Vehicle And Spaceship Damage

[atgxtg]

This is just an idea, but what if instead of the automatic bumping up that vehicle damage gets in 2R&E we just applied a -1D per damage level penalty to the vehicle's soak?

It would allow vehicles the possibility of taking multiple light or heavy damage hits, while still masking them more likely to break up.

For example, let's say that an TIE/ln has suffered Serious Damage, but gets hit by a blast of laser fire from an A-Wing (5D damage). The TIE would soak at only 0D due to the Severe damage,m and would just have to take the full damage rolled. Now Odds are that the A-Wing will do at least 16 points and blow the TIE out of space, but there is a chance that the TIE could hold together, but suffer more damage.

[garhkal]

Sounds like it would make it easier to blow targets up.. pc ships included.
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[atgxtg]

[Raven Redstar]

I'm going to have to re-read that section, because that's not the way I remember vehicle damage.
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[Raven Redstar]

Right, but lightly damaged can be done over and over with no inflation.
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[atgxtg]

[Raven Redstar]

But if it gets lightly damaged initially, it can be lightly damaged over and over as long as it doesn't end up with -5 moves, right?
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[atgxtg]

[vanir]

In computer modelling with flight simulators you have a finite structural integrity that decreases with even light damage, so that maintaining the same performance marques following some kind of damage (whether combat damage or exceeding airframe limitations), starts to damage the craft further. Essentially you reduce the stresses on the airframe to keep it from failing the more you threaten the structural integrity.

Say if you have an Eagle with +9/-3 advertised, but +8/-2 pilot guidelines and you go +13G during a tight manoeuvre avoiding a snapshot. Now you'll want to keep it under +6-7G or you might lose a fin or wing. Same thing goes with combat damage.

So in that context, following combat damage even if light, maintaining the same performance marques will absolutely multiply any further damage due to the reduced structural integrity.

Because the stresses on an airframe are in four dimensions (velocity vector, Alpha and inertial acceleration comes into play so it's not just three dimensions), and they're designed to perform in a fairly specific way (ie. not tumbling through the air but flying in a forward motion), all sorts of very strange things happen when airframe stresses are exceeded. This includes the molecular makeup of the very metals used in construction changing due to stress retempering.
Aircraft aluminium becomes more brittle the more flying hours you have on an airframe, for example, the metal itself is altered by the stresses involved.

Structural integrity is a big thing with aircraft.

[Fallon Kell]

[vanir]

Actually that's not bad, I haven't thought about that take on it before, have to contemplate it further.

The trick with airframe stress limits is what they call normal variation. The listed rating is that which falls within the normal variation of what a random production example of that airframe construction can handle fairly reliably. You can generally exceed this by around 50% safely but the pilot has to consider the effort a light damage to the airframe by default, and subsequently reduce stresses and record the experience in the flight log.

So in practise an Eagle can take around 11-13G on a light fuel load okay, but smart play is to tell yourself as a pilot you've just damaged the plane, just good practise. In fact Eagles have demonstrated 11+G several times in service.
It's just the listed rating is a reliable one, in the case of the Eagle (or Flanker) the accelerometer the pilot is supposed to watch actually redlines at +8G, in an F-16 at +9G. There's also markings on the Alpha meter (angle of attack), so during BFM the pilot is supposed to watch those two guages like a hawk and keep his airspeed in the sweet zone by type.

Exceeding the accelerometer damages the bird, exceeding the alpha meter causes departure.
Interesting thing though, during emergencies like when someone is trying to kill you very badly, both are often exceeded in the combat record. Even during dissimmilar flight training F-16 pilots using the Block 30 (analogue FCS) manage to frequently exceed alpha limiters to bring the nose around hard, in aircraft like the Fulcrum it's actually built into the design to do this and the pilot can just switch the FCS (and alpha limiters) off from the cockpit with the flip of his fingers (the MiG is very well suited to this due to neutral inherent stability), but modern birds are very hard to handle doing this (pilot workload goes up exponentially and it's already very high in the MiG).
Similarly, the pilot will often assess how much exceeding airframe limitations are worth to him to survive an encounter and it comes down to his personal judgement of what to make the plane do to get home safely.
Newer types like the Raptor make this process even easier because the FCS runs concurrant simulations whilst you're flying and steps in if what you're doing is a bit silly.

[ZzaphodD]

I impose a -1 pip penalty for each light hit after the first. If the ship get more serious damage the penalty is reset to 0.

Simple and easy without raising deadliness too much..

Also, I can find it rather amusing seeing the players try to cope with several 'light damage' results. On the fly repairs, jury rigging and whatnot.
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[atgxtg]

I'm not so worried about multiple light hits not bumping up, but I am worried about the automatic bump ups at Heavy and Severe damage. Yeah, I can see the idea that a compromised frame is going to have trouble holding together (in fact, going at high speeds can also cause a compromised hull to break up), but it shouldn"t be automatic. There is still a chance that a hit might take out a non-vital system. Just because half a wing is shot off does"t mean an aircraft would break apart if a couple of bullets hit the radio.

How about the vehicle suffers +1D to any damage it takes if it is heavily damaged or worse? That way the compromised frame make the vehicle more likely to break apart, but it can still take more light damage.

[vanir]

What about different rules for the class of ship.

Going by the combat record, a WW2 navy destroyer can handle being almost blown to oblivion and not only keep floating but keep fighting until literally chopped in half and sunk. Ship damage is really measured by how long the craft must be placed into drydock to repair and get back into action, severe damage generally means just that vessel won't be participating in fleet actions, it will be stuck in drydock or repair yards for a while. It's still a dramatic increase from severe damage to sunk or destroyed, and you can lightly damage it over and over as specific, lightly armoured systems are blown to pieces one by one (radio tower one shot, fire control another shot, etc.), at no point the structural integrity of the hull might be threatened unless the deck armour is pierced and the magazines struck. By default that's more than a lightly damaging kind of shot to start with, so you really need a heavier guage attack/damage excess to raise the structural damage received from light to heavily or severely damaged.

See ships are weird because the superstructure is built onto a separately constructed hull section, so warships of this type were really like two craft in the one, a superstructure-craft, and a hull-craft, you can threaten one with damage exclusively, it won't affect the other necessarily. But you have to do the hull to sink the ship.

Compared to the rendition I made previously regarding aircraft structural integrity and construction wrt damage, they're completely different kettles of fish yet use the same damage system in SWU.

Perhaps starfighters and other starships should use different systems. One for starfighters like that of aircraft, one for other starships (particularly multicrewed types), more like ship damage in WW2.

Just a thought. Haven't put anything concrete like this into our game but the abstract for it is there. Perhaps a concerete system and tables would be a good idea.


Just had a random thought: what if when damaging multicrewed starships, repetitive light damage kills crewmembers but doesn't increase hull damage to the next level?
So you can disable a ship by destroying individual systems and killing the crew with repetitious light damage, but you can only lightly damage the structural integrity of the ship if you can only make light damage results with your attacks?
Sort of makes starcruisers much tougher in game and separates them from starfighter class vessels, which is certainly desirable to me but everyone has their own preferred gameplay style.
I like the way it makes things like light freighters much sturdier than high performance starfighters too, the typical adventuring starship is a freighter and you want it to be sturdy even if performance is ordinary on paper. That survivability factor, crashing on an alien world rather than being disintegrated every time a couple of TIE have too much piloting dice.



You know, one of the things about the P-47 that made it such a sturdy aircraft, the engine was really hard to take out is one thing, but it wasn't particularly heavily armour plated or anything, you wouldn't want the turbo getting hit. It's just the overall size of the bird made any vital systems, including the pilot, so small by comparison they were really really hard to hit. Germans used heavy cannon banks by then in all their fighters and some FW-190 literally emptied their entire magazines into them hitting nothing but empty space and bracing bands.

When you have more area, it's just harder to do significant effect with individual shots unless they're real king hitters like a heavy FlaK.

[ZzaphodD]

I once worked on a system where different parts of capital ships all tracked their own damage record. A Star Destroyer (or even smaller captials) where divided into sections which took damage separately (each sector could house different systems, weapons, engines, crew etc). The idea was that (especially) combat warships where built to be able to fight even though sections had been severely damaged (tranferring command to the secondary bridge, only having port side turbolasers operating for example).

In the end I didnt think it was worth the trouble as most capital combats where narrated rather than played out in our games.
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My Biggest Beard Retard award goes to: The Admiral of course..