Full Steam - Playtest and Breakthrough!

A couple of months ago I did a playtest of Binhan's Wet Thrust rules as
it
applied to the Russo-Japanese War. The playtest report can be found in
the
archives. In essence, the big problem was lethality. The system was just
too
lethal. While long range gunnery was okay, short range was shredding
cruisers
and the smaller ships. 

I think I've found a way around this problem.

I was thinking a bit about Wet Thrust/Full Steam recently. I have been
redoing
my Russo-Japanese War stats for the game General Quarters. This got me
back on
the Wet Thrust/Full Steam track. With the release of the FT Fleet Book,
I
thought it might be interesting to try converting Wet Thrust/Full Steam
to the
FT2.5 (i.e. Fleet Book) rules. But there's still that nasty deadliness
problem. A beam weapon does damage to an unshielded spaceship 50% of the
time.
This is just too high for historical naval battles.

Then it hit me: why use six sided dice?

By integrating different sided dice to the existing beam rules, an
easily done
thing, the probabilities completely change. From 50% on a 1d6, you get a
75%
chance of damage on a 1d4, 37.5% on a 1d8, 30% on a 1d10, and 25% on a
1d12. 

I'll cut to the chase. Using the Fleet Book construction rules, I
designed a
small scenario of one battleship and one cruiser per side. The following
is a
set of notes for creating the ships and a playtest report.

SHIP DESIGN

I used the Fleet Book's mass rules for creating a ship. I took the
historical
ship's tonnage and divided it by 100 to get the FTFB mass. I then used
the
mass to figure out the number of damage boxes on the ship. Funny enough,
when
it came to adding weapons to the ship the FTFB mass wasn't THAT far off.

Example: the Fuji had a listed mass of 12,533 tons. I misread the
listing (all
stats are from Conways All The World's Fighting Ships, 1860-1905) and
used the
tons from her sister ship, the Yashima. The Yashima's tonnage was 12,320
so I
gave the Fuji 123 mass points. An average hull has 30% of its mass as
hull
boxes, giving 37 hull boxes. In the FTFB rules, ships have a maximum of
4 rows
of hull boxes, so the Fuji has 10/9/9/9 hull boxes.

Damage control parties were assigned as per the FTFB rules.

For armour, I took the average thickness of hull armour in inches,
divided by
2 and gave that many hull boxes (all ships had nickel/steel armour).
Fuji had
5 boxes, the Borodino had 3.

For thrust/speed ratings, I took the ship's top speed in knots and
divided by
6. I allowed half-inch fractions. 

Finally, the guns. I used FTFB's 6 fire arcs, instead of the old 4 fire
arc
system. I plotted the guns as batteries. The Fuji had 10 batteries of 6"
guns,
and two batteries of 12" guns. The 12" guns were two guns per battery,
while
the others were single guns per battery. This meant that a 12" battery
could
only fire at one target, but it rolled twice as many dice as usual. I
ignored
any guns smaller than 3".

Guns were treated as beam batteries, with the following modification:

- a roll of 1 indicated a hit for two points of damage, and a reroll for
extra
damage
- a roll of 2 indicated a hit for one point of damage
- a roll of 3 indicated a hit for one point of damage
- a roll of 4 or greater was a miss

The prevalent calibres of this era were 3", 4.7", 6", 8", 10", and 12".
The
larger guns were treated as Class 3 batteries (36" range = 1 die, 24" =
2
dice, 12" = 3 dice), the intermediate guns (6" and 8") were treated as
Class 2
batteries, and the smaller guns as Class 1 batteries. Instead of rolling
6
sided dice, though, the 12" guns rolled 8 sided dice and the 10" guns
rolled
10 sided dice. Likewise, the 8" guns rolled d8s and the 6" guns rolled
d10s.
In the small calibre, the 4.7" rolled d8s and the 3" rolled d10s.

Finally, to better represent armour, I gave battleships level 2 screens
and
cruisers level 1 screens (I didn't actually call them screens, I just
listed
them as combat modifiers).

In the end, 12" guns on the Fuji have a 25% chance of hitting a ship at
long
range and doing damage, a percentage that is quite close to that listed
in
other games I have for this period.

OTHER RULES

I kept the other rules to a minimum. I moved the ships in keeping with
naval
vessels and not with the FT rules. This needs to be fleshed out a bit,
but I
required that the battleships had to move 1.5" before they could make a
30
degree turn, while the cruisers could do the same after only 1" of
movement.

I also required that the ships have an unobstructed line of sight to
each
other. In other words, when measuring from the front funnel of the
firing ship
to the front funnel of the target, no part of another ship can pass
through
this line. Line of sight was important, as you had to be able to see
your
shots dropping on the target in order to correct.

PLAYTEST

For the playtest, I had the Japanese ships Fuji (battleship, 2x2 12"
batteries, 10x1 6" batteries, speed 3, 5 armour, 10/9/9/9 hull, level 2
screen
equivalent) and Idzumi (cruiser, 8x1 6" batteries, speed 3, 0 armour,
3/2/2/2
hull, level 1 screen equivalent) versus the Russian ships Borodino
(battleship, 2x2 12" batteries, 6x1 6" batteries, speed 3, 3 armour,
11/10/10/10 hull, level 2 screen equivalent) and Pallada (cruiser, 8x1
6"
batteries, speed 3.5, 1 armour, 5/5/5/5 hull, level 1 screen
equivalent).

The edge goes to the Russians as the Russian ships are bigger, however
the
Japanese ships have more guns to bear. This should be a close battle.

Both fleets started at the table edge with the battleship in line in
front of
the cruiser. They were lined up almost opposite each other. Both forces
began
to close at top speed. The battleships started firing at long range.
Borodino
did minimal damage to the Fuji, but Fuji did a good amount of damage to
the
Borodino, so that before the ships had hit 24" range, Fuji still had not
taken
a hull hit (armour absorbed most of it) but the Borodino was half way
through
her first damage track.

At this point, the Russians made a crucial error. The Japanese turned to
starboard in an attempt to cross the Russians' "T". The Russians did not
respond until the following turn. This meant that the Japanese got
turned
first unmasking the Idzumi from behind the Fuji. The Fuji fired a
broadside at
the Borodino, who responded. However, the Pallada was still screened by
the
Borodino and could not fire. Idzumi fired on the Borodino. The Borodino
crossed its first threshold line. The only thing hit was the engines,
slowing
the Borodino to 1.5" per turn.

This was a crucial problem, as it allowed the Japanese to jump ahead.
Fuji and
Idzumi continued to pound Borodino as the range rapidly closed. Both
ships
fired full broadsides, while the Pallada--once it became unmasked--could
only
fire forward guns at the Idzumi. Fuji outpaced Borodino and turned once
more.
The Fuji had finally crossed the Borodino's T. Fuji was firing full
broadsides
at Borodino while Borodino could only fire 1 12" battery and 1 6"
battery back
at Fuji. The pounding commenced. 

Borodino split its fire between Fuji and Idzumi, while Pallada
concentrated on
the smaller Japanese ship. Idzumi crossed two thresholds at once, lost
two
batteries and half her speed. The following turn, the Idzumi took a
devestating hit from Pallada and was sunk. 

Borodino was not long for this world. Another broadside salvo from Fuji
at
close range knocked out Borodino's forward 12" battery. One turn later,
the
Borodino took on water and began to sink. This left a damaged Fuji to
take on
the undamaged Pallada. The two ships manoeuvred and traded shots, but
the
Pallada was no match for the Fuji's 12" guns. With one devestating shot
(a
total of 10 points of damage), Pallada's magazines exploded and she sunk
beneath the waves. (Note: in a campaign game or properly set up
scenario, the
Pallada would have tried to escape the battle. With her greater speed
and the
disposition of the ships when the Borodino was sunk, the Pallada stood a
good
chance of escaping.)

The entire battle took about 25 minutes of real time to play, but that
was
with verbal movement orders, not written. The results were far more
"realistic" than the first playtest. The hits at long range were few and
none
too damaging, but they set up the slugfest to come. Damage seemed to be
modelled relatively accurately.

The game was decided by the mistake on the Russians' part. If the
Borodino had
turned at the same time as the Fuji, or if it had turned away from the
Fuji,
not towards, the Pallada would have been unmasked sooner and the battle
would
have been evened out. As it was, a tactical mistake was the Russians'
undoing.

THINGS THAT NEED MORE WORK

On the whole, I'm quite happy with how this turned out. The game had the
right
feel for the period, if a little more beer-and-pretzels than General
Quarters
and other game systems. There are some areas that need to be fixed,
expanded,
or explored.

Movement rules need to be ironed out for this period. While the FT
movement
rules worked okay in the first playtest, I felt that they didn't capture
the
period correctly. This isn't difficult to change.

The 4.7" guns as class 1 weapons may not be accurate. Another option is
to
make 4.7" guns equivalent to Class 2 beams but have them roll 12 sided
dice. 

While the armour seemed to work, it is very "gamey". The armour rules
are fine
for FT where you have starship armour blown away by high-tech weapons.
For
this historical period the armour rules don't have the right feel.
Another
option is to use varying strengths of hull to represent armour. Strong
hulls
would be battleships, average would be armoured cruisers, weak would be
protected cruisers or light cruisers, and destroyers, and very weak
would be
used for civilian ships. This would also give Binhan very strong hulls
for his
WWII battlewagons. If I incorporate this, I would probably do away with
the
level 1 and level 2 screen idea. Instead, ALL shots would do one damage
on a
roll of 2 and two damage (and a reroll) on a roll of 1. Rolls of 3 and
above
would be a miss.

The battle was over relatively quickly, but for a large engagement like
Tsushima the game might bog down. I'll have to try a relatively large
engagement. One way of speeding things up is to half the mass and half
the
number of batteries firing. This means less dice are thrown at a time,
making
it easier to resolve combat. The same number of turns (on average) would
be
needed to sink a ship but the turns would be over quicker.

Torpedos weren't modelled. They weren't a major factor in the Battle of
Tsushima (1905) until after the Russians were mostly defeated, but they
did
have their place. I'll have to come up with reasonable torpedo rules. 

This system opens itself up to a number of die modifications using the
FMA die
shift idea. For instance, more than one ship firing on a target caused a
lot
of confusion when it came to correcting shots. A simple idea I had was
to have
players declare which ships will be fired on by more than one ship. A
marker
(in this case a green marker) is then placed beside these ships. Any
ship
without this marker can only be fired on once in the turn. Once it's
been
fired upon, a red marker is placed beside it to indicate that no other
ship
may fire on it. Any fire aimed at a ship with a green marker is shifted
up one
die type (thus the Fuji's 12" guns would roll d10s if both the Fuji and
Idzumi
were firing on Borodino).

This idea can be extended further. Poor visibility or night battles
could
shift the die type up. The Japanese had much better gunnery technique at
Tsushima, so the Japanese could shift their die type down by one type
when
firing at close range. These are just two ideas for die type shifts.

So, there you have it. All comments are welcome, particularly by those
who
want to try this out. With Binhan's original Wet Thrust rules and some
concepts I have here, we might have the makings of a fun and fast paced
naval
game that's still reasonably accurate.

Allan Goodall	     agoodall@sympatico.ca

"Once again, the half time score, 
 Alien Overlords: 142,000. Scotland: zip."
  - This Hour Has 22 Minutes