Crazy idea: starship blobber combat

[Norfleet]

If you're chugging between the stars, your own engine capacity is probably already the ceiling of engine tech of your civilization, so rockets going off significantly faster than you are out from the picture. Lasers and shit at millions of miles? LOL.

Yes, but the thing is, your ship's engine tech is lugging along a lot of things which are ship. Your missile, using the same engine tech, is just an engine, possibly with optional warhead, but this is strictly optional. It is also making a one-way trip. Your ship is loaded down with enough fuel and whatzit to go to a place, stop, turn around, come back, and then stop again. Missiles don't do that, they're making one-way trips where stopping occurs very abruptly for free. For this reason missiles are ALWAYS going to out-perform your ship, because, like you said: It uses the same engine tech, but without the baggage.

I'm unclear if that is where Norfleet got his hard-on for missiles, but in that show they are also essentially just engines which create impacts at near-light speed. The ships are designed with lasers to shoot them down and an outer shell/skin to disperse the force of such impacts with the bridge located at the center for the ship instead of on top with a window like Star Trek.

I've never heard of or even seen this show, not being a TV watcher. Mostly, it's just that missiles are really effective, and there really isn't a problem you can't solve by throwing more missiles at it. Sure, good point defense can stop missiles, but this isn't a problem you can't overcome by simply using more missiles. Even other people shooting missiles at YOU is a problem you can solve with more missiles!

Besides, real lasers aren't even particularly cool-looking. There's no beam, no pew-pew. None of that stuff you see from lazors in sci-fi. If you shoot someone with a laser in space, there's basically just an evaporating column of vaporized material coming off his ship. No pew, no beam. Missiles not only are cooler, they look cooler, too.

Lasers and shit at millions of miles? LOL.

Shooting moving targets at millions of miles with lasers is basically like trying to hit a target with several-thousand-ms lag. What you see happened several second ago and by the time the laser shot gets there, your target probably isn't. Even a slight deviation in course and you miss by hundreds if not thousands of miles. These are short-ranged weapons at best. Missiles can waste a dude from as far away as your ship can fly, because whatever the range of your ship is, that's your potential missiling distance.

 

[MRY]

Space operas tend have unrealistic space combat because realistic space combat cannot really convey the kinds of stories that space operas tend to tell. Plus, once you have the ability to easily accelerate extremely heavy objects at massively superluminal speeds, I don't even understand how "combat" makes sense any more. An FTL asteroid flung at your opponent's homeworld isn't really plausibly stoppable. Even if you fudge how FTL works (e.g., warp gates that merely preserve momentum and cannot be too close to gravity wells), the whole thing still doesn't really make a lot of sense -- why you'd use manned craft, why you wouldn't flak your entire warpable are with little robots flying around so that anyone who warped in would wind up with a drone in their heads, etc., etc. Mind you, it's not like I've spent any serious time thinking about this, it's just that I'm relatively confident that you cannot come up with a sensible setup where anything like narratively interesting warfare takes place in a galaxy-spanning setting.

Instead, you have a continuum of WWI dogfights to [insert your contemporary "hard" space opera of choice: Risen Empire, Culture, Revelation Space, what have you] -- but it really has nothing to do with what the future of warfare will really be like, it just has to do with what kind of story you want to tell and what kind of technology and battles suit that story. For a game like this, I would start with (1) what kind of rock-paper-scissors system would work best for combat (I had missiles / slugs aren't stopped by shields, lasers are stopped by shields, missiles can be shot by lasers, slugs are relatively easy to avoid) and (2) what kind of combat suits the narrative you want. Space opera fans are pretty forgiving; if it's a good yarn, that's usually enough.

 

[mondblut]

Yes, but the thing is, your ship's engine tech is lugging along a lot of things which are ship. Your missile, using the same engine tech, is just an engine, possibly with optional warhead, but this is strictly optional. It is also making a one-way trip. Your ship is loaded down with enough fuel and whatzit to go to a place, stop, turn around, come back, and then stop again. Missiles don't do that, they're making one-way trips where stopping occurs very abruptly for free. For this reason missiles are ALWAYS going to out-perform your ship, because, like you said: It uses the same engine tech, but without the baggage.

Outperform, yes. Significantly, that's questionable. Even today ICBMs and orbital flight rockets are pretty much the same vehicle with few modifications. And providing you've got the tech and the fuel to accelerate to near speed of light in few seconds, nothing prevents you from stuffing a few more engines into your ship for an added kick. There is always a hard speed cap, remember? At these speeds, space missiles will be torpedoes.

 

[Norfleet]

Even if you fudge how FTL works (e.g., warp gates that merely preserve momentum and cannot be too close to gravity wells), the whole thing still doesn't really make a lot of sense -- why you'd use manned craft, why you wouldn't flak your entire warpable are with little robots flying around so that anyone who warped in would wind up with a drone in their heads, etc., etc. Mind you, it's not like I've spent any serious time thinking about this, it's just that I'm relatively confident that you cannot come up with a sensible setup where anything like narratively interesting warfare takes place in a galaxy-spanning setting.

That's mostly because human audiences want to watch stories about humans, not about the life and times of a bunch of drones. GAMERS, on the other hand, are not under any such limitations, as the history of robot games has already proven. We're perfectly happy to have a space war game where we never see the face of a single human being, or space war games in which there are no human beings. These games already exist. Gamers are an audience much more tolerant of a lack of human interaction than moviegoers or readers.

Outperform, yes. Significantly, that's questionable. Even today ICBMs and orbital flight rockets are pretty much the same vehicle with few modifications.

That is because they are still mostly Earth-environment vehicles, and ICBMs are intended to target things that have the evasive capabilities of large cities (none at all). The constraints of operating in an Earth-dominated environment means that both such things are basically 95% rocket anyway. If you put a large city in space and tried to thrust it around using that same technology, it would be a sitting duck.

And providing you've got the tech and the fuel to accelerate to near speed of light in few seconds, nothing prevents you from stuffing a few more engines into your ship for an added kick. There is always a hard speed cap, remember? At these speeds, space missiles will be torpedoes.

Most sci-fi does not, in fact, offer this capability. That is, in any event, besides the point: it all comes down to mass ratios. To be a ship, you have to carry a minimum of 4x as much delta-V as the equivalently-ranged missile (go, stop, go home, stop again vs. just go), AND you have to carry things to handle issues of high-performance spaceflight like the Chunky Salsa Effect. A ship, therefore, must necessarily be made of a lot of things which are not directly related to moving. Missiles just don't have any of these limitations. They will always outperform your ship and you therefore cannot outrun them. The Star Trek Photon Torpedo is really more like a mass driver round with slight course correction abilities.

As is typical of schlock sci-fi (hey, we love it, but Star Trek's scale of science-hardness is basically schlock), the observed destructive power of a photon torpedo generally is somewhere below that of a brick. Yeah, a photon-torpedo-sized brick dropped from orbit will do more damage.

 

[tuluse]

The more space opera TV I have watched (and by now I only have Farscape missed), the more I feel spaceship combat as presented there (i.e. WW1 battleships majestically slogging through the void in two dimensions exchanging salvos, or worse yet, the Trek inanity) is beyond salvation.

Blobber combat is so abstract, I don't think it matters.

At least that's what I'm hoping for.

 

[tuluse]

Regarding missile spam:

If warp engines are so ridiculously rare that a multi-planet spanning empire only has a couple dozen of them, you're not gonna put one on a single use suicide vehicle.

 

[CreamyBlood]

Protector by Larry Niven is a good read. It has some great battles and a good ending dogfight at sub-relativistic speeds. I always wondered what a TBS game would be like based on it where each turn takes years and you use neutron stars or whatever to alter course. Probably kind of boring to play. Will have to read it again.

 

[Norfleet]

If warp engines are so ridiculously rare that a multi-planet spanning empire only has a couple dozen of them, you're not gonna put one on a single use suicide vehicle.

But are your warp engines how you fight? Your warp system decides a lot about how things work. A typical jump point warp drive, for instance, basically plays no role in combat, and is basically just a piece of dead weight you haul through the fight so you can get home again after you win. Or run away when you lose.

 

[tuluse]

Mechanics time. Wooo fun yeah.

My idea for combat is each turn is 10 seconds, broken down into 1 second increments. So you issue your orders, then watch 10 seconds go by, then put in a new set of orders until everything is dead.

I think what I'm going to do is have two basic types of weapons. Beam weapons and torpedoes. Torpedoes do high instantaneous damage while beam weapons do damage over time. I'm currently thinking a geometric function for increasing damage. Each weapon would have the following properties: damage on initial hit, damage increase over time, initial shield damage, shield damage over time, shield penetration, initial armor damage, armor damage over time. armor penetration, accuracy bonus/penalty.

A basic example with made up numbers: a simple laser does 1 damage per second and for each second of continuous contact an additional damage. That would be 1 damage on the first turn, 2 on the second, 3 on the third etc. Here's a spreadsheet with all the fun math if you can follow it with no words or explanation https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15BsXc6IuiaN_hTV2H8zeE6ZqfVqDgiTcmpcCyt4kWoE/edit?usp=sharing

In this example, the shield stops a percentage of damage equal to its strength and regens 1 hp per second, and the armor stop 10 damage which also has a linear relation to its strength (stops 9 at 90, 8 at 80 etc).

On the example tab it shows the first turn with a weapon I've dubbed "phaser" hitting 100% for 10 continuous seconds. The phaser does 1 normal damage increasing 1 per second, and 1 shield damage increasing one per second. With the numbers I put in, you can see it does work on the shields bringing them down to 18%, and does ok damage for a single turn to armor. However, the ships defenses do hold and it does basically nil damage to the ship internals. The damage to armor becomes ok after the whole turn, but is basically nil for the first 7 seconds. In the game proper I want 100% hit rate with a beam weapon to happen almost never. I think you should land 2 or 3 bursts that each last 2-4 seconds, with a 5 second hit feeling like scoring a critical and a 1 second hit feeling like a "gaze" to borrow a term. So I think increasing initial damage is needed. I'm also thinking a faster function for damage over time with a maximum damage per second might feel better. So laser that does 10 initial and increases 3 each second to a maximum of 19 instead. Any feedback of preferences with this would be appreciated.

What do you all think is a good percentage of health to get with a single normal hit? With the system and feel I'm going for I think the first hit should be mostly if not entirely absorbed by shields. It's more of warning/wake up to combat starting for real. After that first solid hit, that's when things get dangerous.

Also, how many rounds do you like combat to last? And how much does this change for a boss/important encounter compared to a run of the mill encounter?

Random other things I'm thinking of:

I think I want to make it very rare for torpedoes to miss completely. Instead the to hit roll determines how close it gets and how much of the explosion the ship eats.

I'm thinking most torpedoes will have negative shield penetration. So the primary tactic is to get shields very low or off before launching them.

Shield regen will mean that I'm encouraging degenerate play because the best tactic when shields are damaged is to avoid damage until they regen not just tactically, but it means no strategic resources (armor, internal hp) will be spent. So I need something that encourages higher risk. Enemy shields also regenerating will help, but there needs to be some spice or something cool about pulling off the daring maneuver where you really close, eat a lot of fire, but then blow the other guy to smithereens.

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

What do you all think is a good percentage of health to get with a single normal hit? With the system and feel I'm going for I think the first hit should be mostly if not entirely absorbed by shields. It's more of warning/wake up to combat starting for real. After that first solid hit, that's when things get dangerous.

I think this depends on how easy it is to totally repair your ships armor and HP and how many rounds the average combat should be. I'm imagining that even non-boss encounters would be more akin to minibosses than mooks, so I'm assuming regular combat would be like 10 rounds and bosses would be around 20. If its difficult to repair such that you have to make a deliberate choice to seek out repair facilities, maybe a range of damage going from 1% to 3% with good evasion potentially average evasion avoiding half of these hits. In other words, average combat will take 5-15% of your hp if you are playing neither well nor badly while boss combat would be 15-30%. Basically you can fight 4 normal ships and one boss ship before getting down to half health, at which point to have to choose whether to seek out repairs or continue space battling and risking death.

Shield regen will mean that I'm encouraging degenerate play because the best tactic when shields are damaged is to avoid damage until they regen not just tactically, but it means no strategic resources (armor, internal hp) will be spent. So I need something that encourages higher risk.

It seems like the natural tradeoff should be that evading damage consistently enough to significantly regenerate shields seriously weakens or totally eliminates your offensive capacity (perhaps by concentrating all ship power on the engines and evasive maneuvers), effectively creating a standoff where you can't be damaged and you can't damage anyone. However, if at least some attacks have a high chance of at least "grazing" a fully evasive ship (like a wide angle beam attack that has a high THC but can't focus for increasing damage over time?) and hits on full shield targets do some minor amount of non-regenerating damage to armor or systems, then the standoff just becomes a net loss. As long as the damage is low enough (like 1 or 2 points) the first hit will still function as more of a warning that shit just got real. It's not an immediate threat, but it does at least make it a net loss over the long term, which is kind of why I would favor a difficult repair, attrition oriented campaign.

So getting really close, going full offense and blowing the other dude up potentially saves you from taking small amounts of damage that, over the long rung, would be a death by a thousand cuts. Alternatively, you could just have a range at which you are "inside" the enemy's shields (and they are inside yours) so you can both just do direct damage to armor/internals. If their shield systems are stronger than yours, it would be kind of a high risk equalizer.

Basically, in my opinion, shield regen should be keyed to benefit evasion focused ship designs and highly trained pilots in relation to simply getting powerful armor or shields. Or possibly to allow you to pull back and repair key systems that have been knocked out before heading back into the fight.

 

[tuluse]

I think I over though the shield regen problems. As long as the enemy is regening at roughly the same speed, and you can't cause more damage than you take while trying to evade, it's just treading water.