Re: [FT] Hardened Systems

Richard Slattery wrote:

> > The cumulative chance to lose a system is
> > 
> > 1st: 16.7%
> > 2nd: 100% - 83%*66% = 44.4%
> > 3rd: 100% - 83%*66%*50% = 72.2%
> > 
> > ie, the probabilities are multiplicative and not additive.
> 
> [snippage]
> 
> > 
> > So, if you get ~25% more use out of the system, the mass penalty
should
> > be 25%. Simple as that :-)
> 
> Ok, you got the stats right, but I think you are misinterpreting 
> them....

Nope. I've done too many simulations and battles over the last two years
trying to balance weak systems in general to do that.

> Hardened systems cannot fail at all until the second threshold 
> check, which means you don't have to worry about them failing at 
> all until almost half the ships hits are gone, as opposed to a 
> quarter. In the early part of a fight this is a major bonus.

Not exactly. It is only a major bonus if it means that you'll have more
firepower available than your enemy at some time during the battle. If
you start out with only 2/3 the firepower of your enemy it doesn't
matter
that he'll start losing some of his earlier, because *you* will reach
the
second treshold before *he* does... and he is very likely to outgun you
by a respectable margin even after his first treshold.

If the mass penalty for hardening is only 25%, you'll still be outgunned
until the enemy takes his 2nd treshold check (though you won't be far
behind after the first) and you'll still take *your* 2nd treshold check
before he takes his, but you'll have so much more firepower left (in
absolute terms, not relative) than he does after the 2nd and 3rd checks
that you'll be able to mutually annihilate each other <g> If the mass
penalty is 50%, you won't catch up - unless you're lucky early on, of
course, but you'll lose far more battles than you win.

> For selected systems it seems rather cost effective. Two firecons that

> don't even have a chance of being destroyed until the ship is half 
> gone, and will probably both still be active when the ship 
> vapourises, compared to three firecons for the same price.

Average number of FCs available for:

Treshold:      Hard:	Standard:	
      0 	2	      3
      1 	2	     2.5
      2 	1.67	     1.67
      3 	1.11	     0,83

This uses the 50% Mass penalty, or my 25% but rounded up (assuming no
other hardened systems on the ship).

On average, the only time when the "hard" FCs are more numerous than the
standard ones are after the 3rd treshold check. Yes, the certainty that
you won't lose all of them (and thus all your firepower) is nice -
that's
what you pay for, after all - but most of the time you'll have fewer FCs
available than a ship using normal ones for the same Mass would have.
Unless you're one of those people who only roll "6"s on the treshold
checks, of course - it's no coincidence that many of my older (FT2)
capital ship designs had 1-2 extra FCs, and that was when extra FCs cost
3 Mass each rather than 1. Since the FB, that particular demon seems to
have left me :-)

The chance for the hardened ship to have two working FCs after the 3rd
check isn't that good - about 30%, compared to the ~20% probability that
it'll lose both. The chance that the standard 3-FC ship loses all of its
FCs after the 3rd check is about 38%, ie twice that of the hardened 2-FC
one.

Actually, this isn't entirely true, because this ignores damage control
parties. If the *standard* ship loses systems in the first treshold
check, it has a reasonable shot of getting at least some of them back -
it should have over half its DCPs left, at least. This means that the
average probabilities for losing systems I listed above are in fact a
bit
too high.

Since the *hardened* systems won't fail until *more* than half the DCPs
have already bought it, they have a smaller chance of repairing them
early. They can repair some, but they'll have on average less time to do
it in and fewer DCPs to use, so the the DCP's impact will be less than
for the unhardened systems. The "hardened" loss percentages are a bit
too
high as well, but not as much too high as the unhardened ones.

But yes, the FC is one of the systems that benefit most from being
hardened. Depending on what you envision the FCs as it can even be
realistic - if they're the targetting sensors and scanners they'll be
pretty difficult to protect, but if they represent the Tactical officer
and his staff, well... in military SF tend to be located on the Bridge -
which is a Core system, and thus hardened already! <G>

> So, to summarise... REALLY good early in a battle, you can't lose 
> them except to needle beams/missiles (and emp missiles 
> perhaps?). 

Quite the contrary, in fact. Hardened systems are really BAD early in a
battle, since by then the enemy hasn't yet lost any systems to treshold
checks and therefore outguns the hardened ships by a rather wide margin.

Hardened systems are good *LATE* in the battle, when enough unhardened
systems have faild their tresholds while the hardened ones hopefully
haven't.

> It seems to me that for a small ship which you would normally only 
> give a single firecon to, but wouldn't consider running to two, the 
> hardened option is quite attractive. (i.e. 1 firecons ships become 
> totally useless if it goes down.

I tend to use 1 FC only on ships of Mass 40 or less - usually only on
Mass 30 or less. The minimum penalty you'll pay for hardening is 1 Mass
(which, if you adopt my idea of adding all hardened systems together
before rounding, covers 4 Mass of assorted systems), which is typically
10-20% of the total weapons payload of the ship. Sure, it buys the
hardened systems more time to be used - but the price you pay is a
significant fraction of your firepower early in the battle... indeed,
buying a point of armour has nearly the same effect for ships this small
(and the armour is slightly cheaper).
 
> I'd not consider hardening everything on a ship en masse, keeping 
> the same points per ship means your firepower vanishes, but for 
> critical systems it seems like a good idea, and a good price.

For those ships where a little hardening is most likely to make a big
difference, the price tends to be higher than it seems :-/ 

> Can't act. Can't sing. Balding. Can dance a little. 
>      MGM summary of a screen test by some guy named Fred Astaire

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Can't sing. Can'¨t dance. Can handle a sword a little."
-Pterry