Doesn't correlate.

A ship loses 1% of its crew for every point of damage suffered. In a lunar 1% of its crew is 950 crewmen whilst a vagabond has 1% at 180 crew. The lunar lose 5x the crew of the vagabond when it takes the same damage. In a larger ship you would (and historically did) take fewer casualties from the same number of hits. There is literally more ship between the crew and the impact. A small ship is far more vulnerable to enemy fire and its crew will die faster.

A larger ship will have more armour and take less hits, but it isn't enough of a difference.

So, what to do. You could go the laborious route and remove a set number of crewmen from each ship for every hit, like say 100. That means larger ships will survive longer because they have the crew to spare. Unfortunately you'd have to calculate what percentage of the crew had died after each round to see what affects the ship suffers. This would be more realistic but far too cumbersome.

A very simple method would be to have every point of damage done to an escort sized ship take of TWO points of crew population. It still doesn't match up but it's closer and means that escorts can be beaten through attrition. You could do a similar thing but make it multiples of 5. If you multiply 180 by 5 you get 900, 220 x 5 is 1100 and so on. That correlates the escort sized vessel casualties at a far closer approximation of the damage taken on the larger ships. That means that the average escort couldn't sustain more than 20 hits before it became a drifting tomb and would be suffering negative effects far before that.

Or you could go back to the X per hit concept and change the crew population table so that it worked slightly differently.

Say if a ship had its crew numbers listed to tell you what levels they suffered at:

Lunar Class

Crew: 95,000/ 75,000/ 45,000/ 25,000/ 10,000

Effect one happens when your crew drops to 75,000 and so on. That way you could tweak the numbers for different ships to represent automated repair systems etc kicking in to take over where the recently deceased plebs left off. Number tweaking would be done by upgrade components (more stuff to buy yay!) so that you could install an automat system and change the numbers to 95,000/55/35/15/5 so that damage takes even longer. On the flip side less developed ships would have a higher crew damage level (because they rely so much on manual labour when even a small amount of crew are gone things can't be done).

It does create a rather large crew line though. And you would have to keep track of the amount of crew lost in a single hit, nominally 100-500 depending on whatever is easiest. You could shorten it to 95,000/ 75/ 45/ 25/ 10 to save space.

Personally I think that it would reflect the circumstances far better and you'd actually have issues with larger ships because their crew compliment is so big.

Hellebore

Really like your tiered modell. Escorts 2, warships 1is very elegant

The only question is, does this require rebalancing?

Do you mean 2 pts of crew population removed for escorts and 1 for cruisers?

Rebalancing would probably be in the amount of ship points it cost to buy the hull. By differentiating between the the ships you create a divide where it is better to have a cruiser hull than an escort hull (over and above just the hull points and armour). At a rough guestimate probably reduce the Ship Point cost of escorts by 10-20% so around 3-6 points per ship.

Hellebore

Modifying the amount of crew/morale lost for the size of ship makes sense to me. I'd been considering how to handle the fact that Raiders tend to go pop before they hit any major thresholds on the population/morale tables. The only way they'd matter for a Frigate is if it's a PC ship and it engages in several running battles.

In order to keep things distorting in the other direction, I'd base the multiplier on the Hull Integrity of the ship. Have the multiplier be the number of times the ship's base Hull Integrity can fit into 100, rounded down. This makes the modifier 1 for Cruisers, 2 for Frigates and Transports (Jericho-Class just fits in twice) and 3 for Raiders. Since the Raiders are described by the fluff as "Glass Cannons", this seems reasonable.

Naturally there will be a higher scale where Grand Cruisers and Battleships get the losses halved (or even more), but unless you're using fan-made rules for these classes this won't be something you need to worry about. The important thing is to match the ratio of pop/morale to Hull Integrity. Pop/Morale works on a fixed base of 100 (then modified, but not enough to make a difference), so having everything scaled to that makes more sense to me.

Of course it's up to you to modify any rules to your liking, but you should take one thing in mind: Rogue Trader is a role playing game, not a simulation. I think the rules for crew-loss are absolutely ok. Why? You don't really need to know up to the single man, how many folks on your ship are alive or not, a percentage-number really is enough for everything you need to handle this part of the game.

And if you need an explaination why each point of "crew damage" effekts more total crewmembers on a larger ship than on a small one:

If you hit one section of a larger ship, you automatically effekt more crew members, since everything is bigger on larger ships, while the proportions are roughly the same for all ships, regardless of its size. So if a sections of a small vessel is hit, there are lets say 100 crewmembers effected, who are working in that section. On a ship twice it's size, the hit section itself would be twice as big with twice as much crew working there, so lets say 200 crewmembers might suffer. But sind the crewsize of the whole ship would be also twice as much (just an example), it's still the same percentage of the whole crew who are effected by that hit.

So all in all, the existing rules are totally sufficiant and all you need, so you can concentrate on the real important part of the game, the roleplaying .

If you like to see more micromanagement, it's of course up to you to change the rules.

nadomir said:

I don't think we're looking at micro-management here. If you merely give each class of voidships: (as per above: Raiders, Frigates and Transports, Cruisers) 3, 2 or 1 points of damage for each hit you're not really changing the detail level. And I think that it IS a disconnect for me if a smaller vessel lasts as long as a large vessel from a crew p.o.w.

As I said, I think the rules work absolutely fine as they are. Spacecombat is really fun, as my void-master gunner can tell you. I don't really see any reason to add more crew-loss for smaller vessels. Starshipbattles shouldn't be won over which ship runs out of crew first, but over which ship holds together. The crew is just one factor, but in starship combat, the true heros are the ships (with some help of the explorers, of course).

It sems very much an optional rule, but I have always wondered why a vessel can be completely crippled and still have more than half the crew remaining. It seems to be a fudge in favour of the players, who should theoretically find repairs much easier than replenishing crew. If you dock regularly, neither should be a problem. It really only matters in the deep void runs when you can't replenish population at all, and hull/morale is much harder.

I'm not sure I agree here. If I hit a much bigger ship with a lance, the lance should end up killing much more people just because it has so much more area to go through. Draw a small rectangle and a big rectangle and draw a line through both of them. No mattler the angle, the line through the large rectangle will be longer.

Now if you compare one macrobattery hit on a large vs. a small ship I can see your point. But it seems it should be easier to land multiple hits on a large ship. If your aiming at the front of a cruiser you could "miss" and hit the back of the cruiser, just as you could miss a frigiate and hit a firgiate that was flying behind it in close formation.

My point is, that it's completely unnecessary to go into too much detail here. Starship combat really works fine and it's really not important to adjust crewlosses, neither for the outcome of the combat, nor for the flow of the game or for anything else. Trying to bring up more realism in a universe as unreal as the 40k-universe doesn't make more sense to me either. But if anyone feels like adding more pain for their crews, that's fine to me. I just really don't see any reason to fix something, that's not broken.

btw: This topic maybe should be moved to the "house rules"-section

An important thing to remember is that the Crew value is as much a reflection of crew effectiveness (that is, whether or not the current number of able-bodied crew are capable of operating the ship and how effectively they can do so) as it is a matter of absolute crew numbers.

TraderJB said:

I was waiting for someone to use the 'bigger ships take more damage cuz they're bigger' argument. It doesn't work, if it did, large ships would be destroyed quicker than smaller ones because 'more of their hull' would be damaged.

A larger ship has MORE compartments with MORE armour simply by dint of size, but individually those take up a smaller percentage of the ship's overall size. Where a gunbay on a sword might be 2% of its size, the same gunbay on a cruiser may only take up 0.02% of it size. If a shot penetrates X metres of hull, then it will go through a far smaller proportion of hull in a bigger ship than smaller, which means it will go through a smaller amount of crew than a smaller ship, because the smaller ship's crew fit in a smaller amount of metres but the shot goes the same distance of metres.

A single shot imparts exactly the same amount of damage to each target, but a smaller target suffers that damage over a larger % of hull than the larger target and therefore a larger percentage of its crew are affected.

To take your rectangle example. If a lance beam is 50x50 metres in height and width and produces 100 metres of penetration on hull contact then it has a damage area of 250,000 cubic metres.

A lunar class cruiser is 5km long and 0.8 abeam. If we assume it's 0.8 tall then it has a volume of 3,200,000,000 cubic metres. A lance then hits 0.000078125% of the ship.

A Sword class frigate is 1.6km long and 0.3 abeam. If we assume it's 0.3 tall then it has a volume of 144,000,000 cubic metres. A lance then hits 0.0017361111111111111111111111111111% of the ship.

The difference between the two is quite large; a lance shot at a sword frigate hits ~24x more area than the same lance shot at a cruiser.

A ship's crew are limited to the space within the ship. Which, if we take the crew size gives an average of 0.0000296875 crew per cubic metre for a lunar and 0.0018055555555555555555555555555556 crew men per cubic metre in a sword.

Obviously crew aren't spread out this evenly, but a lunar's macrocannon bay will require exactly the same amount of crew as the sword's because according to RT they are the SAME gun. Being on a bigger ship doesn't put more crew inside the gun bay, having a bigger GUN does that because it requires more crew. The increase in crew size takes into account the extra area and systems that need to be worked on.

So if we take the above and a lance damages 250,000 cubic metres of space on a sword then it will kill 45.13 crewmen whilst on a lunar it will kill 7.421875, one sixth the crew of the sword.

As a weapon always produces the same amount of damage you cannot assume that a bigger target will take more damage. If a weapon produces enough damage to destroy HALF a frigate sized ship (so 72,000,000 cubic metres of damage) it will only damage 0.0225% of a cruiser

The only way for the cruiser to suffer more crew casualties is if its crew size increases at the same rate as its size. ie there would be 3 people standing on every peice of space a single crewman stands in a sword. But we know it doesn't work that way.

Any other argument says that a larger ship will die before a smaller one through crew loss because it loses more crew every time it's hit. Except it doesn't.

@N0-1_H3r3 and it's simply convenient that the larger a ship is the less able its crew will be all the time? A law of the universe states that crew will always be less able the bigger their ship is? And less able to just the right amount so that they will degrade in crew quality at exactly the same rate as any other ship, even one a 10th the size?

People have no problem with the different hull points assigned to ships, but the argument given here is 'a bigger ship takes more damage' thus that argument should apply to the ship's hit points as well, give all ships the same number. Because it makes about as much sense as saying that all ships irresepctive of crew size will lose exatly 1% of their crew every time they are hit. All ships irrespective of their size will lose exactly 1% of their hit points every time they are hit.

No, it's a rules symplification that oddly only affects crew size. There are two different sets of rules for crew and ship, despite the crew being spread across the ship almost as much as the ship is. If people like such a simplification and the results it produces (ie a frigate gets crippled at the same rate as a cruiser through crew loss) then be my guest. this thread however is for people who would like to discuss different rules, not a discussion on whether different rules are appropriate or not. I can just imagine the high admiralty being told that their larger ships lose men an material faster than their smaller ones 'only build smaller ones then you idjots' would be the reply.

Hellebore

The facts are that the rules are a perfectly serviceable abstraction of a combat aspect that is not in fact the focus of the game and will bog it down quickly if you strive for simulation rather than speedy resolution. Also... facts? In 40K? LOL

The vessels described couldn't even exist, the idea of engaging another vessels at anything less than thousands of kilometres is ridiculous, using ballistic weaponry would be pointless, fighters are laughable as a concept in space warfare, etc, etc, etc.

Be careful of resorting to 'facts' as the argument for altering the game in a way you happen to favour and bear in mind that the rules on this point have more to do with the ability of the crew to keep the vessel functioning than they do with actual crew deaths and they are meant to serve as a quick and dirty way to resolve ship-to-ship battles when you don't want to count every projectile and make saving throws for each crewman hit.

Universe says that bigger ships are better. A cruiser in BFG takes 8x the amount of damage as a frigate. In the background cruisers survive taking massive damage and casualties (Read Execution Hour and Shadowpoint), frigates do not.

If you want to throw out 'facts', then your own will have to go too. I'm not interested in discussing something with someone who resorts to fallacy to avoid being proved wrong. I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning. Why bother arguing a defence when one can simply say 'i reject your reality and substitue my own.'

I didn't ask for your permission to talk about this, so if you aren't interested go start a thread about how the rules are fine as is and leave those people actually interested in this to this thread.

Hellebore

Actually you got it completely backwards. There is a subforum for house rules and you aren't on it. Plus you started this thread saying that the RAW didn't make sense. So, I (and aparently some others) assumed you wanted to argue about wether or not the rules did make sense.

BTW, I assumed from the description that Lances came in one side of the ship and went out the other.

Also, you make big ships sound like the be all and end all. Why would the Navy build so many little ships if big ships were so much better?

Hell-bore, the only fallacies here are yours, mate and trying to flame me will make you look stupid and hypocritical, not me. Attempting to argue the semantics of physical interactions when already dealing with physically impossible fantasy vessels is just plain stupid, even if it were not the case that the rules are an abstraction of an aspect that is tangential to the game's theme. Battlefeet Gothic is where to look for flying cathedrals shooting cannon at each other from metres away, Rogue Trader is about conquistador style derring-do. HtH.

Gaidheal said:

Right because assering everything I said was wrong 'because you said so' is completely logical. To disprove that a large ship in 40k takes less damage and less crew damage than a small ship you must use a logical argument based on 40k background to do it not simply declare i'm wrong. And trying to say that the rules are a good immiation of said fantasy setting is equally stupid. Rules aren't perfect and 40k uses SOME semblence of reality which can be analysed and thus what I've written is far more logical than simpy saying 'no'. The ships used in RT are exactly the same as those used in 40k, whether it be BFG or not.

The person I replied used a logic string to argue that larger ships take more damage. I did the same thing to prove they don't (and in far more detail than just 'two rectangles'0. 40k says that large ships are the most important part of any fleet, if these rules were enacted in the Imperium they wouldn't use large ships because of the ridiculous casualty rate (not that they care about manpower, but it would have been better to spread all those grunts across several smaller ships as they would take 'fewer' casualties). Using these rules a fleet of frigates would always defeat a fleet of cruisers, yet the RT book specifially says that cruisers are the main part of the navy fleet.

This is such an unimportant part of the game I find it amusing that people fight tooth and nail to defend it. It's extremely abstract and doesn't represent the rate of crew loss properly as shown in the setting it is trying to emulate. Forgive me for expecting some correlation between the rules and setting they are trying to represent.

I also forgot that you must play a roleplaying game EXACTLY as it is given, that focusing on an aspect of the game is BAD. I'll go back to my cutlass wielding pirates in space then shall I because obviously I was mistaken and don't actually want to play with 40k space ships. I'm blown away with all the FFG apologising going on. The rule isn't perfect and COULD be better. It is the only variable in a ship constant across all of them, hull points, armour, manoeuvrability et al are different for each type of ship. But apparently it's ok to have crew populaiton rules identical to all ships. Why bother even describing that a cruiser has almost 4x the crew of a frigate when they lose the same amount anyway.

The book even says 'treat the ship like a character'.

I fail to see how making raiders suffer 3 pts of crew damage, frigates and transports 2, and cruisers 1 makes the game so much more unmanagable than if they all just take 1pt.

I recall early in the release of the game people complaining about the resilience of frigates compared to cruisers. All this does is make the smaller ships more like they are supposed to be, fragile.

Anyway as this has gone completely offtopic I shall go back to the original topic. The crew size vs crew loss doesn't correlate (this is an objective fact, as ship crew sizes do not correlate to the rate of crew loss compared to each other).

Although the concept of 3, 2, 1 is a simple one I think that crew damage should be more like ship damage so that it corresponds to the ship more directly. Say, use the Hull points as the Crew points and modify the current population table to be at 75%, 50% and 25%. So a cruiser with 70 hull points would be 70/52/35/18 for crew population. That at least reflects the ship size more directly in the crew population.

Personally I also prefer the BFG concept of crippled being when the ship has suffered 1/2 hit points as well because at 0 it shouldn't have anything left rather than just starting to get crippled. That would have a bigger effect on the game than crew population tweaks though.

Hellebore

Bluntly, mate, the only person 'fighting tooth and nail' here seems to be you, I.E. noone else seems to be at all emotionally invested in it, as evidenced by your tone and the quantity of verbose text and attempted arguing from maths, appeals to pseudo-logic, etc, etc. As pointed out, the rules work fine in the opinion of many (maybe most) commentors, your suggestions belong in the House Rules section, your arguments are built on a shaky foundation and being rude and aggressive doesn't help you make your already weak and mostly irrelevant case. I hope that clears the issue up for you.

Well whatever you may believe you've not provided an argument beyond 'you are wrong' which isn't an argument at all. The location of this thread is immaterial to the validity of its content.

Anyway, back to the thread. Does anyone have any other suggestions for modifying crew casualty rates vs the size of the crew?

Hellebore

Pointing out where your argument fails doesn't require an argument in itself, were you familiar with real logic you'd kmow that. *sweet smile*

You're still in the wrong section of the board, though.

Gaidheal said:

In order to do that you'd have to prove your position with an argument, but you haven't. The closest I can see is saying that the game uses fantasy space ships, but that's dodging the actual discussion rather than contributing to it. That logic leads to ad absurdum. Does or does not the 40k background use those fantasy space ships in such a way as to have the largest ones survive longer with fewer casualties? Yes it does as evidenced by the battlescenes in Shadow Point and Execution Hour where the larger ships survive longer with fewer casualties than the smaller ones.

Does it or does it not have rules precedents where larger ships survive longer with fewer casualties? Yes as evidenced by BFG where the number of ship hitpoints indirectly correspond to ship crew levels and thus represent the ease of repairing critical hits (the fewer hit points the fewer crew left alive to repair).

You must counter an argument with an argument. You must prove that you've pointed out where the argument fails, simply saying 'the argument fails' is not logical nor is it an argument.

Where is the 40k background that supports your position? Because we are talking about an RPG that is supposed to represent 40k yes? If so then crew casualties should follow the way crew casualties work in 40k. Which these do not.

Where does the argument that larger ships with larger crew lose less of them from damage fail?

hellebore

Hellebore and Gaidheal: Calm, people, calm! There's no right or wrong here. If it doesn't make sense to you that crew size doesn't affect crew loss, then just use the rules as they stand. If it DOES bother you then take the opportunity to discuss how you can fix that. As several posters have pointed out it is up to what level and nature of abstraction you're aiming for.

I think you can argue both sides here, and at the end of the day it's up to your own intuition

Haha! I'm perfectly calm and I was last night too. :¬)

Hellbore seems to be self-winding though and as my father says "It's unbecoming to mock the afflicted" so I've resolved to leave him alone, amusing as it was. The rules work fine as written but if you're determined to alter them towards a simulationist ruleset, larger ships should indeed probably last longer but since the inspiration for this kind of combat is "Age of Sail" they should probably also mount heavier weapons and thus dispense with smaller vessels even faster, they should also engage smaller vessels at ranges where the smaller vessels cannot effectively engage them (at least not immediately) by virtue of these heavier weapons and they should have the manoeuvrability of a slug, relatively speaking, meaning that it would be deadly to allow smaller vessels to close, this being why you employ escorts as a screening force.

Hellebore said:

It seems to me, if you want to have the least cascading effects through the system, then it would be better to increase the starting population on cruisers to 150, 200 or more.

Under your current 3,2,1 system, you'd have to think hard about what you want to do with the Crew Reclamation facility so that it doesn't become a standard feature on every raider.

Plus, Rouge Trader being about Badassery, all changes should lean towards more badass not less badass.

TraderJB said:

I was considering this as well, just wasn't sure whether it has any unintended consequences. I not, I definitely think its the way forward!

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