CAN Ships do the 'Space Superiority' thing? Question on specifics and tactics!

I have a question about whether it is indeed possible for Ships, using the combat rules, to -rely on- the 'outmaneuver my enemy so that they can't get a single shot at me' sort of thing. Let's say that one is fighting a not very maneuverable ship with a limited fire arc. Let's call it a Heavy Cruiser of some sort, kind of like a pocket grand cruiser, or a slower and more armored battlecruiser. Let's say it has:

-2.4 gravities max acceleration
-Speed 4
-No equipment to improve maneuverability or speed
-Maneuverability +8
-3 Port and 3 Starboard weapons
-45 degree turning radius
-Some broadside that is like the mars broadside is to the mars macrocannon, but with stygies (extra armor penetration). For extra insult, let's assume that the weapons are best (strength, damage). Essentially, if you get into range and firing arc of those weapons, you will be destroyed in one volley, and the weapons have range 5. You might be destroyed in a single hit! Also assume that the crew is great at targeting these weapons, and that maybe it has items to improve targeting.

Now, let's say you are some sort of weird overpowered Heavy Frigate of some sort. You have a Dorsal, Keel, and Prow weapons slots, and have a lance in the prow, and macrocannons in the other two. You have no missiles or torpedoes. For a more difficult time (ie, if it would give a better answer), assume you have no Keel weapons slot, and it is instead another Dorsal. You'd probably need to use all your weapons to punch through the shields and armor of that ship. Assume that there are rules which allow stacking of at least some of your weapons

My question is this:
-What is the speed, acceleration, maneuverability bonus, turning radius, quality of your helmsman, specific archeotech items, tactics, houserules that fit the existing rules and setting, and range of your weapons that you would need to safely engage this much larger, and supposedly much deadlier ship, using 'space superiority' tactics (ie, get behind them and stay behind them, firing at their rear arc to pound them, or perhaps just stay out of their range and pound them from afar). How possible would it be to maintain these tactics over an extended fight? What would be needed to do so?

Would you need an archeotech item that gives something like Eldar's Surpreme Manoeuvrability? For reference:

Supreme Manoeuvrability: A ship with Solar Sails may interrupt its Manoeuvre Action at any point to perform a Shooting Action. Once the Shooting Action is resolved, it must complete the remainder of its Manoeuvre Action. The limit of one Shooting Action per turn still applies. In addition, all Eldar vessels can make turns of 90 degrees, regardless of hull size.

Or other weird maneuverability helping archeotech, like this homebrew bit:

Inertial Damping Capacitors (4 power, space 2)

"The pattern for this system is long sought by the priests of mars. Massive banks of capacitors sit ready to discharge into enhanced inertial dampers to allow a ship to perform maneuvers that would normally break a ship in half. This makes for a nasty surprise when a ship suddenly spins around to chase an attacker.

Inertialess turn: When activated, a pilot may attempt to turn his ship by any ammount at any point is his normal movement with a difficult (-10) pilot check. If the check fails, the ship moves its full normal movement, then faces a direction determined by rolling on the scatter diagram. Once used, this system requires two turns to recharge."

Can anyone who knows a lot about the Rogue Trader starship combat system answer this? Thanks!

I have seen my players circle and smash a cruiser with their Orion Cutter. The ship is speed 11, Man +28 with a skilled pilot MIU interfaced with the ship and a competant Navigator. Using very long range weapons (range 12) with good crit rating (3). They basically kept at a range of 20-24 and chipped away. Unfortunately, they got luck and killed the cruiser's escort before it could effectively do anything to them. Any ship that has a 4 speed and low maneuverability can be easily killed in such a manor. Cruisers usually run with escorts for exactly such a reason. As long as you are willing to accept that you are not going to have easy shots, or sometimes no shot at all, you can apply those tactics. The only real problem is cruisers with long range weapons (such as many Chaos cruisers). They will be able to fire back unless you can stay completely in the aft arc, which is hard at long range.

What the heck were the using? Good Crit Staravars?!

Range is something that is quite powerful, especially with ships that greatly outdistance your opponents (e.g. Range 12 versus Range 4). However there is an inherent danger there, where if you're keeping at Maximum Range for the SunSear (Range 24), then any enemy vessel you're attacking can Disengage as a free action. This instantly ends the combat and the vessel you're attacking escapes. Even if you close to a more reasonable range, then you just test Pilotting against Maneuverability, until you succeed.

So. Let's say you have Good Range Staravar's (13!!!)

If your enemy has 4 range, what is a 'good' range for you to be in? what about 5 range weapons?

Depends on the enemy's speed. Obviously if you can stay just outside of (2x Range + speed) that would be optimal, although they might increase speed if they think they can hit you. The rules for Cruisers and above being what they are, it's better to try and end your turn heading in the "opposite" direction of a Cruiser, so that you can take advantage of the move-then-turn rule, and their turning speed not being very good.

Ultimately if a Cruiser can (and should) just disengage if it's being overwhelmed, you can fight your way through a lot of battles, but you're probably not going to be destroying enemy ships.

My players use Active Augury to extend their Auger Array range, IIRC. If it would detect a silent running ship, then I rule that you can't Disengage as a free action. That is how they kept the Cruiser from getting away. A stern chase is really not in the cruiser's best interest, either.

My players use Active Augury to extend their Auger Array range, IIRC. If it would detect a silent running ship, then I rule that you can't Disengage as a free action. That is how they kept the Cruiser from getting away. A stern chase is really not in the cruiser's best interest, either.

Silent Running is not Disengage though. Silent Running is basically minimal power output, but the ship is still functional and can fight. Disengage is you shut everything down and launch your ship in a random direction so that your opponent doesn't know where you are. The idea behind Augury is the sensory officer gets one chance to detect where the enemy is going to "break off to" and then the power shutdown doesn't do anything to hide them.

If you take away the ability to Disengage, then yes small ships will be able to out-range large cruisers to death. That's why Cruisers have escorts, and disengage is such an important tactical decision.

Not sure how believable shutting down a ship is and instantly becoming invisible to sensors. Stealth in space is mostly a sci fi myth, heat alone makes you stand out in space. If you are still in range for a ships Active Auger, you are not going to disapear just by shutting things down. Especially if you have fires raging and atmo and pieces of ship venting. The time it would take for the plasma drive to cool down alone is probably long enough for another ship to get a lock on you. At that point your travel is balistic, and therefore easy to determine unless there is something else to hide in. I understand the game reason to allow players and NPcs to run away when things get too rough, just hard to justify sometimes. The compromise was to only allow it if the other ship can be outside of Auger range when they attempt to Disengage. Normally that is 20, but with even decent rolls I have seen it hit 30+.

While I know 40k ignores this:

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php

Let's not talk about some of their weirdness with stealth -- I'm mostly trying to figure out some stuff with maneuverability, right now.

-Speed 4

-No equipment to improve maneuverability or speed

-Maneuverability +8

-3 Port and 3 Starboard weapons

-45 degree turning radius

-Some broadside that is like the mars broadside is to the mars macrocannon, but with stygies (extra armor penetration). For extra insult, let's assume that the weapons are best (strength, damage). Essentially, if you get into range and firing arc of those weapons, you will be destroyed in one volley, and the weapons have range 4, I believe. Also assume that the crew is great at targeting these weapons, and that maybe it has items to improve targeting.

OK, basics.

Since ships can turn 45 degrees for "free" as a minimum, they can always target any angle around them, as long as they have intact broadsides. If this is not obvious, try and draw it (as my old physics instructor always said).

Now, range is a killer.

As you have noted, with something like Mars Macrocannons (broadsides or not) and a slow ship, you'll often find that you cannot hit a more nimble opponent.

This is why (as you have indicated) they use escorts - to herd targets into their arcs of fire.

Grans Cruisers (especially) should probably not leave port without several escorts, for just that purpose.

Unfortunatly, the whole problem came when smaller ships (raiders, frigates) were up-powered from BFG, compared to capital ships. In my experience, the problem diminishes (but does not go away) if you do not allow allow multiple weapon batteries to combine fire - the heavier armor of the bigger ships become more of an issue.

Smaller ships still have major advantages, but they appear to decrease. Obviously, your experiences may vary.

OK, basics.

Since ships can turn 45 degrees for "free" as a minimum, they can always target any angle around them, as long as they have intact broadsides. If this is not obvious, try and draw it (as my old physics instructor always said).

So what might be some archeotech or rules or something that will allow the more nimble ship to stay technically within range of the stygies (range 5, presume max range 10, and I think the ship wants to be within range 8 for some rules info?), but not able to let the broadside equipped heavy cruiser draw a bead?

And you are saying that if something has stygies macrocannons or a homebrew stygies broadside, and since the other ship doesn't want to let them disengage (so they are staying within 8 vu's), there is no rules way to PREVENT hits from happening, yes?

Honestly, that disengage rule, ugh. How good would sensors have to be to negate that rule?? Would some archeotech sensors be needed with some anti-disengaging rules?? What about preventing the ship from causing a stern chase?

As far as I know there are no official rules to counteract this. As a GM, if you want to negate that rule then you can negate it whenever you want with whatever justification you want. Keep in mind that against an enemy with a good enough detection it will be very hard for a slow, unmaneuverable cruiser to successfully disengage in combat.

You could rule that if your vessel's detection bonus is greater than 20, then that is the maximum range at which an enemy can dis-engage. Raiders would thus be very good at chasing people down with a good Augur Array.

Given that by default you turn only after you complete your entire move, there is no position you can take that prevents someone from broadsiding you. You'd just have to use evasive maneuvers and buy defensive countermeasures to interfere with shooting.

In my campaign we use the Mathhammer fix for Voidship combat, which allows high-armoured ships to survive Macrocannon barrages easier and feel more like actual tough cruisers.

The problem is that the range of a ship's augers is not very well defined. 20 VU is used as an effective range for all auger actions, but the Active Auger action increases that range (+5 VU per degree of success). As the Disengage action requires an opposed test if the ship is within 20 VU, I have ruled that the range is increased if the enemy ship is using Active Auger to increase their ship detection range. I think it is a pretty obvious ruling, as 20 VU appears to be a ship's detection range unless increased by Active Auger. The check involved isn't all that difficult (0+Scrutiny+Detection Bonus).

I don't see a need to houserule the detection range, I just think they did a poor job of describing what it is and when it is used.

OK, basics.

Since ships can turn 45 degrees for "free" as a minimum, they can always target any angle around them, as long as they have intact broadsides. If this is not obvious, try and draw it (as my old physics instructor always said).

So what might be some archeotech or rules or something that will allow the more nimble ship to stay technically within range of the stygies (range 5, presume max range 10, and I think the ship wants to be within range 8 for some rules info?), but not able to let the broadside equipped heavy cruiser draw a bead?

Generally we have the opposite problem - that nimble ships are too overpowered, compared to cruisers

But no, if you want to stay within such short range, there's really no way to stay out of the arc of fire from the broadsides.

And you are saying that if something has stygies macrocannons or a homebrew stygies broadside, and since the other ship doesn't want to let them disengage (so they are staying within 8 vu's), there is no rules way to PREVENT hits from happening, yes?

Assuming I understand your question (and I'm admittedly not sure abut this), you're largely correct.

Unfortunatly, the whole problem came when smaller ships (raiders, frigates) were up-powered from BFG, compared to capital ships.

Please explain this viewpoint to me. Personally, I found that the addition of fighter craft, torpedoes, nova cannons and plasma broadsides allow larger ships to easily outrange smaller ones and pretty much casually destroy them at will. I don't really see anything in BFG that improves smaller voidships at all.

That was largely the point; compared to BFG's combat scale, frigates, transports and raiders are far more powerful and capable than their traditional roles would suggest, largely due to the combination of player skills and the macrocannon rules.

Ok, I'm missing something here , what is BFG?

BFG stands for BattleFleet Gothic. It was Games Workshop's spaceship miniature game set during the 12th Black Crusade that was fleets of ships battling against each other.

It didn't use the d10/d100 system of the RPGs, but it did go a long way to establishing the Naval tactics used by the various forces in the 40K universe. I believe up until Hostile Acquisitions all ships that didn't belong to the Stryxis or Rak'Gol were ships that had appeared in BFG whose capabilities had been converted to be in-line with how Rogue Trader handles combat. Unfortunately as a result of PCs having crazy high stats relative to most of the people they face, this let small, nimble combat craft have a huge advantage when conducting Macrocannon salvos.

Oh, my bad. I got BFG and BFK mixed up.

BFG stands for BattleFleet Gothic. It was Games Workshop's spaceship miniature game set during the 12th Black Crusade that was fleets of ships battling against each other.

It didn't use the d10/d100 system of the RPGs, but it did go a long way to establishing the Naval tactics used by the various forces in the 40K universe. I believe up until Hostile Acquisitions all ships that didn't belong to the Stryxis or Rak'Gol were ships that had appeared in BFG whose capabilities had been converted to be in-line with how Rogue Trader handles combat. Unfortunately as a result of PCs having crazy high stats relative to most of the people they face, this let small, nimble combat craft have a huge advantage when conducting Macrocannon salvos.

Couple of reasons.

1) If I give a ship equipment that will increase its maneuverability or speed then my players are going to wonder (rightfully) why they don't have access to it. If they're fighting Chaos raiders then I can always wave my fingers at them and go "Chaaaaoooooooos", but that does feel like a bit of a cheat. Plus they'll just try to salvage the **** stuff.

2) Bombers as written can't survive outside of their host vessel for long, and they need to leave it under their own power so using it as an ambush doesn't work. Mines could work, and rules for them do exist, but that's the kind of trick that only works once.

3) Speed and Maneuverability doesn't get around the problem of one macrocannon salvo obliterating the enemy completely. Given an example combat, my players get maximum bonus when firing their weapons (not uncommon) and they salvo together two Sunsear Las Batteries. My Arch-Militant rolls against 113, and then thanks to Fate Points and admitting this is a "lucky" roll, scores 25. That's 8 shifts of success, so nine shots get through. A Cruiser's void shields absorbs 2 of them leaving 7 to strike the hull. Damage is 1d10 + 2 so we can expect 7.5 damage a shot. 52.5 damage then makes it through to the enemy vessel, which given the Cruiser armour of 20 means it takes 32.5 damage. Then it gets critically hit. The Cruiser is now essentially half-dead, and my players could be piloting an Orion Star Clipper and be out of range of any return fire.

It's possible to come up with tactics specifically to fight my party, but unlike with dragons your average vessel is all drawing from the same range/firepower capabilities. The fun thing with Mathhammer is it makes combat more interesting because there are now different tactics depending on what ship you're fighting with and what ship is doing the fighting.

Couple of reasons.

1) If I give a ship equipment that will increase its maneuverability or speed then my players are going to wonder (rightfully) why they don't have access to it. If they're fighting Chaos raiders then I can always wave my fingers at them and go "Chaaaaoooooooos", but that does feel like a bit of a cheat. Plus they'll just try to salvage the **** stuff.

2) Bombers as written can't survive outside of their host vessel for long, and they need to leave it under their own power so using it as an ambush doesn't work. Mines could work, and rules for them do exist, but that's the kind of trick that only works once.

3) Speed and Maneuverability doesn't get around the problem of one macrocannon salvo obliterating the enemy completely. Given an example combat, my players get maximum bonus when firing their weapons (not uncommon) and they salvo together two Sunsear Las Batteries. My Arch-Militant rolls against 113, and then thanks to Fate Points and admitting this is a "lucky" roll, scores 25. That's 8 shifts of success, so nine shots get through. A Cruiser's void shields absorbs 2 of them leaving 7 to strike the hull. Damage is 1d10 + 2 so we can expect 7.5 damage a shot. 52.5 damage then makes it through to the enemy vessel, which given the Cruiser armour of 20 means it takes 32.5 damage. Then it gets critically hit. The Cruiser is now essentially half-dead, and my players could be piloting an Orion Star Clipper and be out of range of any return fire.

It's possible to come up with tactics specifically to fight my party, but unlike with dragons your average vessel is all drawing from the same range/firepower capabilities. The fun thing with Mathhammer is it makes combat more interesting because there are now different tactics depending on what ship you're fighting with and what ship is doing the fighting.

I don't have my RT book on hand ( loaned to a prospective player right now ), so I'm going from memory-

1) And ork equipment becomes unreliable, when used by races other than orks. RakGol engines have radiation to high as to be safe, so given that there is precident there is no reason not to use something simular for the other races.

2) At the time, all I recall about bombers is that they had a limited range based on limited amount of fuel - but nothing about a time endurance ( other than the limitation of the void suits of the pilots and crew ) while sitting dead in space waiting for the fight to come to them ( and in such situations they would likely have about the detection signature of mines - especially if your players are not activily scanning for something that small in the middle of a battle ).

3) Something about that doesn't sound right - I can't put my finger on it right now, but it just doesn't sound quite right. 8 degrees of success sounds excessive ( even 6 points of success should not be common unless multiple Fate Points are being used ). Even then, the crew and the equipment of the other ship should still be able to get within 10-20 points of your players. If your Arch-Militant is rolling aginst 113, then the other ship needs to be rolling against 100-125, either through crew enhancement ( probably the easiest ), a singular piece of race specific equipment ( as mentioned in #1 ), a combination of many different pieces of equipment, each of which has a chance of being distroyed in the fight or is unsalvagable due to a bad salvage roll ( why do I have this feeling that your players also have really good salvage rolls? ).

I don't have my RT book on hand ( loaned to a prospective player right now ), so I'm going from memory-

1) And ork equipment becomes unreliable, when used by races other than orks. RakGol engines have radiation to high as to be safe, so given that there is precident there is no reason not to use something simular for the other races.

2) At the time, all I recall about bombers is that they had a limited range based on limited amount of fuel - but nothing about a time endurance ( other than the limitation of the void suits of the pilots and crew ) while sitting dead in space waiting for the fight to come to them ( and in such situations they would likely have about the detection signature of mines - especially if your players are not activily scanning for something that small in the middle of a battle ).

3) Something about that doesn't sound right - I can't put my finger on it right now, but it just doesn't sound quite right. 8 degrees of success sounds excessive ( even 6 points of success should not be common unless multiple Fate Points are being used ). Even then, the crew and the equipment of the other ship should still be able to get within 10-20 points of your players. If your Arch-Militant is rolling aginst 113, then the other ship needs to be rolling against 100-125, either through crew enhancement ( probably the easiest ), a singular piece of race specific equipment ( as mentioned in #1 ), a combination of many different pieces of equipment, each of which has a chance of being distroyed in the fight or is unsalvagable due to a bad salvage roll ( why do I have this feeling that your players also have really good salvage rolls? ).

1) Yes, but I'd still rather go for rules as written. I have made my own custom Xenos race as well as statted out some Slaugth vessels, but for the former I tried to just make them "different" whereas not overbalanced. Slaugth ships ended up as monsters though.

2) This is a tactic I hadn't considered, but in my mind I pictured bombers like the generic SciFi bomber, which realistically only has a few hours of air on board since they're effectively torpedo delivery system. Since each Strategic Turn lasts about 30 minutes, I could probably reasonably stretch it if they went into cold running, but even then it would only work for a deliberate ambush plan.

3) Rolling 50 is the expected value, so against a 113 you would expect 6 shifts of success. However when modified a high armour vessel suddenly means one macrocannon salvo hurts a Cruiser+, but isn't in danger of seriously wiping it out. Conversely the massive broadside lances that are meant to be on Cruisers and above are the capital ship killers they're expected to be, while smaller craft flit around in macrocannons attempting to draw fire and inflict critical hits. Also NPCs don't need to be rolling against a value that high with proper tactics (though admittedly using RAW I do commonly get them up to the 80s/90s).

You may have guessed about the salvage rolls due to pattern recognition from how my jerks players handle things. They do play fair with me, but if there's some rare piece of equipment and they don't salvage it, they're going to start a massive campaign to acquire it. Which is fun, but I fear the end result of them getting even more powerful.

So I wrote up these archeotech bits, to hopefully give ships the capacity to do some space superiority stuff...

"Inertial Damping Capacitors

The pattern for this system is long sought by the priests of mars. Massive banks of capacitors sit ready to discharge into enhanced inertial dampers to allow a ship to perform manoeuvres that would normally break a ship in half. This makes for a nasty surprise when a ship suddenly spins around to chase an attacker.

Inertialess turn: Before attempting normal movement, a pilot may attempt activate the Inertial Damping Capacitors with a difficult (-10) Pilot check. If successful, his next move can have several extra capabilities: He can turn his ship by up to 135 degrees at any point is his normal movement, and the ship can further interrupt that movement action at any time to perform a Shooting action, using up it's single Shooting action that turn. If the check fails, neither of these capacities is gained and the ship moves its full normal movement, then faces a direction determined by rolling on the scatter diagram. Once used, this system requires two turns to recharge."

"Pursuit and Chase Cogitators:

With this component, if a ship achieves a dominant position (IE, within 8 VUs and immediately aft of that ship, where the dominant ship is faster than the non-dominant ship), it can attempt to 'stay behind them', no matter how the other ship twists or turns or rotates. This nigh-heretical cogitation component interfaces with the bridge and maneuvering thrusters, making it easy to plot and predict -- and rapidly react to -- the movements of a ship one is pursuing, allowing a unique movement action to be declared: "Stay Behind them", which makes any attempt of a pursued ship to "Adjust Bearing", "Adjust Speed", "Adjust Speed and Bearing", or "Come to a New Heading" be an opposed Pilot check, opposed by the Pilot (Space Craft) of the pursuing ship. This opposed check is not to check the success of the maneuver per se, but rather if the maneuver managed to throw the ship off of it's dominant position. During this time, the ship pursuing automatically does the simplest maneuver necessary to maintain it's relative position, be it Adjust Bearing, Come to a New Heading, etc. Further, due to the advanced cogitation systems the pursuing ship gets a +5 on its manoeuvrability in these pursuit actions."

"The Omega Pattern Sensor Array:

Eyes of the Ancients: This Ancient sensor array is so powerful that it completely negates the capacity of an enemy ship to successfully use the 'Disengage' action when actively in combat with a ship equipped with this Augur array."