Why do only capital ships have screens?

[Brandon C]

While I have the core rules for the GDW and Mongoose versions, as well as both Ships of the French Arm, I have noticed that only battleships on heavy cruisers mount screens despite the fact that the rules do not indicate that they can't be used on smaller ships. In particular just about any warship larger than a fighter has room for minimal screens.

One ruleset I am lacking is Star Cruiser, so I don't know if there is a prohibition there for screens on a ship below a certain size or power plant below a certain output or if this simply became "the way things are done" back then and no one was vocal enough asking "why?"

 

[jcrocker]

From what I recall, it was power demand. Smaller ships couldn't manage to haul around all that required power plant easily.

 

[Brandon C]

From what I recall, it was power demand. Smaller ships couldn't manage to haul around all that required power plant easily.

Okay, it could be a poor conversion to the MgT rules. In the conversion, screens draw less power than active senxors or energy weapons, but you can explicitly increase power plant size to compensate. Or more specifically, if stutterwarp and power plant have thd same rating, active sensors and energy weapons decrease stutterwarp speed significantly more than screens.

 

[McPerth]

From Ships of the French Arm page 14:

...the Ypres is also one of the first ships to employ extensive screens. The great power requirements forcé the inclusión of a large fusión power plant that could run a much larger vessel...

And see that the PP is a 150 Mw one, and the screens are only rated at 3 (quite useless in 2300AD)...

So I guess jcrocker is right, but neither I have the Star Cruiser rules.

 

[mike wightman]

In Star Cruiser screens can either be old military or new military.

Old military have ratings of 1-4, take up 10 cubic meters per rating plus 10 cubic metres (20-50), all require 40 square metres of hull and the power requirements are 1, 8, 18, 32 MW.

New military have ratings 1-6, take up 10 cubic metres per rating (10-60), all require 30 square metres of the hull and the power requirements are 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36 MW.

Hope this helps.

 

[Brandon C]

McPerth:

It looks like another case of the color text not matching the rules. It will be a few days before I am back with my GDW 2400AD stuff. I only have the MgT 2300AD core and SotFA right now.

Mike:

Yes, that helps. Interestingly, the original boxed set listed screens as being rated 1-10 but that was clearly changed not long afterwards.

The stats of screens you listed clearly put minimal shields within the capabilities of sma ll warships like corvettes and frigates. Energy requirements of 30-35MW is easily doable for a medium warship.

Right now, I feel comfortable putting screens on ships smaller than capitol warships. It might violate the spirit of canon, but not RAW.

 

[whartung]

McPerth:

It looks like another case of the color text not matching the rules.

Too bad, would have been a nice function that distinguished a capital ship other than simply raw volume.

 

[epicenter00]

Yes, that helps. Interestingly, the original boxed set listed screens as being rated 1-10 but that was clearly changed not long afterwards.

It's not so much that it was changed but that Star Cruiser and the starship combat system in 2300 are different rulesets.

The problem with screens in Star Cruiser is that you have to roll equal to or under the value of the screen for them to work and that each hit reduces the effectiveness of the screen by that amount for the turn. The latter is fine; screens are ablative, so it's understandable. It's the former that is the issue.

For instance, the best Old Military screens you can get are rating 4, which means it has a 40% chance of stopping an incoming shot; 60% of shots simply go through like it wasn't there. Its usefulness is a bit questionable.

Besides the large power draw (fusion reactors aren't on everything in 2300), it's this question of effectiveness for its enormous power draw that prevents them from being put on small ships; screens with a value 1 or 2 are essentially drawing power for no reason at all; stopping 10% and 20% of shots is practically pointless. Even 3 and 4 are questionable. Only when you hit 5 or 6 do screens become very useful, I think.

If you match this against Detonation Laser missiles, especially against the killer 10x2 of modern navies or the frightening 14x2 of the Kafers, screens as might as well not be there.

The other issue with screens is ... armor is so much better. Armor doesn't ablate and its not limited to values 6. You can get some ridiculously well-armored ships in the game (armor, hull hits, and speed are the of parts of Star Cruiser with the greatest need of revision) the most egregious example being the French Martel fighter with Armor 10. It stops like 90% of hits iirc. The Foreign Legion had like 50 (!) of these in Kimanjano. I simply fail to see how the Kafers were ever make any kind of headway against such a force.

 

[McPerth]

I guess then that the kafers have better screen tech, as thye have some ships with screens rated at 9...

 

[mike wightman]

There are a couple of areas where Kafer tech is better than even new military.

I wish The Kafer sourcebook had included Star Cruiser add-ons.

 

[McPerth]

We must not forget that the kafers have space tech since quite longer than humans

 

[mike wightman]

Yup, and the Ylii...

 

[McPerth]

The Ylii, while have superior computer tech (and are the ones behind the kafer's) have not good military tech, so I don't believe they have anything to do with screens (or weapons for what's worth).

 

[mike wightman]

I would imagine Ylii computer tech is what improves a lot of Kafer electronic systems - screens included. Then there are sensors, fire control systems etc which also all rely on computer technology.

 

[jcrocker]

The other issue with screens is ... armor is so much better. Armor doesn't ablate and its not limited to values 6. You can get some ridiculously well-armored ships in the game (armor, hull hits, and speed are the of parts of Star Cruiser with the greatest need of revision) the most egregious example being the French Martel fighter with Armor 10. It stops like 90% of hits iirc. The Foreign Legion had like 50 (!) of these in Kimanjano. I simply fail to see how the Kafers were ever make any kind of headway against such a force.

I haven't read the starship combat rules in about a decade, was there a way to punch through armour higher than 10?

Speaking of ridiculously well-armoured, most of the Kafer ships were pretty tough customers for fighters to handle. Did the Martel carry missiles? If not, then you'd pretty much need all fifty to handle one single Kafer capital ship.

Sounds like a fun scenario, actually. Where's my Star Cruiser...

 

[epicenter00]

I wish The Kafer sourcebook had included Star Cruiser add-ons.

GDW had a (pretty awful) tradition of ... not using the rules they wrote. I understand that people like Mssr Miller et al were more interested in "gaming than dealing with crunchy rules" but I've always questioned the point of these crunchy rules when the guys who wrote them didn't use their own rules because ... they were too crunchy.

You can see the results of this kind of slap-dash "let's give crunch for the grognards" in Star Cruiser Naval Architects Manual in particular. There's a contempt for the people who actually tried using those rules from GDW. It's not just Star Cruiser, either. I remember ages ago, someone writing into Challenge magazine asking why the numbers for ships in TNE didn't match the numbers you'd get from using FFS ... they outright answered they didn't use their own rules but a few more simplified formulas they used to ballpark the results that were a lot of faster ... seriously guys, if your own rules are too fiddly for you, why push them on us, couldn't you have just given us the more simple formulas to save our time as well? I got a real serious sense the consumers were being looked down upon by that.

If you try and reverse engineer a Beta battleship ... it doesn't work. I tried it once, a long time ago. I was willing to fudge some of the technology multipliers because we can assume the Kafers have different numbers. However, even doing that, there's some hard rules you can't get around, like how power plant and hull hits were figured out. I remember that the at least one (maybe all) of the Kafer ships should have had multiple pages of hull and power plant hits like the French Battleships (pretty much any ship sheet that neatly used all the PP/Hull boxes on the sheet was likely not following the NAM rules). IIRC, you can't reverse-engineer the German Bismarck either (I think the Sachsen too), because they also have made-up numbers as well.

Okay, I do understand that limiting hull and PP hits is fine because ... they were two of the most meaningless stats in SC (particularly power plant as after a tiny fraction of the hits, the PP becomes inoperable - do we really need so many hit boxes?), but I think it could have been handled a lot more elegantly.

I haven't read the starship combat rules in about a decade, was there a way to punch through armour higher than 10?

10 was the maximum iirc. However, Star Cruiser had a "critical hit" type system where a roll of 0 on the d10 penetrated regardless, so you really only needed armor 9. It made engaging Alpha-class BBs really tedious. (And made you wonder why the Kafers made anything else.)

Basically, the Foreign Legion could clean out all the Kafer Transports, those pointless Epilson cruisers, likely put a lot of hurt on any Deltas, and probably hurt the Betas pretty badly. The only ships they'd really struggle with the Alphas and Improved Alphas. But with only the Alphas left, the Kafers wouldn't be able to do much. The Martels were pretty fast, so they could basically cherry-pick their targets.

 

[McPerth]

I haven't read the starship combat rules in about a decade, was there a way to punch through armour higher than 10?

10 was the maximum iirc. However, Star Cruiser had a "critical hit" type system where a roll of 0 on the d10 penetrated regardless, so you really only needed armor 9. It made engaging Alpha-class BBs really tedious. (And made you wonder why the Kafers made anything else.)

In Invasion sourcebook, on the battle of Beowulf special rules (page 53 sidebar) it si suggested to use 1d10-1+dm, where dm is the damage multiplier for the weapon, to overcome armor.

This way, powerful weapons are really so, and if used the game might speed a little.

 

[Orr]

GDW had a (pretty awful) tradition of ... not using the rules they wrote.

Too true, sadly. Look at Classic's HG for example. GDW's own ship combat rules don't match GDW's own descriptions of ship combat and the results of ship combat don't support the kinds of ships that are said to exist.

 

[jcrocker]

If you try and reverse engineer a Beta battleship ... it doesn't work. ...IIRC, you can't reverse-engineer the German Bismarck either (I think the Sachsen too), because they also have made-up numbers as well.

I think I read once that they used a different system to come up with the 'official' ships. I know that not many of the missiles worked with the rules.

Maybe the Martel/Kafer setup was intentional, a nice spot for some good gaming. Have to give the French media something good to broadcast from the front, after the Germans keep playing reruns of the tape showing the death of the Talleyrand. Or the Ste. Jeanne D'Arc.

 

[epicenter00]

I think I read once that they used a different system to come up with the 'official' ships. I know that not many of the missiles worked with the rules.

I'm pretty certain you're right. I hazily remember them publishing the missile design rules in Challenge once. Of course, these were not actually the rules they used; I think the missiles and sub munitions don't come out right.

Of course it makes me wonder why they had the "sekrit gdw rules" and the "rules for the hoi polloi who paid for the game" - why couldn't they just give us the "sekrit gdw rules."

OTOH, GDW is long-gone, so it's not really something I carry a heavy grudge over at this point, just something that makes me Shake My Head when I look back on it.