive.

15 + 6 + 3 for the lasers targetting = 24 to hit, on a D20, but you then suffer -6 to hit because of the range, and the Narn player's gone full defensive with all 8 points in ECM (meaning they can't shoot at you) means you need to roll a 10 or under to hit on a D20 (or was it 2D10, can't fully remember)

But lets say you hit with one laser, you roll to see how much damage you get, this is then broken up into 10 point clusters as the laser rakes over the hull. The armour counts once against each individual rake, unless you hit the same area twice at which point you do the full 10 damage.

And going back to the fighters earlier, you'd do the full 4D10+20 damage of whatever you rolled against a single fighter, and most likely eradicate it if you managed to hit a fighter with a heavy laser. But then you'd not shoot at a fighter with your capital weapons, and most B5Wars ships had shorter ranged more rapid firing anti-fighter weapons, and you could use them to target ships, but their range penalties and often low damage meant that really you'd be door dinging half the time, but that didn't mean that a close range battery was useless. An EA Omega carried 12 particle beams, able to fire 6 per side and target things individually, but if you managed to centerline someone you could fire all 12 ahead.
And each one did 1D10+6 damage and instead of raking it did its damage in a single hit, so against most ships you'd be doing some damage with every hit and they could fire 1 per turn per gun.

B5Wars really was more mathrocks than BTech :D

But you could probably adjust such a system for BTech's capital ships. The biggest change would be downscaling fighters and the like as well as working out rates of fire for weapons, their + to hit etc.

You could also scale fighters so lets say..err...the Seydlitz had like 6 health, 1 armour everywhere, but has a small profile and lots of thrust so its hard to hit and agile. But something like umm...err..A Kirghiz has 4 armour, and 15 health, whereas a Hydaspes for example might have 12 health but 6 armour on the front and so on. You'd also have to scale mech weapons down a lot to fit this scale.
And you'd have to work out either how to have like large batteries of Naval weapons together or just accept that you'll be rolling a LOT.

As a comparison an EA Omega has 2 x Heavy Lasers, 2 x Heavy Pulse Cannons firing forwards and 2 Heavy Llasers firing aft. 12 x Particle beams for point defence and 6 x Interceptors for pure anti-fighter or shooting at incoming fire (apart from lasers and some Ancient stuff). Compared to a B5 Cruiser, that's hugely undergunned, even when looking at dogs eggs like the Sovetskii Soyuz class which has 12 x NAC-20's, 6 x NL-45's, 8 x Med Naval PPCs 2 x Killer Whale Missiles and 4 x Barracuda Missiles.

There's also the issue that most BTech Capital ships have ZERO point defences at all against fighters.

There's also the issue of Btech armour being ablative. So you could redo the ships to be like Mechs, you have an armour layer that you need to nibble through and then under that, you've got a structure layer, just like 'Mechs/ASF and once that's gone, its gone.

[RifleMech]

Why would I be hunting saboteurs with Jumpships?

You talked about receivers being destroyed so that tracking systems could not detect an attacking force coming in.

Simply put, saboteurs won't be leaving the planet without a Dropship at best, or a long-distance shuttle at worst.  As soon as the receivers got hit, they would be hunted.

Who said anything about saboteurs? Things get damaged in combat whether or not they're directly targeted. And early warning systems would be a target to eliminate their use in future raids.

And you're assuming such a dirge of technology that being able to repair such receivers wouldn't possibly be available.  You're assuming a general lack of capacity that isn't supported.  Sure it exists in more remote and less desireable locations, but those are exceptions, not the rule.

Still, those are campaign considerations, not aerospace rule considerations.

That's like saying that every planet not only has HPGs but the means to repair and build more. That's simply not the case. We know not all planets have the same level of technology. Even if a planet was of that level, it doesn't mean it could build that particular system. Just because a planet could build a Space Shuttle doesn't mean it can build a system to detect emergence pulses. And a Planet that could may not have means to get it a jump point.

We also know that Jumpships don't travel to all planets regularly. That means even if a planet could buy parts or a new system, it could be months before it arrives. Presuming it doesn't get lost along the way.

So no, not every planet has such systems. If they did, raiding would be more difficult.

So a hex with its 6 facings can be used like an x-y-z axis, and it's pretty accurate for a cone or cylinder of space when forced to use a 2d map.  All the planet in orbit, for example, would swing like pendulums of different lengths in this frame of reference.  This is more for zenith to earth like 1 day turns, where the zenith or nadir is at the top left corner and the sun is in the bottom right part of the map.  Battlespace doesnt use 1 day strategic turns, but the cylinder of space hexmap frame of reference can be scaled down to "fix" the xyz plane needed for space combat.

(snip)

Velocity has always given me problems. I end up skipping it. And the capital ranges do feel way short for their weight. I like including the heat sinks in to it.

That is why I was comparing a Warship with 4/6 Thrust/OverThrust vs an ASF with 4/6 Thrust/OverThrust.  If the two platforms have the same acceleration, then even though the Warship takes more energy to accelerate it also has more energy to accelerate.  Fuel Supply was not a factor in this.

You still have to overcome the mass's inertia. The smaller craft has less inertia to overcome than the larger one. To try to match the smaller ships acceleration and maneuverability it would use more fuel because the engines have more inertia to overcome. It's also going to be far more difficult for the crew at either end of the ship as they'd be experiencing heavier gee loads than those at the center. It's why we don't see Star Destroyers maneuvering like the Millennium Falcon.

I'd prefer to compare equal tech to equal tech.  Advanced races had better armor, but also had better weapons.  So advanced races vs advanced races would have their fighters trying for critical hits, rather than punching through the armor directly.  Advanced race vs lower-tech race would just be stomping the lower tech race (unless both are limited by points value to be equal).

That would make things easier. I don't remember fighters trying for critical hits though. Maybe engines but those are big targets.

(snip)
Honestly bombs do only 10 damage due to balance concerns not trying to establish consistent physics.  Bombs are already an overwhelming damage source for ground attack, making them more realistic 1 ton iron bombs and dropping 10 of them from a 50 ton average fighter would clear multiple city blocks.

I suppose that's why they did away with AT1's bomb ratings.

[Charistoph]

Who said anything about saboteurs? Things get damaged in combat whether or not they're directly targeted. And early warning systems would be a target to eliminate their use in future raids.

Already explained.  How else are you going to destroy receivers before shots of a raid are fired?

You're talking about a second raid taking advantage of what a previous raid did, which was not presented in your original hypothesis.  Why would someone need to destroy the receivers of such when they are already taking everything they want?

That's like saying that every planet not only has HPGs but the means to repair and build more. That's simply not the case. We know not all planets have the same level of technology. Even if a planet was of that level, it doesn't mean it could build that particular system. Just because a planet could build a Space Shuttle doesn't mean it can build a system to detect emergence pulses. And a Planet that could may not have means to get it a jump point.

Not even close to being a comparison.  There is a difference between having a basic satellite network up to do basic Space Control, communications, and weather monitoring, versus carrying a valuable and advanced communications network that was held under monopoly for over 300 years.

We also know that Jumpships don't travel to all planets regularly. That means even if a planet could buy parts or a new system, it could be months before it arrives. Presuming it doesn't get lost along the way.

Since you want to be pedantic about things, Jumpships don't travel to planets, ever.  It's the Dropships that do that.

Furthermore, we're talking about maintaining a technology that is literally over 1000 years old.

So no, not every planet has such systems. If they did, raiding would be more difficult.

I didn't say they did.  I just said that finding a planet that didn't have such systems is far less common than finding one that did.  In fact, I've said this numerous times at this point.  The farther you go in to the Periphery (depending on the direction), the more likely you are to find one, but odds are that if you picked a random planet that it would have some form of Space Control.

[klarg1]

It warms my heart to see so many references to B5Wars in this thread. I played the heck out of that game, but usually get blank stares or references to Mongoose’s ACtA when I mention it.

I will say that some of the fighters in that game had pretty significant ship killing guns which could punch through pretty much any plausible hull armor. (Thunderbolt, Pikitos, and Dartha, I’m looking at you)

[idea weenie]

One also has to take in consideration the delivery capacity of such systems.  The delivery of a Bomb just requires an ASF to exist, and doesn't take up any internal mass of the ASF.  Delivering a Long Tom round requires the unit to be on the ground as well as the 30 ton cannon to fire it, and Warships are never a functioning unit on the ground.

The 30-ton Long Tom plus the propellant is used to get the <200 kg shell up high.  An ASF is already up high.  Why can't someone mount a release mechanism for a Long Tom shell so an ASF can carry it?

This is already true. Per the existing squadron rules that came out in the first printing of StratOps (and are still there), when a fighter squadron fires a cluster of weapons, you only look at the damage of a single weapon to check for damage thresholds. A PPC will always threshold more armor than a group of any number of medium lasers, and a single AC/20 will always threshold thicker armor than a group of any number of PPCs.

Big clusters of small guns are good for scrubbing armor, but very bad at penetrating armor that is still present

Ah.  I was using page 27 Strategic Operations (General Rules -> Maximum Damage Threshold, from corrected 4th printing):

Thus, only the Attack
Value of a single fighter’s weapon bay is compared to the
target’s Damage Threshold regardless of how many functional
fighters are in the squadron.

You are likely using page 29 which has:

the ability of a fighter squadron to inflict a potential
critical hit through exceeding a target’s Damage Threshold
(see p. 239, TW) is based on the maximum Attack Value of a
single weapon in the firing bay

I'd wonder if someone could still mount a single Large Laser and a bunch of Medium Lasers to exploit the LL's ability to crit vs Threshold 8.  This is why I want to modify the ASF sheet (individual and squadron) so it lists the numbers of weapons in a Bay.

Of course page 29's example, in the right hand column, in the third whole paragraph:

the current Threshold of that location
is 18, which is well below the MDT of 8 for a light Gauss rifle
bay.,

Last I checked, 18 was above 8.   ;)

The cargo weight of bombs is not the same as the tonnage of a bomb.  A single arrow is 5 bomb slots but 1 arrow shot from a launcher is 200kg and yet still different cargo packing weight. Same with the RL10, 1 bomb slot/ton, but .5 tons on a mech.  So an HE bomb is likely similar, 1 ton/bomb slot for cargo space/storage in a crate, but weighing much less when unpacked and being dropped.

As for artillery damage, I have no idea why the damage was increased in tac ops from the 25 years prior.  I opened a question regarding this--the BV seems to reflect the old, pre tac ops values, as for example a thumper is only 40ish BV, but dors 3x the damage now and has radius damage, yet they didnt increase its BV cost.  If the long tom damage was reduced to the same as an ac20 which also has 5 shots/ton it still makes HE bombs look bad, but not as bad.

Honestly bombs do only 10 damage due to balance concerns not trying to establish consistent physics.  Bombs are already an overwhelming damage source for ground attack, making them more realistic 1 ton iron bombs and dropping 10 of them from a 50 ton average fighter would clear multiple city blocks.

So in order for a 1-ton/slot bomb to do 10 pts of damage and be equal to a Long Tom shell, it would need to be ~80 kg in mass (I was wrong about Long Tom being 30 pts in the central hex, it is 25).  A Long Tom Shell does 25 pts of damage to a single hex, and masses a total of 200 kg.  In order for an HE bomb to do similar damage per kg, its 10 pts of damage is divided by 25 pts of damage and multiplied by 200 kg.

D1/M1 = D2/M2
(25 pts)/(200 kg) = (10 pts)/M2
(25)/(200 kg) = (10)/M2
(25) * M2 = (10) * 200 kg
25 * M2 = 2000 kg
M2 = 2000kg /25 = 80 kg

So the one slot bomb doing 10 pts of damage would mass somewhere around 80 kg, and this mass value is ignoring the Long Tom's bonus damage to adjacent hexes.

You still have to overcome the mass's inertia. The smaller craft has less inertia to overcome than the larger one. To try to match the smaller ships acceleration and maneuverability it would use more fuel because the engines have more inertia to overcome. It's also going to be far more difficult for the crew at either end of the ship as they'd be experiencing heavier gee loads than those at the center. It's why we don't see Star Destroyers maneuvering like the Millennium Falcon.

The Thrust ratings and Fuel Consumption values already handle that inertia and fuel needs.  Unless you are saying that a Warship that accelerates at a Thrust of 4 in turn 1 does not actually start to move until turn 2?

For ISD vs MF, the ISD might just have a lower thrust rating.

That would make things easier. I don't remember fighters trying for critical hits though. Maybe engines but those are big targets.

Closest I can think of is the White Stars vs Shadomegas, where the Star Furies are firing on White Stars while the White Stars are passing by.  Not sure about damage inflicted by the Star Furies though.

The key for me in BT is that an ASF force that is 1% the mass of a Warship can engage it and be likely to win, even just punching through the armor.  To test this, make a 100 kton Warship, and put ten 100-ton ASF against it (or twenty 50-ton ASF, fifty 20-ton ASF, etc).

[Daemion]

I do have one suggestion that could garner more interest in BattleTech Space Ships:

Dropship Carrying Cases.

Nothing like having portable gaming terrain with the added function of carrying your gaming miniatures.  Of course, if you're not playing open tabletop like in Alpha Strike, you might want to include a hexmap-scale template for if the ship is part of the scenario.  Using that enough times may get some people curious about the rest of interstellar transit and the foils and foibles of Void travels.

Hmmm.  It got mentioned on the boards.  Guess it's not gonna happen now. (Can someone tell me how this hasn't become a meme, please?)

[DevianID]

Dropship Carrying Cases.

Honestly you are really on to something Daemion.  Part of the lack of interest is due in part of a lack of playability.  If you built a cheap dropship in line with the value of the force packs (so probably 25$ or so for a map scale leopard which would fit in a lance pack box), then everyone would buy that leopard.  If everyone has a cool leopard forcepack mini, well now they want to put it on the table.  For that, they will want rules, ect ect. 

They made a 28mm scale marauder after saying the big model was just for fun, because of how much interest people had in buying it.

So a Union or overlord made in cheap injection mold clamshell style that opens like a hinge to store a few dozen minis would also sell.  Such a carrying case would be more expensive then other carrying cases cause of the amount of plastic versus fabric and foam inserts, but once you make 5 you can make 5000, so after the startup cost is paid off it would be profitable.

[Daemion]

The ASF sheet needs a modification to show how many weapons are firing, while would serve as a 'reducing' effect on the critical hit roll or modifying resistive armor.  Basically I would want this:
(weapon/s type) - (# of weapons) - (damage of weapons group)
AC - 1 - 20
to be better than this:
PPC - 3 - 30
or this:
Laser - 10 - 50
when it comes to trying to penetrate Warship armor (and combat Dropships get a slight benefit as well).

Um, I know I'm still way behind in catching up, but I want to point out that AT2 damage threshold handled this already.  The damage threshold was compared to each individual hit, so an AC/20 would certainly crit the Union Dropship's nose threshold of 18, but four medium lasers would not.

So, keeping to that on the Warship scale would help even further. 

And, this kinda goes to show that having rules spread out like they are isn't helping consistency.   

[Daemion]

The key for me in BT is that an ASF force that is 1% the mass of a Warship can engage it and be likely to win, even just punching through the armor.  To test this, make a 100 kton Warship, and put ten 100-ton ASF against it (or twenty 50-ton ASF, fifty 20-ton ASF, etc).

But an ASF versus ground units will get cut to smithereens and barely hurt the ground units in turn with the external ordinance it has access to.

Yeah.  That is a valid complaint.

So if Aero has a flaw in BT it's that it, like basically EVERYTHING in the setting, bends the knee not only to the 'Mechs, but also a 'Mech only game that players can knock out in an afternoon, and so everything exists to support that, the pre-dominate way to move forces around is in DropShips sized for games of this size (Lance to Company) and this is done because raids, which explain (but not really) why there is fighting going on, and anything that threatens to make raids difficult or not make sense isn't allowed, change that and things might change.

Pretty much.  Otherwise, the best we can expect is (crosses fingers)  DropShip styled carrying cases for minis.  And some ASFs for deployment in support of the ground forces as they romp through the countryside.

It's funny that the Devs have ultimate control over the scary monsters that are space battleships.  There are ways to scale them appropriately and yet keep them from becoming the 'final answer' to everything.  Being they have the creative license, they can simply come up with a plausible reason to include but limit them. They have that power.  And, yet they seem to treat them with the same fear as the proverbial nuke.


Now, that aside, and with me caught up in this thread, I'd like to tackle a scaling idea.

People keep talking about having space ships taking up multiple hexes.  That's fine.  But, does that mapping have to be by hex, for one? And why does the mapping of a ship have to translate to the combat map directly?

For point 1, there's the funky little thing in BattleTech that is currently unique to one combat unit: The crit location table.  But, it doesn't have to be unique to the BattleMech.  What's wrong with mapping out a ship's items that way?  Sure, I think space ships of most volumes that equate to a large building should have more than 4 or 6 locations.  Way more if they're whole sections of land.

On point 2, does anyone remember Adeptus Titanicus second edition?  Or maybe it was 40k Epic?  Anyway, the Gargant was mapped out with a diagram.  But, that was its data card for tracking damage.  The mini still moved around the table using standard ranges and movement appropriate for the system.  Sure, some ships are big enough they should have a hex map diagram applied to them.  But, why can't that simply be part of the record sheet?  Why does it physically have to manifest on the playing map?  There're ways to make this work.  I'm not going to elaborate because that goes into fan-rules territory.

[Greatclub]

Bring back renegade legion interceptor and Leviathan in a BT skin?

OTOH, that would require abandoning decades of built up inertia...

[Daemion]

So, I want to go over the issue of scale and damage and point out how rediculously overpowered ground weapons are to the shear volume that any BT space craft large enough to carry 'a crew' deals with. 

Let's start with the ubiquitous Union Dropship.  Its dimensions are 78m by 81.5 by 81,5.  Since two of those dimensions are equal I'm going to assume its the horizontal diameter if one were looking at it grounded.  That leaves a height of 78m.  That's 13 elevation levels. And, from the top down, it would sit squarely over a central hex and occupy the surrounding six hexes. 

It's current Aero Stats give it four (4!) damage locations.  The nose has 180 points of armor.  Each side (two total) have 180 points of standard armor.  And the aft has 100 points of standard armor.  That's over 13 ground levels and 7 hexes. 

It also can only take 22 points of damage before it gets demolished once you're past that armor in any one of those 4 locations.  Its Structural integrity value is 11, but you have to do 2 points per SI.

I would posit that most people might look at the Union and assume it should have hardened building levels of CF.  They wouldn't be wrong.

Take a look at these images to get an idea of the layout of the Union:


 

Now!  By comparison. The 100 Ton Thunderbird ASF, which can be carried inside said Union as one of two (2!) has an armor profile of 82 for its nose, 52 for each wing, and 40 for its aft.

Or, better yet, the EST-R3 Eisensturm has a profile of 110/85/69 at 95 tons. These fighters rival Assault Mechs for general volume.  Maybe more since you have the wing span, but not by much.

I would like to point out that the old BattleSpace stats had two extra locations splitting up the sides into fore and aft, and each had 180 points of standard armor.  A little better, but still an issue.

Do you see a problem there? I do.  Especially on the ground when the Union is an immobile target.  You would think that you should be able to work the armor for a weapon bay down to zero to eliminate that weapon or weapons.  But, the way the system works, you have to power through all 180 points and risk destroying the ship, or hit it with a big enough gun to get past the threshold of 18 to crit the weapons out.  And there is some ambiguity with it being an immobile target if the standard rules would allow you to pick out that specific hit item on the location table or have to roll random.


The way the Union is laid out, it seems like the different arcs would be in a singular turret, but I'll play it both ways.

A Union Foreward side weapon bay could be looked upon as a weapon emplacement building attached to the the side of the dropship.  If we go by artistic layout, it carries all of the following weapons:
1 x PPC, 2 x AC/5s, 2 x LRM 20s, 1x Large Laser and 2x Medium Lasers.  Technically, the emplacement could be any class and associated CF, but let's work with the tonnage of the weapons combined.  After all, a building is supposed to be able to hold the tonnage of its contents in CF. 

All those weapons together come to 50 tons.  We can potentially add 3 tons of LRM and 4 tons of AC/5 ammo (since the 9 tons of LRM Ammo and 12 tons of AC/5 ammo for the ship are probably evenly distributed across the three arcs that have those weapons) making for 57 tons.  And, an emplacement needs to run heat neutral.  So, we'll want 38 heat sinks.  And, since we're talking the classic Union, that's in singles.  So, that tallies up to 95 tons.  That forward side bay is already into the Hardened building range of appropriate CF.  And, let's not forget the armor.  A threshold of 18 would suggest a protection level of 2.5 tons standard armor, at the very least.  So, somewhere around a 100 CF hardened building. 

And if you were to target the smaller laser bay, either one, would be in light class building range after including heat sinks and the armor, if barely.

That's the ground equivalent for a single weapons bay.  And, that probably doesn't take up more than a couple elevation levels near the middle of the ship.

And, that's just ONE weapon bay for one firing ARC on one SIDE.  You still have things like cargo bay doors (6 of 'em), and Landing Gear (4 of those), and that large thruster bubble depicted over each landing gear.  Do you really imagine that a single door is going to be protected by all of a side's armor?  And, that door can rival a Mech or Fighter, like the Eisensturm for surface area.

But, let's take a look at the 'next level' of ship, shall we?

 

 

[Daemion]

The Aegis Class Warship has this wonderful bit of modern BT Art to look at, so let's use it as our ensample Star Ship.



It's listed on Sarna as being 725 metes long. That would make it span 2 low-altitude hexes with some room to spare.  A more direct conversion to the ground map would be 24 hexes long with a fractional spill-over, so let's round up to 25. 

It's got 4 dropship collars, each of which is prominently displayed on its nose.  Remember that a Union takes up 7 ground hexes in a 3-hex wide circle.  And, you've seen what I've pointed out about the Union.

It's got... a lot of guns!  But, that's not what I'm going to point out. According to Ye Olde TR '57 that was statted for BattleSpace, it has a structural integrity of 75!  If that matches the Union in any way, That means a fighter, or Mech, could demolish it after 150 points of damage.  Not hard with many assault mechs or Clan Mechs in general. 

But, I imagine that's supposed to be in the capital scale, so it might be more like 750 damage.  I'd like to point out that a swath of light woods takes 90 points of damage to clear in Total Warfare.  But, even if you went back in time, it took 40 points of damage to crater a hex according to Ye Olde Tactical Handbook.  It really should take a Mech more than a few minutes to demolish a warship.  Maybe an hour.

But, that's not all!  Let's look at the armor protection, shall we?

The Aegis has the benefit of having 6 different armor locations:  Fore, Aft, Fore-sides right and left, and Aft-sides right and left.  The Fore and Aft each have 91 capital armor points and each side has 101 armor points. It seems impressive when you magnify that to standard. 910, 1010, 1010, and 910 when looking at it in horizontal profile. But, remember that it's 25 BT ground hexes long, and we haven't gotten into the beam and height. It looks like it is at least half as wide as it's length. But, you see the problem. Each weapon bay depicted on the art rivals a tall building or even a dropship for volume.  Do you really think it all 1010 armor points is going to protect one? And, 910 points of armor certainly not going to protect all 4 of those docking collars if one is singled out for a concerted strike. 

Mechs have multiple locations with armor limits.  Each location is much much smaller and can be picked at, especially if it's immobile, randomly if it isn't.  You don't have to worry about whittling away all the front torso armor just to take out the right torso.  (Unless you're playing Alpha Strike.)

The shield bubble that we usually see for settings like Star Trek and Star Wars exists in BattleTech, magically in the form of solid armor. 

If there was anything borken about BT Space, it's that. 

[Daemion]

Bring back renegade legion interceptor and Leviathan in a BT skin?

OTOH, that would require abandoning decades of built up inertia...

You speak of Renegade Legion and inertia...  ^-^  Do you realize you made a pun?

[SCC]

That’s…a pretty good assessment actually.

So I've realized that there's another way that Aero bends the knee, and that's to old Record Sheets that where written before we had construction rules for units of that type and before all the lore was worked out, even if it makes no sense from what we now know of the universe.

[marauder648]

Thinking of B5Wars again and BTech I was thinking about the various damage types there was

1 - Standard - your gun does its damage against what it hits, any leftover damage if you blow something up carries over to the hull.

2 - Raking - your gun's damage is broken up into 10 point groups (or whatever it is, if you do 17 then you get 1 x 10 point rake and 1 x 7 rake) and you roll to hit as many sections as you have damage, if you hit the same section twice you ignore armour

3- Piercing - This wasn't that common but basically the weapons damage is split into 3 and you do X damage against the ships sections. It usually came with a penalty to hit to do so to outway the chance of scoring a nasty critical hit like walloping the engine or C&C.
Lets say you shot an Omega from the front with an Abbai Combat Laser and you get a perfect roll of 50 damage (3D10+20) You then do 17 points of damage to the bow, then 16 to the centre section (where things like engines and bridges are) and finally 16 to the stern.

4 - Flash - This is your nuke/proximity explosion in space a big flash of energy washing over a target. You do the damage, then start hitting sub systems/weapons etc until they're all gone and then any left over damage is done to the hull.

5 - Sustained - More a firing mode than a way of doing damage, basically its the long long sustained beam blasts and had to be charged up by not firing that weapon for its full charge period (and the weapon must be capable of sustained firing). You roll to hit as normal, and on the 2nd turn, assuming you're still in arc, the weapon (usually a laser) hits automatically and you roll to work out damage and carry on raking, but if you hit a section in the previous turn and hit it again, you ignore the armour like you've hit it before.

With BTech i'm thinking that you could do it like this

NAC's - Standard damage
NL's/PPCs - Raking damage
Naval Gauss - Piercing

Maybe have the NL's capable of Sustained fire,  but only the NL-55 and whilst the Gauss is a naturally piercing weapon (see railguns from The Expanse for how it would look) maybe a the Heavy Naval PPC could also overcharge to do a piecing shot but the Gauss don't get a - to hit, the NPPC would.

Missiles you can load up different warheads  so they could do flash damage against fighters or you could try using it against warships and the like to damage them etc. And of course any nuclear warheads would be flash types, meaning that they'd be scraping off weapons and external stuff like thrusters etc before hitting the hull.

Unlike B5Wars you'd not have any interception capability, where point defence weapons could target incoming fire giving it a - penalty to hit. Only lasers couldn't be intercepted and some Ancient weapons. In BTech you can't do that but you could shoot down missiles. Perhaps you could make screen launchers like more common and actually part of a WarShips defences (just like how any 'Mech would have A-Pods aboard regardless of era because its a claymore mine).

You could easily copy over the sensor rating system so each ship can allocate points to give you a + or - to hit.

One thing I think is an issue is that i've seen folks saying Btech ships are too light for their size, I recall seeing that someone worked out how thick a Leviathan's armour is and it was thinner than a sheet of paper. So why not add a zero to the WarShips mass. All of them.

This makes the huge guns not seem so bad, and you could increase the tonnage allocated to armour so its no longer a molecule thick.

[DevianID]

The btech ships are too light, but thats because the ships are no longer tube shaped like in tro2750 but chubby blocky things with much more width and height in tro3057.  Also, the leviathian's armor weight is the issue, not the leviathians actual weight.  Like, at 2.5 million tons there is plenty of tonnage to put a big thick sheet of armor on the leviathan even at it's existing overblown dimensions, but while the structure is 360,000 tons, the armor is only 5300 tons thanks to the wonky construction rules.  So the armor is a mere .2% the mass while the structure is a respectable 15%.  Mech armor is up to 20% the mass of the mech, with another 10% structure, and can be 40% for hardened armor and 20% for strengthened internal structure.  Adding a zero to the warship's mass isnt going to fix anything, the armor would still be .2% when you multiply everything by 10... 10 sheets of paper for example instead of 1.  Gotta fix the dimensions--if you want bulky ships they need to be shorter, if you want long ships cause of the KF core they need to be thinner.

79.5 tons is how much structure the union has by the way.  Thats 1272 structure bubbles if the union was a mech.  So yes, the union loses its integrity after just 22 damage, but it doesnt collapes like a building that has its CF reduced to zero.  Its just combat useless/cant fly after 22 structure damage bounces around inside the armor.  This makes sense to me if the union is just a metal shell, pretty open except for some cramped enclosed crew quarters and a bridge, with the rest of the space just empty hanger space.  Yeah it feels right that a 22 damage hole to what little structures inside an otherwise open hanger would knock it out.  However, the art doesnt support this open hanger idea, and thats kinda an issue.

Now, I still think the union's structure and armor are too light, but every dropship dimension is probably off by 2x.  So instead of an 81 meter diameter, the union should have a 40 meter diameter and a pretty open floor plan.  But if you keep the existing art/dimensions the union could also do with 20x the structure weight at least, based on the image posted below of how thick the decks are in the picture... its not an open space at all, its full of floors and structures and giant ramps and stuff.   If 80 meters tall, that pic shows a lot of metal colored stuff with lots of independent sections you can close off.  22 damage to the interior structure doesnt look like its making that whole ship not space worthy at all, judging by the picture.  There is just far too much stuff inside that union.

[Daemion]

That's not a lot of structure.  That's like taking an Awesome and ballooning it out to 8 times its height, 8 times its width, and 8 times its chest depth.

And, the vessel weighs in at 3500 tons, which is significantly more than 80ish.  That's not even a full percent of the overall mass.  At least an Atlas's internals is 10% or 5% of its overall mass depending on whether it's standard or Endo.

[Daemion]

Out of curiosity, how is the KF core laid out?  I notice it's a minimum 2500 ton requirement somewhere in the rules.  And, Germanium is a key factor in its operation.

A couple questions then:  How much Germanium and in what arrangement?

I've seen some breakdowns of warp nacelles, and they have an array of solid metal rings down their length.  A Connie, being 289 meters would have somewhere around a 150m long nacelle. 

Would the Germanium alloy be similarly arrayed?  Or would it be more of a giant rod going however long? 

Basically, is 2500 metric tons enough weight for that system?

[RifleMech]

Already explained.  How else are you going to destroy receivers before shots of a raid are fired?

You're talking about a second raid taking advantage of what a previous raid did, which was not presented in your original hypothesis.  Why would someone need to destroy the receivers of such when they are already taking everything they want?

How else would the receiver be damage when there aren't saboteurs? I suppose it could be a natural act but how would pirates know about it? And if pirates did send a saboteurs, they could leave the planet on the pirate's ship and the planet still couldn't chase them.

I didn't say they'd need to destroy the receivers. I said that things get damaged in combat. The receivers could have just received an unlucky hit. Or they could have been victims of a fire, or some weather event or something. The point was that not every planet is going to have the means to make more. They'll have to order the parts or an entirely new system. They can only do that when a jumpship comes in and lands a friendly dropship small craft on the planet.

Not even close to being a comparison.  There is a difference between having a basic satellite network up to do basic Space Control, communications, and weather monitoring, versus carrying a valuable and advanced communications network that was held under monopoly for over 300 years.

Piracy occurred before Comstar was created. And you can't put up satellites if you don't have the technology. You might be able to build them but they're just going to sit in a warehouse unless you've got means of getting them into orbit.

Since you want to be pedantic about things, Jumpships don't travel to planets, ever.  It's the Dropships that do that.

Furthermore, we're talking about maintaining a technology that is literally over 1000 years old.

If a ship lands on an island, it's crashed. The moor offshore and send in rowboats/dropships.

It doesn't matter how old the technology is. If you don't have the means to fix it, it's just a pile of junk.

I didn't say they did.  I just said that finding a planet that didn't have such systems is far less common than finding one that did.  In fact, I've said this numerous times at this point.  The farther you go in to the Periphery (depending on the direction), the more likely you are to find one, but odds are that if you picked a random planet that it would have some form of Space Control.

I disagree and you don't have to go into the periphery to find planets without a receiver. Every planet has a chance of loosing it's receiver in an attack and space ports are a priority target. Once they're damaged or destroyed you've got to repair or replace it. Until that happens no one on the planet is going to know when Jumpships or Warships arrive.  The time frame for repairs/replacement could be weeks or years or more, depending on where that planet is, who's covering the cost and it's value. High value planets are going to have their receivers repaired or replaced sooner than some planet out in the nowhere of space. In fact, constant repairs/replacement of those receivers could keep that "country" planet from receiving theirs as the parts are diverted.

[RifleMech]

The Thrust ratings and Fuel Consumption values already handle that inertia and fuel needs.  Unless you are saying that a Warship that accelerates at a Thrust of 4 in turn 1 does not actually start to move until turn 2?

For ISD vs MF, the ISD might just have a lower thrust rating.

Which accelerates faster, a motorcycle, a mid-size car, or a semi-truck? When traveling at the same speed, which turns faster?  I'm pretty sure it's the motorcycle as it has less mass and inertia for the engine to overcome. So why should a million ton warship accelerate and turn as fast as a fighter that's 10,000 times smaller?

Closest I can think of is the White Stars vs Shadomegas, where the Star Furies are firing on White Stars while the White Stars are passing by.  Not sure about damage inflicted by the Star Furies though.

The key for me in BT is that an ASF force that is 1% the mass of a Warship can engage it and be likely to win, even just punching through the armor.  To test this, make a 100 kton Warship, and put ten 100-ton ASF against it (or twenty 50-ton ASF, fifty 20-ton ASF, etc).

I don't remember either. It's been a while since I watched the show.

History has proven that a lucky hit from a plane can take out a warship. That said, most weapons mounted on fighters shouldn't do much to a warship. It should be things like Arrow Missiles and Bombs that do the most damage and the damage they do seems a bit light. AT1's bombs feel more right to me as they can do up to 10 points of damage to a warship.

[RifleMech]

I do have one suggestion that could garner more interest in BattleTech Space Ships:

Dropship Carrying Cases.

Nothing like having portable gaming terrain with the added function of carrying your gaming miniatures.  Of course, if you're not playing open tabletop like in Alpha Strike, you might want to include a hexmap-scale template for if the ship is part of the scenario.  Using that enough times may get some people curious about the rest of interstellar transit and the foils and foibles of Void travels.

Hmmm.  It got mentioned on the boards.  Guess it's not gonna happen now. (Can someone tell me how this hasn't become a meme, please?)

That would be cool.

Now, that aside, and with me caught up in this thread, I'd like to tackle a scaling idea.

People keep talking about having space ships taking up multiple hexes.  That's fine.  But, does that mapping have to be by hex, for one? And why does the mapping of a ship have to translate to the combat map directly?

For point 1, there's the funky little thing in BattleTech that is currently unique to one combat unit: The crit location table.  But, it doesn't have to be unique to the BattleMech.  What's wrong with mapping out a ship's items that way?  Sure, I think space ships of most volumes that equate to a large building should have more than 4 or 6 locations.  Way more if they're whole sections of land.

I wouldn't mind something like that.

It would also be nice if all dropships and above were treated like multi-hex/multi-elevation structures. It'd greatly complicate construction but it would fix some of the breaks in aerotech.

[SCC]

The btech ships are too light, but thats because the ships are no longer tube shaped like in tro2750 but chubby blocky things with much more width and height in tro3057.  Also, the leviathian's armor weight is the issue, not the leviathians actual weight.  Like, at 2.5 million tons there is plenty of tonnage to put a big thick sheet of armor on the leviathan even at it's existing overblown dimensions, but while the structure is 360,000 tons, the armor is only 5300 tons thanks to the wonky construction rules.  So the armor is a mere .2% the mass while the structure is a respectable 15%.  Mech armor is up to 20% the mass of the mech, with another 10% structure, and can be 40% for hardened armor and 20% for strengthened internal structure.  Adding a zero to the warship's mass isnt going to fix anything, the armor would still be .2% when you multiply everything by 10... 10 sheets of paper for example instead of 1.  Gotta fix the dimensions--if you want bulky ships they need to be shorter, if you want long ships cause of the KF core they need to be thinner.

The K-F Core is fluffed to actually provide the ship's spine (It's 47.5% of the ship's weight and the ship is LITERALLY built around it) so a lot of that weight is structure of some sort.

[Charistoph]

On the other hand, how much of that is liquid helium?  That can easily alter density rather quickly as Helium is not very dense.

[Daemion]

Can somebody confirm for me whether the Union is allocated only 40 tons of armor?  I'm inferring this from stats and a brief look at the AT2 construction rules.  The TROs I have don't go into the hard weights.

Thanks.

If that's the case, it's not a lot of protection.  For comparison, the Atlas tops off at 19 tons of armor.  And, it's rivaled by the Sturmfeur with 19.5 tons.

[Charistoph]

According to MML, the 2708 Union has 37.5 tons of Standard Armor.  For comparison, the 2762 Overlord has 45 tons of Standard Armor and the 2537 Leopard has 29.5 tons of Armor.

Keep in mind that Dropships also get free Armor per facing based on their SI which is 44 for the Union.

[Daemion]

So, I was looking at whether the tonnage values could be rearranged for the Union to help provide better armor protection if looking at as much as 14 hit locations.  Because the basic tonnages for armor and SI are way lower than I'd anticipated.  It made me wonder where the majority of the tonnage goes.  Over half of it is potentially dedicated to the cargo with 14 bays allowing for 100 ton war machines (12 Mechs and 2 fighters) plus consumables and crew accommodations.  Without having gone thoroughly gone through the construction rules recently, I'm guessing that a fair a mount of weight also goes to the engine and fuel.

But, that begs the question of how much mass is required for the Engine.

For the day that BT was put together, I figured that the stats for the Saturn V Rocket might be available somehow, somewhere, and looked them up as a potential reference.  The Rocket topped off at 2,965 metric tons.  That's not that far off from the Union's 3600 tons.  But!  it could only carry a load of 141 metric tons to low earth orbit or a load of 52 metric tons to a Lunar Insertion Trajectory. 

Sure, I expect some magical number shenanigans with 'futuristic improvements', But, how much do we want to allow?  14 bays for 100 ton machines at top end would require 14 rockets at minimum. But, then you have the crew quarters and living amenities, weapons and ammo, and a more complete protective shell in the form of a hull.  So, we might be looking at closer to 10 Saturn Vs worth of rocket power to get a Union into orbit and beyond.

It doesn't matter whether you have a man-made bottled star providing perpetual power, you still need to burn the same amount of fuel to get lift-off and freedom from the gravity well, to say nothing of landing.  So, this calls into question the ability of Dropships to transit space and then come straight to a landing.  There'd certainly be issues of refueling, which might be something to account for on the ground.

First thing this brings to light is the tactical limitations of raiding.  A ship would need to refuel once it's on the ground, and assuming it can be done via electrolysis and water, that means water sources will be the most logical landing sight for raiding dropships.  They need to refuel to get back into the air. 

This also makes me wonder if there shouldn't be more space stations for typical commerce in simple orbit as refueling points.

[Euphonium]

BT fusion engines are magically efficient, I think someone did the maths and worked out that they can extract more energy from the fuel that total matter to energy conversion would release.

[Charistoph]

It doesn't matter whether you have a man-made bottled star providing perpetual power, you still need to burn the same amount of fuel to get lift-off and freedom from the gravity well, to say nothing of landing.  So, this calls into question the ability of Dropships to transit space and then come straight to a landing.  There'd certainly be issues of refueling, which might be something to account for on the ground.

That is a very broad assumption based on several levels.  That's like saying that it takes the same amount of fuel for the X-1, F-15, and F-22 to go supersonic.  The first is a pure rocket, the second requires afterburners, and the 3rd can go supersonic on the equivalent of Safe Thrust.  Efficiency is a HUGE factor in how much fuel it takes to launch.

It may take as much energy to launch, but how fuel is used is dependent on the efficiency of the system being used.