I was thinking of ways to make capital ships more feared (which according to fluff they should be).

My ideas come from looking at WW2 ships and battles.

Step one armor: Increase the armor of capital ships as follows.

Light cruisers +6 / Cruisers +10 / Grand Cruisers +14 / Battleships +18

The reasoning here is that in WW2 destroyers only took out the heavy ships with torpedoes which we will consider a lance analog.

The other thing missing is range and firepower. If the macrocannon batteries of the escorts are a 5inch gun analog.. Why are the capital ships only mounting 5 inch guns? Where are the 8-16 inch guns commonly found on the larger ships?

To fix this I would propose a weapon battery upgrade.

Cruiser Main Guns.

Requirments: Munitorium and the ship must be a capital ship (light cruiser or larger).

A Light Cruiser or Cruiser may only upgrade a single battery.

A Battle Cruiser or Grand Cruiser may upgrade two.

A Battleship may upgrade four.

Effects: Increase weapon range and damage by 4 each. Increase power and space cost by 2 each. Increase cost of that weapon battery by 1 ship point.

Battleship Main Guns

Requirments: Munitorium and the ship must be a Battleship.

A Battleship may upgrade 2 weapons.

Effects: Increase weapon range and damage by 8 each. Increase power and space cost by 4 each. Increase cost of that weapon battery by 2 ship points.

The Main Guns upgrades cannot be added to a weapon component they must be built that way. In effect adding cruiser and battleship variants of all the weapon systems.

Well, unfortunately I think you're looking at the wrong age for inspiration. Imperial ships are based off of the Age of Sail, their "big guns" are their broadsides. In the old days it wasn't the size of the gun that counted, it was how many. Identifying yourself as a "120 gun frigate" was like saying you were the Battleship Iowa. Also, in the rules already offered, raiders are destroyers, complete with the torpedoes. This sort of puts frigates in a weird position, since technically at that point in human history a frigate was considered smaller than a destroyer.

If you still think they're underpowered, my suggestion would be to scratch the armor addition but add some extra hull integrity. In addition, add more port/starboard batteries to each ship, or make a "double-decker" or "triple decker" broadside.

Fortinbras said:

I was thinking of something along those lines but the base rules die a painful death once you hit 100 hull points.

What do you think of a system where you take the stats and for normal and light cruisers and double the hull points, max crew and moral become 200, and the number on the moral and crew damage charts also get doubled. This makes them hard to kill and adds the added realism of if they get heavily damaged they will spend a lot of time in the yard, after all you are basically trying to repair a mountain of metal.

You could make the armor ablative instead. Add the extra armor, but for every point of damage the ship takes beyond its armor rating, it loses that amount of armor, down to a minimum level? My mindset was basically that a ship of the line of the age of sail didn't really have heavy armor, it just took a lot of punishment to sink one, unless you managed to de-mast it.

Fortinbras said:

I recommend against this. As it is, you lose population and morale as hull integrity degrades. It's odd that a ship with only 30 hull is likely to have a large population (and good morale) left when it's brought to 0 hull while a super-cruiser with >100 hull will run out of population (and then morale is irrelevant) before the ship is out of hull.

Better armour values for larger ships is a better answer. I'd consider +4 for light cruisers and +8 for cruisers to be about the limits. This would make either Lances or concentrated battery fire necessary to harm the vessel.

Just a few things about the age of sail, mostly napoleonic period. (historical wargames have so many historians on their boards one can actually learn something ^^)

Frigates were perfectly good for pirate hunting and protection of trade vessels (or their plunder), scouting maybe.

But when a ship of the line appeared it was over. A frigate can sting an 84 cannon ship of the line, but the return salvo will most often instantly gut the frigate, if it has time to respond to such a piddly threat.

It would be really like returning to simple gothic stats and saying cruisers have 6-8 times the hull points of frigates, while keeping weapons the more or less same (no lance as torpedo equivalent on a frigate). Would stop every RT stepping foot on a frigate unless he really had a good reason to.

Voronesh said:

That is similar to what we did with doubling the hull etc, but that also required fudging with other rules. I was hoping to come up with something simpler like a template that could be added and would work within the existing rules.

At the risk of being overly complex, my group uses the following formula.

RAW ship armor / 2 = New ship armor, used in the current manner of the rulebook.

RAW ship armor / 4 = Value subtracted from each impact

So if a barrage of macrobattery hits impact an armor 20 cruiser, each will subract 5 from their final damage. As a note that is -5 from each round, meaning that against a cruiser many shots bounce harmlessly off the hull.

So our armor values take on the appearance of a split, for example 10/5 etc...

For Hull Points above 100 you could simply rule that the armour is able to fully protect the crew so there would be no loss of crew, or morale until the ship is brought below 100 HP.

Vandroiy said:

Still ignores the problem that smaller ships seem better able to protect their crew when the opposite should be true. Using a flat 1-100 for all Crew Populations is a weak premise that should be reworked from the ground up.

Looking at the stats for the Wurldbreaka in Edge of the Abyss, they seem to have done a few things.

It has 120 crew and 110 moral... 120 hull.. That gets rid of the whole crew being dead before ship is destroyed... well unless there are any criticals... and at 0 hull the crew would be dead and the hull intact.. soo... millage may vary.

Armor is fairly standard.

As the only battleship class ship we have states for I must say I am not overwhelmed.. Size 11km long 1.8km wide and only 120 hull points... sigh.

HappyDaze said:

I know. Maybe have crew losses per hit vary based on ship class. Something like Transports lose 3 crew per hit, raiders/frigates lose 2/hit, cruisers lose 1 per hit. Or maybe ships don't lose Crew/Morale until they've taken a certain amount of damage, something like no loses until you've lost half your hull points, except for Hit and Run attacks. Of course I haven't put a ton of thought into this, so they're probably both tragically flawed ideas.

Voronesh said:

There isn't really much difference between a frigate and a Sixth or Fourth Rate Ship of the Line. When you get into the ridiculous triple-deckers I think you have a point, but otherwise no.

Fortinbras said:

Still a second deck gives you alot more firepower. And the Ship of the line often has the bigger cannons on top of that too. It doesnt give you simply twice the staying power, but it very much gives you alot more firepower. Which sadly isnt all that well modeled in RT, since more strength on a battery doesnt always equal more firepower. Which it should.

Fortinbras said:

There isn't any difference. Fifth and Sixth rates were designated as "Frigates."

After watching my PC's frigate rip through a light cruiser like an empty beer can on the first salvo, I'm inclined to agree with you. I might consider making armor upgrades free of maneuvering penalty. Or perhaps +3 armor for the same cost.

One house rule I'm trying out is to give ships +1 crew for every point of starting hull integrity above 50. I've lef Morale where it is for now, as the group I run tend to use a lot of actions to pump morale and I've been doing the same with enemy vessels. The system seems to work, although it might be worth playing around with the numbers a bit more than I have.

Fortinbras said:

What is the load out of their ship, and did they get a series of lucky hits or what? It just seems odd that they could dish out 60-80 points of damage in one turn.

They had Mars-pattern Macrocannons w/ Munitorium and fired down the prow of a Light Cruiser in a combined salvo. Did about 35 damage and knocked out the prow lance in a critical hit. Thankfully they only needed to hit-and-run it to extract a VIP so I implied that after the players got back from the hit and run that their frigate had gone 3 rounds with their broadsides and lost, so they were pretty scuffed up as well.

Fortinbras said:

Still I think it would be better if you did not have to GM Fiat that the frigate was loosing to the light cruiser...

That's fairly reasonable given the critical hit. I could understand your players being a bit miffed that their ship got smashed up without a chance to prevent that, but really unless they have a pretty skilled crew it would be bound to catch a shells without them around.

I've found that if you want to give them a hard time will capital ships is to have the enemy ship tack towards them, it should be able to get at least one turn of broadsiding them before they can get out of that firing arc. That or have a smaller escort ship around to chase them back into its broadsides.

Vandroiy said:

Well I would assume that they have a few NPC officers (just like I do for enemy ships) to fill out ship rolls. So assuming they were doing evasive maneuver actions it would be hard for the light cruiser to get enough successes off a single broadside component to get past shields and armor.

Vandroiy said:

They weren't. It was mostly cosmetic, though one of the two weapons batteries that the Explorers were planning to refit with a Sunsear was destroyed, and the Munitorium nearly caught fire. I didn't charge them an acquisition roll to repair it or anything.

Basically the reasoning was that the frigate had to remain in close while the boarding party was away. At the same time, they had to keep pace with the light cruiser because it was trying to escape the system with the VIP in tow. If they made it to the edge of the system and were able to jump, the explorers would never find them (the Navigators didn't have Tracks in the Stars...though probably had enough XP to buy it on the spot. She's kind of vain and paranoid about rolling that mutation table though). So, the explorers had to board the ship while still keeping the pressure on, or risk being marooned on an enemy vessel at warp. Hence the frigate was exposed to the broadsides. Also the crew rating is 30 (by comparison, the Arch-Militant who ripped the ship to shreds is at 60, and had a +10 from Exceptional Leader.)

At this point here is what I have..

Light Cruisers and Cruisers multiply their hull integrity, crew and morale (along with the crew and moral damage charts) by 2 and 3 respectively. All complications and components that modify these stats have their effect also multiplied.

Then add 1 armor to Light Cruisers and 2 to Cruisers. Complications and components that modify armor work as normal with no modification.

So for example a lunar class cruiser would have at base 22 armor, 210 hull integrity, 300 crew pop, and 300 morale.

Thus if it was haunted and had a temple-shrine it would have a morale of 279.

Table 8-13 and 8-14 have all their numbers multiplied by the same as well so for example with a lunar cruiser would start to take penalties from morale loss at 240 (80x3).

Damage taken is applied as normal and repaired as normal, thus replenishing crew, moral, and hull integrity can be a real chore for the big ships, which IMHO is as it should be.

I have tried to strike a balance between representing the power and awe of a kilometers long capital ships while not making them invulnerable to harm from smaller vessels.

Comments?

Edit: I forgot to add the bit about boarding, remove the bonuses for boarding based on hull integrity otherwise run as normal (IE crew pop counts but not hull integrity).

If we keep this analogy with the Age Of Sail (which i def think the developers were going for) then i think a frigate engaging a ship-of-the-line in a head to head fight should instill immediate morale penalties. From a historic perspective it just wasn't done.

If the sailing frigate matches to the RT frigate then the Lt Cruiser and the Cruiser would match up to the 50-60 gun ships from the Napoleonic era. They had all the suggishness of a 74-gun ship and none of the punch.

To replicate true line of battle ships, I would add extra gun positions. Give them 3 or even 4 gun batteries on each side plus keel, dorsal and prow positions. I would also give them extra void shields to demo the fact that it is MUCH harder to even scratch them. Two battleships will be able to punch through each others shields and do damage to each other or a swarm of smaller ships could gang up on a capital ship to knock down its shields but a frigate mounting two relevant weapon positions would just see their shot rebound from the hull of the massive battleship.

They would still need hull points over 100 to offer the appropriate protection to crew and morale but with the proper shields and guns it wouldn't need to be a ridiculously high number.