I have been looking at some of the burned up tech about Hammer firepower in prep for a more-or-less space-based High Index game (I want to be prepared based on the murmurings I hear from people).
I’m impressed with the amount of Artillery weapons that have the Blast and Megablast traits. This is probably unsurprising given that is often the point of artillery weapons traditionally but it did make a little confused about some aspects of of the trait when applied to fleets of spacecraft rather than groups of people.
My problem is that Blast and Megablast don’t seem to scale up well.
What I mean by this is that while a Battery or Missile hit (from orbit I suppose) on a company of anvil infantry is reasonably likely to hit all the members of the unit and have some effect - it seems odd that the same weapon system is going to hit a hammer line of battle and, potentially, have an effect on the entire line.
While I can conceive of some weapons that would have an effect on a whole formation of hammer vessels (I was thinking about “large nuclear weapons as effectors” and “truly ridiculous handwavium missiles” a while back) I am not sure why missiles, or fusion canons, would have blast effects on groups of spacecraft. If batteries are q-beams, rather than big fusion guns, then some kind of Blast-like trait makes sense given the description of how a q-beam works, but I am less sure that lesser weapon systems should be able to have this profound, formation-wide, impact on groups of spacecraft.
Anyone else already fretted about this and got some solution?
Well, by and large they won’t. Run the numbers. You’ll find that the blast from a Battery will deal a V8 hit (assuming a Mark hit), which is a Breach only. So that means a fusion battery (and the battery is a fusion weapon, not a Q-beam) will deal serious damage to one target and some kind of collateral blow to another. So it’s not exactly fusing whole battlefleets at a single pulse.
Only the missile has Megablast, and if your folk don’t think missiles or megablast are cool, you could rule it out in world-burning.
Breaches are non-trivial, but I do agree with your point about the numbers.
However, mostly this to do with scaling for me. I appreciate that the hightech equivalent of a MBT main gun might be able to Blast a platoon; but I have a bit of trouble imagining that same weapon Blasting a troop of MBTs, much less a destroyer squadron. Similarly, while a 16-inch naval gun can probably Megablast a company of entrenched infantry, I can’t imagine it being able to Megablast a flotilla of warships.
I suppose that it could be argued that individual vessels are ‘units’. But that seems a bit at odds with the Firefight rules (or can a given side/disposition total have multiple units within it?). It also still doesn’t help me much with my ‘squadron’ problem (I was looking at an order of battle for the Battle of Tsuishima lately when this occured to me…).
I wonder if something quick-and-dirty like limiting blast by Damage Class and DT/MW Class might work? So Vehicular-scale weapons can Blast or Megablast anything with an Human-scale destroyed tolerance/mortal wound, and Artillery-scale weapons can Blast or Megablast anything with a Vehicular-scale destroyed tolerance/mortal wound.
Well I did scale up the ammo cap for High Index Missiles a bit already…
I might just burn up some different Artillery weapons for the gun/torpedo boats so I don’t have a single two-man vessel breaching the hulls of six cruisers simultaneously and leave the weapons in the books for the cap ships.
