Phoenix Space Combat System for Dummies - Part Five Hit!


It's a couple of big warships from the Starship Troopers Universe where you can imagine some of the Human factions fighting a Hex type group.


For the purposes of moving through a ships defensive protection we shall be using one of the more vanilla weapons in the game - the Photon Gun. This is because many other weapons are designed to affect some damage layers differently and though we might touch on these in some of the individual defence blog posts most detail will be saved for looking at the weapon individually. This sort of weapon is also not impacted by point defence which removes an added complication. Photon weaponry is the main most 'energy' weapon type in game and ranges from light photon guns, photon guns to photon cannons and photon batteries. The Mark IV variant of this weapon does exactly 90 Damage if it hits an enemy (note that weapon damage is fixed so is always at that value, no randomness with the maximum damage it might cause).

When a photon/nova weapon hits a ship each individual hit is handled separately (though all weapons of the same type are reported as a group)  

i.e 

Round 1:  30 Photon Gun mkIVs   - 29 hits - 761 (398) [2610] damage - 95% 

So in this case each one of thirty Photon Guns fired separately and was handled by the application separately with it being reported on one row (per round). Each weapon is grouped for the Battle Report with others of exactly the same Mark and Type ( so if you had 10 Photon Gun II's, 30 Photon Gun IVs and 2 Photon Cannon I's then you would see three lines on the battle report per round).

When a weapon hits think of the defending ship as a layered object as follows (naturally if you don’t provide armour/scints/shields your own ships could be missing various defensive levels. Traders would often only have 'hulls') 

As a rough visual conception it looks something like this 

A cross section of everyone's favourite Rogue Trader 'Firefly'

In the center is the juicy innards containing Crew, weapons, engines, cargo and all other internal items.  

This is surrounded by a layer of hulls. 

This is potentially surrounded by a layer of armour. 

This is potentially surrounded by protection provided by the Shields 

This is potentially surrounded by protection provided by Scintillators 

Any hit starts at the outside of the object and has to work its way progressively through each layer starting with the Scintillators  (if they exist). Apart from scintillators all levels follow the same pattern of degradation and the more damage they block the potentially weaker their defences get. Scintillators are a major exception in that they don’t degrade through use but can degrade as the ships scintillators are blown up. Shields degrade both through absorbing damage and when the shield internal items are destroyed. Armour degrades in much the same way and hulls are destroyed until the ship is destroyed. 

We shall continue are path through combat by looking at the outside layer and 'Scintillators'  next.



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