Last week my group got into a starship battle and we were confused about something.
I am the GM and my players are on board the ship.
My groups ship, a Galaxy Class Starship engaged a Galor Class
Starship.
They won the Tactics roll and got to go first.
They get two maneuvers for their Starship.
One was a Lock On maneuver.
The other was Fire manuever.
Here is where the problem came in.
The Tactical Officer (A player) wanted to fire both Photon Torpedo
tubes since the Galaxy Class has two torpedo launchers.
I told him that he could only fire one.
He quoted me rules saying that he could fire one weapon system at target and that he wanted to fire the Photons and that the two torpedos launchers were one weapon system.
Who is right?
I checked the rules and they are a little ambiguos.
Could someone explain to me how it is supposed to work?
Basically in the rules for Coda the weapons are abstracted. You do not fire a number of weapons in sequence, you simply add up the number of 'torpedo tubes' you have up, look up the value for them - add that together and look that number up on the table to work out an offence value.
That said all of that information *IS* already presented on your basic Galaxy class sheet (represented by the 4,3,3,3,3 type number - those being what happens on a range increment etc)
This goes against what we see on the show where you fire individual or multiple torpedoes but then it also makes the action run SO much faster.. you simly roll to see if you hit and apply an ammount of damage to their shields / hull accordingly.
There are other combat systems out there as alternatives, such as Steve Longs 'Spacedock' ruleset which is exhaustivelly accurate, but it depends on how you want to run your game, with accuracy comes complexity and time taking.... Bottom line with the Coda system is you go "FIRE" and 20 seconds later you SHOULD have worked out what happened! This means it keeps starship combat in the realms of the speed of character combat, rather than working on an exhaustive spreadsheet like mechanic working on your individual joules of power and how many torpedoes you have left
You CAN look at this as simply being an abstact of you having fired more torpedoes and I guess as an optional rule you could simply state you are applying the mimimum damage for a weapon system (because you are trying to intimidate / shoot accross their boughs etc) representing you are firing maybe a single torpedo or lowering it's yeild (you can do this with photorps)
There are some more options with manouvers, and I suggest you check out Killer Whales Expanded Operations netbook as it's a superb adition to the Coda rules set! with options to help make combat less point and click!
Tobian only forgets to mention that there's nothing in the rules (that I can recall) to prevent both of the PC-tactical officer's actions to be "Fire Torpedos", since an action can be repeated, and the starship weaponsystems have re-load times that are negliable on the time scale used in ship to ship combat.
Very true, if all you want to do that round is fire then yes you can become an arsenal of death
This in some way allows you to do such multi shots. I can't remember if it's in KW's book or the core rules (they aren't in front of me rightnow) but there is the optiont o double tap too - to punch a hole through the shields and then fire through that hole, negating the shield's deflection!
There is a multiweapon attack maneuver listed by decipher where you fire more than one weapon system at a ship. I've used it once with devastating results (mind you as a last resort).
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