Re: [GZG] Screens versus Advanced Screens in Cross Dimensions?

-----Original Message-----
>From: J L Hilal <jlhilal@yahoo.com>
><de-lurk>
>
>My 2 cents:
>First, there are some things that I think you have overlooked and
second my suggestions based on tinkering with a wet-navy all-gun
battleship inspired background.

>First, K-guns, as well as all other screen-skipping systems, are
balanced vs. beam batteries on the assumption that screens don't affect
them.  If you introduce a new defensive system, whether it's some type
of screen, shield, or integral armor (let's call it Kinetic Defense or
KD), then you have to re-balance all the former screen-skippers by one
or more of the following:

>1) reduce points/MASS cost (only effective if you balance games by PV,
not scenario set-up)
>2) increase range bands
>3) increase hit accuracy

Well, I'll start by just asking, have you read the Cross Dimensions
rules?	The advanced screens aren't just energy screens that are more
expensive, they're also half again the mass.  My design experimentations
have generally found that arming a particularly effective capital ship
with level 2 advanced screens, any kind of armor at all, and not gutting
either its armament or its hull integrity in the process is very, very
expensive.  Even regular screens were expensive enough that I frequently
didn't use them, and not just because they were useless against certain
weapons -- they just weren't worth the payload hit everywhere else
unless I had some stylistic reason to want them.  Advanced screens,
comparatively, are effectively almost as expensive as cloaking devices
between the sheer size of them and the 4x cost, so I've got no real
problem as such with K-guns suddenly having to face an effective
defensive system.  If you don't like it, you can simply stipulate that
no star n
 ation in your games have developed them, just as you may well already
have decided for cloaking devices, reflex fields, mixed human/Kra'Vak
ships, and nova cannons.

>Secondly, how does this new defense system affect other kinetic systems
such as MKP and scatterguns, and also other screen-skippers whose PSB
makes them screen-skippers because they are large mass objects rather
than particles or wavicles, such as human scatterpacks (mini-missiles),
salvo missiles, and p-torps.

Cross Dimensions defines the advanced screen effect as its basic
property to reduce these weapons' damage by one point per hit per level
of the screen.	The discussion of reducing the chance of K-gun extra
damage as well came out of the realization that this wasn't good enough
for the expense of the advanced screens, plus the fact that K-1s and
K-2s would be rendered completely harmless on their face.  Against most
everything else, there's not much need for further adjustment.

MKP would lose 1 or 2 points from each 4-point hit, no complexities
there.	Scatterguns and K-gun armed fighters would have their damage
reduced just as if they'd been beams against regular screens.  Salvo
missiles and pulse torpedoes are part of the Cross Dimension rules and
would just have their damage reduced.

>Next, it seems to me reading this discussion that there is some
confusion about exactly what effect this Kinetic Defense is supposed to
have against K-Guns.  There are two main effects, but the details are
not agreed upon:

>1) reduces chance of doubling damage
>2) reduces damage done
>
>For reducing the chance of doubling damage, the fine detail is whether
you subtract the KD level from the *target number* or from the K-Gun
*class* before figuring the target number.  This difference affects the
largest K-Guns.
>For example:  a class 6 KG hits a target with KD level 2.  If the KD is
subtracted from the target number, then the hit is doubled on a 5-2=3 or
less (50%), but if the KD is subtracted from the weapon class then the
hit is doubled on a 6-2=4 or less (66%).
>This also means that there is now an incentive to use even bigger
K-guns to get maximum chance of doubling against heavily defended
opponents.

Subtract from the target number, and the initial damage (or, if you
wish, the total damage, it's the same thing).  So a K-6 would do 4
points of damage base, would need to roll a 1-3 to get the extra, and
gets the full 6 points of extra damage for 10 total points of damage. 
That'll pretty much neutralize the guys who want to use K-7s and rules
lawyer that they shouldn't see any penalty in their extra damage
chances, right along with the guys who used to load up on all K-3s in
order to min-max their damage-to-weight ratio (assuming these aren't the
same guys to begin with, they likely will be ;)

>In addition you are assuming that KD level will top out at level 2. 
FT2/MT had screens going up to level 3, and the reason this was dropped
for FB1 is spurious at best.  Using both screen level 3 and allowing
Kinetic Defense level 3 allows more variety in your games.  It also
means that the chance to double damage against KD3 does not max out
until you reach Class 8 k-guns (8-3=5).  And incidentally that KD level
3 is immune to class 3 K-guns.

I'm not privy to what the decision making process was, but I would
assume that level 3 screens were removed at least partly because they
were just too good, to a point that _not_ putting them on any ship you
wanted to have anywhere near a firefight was an insanely bad idea.

And yeah, advanced screen 3s, if they existed, would relegate K-3s to
the same category that K-1s and K-2s are in now, where we may or may not
have to put in a special rule to make them useful at all against such
systems.  On the other hand, a level 3 advanced screen (if it existed)
would cost you 22.5% of the ship's mass and, at 4x cost, would only be
slightly less expensive in points just by itself than a cloaking device.
 Unless you want to gut your other systems, it's going to take a very
large ship to absorb that cost and still achieve weapons parity, so
that'd pretty much make it _more_ expensive than a cloak in the end.

>Instead of using kinetic-defeating screens for my big-gun setting, I
used Integral Armor based on the original KV from MT.  This is analogous
to belt armor on battleships.  Ablative armor/carapace/shells from
FB1/FB2 is analogous to double- and triple-hulls, wet and dry
anti-torpedo spaces and the American All-Or-Nothing armoring scheme. 
Integral Armor is also useful for settings without screens or shields
such as Babylon 5 and BSG.

I like the armor system in the fleet books much better.  There's more
cost to it than simply making the hull more expensive, and it accounts
for the idea that armor actually gets destroyed to a point of no longer
being effective when it's hit often enough.

>As far as small K-guns being ineffective against heavily armored ships,
I don't mind that at all.  Historically, a lot of battleships were
immune to the fire of 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-inch guns (and in some cases
even 8-inchers).

Well, if you had a ship with a level 2 advanced screen and four layers
of armor, you'd need to get extra damage from a K-6 just to penetrate to
the hull at all before you'd pounded the armor into uselessness or
destroyed one of the screens.  On the other hand, you're probably
investing 40% of your ship mass to defense to get anything effective
like that, so if you're willing to actually do that, you probably
deserve it.  ;)

I've been experimenting myself in my test games with ships with level 2
advanced screens and two layers of armor thus far.  It's powerful, but
very expensive -- a capital ship that wants worthwhile armor as such
without gutting a capital ship scale armament pretty much has to go over
300 mass to do it, which makes the total cost of the defenses rather
vast, indeed.

E/Stilt Man
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