Phoenix Space Combat System for Dummies - Part Six Scintillators


I picture scints as something like this - no barrier as such just a field surrounding the ship that diffuses any laser passing through it.


The first thing  our incoming weapon has to deal with are the Scintillators. These are basically like a field that dissipates energy weapons that surrounds the ship like the shields. It does nothing versus missile/torp/rail weaponry. They tend to be common because they don’t take a lot of space for the added protection they provide. 

For the given ship size a certain amount of scintillators are required for maximum coverage. Mark I scintillators provide 20 protection, Mark II 30, Mark III 40 and Mark IV 50 IF that minimum number is reached. Scintillator protection only drops as and when internal damage is caused to the scintillators themselves. 

As with most protective items the damage blocked is calculated using the 3d probability bell curve so if your scintillator protection is '20' then you can expect a mean of 10 damage from every individual shot to be blocked by your scintillators. 

For dealing with this hit let us pretend a highly unusual combat where a raiding ship is shooting a mere two Photon Gun Mark IV's at an enemy ship for only one round (then it flees having angered the 'beast') 

This ship will get more defensive gear the deeper into the protective apparatus we get but for initial contact let us assume it has Heavy Hulls and no armour, no shields but strangely enough Mark I Scintillators for full protection (which would be '20') that only applies to energy weapons. 

The first shot 'hits' and Photon Gun Mark IV's have a constant base damage of 90. 

Round 1 Shot 1 The scintillators initially handle all the incoming damage so have to deal with 90 damage. For the first shot these scintillators block eight damage so do slightly less than the mean average of 10. The damage of 90 is reduced to 82 and this is passed on to the next layer. 

Round 1 Shot 2 this is a separate weapon so does its own 90 damage which the scintillators again get to handle.  The scintillators do exactly mean average  and block 10 so the damage passed to the next layer is 80.  

In this unrealistic example the battle report line would read 

Round 1: 2 Photon Gun Ivs - 2 Hits - 162 [180] - 100% 

(to 'translate'

{ROUND ID}: {Amount of Weapon} {Weapon Type and Mark} - {Amount of weapons in group that hit} - {Damage hitting hulls/interior} [{Total Possible damage from all guns combined in this group}] - {% of weapons fired that hit}% 

Scint damage is removed (along with armour!) from the first number after hits so 180 - 162 means that the scintillators blocked 18 damage. Note again that though the weapons are dealt with individually they are reported as a group with all other variants of the same Mark and Type as can be seen by the following example where a DEN ship was attacked by an Imperial force. 1 

Incoming Fire from IMP Corewards defender Charlie (#####) 

--------------------------------------------------------- 

Round 1:  11 Photon Gun mkIIIs 

               - 1 hit - 11 [80] damage - 26% 

          10 Photon Gun mkIVs 

               - 6 hits - 47 [540] damage - 38% 

Round 2:  11 Photon Gun mkIIIs 

               - 2 hits - 34 [160] damage - 38% 

          10 Photon Gun mkIVs 

               - 5 hits - 133 [450] damage - 50% 

Round 3:  11 Photon Gun mkIIIs 

               - 3 hits - 54 [240] damage - 38% 

          10 Photon Gun mkIVs 

               - 7 hits - 272 [630] damage - 50% 

Round 4:  11 Photon Gun mkIIIs 

               - 6 hits - 270 [480] damage - 50% 

          10 Photon Gun mkIVs 

               - 7 hits - 319 [630] damage - 63% 

Scintillators are fairly simple so we can pass on to the more involved Shields next. 

1   Horrible accuracy here but you will notice the Photon Gun Ivs do much better than the Photon  Gun IIIs which is due to the Mark IV having a boosted accuracy. This was a shared battle report so I don’t have much details of the ship involved but from the naming convention it looks to have been designed to be very fast so its dodge was impacting things. It still blew up at battle end so it did not help that much….Logically the reason weapons are grouped and reported by type/mark is because such things as accuracy and sometimes blast differ between marks and this is the simplest way to provide information on how the various weapon systems did. 

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