One of my nephews/admirals has started reading the Honor Harrington
novels, and developed a commendable ambition to launch salvos of heavy
missiles at the OPFOR. Since I'll have to umpire, I've been browsing MT
and trying to integrate the missile rules with FB2. Heavy missiles seem a
bit of an orphan system (no FB design seems to use them for example), and
I have a few questions:
1. Interaction with FB2 armour. Should the effect of armour on heavy
missiles be the same as that for salvo missiles? My feeling is that it
should, if only to keep things simple.
2. Firing/moving heavy missiles. In the fighter movement phase? The way
MT missiles move seems more like fighter movement than the way salvo
missiles shoot. If the missiles move in the fighter phase, should they
alternate with the fighter groups to give the fighters a chance to
intercept? In vector, I think the acquisition range should be cut to 3mu
as for salvo missiles.
3. Fire control. MT is pretty explicit about this:
"One ship may launch any number of missiles in one turn, subject only to
the number it is carrying; each missile may have a different target, as
they are guided by their onboard AIs and their own fire controls."
That seems reasonable enough. I can't imagine missiles engaging over
ranges up to 60mu (60,000km?) using command guidance, beam-riding,
semi-active homing or any other form of launch-platform-dependent
guidance. If each missile has an on-board AI, sensors, IFF etc., they
should be pretty autonomous. On the other hand, I can't really accept
that the launch vessel would require *no* fire control at all. So...
Maybe one FCS per launch?
4. Point Defence. Hmmm. This is a thorny one, since PDS vs. fighters or
salvo missiles involves engaging a group of targets, whereas MT has one
PDS engaging each heavy missile and only knocking it out on a roll of 6.
Now each heavy missile *is* more costly in mass and points than a
standard fighter despite it's shorter endurance, so I imagine it as being
pretty smart, tough and equipped with its own ECM etc. but... I don't
know. I guess we'll go with the MT rule and see how it turns out.
Any thoughts, or URLs where someone's already done this? I'm not looking
for a full-on Honorverse adaptation BTW, just ways of bringing heavy
missiles into our FT 2.5 games.
Best regards, Robert Bryett
rbryett@xxxxxxxx
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