Coriolis: The Third Horizon

[Yora]

Some questions about space combat:

When an attacking ship hits a target with EP damage, and that ship still has unused EP for that round, those EP are lost. Only if the EP damage is greater than the target's remaining EP for that round, the target's EP are reduced every following round until repaired, right?

Regarding repairs after a battle, it only says that disabled ships need a day of work to restore 1 HP or EP. Otherwise, it's the same rules as for repairing during battle.
It says that repairing without a dock takes a -2 penalty. But it also says failure on a repair check has no consequences, so you can just repeat rolling for repairs again and again, making the -2 penalty pointless. Repairs in battle take one round, and a round is stated as a few minutes. So it seems that if you ship has not been disabled, you should be able to get it back to sparkling condition in a few hours at most as long as you have the spare parts.
That doesn't feel right to me narratively. When making it out of a battle badly shot up, a ship shouldn't be able to get into another fight at full strength a few hours later. Have I missed something relevant or is this how the game is written to be like?

 

[aramis erak]

Some questions about space combat:

When an attacking ship hits a target with EP damage, and that ship still has unused EP for that round, those EP are lost. Only if the EP damage is greater than the target's remaining EP for that round, the target's EP are reduced every following round until repaired, right?

Regarding repairs after a battle, it only says that disabled ships need a day of work to restore 1 HP or EP. Otherwise, it's the same rules as for repairing during battle.
It says that repairing without a dock takes a -2 penalty. But it also says failure on a repair check has no consequences, so you can just repeat rolling for repairs again and again, making the -2 penalty pointless. Repairs in battle take one round, and a round is stated as a few minutes. So it seems that if you ship has not been disabled, you should be able to get it back to sparkling condition in a few hours at most as long as you have the spare parts.
That doesn't feel right to me narratively. When making it out of a battle badly shot up, a ship shouldn't be able to get into another fight at full strength a few hours later. Have I missed something relevant or is this how the game is written to be like?

The more general no retries should trump the lack of other consequences.
Someone else could try again, you cannot.

 

[Yora]

Requiring a dock to spend one day repairing after a failed roll would make sense. You could even say that if the dock repair roll on a mosule fails as well, it needs to be ripped out and replaced completely.

 

[Mezuka]

Requiring a dock to spend one day repairing after a failed roll would make sense. You could even say that if the dock repair roll on a mosule fails as well, it needs to be ripped out and replaced completely.

You could put a duration on repairs after the first failed attempt. 1 hour per retries or more if the ship is badly damaged.

'Captain, damage is worse than I thought. I need at least eight hours to make the repairs!'
'You have two Scotty!'

 

[aramis erak]

You could put a duration on repairs after the first failed attempt. 1 hour per retries or more if the ship is badly damaged.

'Captain, damage is worse than I thought. I need at least eight hours to make the repairs!'
'You have two Scotty!'

that would be inconsistent with the rest of the rules, including the core mechanical, only one try, so pray to the icons if you need to succeed and didn't.

It's a fundamental core element of all YZE games. No retries within the near term. Hence the importance of the pushing/praying-to-the-icons in the task system.

 

[Yora]

I also think that given the setting, in most situations where you have an hour to work before new trouble arrives, you'll also have ten or a few days. If your enemy could call for reinforcements, they will either arrive soon while you're still trying to put out the flames, or they won't be showing up for a day or two.

If you have to get the ship ready for another enemy ship that has appeared on the radar, the engineer might be able to quickly get two or three systems running again, but the ship will still be full of holes.

I was thinking about how I want to narratively interpret the engagement ranges for my own campaign. I think doing it logarithmic would be fun. Each increase in range means ten times larger distances.

• Given that soldiers with hand held weapons aiming by sight already shot at each other at distances of 1 km or more in some situations, I think 1 km would absolutely qualify as "contact" for space battles.
• 10 km was considered close range by warships even in the 30s and 40s. A 100m diameter sphere would still look as big as the Moon from Earth. So that easily qualifies as "short" for space battles.
• At 100 km, a sphere with 100 m diameter would still have a tenth the diameter of the moon seen from Earth. That would be much brighter than any star and probably even Mars and Venus seen from Earth. Futuristic targeting computers should have no issues at all making such a shot with an accelerator cannon. I think that would be a good benchmark for "medium" range, if you model space battles on early 20th century sea battles.
• All that considered, 1000 km as "long" range doesn't seem out of place. That's where there's basically only torpedos left on the available weapons list.
• That would leave "extreme" sensor range at up to 10,000 km.

I think for sensor ranges this would be actually silly. It's 400,000 km from the Earth to the moon. Geostationary orbit is 36,000 km. Detecting a 100 meter metal object at those distances would be trivial. Though I guess ground based sensors or orbital stations tracking traffic could have ranges a hundred times or even a thousand times larger than what can get installed on a ship.

 

[aramis erak]

• At 100 km, a sphere with 100 m diameter would still have a tenth the diameter of the moon seen from Earth. That would be much brighter than any star and probably even Mars and Venus seen from Earth. Futuristic targeting computers should have no issues at all making such a shot with an accelerator cannon. I think that would be a good benchmark for "medium" range, if you model space battles on early 20th century sea battles.
• All that considered, 1000 km as "long" range doesn't seem out of place. That's where there's basically only torpedos left on the available weapons list.
• That would leave "extreme" sensor range at up to 10,000 km.

I think for sensor ranges this would be actually silly. It's 400,000 km from the Earth to the moon. Geostationary orbit is 36,000 km. Detecting a 100 meter metal object at those distances would be trivial. Though I guess ground based sensors or orbital stations tracking traffic could have ranges a hundred times or even a thousand times larger than what can get installed on a ship.

(for simplicity, rounding C=300,000km/s, G=10m/s² - the traveller standards - and I know they're both rounded up.)
At 1000 km, a laser's travel time is roughly 1/300 second
the ISS, at 7.66 km/s is a good target.
So, for a laser, you have to aim 2/300 ahead of where it is.
If the accelerator manages even 0.1%C... 300 km/s you're having to aim for it's location 3.00033 seconds from where you see it. In that time, ISS, can change vector by only a few m/s... not enough to dodge... unless you're side on.
but a 100m long ship, some 10m wide, with 1G of thrust can be about D=A×T²/2 so 10×3²/2 is up to 45m off coasting.
Now, slow those projectiles down to a more reasonable 10km/s (Phalanx is 1.1km/s in atmo...)and that 1000 km is now 100.3 seconds so D=10×100,600.09/2=50,300.45m...
you're having to saturate an area the size of a mid-sized city to hit with that railgun..

It's not the detection range that's the issue, its that they can detect your point of aim soon enough to GTF out of the projectiles' way.

Edit: minor formatting issues

 

[Yora]

Which brings us back to the rule "Sci-fi writers should not use numbers".

I've been making a nice spreadsheet to automatically calculate the cost for any combination of ship customizations and ran into some oddities with the pricing.

Optional Modules are only listed as having fixed prices, but I can't find any mention of a ship size multiplier. Without one, fitting 1 standard cabbin into a Class II ship costs 25,000, and fitting 80 standard
cabbins into a Class V ship costs 25,000, or 3,125 per unit. The same scaling applies to escape pods, and for cargo holds it's even more extreme. A 1 ton hold on a Class I ship costs the same as a 1,000 ton hold on a Class V ship.
Can I just not find the scale multiplier or does it really work like that?

I am also assuming the Advanced Countermeasure and Torpedo features apply to the payload and not the launchers, and the Advanced Weapon features applies to a single gun and not the ship? It's all thrown together on the same Features table, but I can't see it make any sense otherwise.

 

[Mezuka]

Coriolis Reloaded The Combat Overhaul. I have not read it:

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

 

[Staffan]

Coriolis Reloaded The Combat Overhaul. I have not read it:

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

It should be noted that this is released from the Free League Workshop, which is basically Free League's version of the DM's Guild.