 April 5, 2018 - 8:16am | Does it make any sense anymore that KHs lacks guided missiles? Sure rockets that fire and impact in one game turn dont really NEED to be self guiding, their chance to hit is resolved against the targeting of the mother ship firing them. Guided missiles, in KHs, would then be anything that stays on the board for a turn or more. the seeker missile comes to mind but the rules governing this are dated. they were designed to simulate the WW2 exp of a torpedo that could come back at the firer and take them out. It also seems to me that Electronics warefare, jamming and telemetry links are important to this discussion. Drones and probes become important as well I suppose. Oh and you'd need to add point defense weapons Im thinging or allow laser batteries to be used for point defense or any battery weapon can function as point defense as well as actual ship killing. Side note: adding EW and tweaking the jamming rules in KHs potentially gives the Astrogator with all his computer expertese something more to do that could have a big impact on a battle where he would normally only be a passenger. Although I guess modifying the game to be more long range oriented would actually change the game into something entirely different? if there is long range sniping with ships holding open the range because they are missile heavy and have no desire to get close in. To be sure I would not want the record keeping of waves of missile as in the Honor Harrington series, talk about book keeping. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 April 6, 2018 - 6:03pm | Well, you have some good ideas here. You could adapt Star Fleet Battles rules for drones. They are a type of seeker/guided missile and they can be long range. And, yes, why shouldn't laser's be allowed for point defense. It would again be like Star Fleet Battles or Battlestar Galactica or Babylon 5. Joe Cabadas |
April 7, 2018 - 5:08am | Laser cannons as point defense- not feeling that but certainly any battery weapon which is 360 degree firing. including rocket batteries. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 April 7, 2018 - 12:24pm | I'm pretty sure the Star Wars game permits lasers to ber used defensively against inbound projectiles (rockets & missiles), the various PC games allow it and they are very GDW SW RPG based. |
 April 8, 2018 - 4:27pm | I'm not entirely certain I understand the thrust of this topic, but... Torpedoes have automatic guidance systems. But that doesn't mean there is no skill involved by the gunner. That character must select his target by computer, enter the criteria by which it is to track its target, and who knows what else to operate the system. I'm sure it's not some guy in a chair going PEW! PEW! PEW! |
April 9, 2018 - 5:31am | KHs rockets are rather short legged when the reality is and will be missiles capable of powered flight for several KHs scaled hexes. would have on board targeting software. The seeker missile is the closest thing to reality and its dumn. It will simply target anything on the table even the ship that fired it. I think KHs could really use proper missile but introducing that will change the game. combat will become more long range. Require point defense, Electronic warefare and jamming enters in more. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
April 9, 2018 - 5:53am | KHs rockets are rather short legged when the reality is and will be missiles capable of powered flight for several KHs scaled hexes. would have on board targeting software. The seeker missile is the closest thing to reality and its dumn. It will simply target anything on the table even the ship that fired it. I think KHs could really use proper missile but introducing that will change the game. combat will become more long range. Require point defense, Electronic warefare and jamming enters in more. With hexes that are 10,000 km in length, one could already argue that KH has long-range combat. One thing I think I read -- maybe a posting by TerlObar -- was 1g acceleration was little more than 3,000 km. So, being able to accelerate at 1 hex per turn is quite a lot of Gs, not mentioning those ships that move faster. Maybe one thing to do is shrink the hex sizes down. Planets and their gravity effects would grow larger, but then you could figure out what the G forces are by the accel/decel speeds. Just a thought. Joe Cabadas |
April 9, 2018 - 6:22am | With ADF of 1 to 5 in game for ships we presume that the highest ADF strains the limits of core 4 biology and Frontier Technology to make ADF 5 possible. However its more than likely only an engineering problem to move something at higher ADF. say 6 to 10 ADF you would want such missiles to be fast burn- that they only have ADF for a limited number of turns (the seeker weapon opperates for 6 turns with an ADF of 2 and it behaves like a mine attacking whatever is close to reguardless of nationality/flag) This attack anything feature of the seeker makes it a mix bag weaopn that most militaries would seek to replace. I would propose a Type A, B, and C missile Missile Rack for the 3 basic categories of hulls Minuim hull size for the A is the HS 3, minimum hull size for the B is HS 5 and MHS for C is 15 Type A might have ADF 6 and duration of 2 turns Type B ADF 7 and duration of 3 turns Type C ADF 8 and duration of 4 turns I would imagine the Type A missile rack to be a replacement for the Assault rocket rack and would hold a similar ammount of ordinance. and scale the other racks appropriately. Missiles that burn out have gone ballistic have a small but greatly reduced chance to still hit their target if the target does not use MR or ADF after the missile burns out ie orbiting space station or a ship continuing blindly at same speed and course. Such weapons would be your long range dueling weapons before ships move into the range of energy weapons. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 April 9, 2018 - 10:09am | IIRC, missiles aren't that large, so perhaps they're limited by the amount of fuel they have and this limits the amount of maneuvering that they can do. Being smart or guided means that they'd have to be able to make constant adjustments to their attack vector, and this would require fuel. |
 April 9, 2018 - 5:56pm | Well, to quote from the weapon descriptions: Torpedo - MPO / LTD / Range: 4 / Damage: 4d10 A tropedo is a self-guided nuclear bomb that homes in on it's target after it is lanched. torpeds are proplelled by prolonged fission reactions which enable them to travel at tremendous speeds. ... Assault Rockets - MPO / FF / LTD / Range: 4 / Damage: 2d10+4 ... Assault rockets are powered by a brief fusion reaction which causes them to fly even faster than torpedos. Unlike torpedos, however, assault rockets are not guided missiles. They rely on their tremendous speed to hit their target before it can dodge away. ... It doesn't explicitly say how rocket batteries are guided but it compares them to assault rockets so I'd assume un-guided. So the torpedos are already guided. I really think the limited range is a fuel issue. Remember this things are only 20 and 10 cubic meters in size respectively and most of that is probably fuel and the propulsion system. For comparison, a modern Trident missile is 45 cubic meters. And while it it has to deal with gravity, it has a range of maximum range of ~12,000 km or 1.2 hexes with a partial payload and 7800 km (0.78 hexes) with a full payload. Obviously launched in space it would have a greater range. It would be interesting to find the exact thrust data on its engine if one could. In any case, with the KH weaponry you're getting many times the performance in even less space already. So I think you could have longer range missiles, but they would be much larger. On top of that, how do you handle guidance if the missile is on the board for longer than a turn? Treat it unrealistically like a seeker missile allowing it to make as many turns as it wants? Impose vector movement rules on it? Limit it's MR to 1 or maybe 2 total? It would definitely add complications. Another thought. The range of a torpedo in the game as stands is 3.3 times the diameter of the Earth. To cover that distance in a single 10 minute turn requires 22.7g constant acceleration for the entire 10 minutes. Which isn't unreasonable. However, if you assume that the actual flight time is less, the acceleration goes up significantly. For example with only 5 minutes of flight time, the accelration jumps to 90.7g for those five minutes. And assuming it is making course corrections, the acceleration actually has to be higher than that in both cases. Anyway, just some ideas to think about. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
April 9, 2018 - 8:40pm | The seeker missile is the closest thing to reality and its dumn. It will simply target anything on the table even the ship that fired it. Actually it targets the largest ship in range, and is placed as a mine at the start of the game. In other words, it is dormant until a ship enters the hex in which it was placed, then it fires up and tracks the largest vessel within its limited range...changing targets as larger vessels enter and leave said range. It's actually more of a guided mine. |
April 10, 2018 - 8:22am | Another thought. The range of a torpedo in the game as stands is 3.3 times the diameter of the Earth. To cover that distance in a single 10 minute turn requires 22.7g constant acceleration for the entire 10 minutes. Which isn't unreasonable. However, if you assume that the actual flight time is less, the acceleration goes up significantly. For example with only 5 minutes of flight time, the accelration jumps to 90.7g for those five minutes. And assuming it is making course corrections, the acceleration actually has to be higher than that in both cases.
I don't see a problem here. The "tremendous speed" of torpedos and assault rockets is presumably "faster than ships," more or less. Ships have ADFs of up to 5, so torpedoes and assault rockets can easily have ADFs greater than that. If we lowball it and say a torpedo has an ADF of 6, that means it doesn't actually accelerate for the entire ten-minute turn, since its maximum range is only 4. And you can't make the argument that course corrections and turns slow down the torpedo, since assault rockets are not guided, are faster than torpedos, and still only have a range of 4. These weapons have an absolute minimum ADF of 4, and very probably go much faster than this and don't accelerate for an entire turn. |
