Phoenix Space Combat System for Dummies - Part Three Point Defence

Point Defence shooting stuff..


The simplest point defence weapon is the Gatling laser. Sends out short bursts of laser energy to 'blind' missiles causing them to explode early 1. The Mark I version takes 10 shots per gun per round and does a mere 1 damage at accuracy 25 and to give some comparison the basic Kinetic Missile has 2 defence so a single shot might give about a 50% chance to destroy it and 2 hits would. So a ship with 30 gatling Mark I lasers has around 300 shots a round. Not all will hit and even if they did they could only stop between 150 and 300 missiles a round. Using the parameters of our recommended odds of 8-1 warships carrying 100 missile launchers that is 1.5-3 ships of the 8 with the remaining 850 missiles hitting home per round…

Better mark gatlings increase their accuracy so making it more likely they will hit the missile. Accuracy increases around 5% per mark so mark 4 has an excellent accuracy of 35%. 

Heavy Gatlings also exist and these basically do more damage if they hit but with less shots (5) per round (or Point Defence Shots as they are called in game ). These do 3 damage so destroy most missiles with one shot but are more intended to counter space bombers/fighters and torpedo's. 

The other Point defence commonly used are Phalanx missiles. These are a bit like the old anti-missile systems we have. If a missile is seen a Phalanx is sent out to try and explode itself close by to take out the opposing missile/space fighter/torpedo etc. These are more accurate and do a huge amount more damage but require ammunition storage so tend to be used when opposing forces are fans of fighters/bombers and torpedo's mainly because they are less effective versus missiles than gatlings and missiles are the most effective ship killers in game. 

How much point defence to use is a bit of a guessing game. Should your opponent be known to not be using weapons that need to be countered by point defence then you can take a chance and remove it. Otherwise how much do you carry? As can be seen by the example in the footnotes 30 is not enough but to stop 'that' squadron of eight missile ships you would need (probably) 200 gatling lasers taking 2,000 Mus space which means very little space for weaponry. A lot of fleet commanders and ship designers rely on the armour to soak up some of the initial damage so 50 gatlings would be a strong point defence. It would not prevent that attack from destroying the ship but it must be noted that that is not the aim. While that ship is being destroyed it is soaking up enemy ammunition and allowing your ships to destroy them in turn. What you don’t want is for your ship to go 'pop' round one allowing those enemy ships to retarget and retarget again hence you want enough gatlings but not too much. 

Details of actual weaponry will be covered post discussion of defences so we will not cover what these weapons are intended to do here.

Next up we need a brief probability discussion before we can continue into the parts of the Phoenix combat engine that use it. 

1 A lot of people are used to the concept of a gatling machine gun and some people might be confused why having actual machine guns mounted to do the same job isn't possible. A bullet hitting a missile will do just as good a job as a laser at killing it but I suspect there are two primary reasons. The first is that that ammunition would need storage space which would prove irritating to manage. The second is that is the point defence was capable at firing thousands of small bullets off then players would want to use those gatlings against other ships even if only un-armoured freighters and the like (a small rock at speed in space is quite enough to be deadly so a deliberately targeted metal bullet could be more so) and this would make it unduly powerful for what it is intended to achieve. You can see in the weapons footnotes that it is stated that the gatlings laser is not 'strong' enough to blind ships sensors and targeting computers which is a shorthand for 'at some point a smart arse player tried to use gatlings to blind sensors and targeting computers'


Now this is a fight with a lot of gatlings and a lot of missiles blowing up (Battlestar Galactica from the look of the ship being attacked)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Phoenix Space Combat System for Dummies - Part Eleven Test Battle Alpha

Image
This is how I picture the starter warship of the 'Broadsword'  class We have now covered a fair amount of basic detail concerning combat which is all very esoteric so I shall now run through some test battle reports in some detail to show what actually happens and what conclusions can be drawn - hopefully these conclusions will reinforce this series of articles basic assumptions but you never know.  Test Battle Alpha  The scenario is that two new players have set up their own combat ships and bumped into each other both being ready and willing to fight. This battle will therefore validate/invalidate some of their design decisions. Both players managed to source some decent Photon Gun Ivs and they have decent Mark Targeting Computers and a few Shields at that level I have set up what we shall term as our 'Blue' ship which is an NHS flagged normal hulled, medium armour patrol ship. It has pretty good shields, poor speed, poor scintillators (only Mark I) and no less than t
Read more

Phoenix Combat Game Improvements

Image
No system is perfect and there are some minor and less minor tweaks that can be made to the game engine to make the game even more enjoyable for players and especially to assist new players in getting more heavily involved in this side of the game. This will be a longish post but for those less interested in rambling verbiage I shall highlight the specific suggestions in red so peeps who want to come move straight to the suggestions and their reasons. Current Situation  Serious combat in game is hard mainly because of the effort involved and the ramifications. The effort is partly game engine and partly players the ramifications are all player caused. One of the biggest player caused issues is an unwillingness to fight unless you have a huge pre-ponderance of force. This leads to a lot of alliances and shifting tactical situations which is actually a good thing. What isn't is the automatic increase in threat that can happen. Let me provide an example. Affiliation A sends its 20 war
Read more

Phoenix Space Combat System for Dummies - Part Eight Armour

Image
There are several different armour types out there with some (Light Plate) mainly used for fast ships not expecting to slug it out and others (Korondite Plate) mainly for stealth with much the same intention. We will not focus much on these as they are often attempts to avoid combat and we are concerning ourselves with a generic ship that slugs it out over several days. For these sort of warships there are two armour types that are head and shoulders above the rest and these are Armour Plate and Ablative Armour Plate.  Let us take each in turn. The most common is Armour Plate which is the workhorse of armour types and the most common you will (probably) have and encounter for major warships that are not toolkit smaller types designed for specific tasks. The basic Mark I armour provides a default armour depth of 80 and each mark increases this by 20 so Mark II = 100, Mark III = 120 and Mark IV (this is described as Advanced Heavy Armour on Battle reports) at 140. Since armour uses the s
Read more