Phoenix Space Combat System for Dummies - Part Thirteen Test Battle Delta - Torpedos

So far in our mini-war of a lightly armed scout versus our heavily shielded exploration vessel we have not seen much to alarm the exploration vessel.

Both ships though have changed it up slightly. The Exploration vessel has upgraded from the single photon scatter gun to a single Photon Gun Mark IV just cause what appears to be shining a torch at the enemy has done nothing at all.

The scout this time has decided to fire torpedo's instead of missiles.

The Attacking Ship

We should briefly look at how the turn report shows the new weapon

 SPACE WEAPONS                                                                |

|                                                              ACC       AF     HP        DMG      |

| 1       Torpedo Launcher (219)                                      10                        |

|         - 4 salvos of Torpedo                   +6             5                     600      |

Now the torpedo launcher is very similar to the missile launcher  with the big exception of HP (Hard points) the Torpedo launcher takes up 10 hard points whereas the missile launcher only takes up 1. 

Hard points are a weird concept but can be roughly thought of as mounts for weapons and each hull type (heavy hulls have the most hard points then normal and so on). The starter broadsword 75 Heavy Hull ship has 165 Hard points so could (if it maxed out) carry 16 torpedo launchers. If it massed missile launchers it could carry 165 of them. So that is 165 individual attacks (ammo allowing)  versus 16 so you can see here how point defence tends to be much happier dealing with torpedos than missiles. 1

But we can now see that we have four torpedoes loaded that have a worse accuracy than the missiles (+6) . Since torpedos are larger than missiles (5 MUs vs 1 MU) one hit from a gatling laser would only have a 20% chance of destroying the torpedo. It could take as much as 5 but probably 2-3 would be needed. If we briefly look at cargo

CARGO                                                                        |

| 4       Torpedo (220) - 5 mus                                       20       |

|                                                                              |

| Cargo: 0/100                          Life Support: 78/120                   |

| Magazine: 20/30                                                              |

So these 4 torpedos are taking up 20MUs of space (and needed an extra magazine installed to hold them).  As a brief comparison look at how the cargo was back when it carried 4 missiles

CARGO                                                                        |

| 2       Cloaked Kinetic Missile (2040) - 1 mus                      2        |

| 2       Missile (209) - 1 mus                                       2        |

|                                                                              |

| Cargo: 0/100                          Life Support: 78/120                   |

| Magazine: 4/15                                                               | 

So this ship could have carried 15 missiles in 1 magazine (or 30 in two) whereas the current ship could carry a max of 6 torpedos. 

The Combat -

I shall comment in italics (this time) after the relevant sections

Shields: 7000(67.3)

Armour protection: 39.9

Targeting MRC Sekkou - Tanuki (#####):

    Returning fire.

Attacking MRC Sekkou - Tanuki (#####)

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

Round 1:  1 Photon Gun mkIV

               - 1 hit - 80 [90] damage - 91%

Round 2:  1 Photon Gun mkIV

               - 1 hit - 81 [90] damage - 91%

Round 3:  1 Photon Gun mkIV

               - 1 hit - 79 [90] damage - 91%

Round 4:  1 Photon Gun mkIV

               - 1 hit - 76 [90] damage - 91%

You can see the difference the Photon Gun has made over the Scatter gun but look at how little the Korondite Plate (20 armour depth) is giving the scout. It is taking a large chunk of damage from each shot.

Incoming Fire from MRC Sekkou - Tanuki (#####)

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

Round 1:  1 Torpedo Launcher (Torpedo)

               - 1 hit - 314 (34) [600] damage - 95%

Round 2:  1 Torpedo Launcher (Torpedo)

               - 0 hit - 0 [0] damage - 95%

Round 3:  1 Torpedo Launcher (Torpedo)

               - 1 hit - 408 (25) [600] damage - 95%

Round 4:  1 Torpedo Launcher (Torpedo)

               - 1 hit - 311 (40) [600] damage - 95%

To quote Daphne from Scooby Doo. Wowzers. Remember how little the missiles did? Let us move through the rounds

Round 1 - The Shields block 170 of the 600 damage which means the shields were 55% effective. Torpedos, like missiles, have a high AF (though not AS high as missiles) of 5 so the shield depth of 67.3 is multiplied by 5 to 365.5 so the mean average damage blocked should be around 168.25. This means 430 damage moves to the armour which also gets increased by the AF of 5. Default armour depth is 40 * the AF of 5 = 200 so mean damage blocked should be 200. Only 116 damage is blocked so the armour was 29% effective against this shot and 314 hits the hulls and internals.

Round 2 - The torpedo actually missed or simply failed to explode (pick your narrative)

Round 3 - Same as Round 1 so without the explanation (which applies in exactly the same fashion) we can see that the shield blocked 125 damage (note the first shot reduced the shield depth slightly so shield effectiveness gets harder to calculate),  475 moved to the medium armour which blocked only 67 points of damage!! Leaving 408 to hit the hull and internals.

Round 4 - The best defensive round so far but still not brilliant. The shields blocked 200 incoming damage allowing 400 to the armour which managed a much better 89 points blocked (closer to 50% effectiveness). Still 311 points of damage hit the hull and internals

Post Battle Summary

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

Combat stress caused 4% integrity loss.

1 Toshiunori Oda (#1) gained 1 experience.

Naval Damage:    1 Photon Gun mkIV (307)

                 1 Sensor (103)

                 7 Shields (115)

Military Damage: 2 Human Crew (505)

                 1 Human Marine (506)

Civilian Damage: 2 ISR Type 2 Engines (145)

                 1 Jump Drive - Built-in (174)

                 2 Quarters (131)

                 1 Thrust Engine (160)

Ship hulls have taken 887 damage.

Total ship hull damage 900 (18%)

Nasty losses!! Include a built in jump drive (in retrospect using starter ships for this is a bad idea….) 2 isr engines gone make it harder to move plus it lost its defensive weaponry. Note that 3 torpedos have almost taken a heavily shielded normal hull medium armour ship to 18% damage in one day. If the attacking ship was carrying 10 launchers so was launching 10 torpedos a round then this ship is probably dead.

No doubt the officer in command is now urgently looking at getting gatlings installed. The damage shown is interesting as well because if this ship had a heavy hull then that armour would have a depth of 80 increasing to 400 (instead of 200) so would block an additional 200 points. It would still hurt but not as bad. Most warships carry point defence and with point defence you need to overwhelm with lots of targets and torpedos tend to be easier to defend against.

------------------------MRC SHIP Sekkou - Tanuki (#####)------------------------

Shields are down

Armour protection: 20

ENEMY TARGETS             SUPPORT TARGETS           DEFEND TARGETS

Tousa - sh - Daidokoro (#####)None                  None

Targeting NHS Tousa - sh - Daidokoro (#####):

    Position is on our enemy list.

Attacking NHS Tousa - sh - Daidokoro (#####)

[SHOWN ABOVE SO WE WONT REPEAT]

Post Battle Summary

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

Combat stress caused 0.5% integrity loss.

Enemy ISR field stress caused 6 damage.

Ammo Expended: 4 Torpedos (220)

1 Yukiko Kitano (#1) gained 1 experience.

1 troops promoted to veteran.

Ship hulls have taken 300 damage.

Total ship hull damage 300 (6%)

Even though the ship still took 6% damage from that one Photon Gun IV (which was obviously destroyed during round 4) the scout is perfectly happy with this result and for this series of tests the exploration ship would now keep away.

---------------------------------Battle Summary---------------------------------

NHS Tousa - sh - Daidokoro (#####) - Ship

    Survey Cruiser Class Destroyer [G] {Light Armour}*

    Armour: 39.9   Shields: 7020(67.4)

    Hull Damage: 18.0%

    Targeted by MRC Sekkou - Tanuki (#####) - 1033 [1800] Damage

    Attacking MRC Sekkou - Tanuki (#####) - 314 [360] Damage

MRC Sekkou - Tanuki (#####) - Ship

    Courier Class Scout [G] {Light Ablative Armour}

    Armour: 19.9 

    Hull Damage: 6.0%

    Targeted by NHS Tousa - sh - Daidokoro (#####) - 314 [360] Damage

    Attacking NHS Tousa - sh - Daidokoro (#####) - 1033 [1800] Damage

Conclusion

I am rare in the Phoenix universe in liking torpedos. I can see the advantages of many missiles as a counter (and anti-matter missiles pack the same punch as a torpedo just in much smaller size). I think we have effectively shown here that a torpedo armed ship can be very dangerous to a normal hulled warship. To take out a big heavy hulled ship then you really need multiple missiles and preferably of the anti-matter variety.

1 The reason this exists in the game is that way back when it was probably doing mailed turns (the actual play-by-mail) a player at some point though it would be a useful tactic to fill a light hulled freighters with 400 missile launchers and have a one round enormous attack. To prevent this moving on hard points were added and to be honest they make logical sense. A heavy warship has the structure to carry and use more weapons whereas a flying tin can (a light hulled freighter would not). As a base comparison a 75 LH ship has only 24 hard points.