OT Starfire/Starbase assault

Roger Books wrote in reply to  j a c's complaint about untakable
Starfire WPs:

> Easily remedied, sounds like the mass limits need to be upped.  Or
> you could do that thing from the other David Webber/(someone else)
> novels, you can bring more through, but roll a dxxx (probably 100),
on a
> match the ships collide and are destroyed.

The current (3rd Revised edition) rule on "simultaneous transits" (ie,
when you send many ships through at once) is that if more than one ship
goes through the WP in the same direction in the same impulse (~5
seconds), each pair of ships has a 30% probability of being destroyed.
This makes simultaneous transits rather attractive against heavily
defended warp points, but usually rather wasteful against light
defences.

The best solution to the "untakable WP" problem is to cut all incomes
in the campaign to 10-25% of what generation of campaign rules you use
(Starfire III: Empires, New Empires or Imperial Starfire). The Sky
Marshal #2 campaign economics seem to work reasonably well unless a big
empire has only very few WPs to defend... but that's not very likely
:-/ )

'Course, there are the warp-capable missile pods (SBMHAWKs)... but
there are also a lot of ways to fool them :-)

Later,

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com
Starfire Design Studio

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
- Hen3ry