Starship Combat Question

[Ergi]

I know a lot of you are very fond of Decipher's starship combat system. I am not, and I am wondering if I am the only one feeling this way.
I haven't really used the starship combat rules, yet, apart from one or two test battles, so I think it could work fine. What greatly bothers me, however, is the fact that weapon strength isn't a factor in determining the amount of damage dealt to shields.
Unless I have overlooked the revision in Starships, the rules from p.114 of the Narrator's Guide still apply: Roll 2d6, add the system operation(tactical) skill level and modifiers resulting from maneuvers. The result is compared with the target's protection value and (remaining) shield strength is reduced according to table 7.8.
So, if all you want to do is lower an opponents shields, it doesn't matter whether you are aboard a shuttle or a Galaxy class explorer.
This just doesn't seem right.

One idea from the top of my head to resolve this problem is, to add the penetration value to the attack test and say half the target's size its shield's protection value.
As soon as the shields are down, both modifiers no longer apply. (not sure about that one)

Thoughts?

[Tobian]

Hmm you're mising some of the subtleties..

You roll your skill to attack, adding in your ships modifiers etc. How much you succeed past the ships protection allows you to do more damage to a shield.. each +5 beyond the protection you do one more damage step to the shield... I.e. say the shuttle you use had a protection of 14, you roll a 19 on your skill test, so the shuttle takes 2 steps of damage on it's shield test as well as any structural damage it gets.

Generally speaking if you were to put a shuttle versus a Galaxy class the galaxy class would have considerable odds in it's favour.. The Shuttle (by default, you can tweak it) will have a low protection, low threshold and low structure. A Galaxy class has high protection, high threshold, and high structure. The Galaxy class will also likelly have a larger tactical bonus and, usually among the most skilled officers in the fleet (i.e. your average person on the Enterprise would have had exceptional skills bonuses to their rolls).

When you hit a ship, any damage over their threshold counts against the hull.. 2-3 hits from a galaxy class would destroy a shuttle because it might only have 0-2 threshold, and it hits for 5-6 (can't remember off the top of my head) - a shuttle only has 5 points of structure (a runabout 10)!

[Ergi]

I know that a shuttle will be blown to pieces much faster than a Galaxy class vessel, but if the attack test results are more or less equal, ignoring the relatively small difference in the respective protection value, it doesn't matter if you strike with a type IV phaser bank or quantum torpedo launchers. Even if you are an expert marksman, you can't take out a tank with a 9mm.
Following the current rules, small (i.e. lightly armed) crafts seem way too powerful to me, in relation to the larger vessels.

[Tomcat]

But a shuttle is not going to have that powerful an offensive weapon. The maximum a shuttle could probably carry is a Class I phaser (from NG, don't have Starships in front of me) which would equate to a 2/2/2/0/0 offensive value. To get a higher value than that, the ship would need to carry more than 4 phaser systems which is not probable with the amount of points you would have to purchase with and the shuttle's size.

So based upon that, the ship could not even overcome a major starship's shield's threshold until it wore them down (via reducing shield strength). Well that is going to take a minimum of 10 turns if the shuttle pilot has a good tactical skill but I don't think the larger vessel would give the shuttle that much time. If it became a threat, the larger vessel would blow the shuttle away very quickly.

[Tobian]

You are also not allowing for repairs and rerouting. My players have allot of fun extending spaceship combat by juryrigging all of the systems and the shields. Having a large crew offers engineers. if you have several cumulative bonuses fromt he whole engineering department, it can make repairing systems much faster / more possible.

A Large starship can also transfer power to it's shields, and generally speaking it has many more systems to transfer from than a shuttle. So really it's not too much of a problem.

[Ergi]

... Well that is going to take a minimum of 10 turns if the shuttle pilot has a good tactical skill but I don't think the larger vessel would give the shuttle that much time. ...

That's exactly my point. So, before every battle you just send out all your shuttles to wear down your enemy's shields, while the main ship stays out of harms way, until the bigger punch makes a difference, when damage is applied directly to structural points.
This just doesn't seem right.