So I've been toying with the idea of making an alternate and much more detailed damage allocation system for SNE. This is going to be a somewhat wordy post as I'm not great at explaining these things, but I would definitely appreciate thoughts and feedback.

This is very much just in the conceptual phase, and is designed to fit directly into my own fiction, so I don't know quite how well it will translate into other settings for SNE; the main problem would be the size of the ships. For my designs the largest ships are around 350 points, with most cruisers sitting in the 250-300 range, while the smallest ships are in the 40 point range. If you had ships in the 500+ range conversion would be problematic.

There are 3 main things I took into consideration creating this system:

1 - My fiction has directional shields.

2 - I wanted to significantly increase the detail of the damage ships take, beyond the "roll a die and mark off 1 shield box". For example, with my new system, it's completely possible for a ship to lose the entirety of its front shields in a single salvo. Unlikely, but possible.

3 - I wanted to mimic directional damage, so positioning in combat becomes very important. In stock SNE relative positions don't really matter too much. With this system they do. This greatly increases the usefulness of fast and maneuverable escort ships.*

*[size=85]This also factors into my fiction, as huge fleet battles are incredibly rare and skirmished between small cruiser patrol groups are the norm.[/size]

So I'll get right to it: Below is the damage allocation diagram for a 287-point cruiser. This ship has 14 hull and 8 armour, Thrust 3, no ECM, and shields of F3, P4, S4, A5.

<IMG src="http://www.rimworldproductions.com/Warfleet/Revision_5S/dallocv2/starsail_sne.jpg"></IMG>

Above is the normal SNE Ship Display for the cruiser. Below is my new damage allocation diagram.

<IMG src="http://www.rimworldproductions.com/Warfleet/Revision_5S/dallocv2/starsail_concept.jpg"></IMG>

How the diagram works:

This diagram probably bears some similarity for anyone who's played Renegade Legion: Leviathan, and indeed I took a good chunk of inspiration from that (and Crimson Skies).

Think of the diagram as a top-down abstraction of the ship, with the front pointed "up". The diagram represents everything on the SNE Ship Display in greater detail (the SNE Ship Displays are made first, then I convert to this diagram). It does not replace the SNE Ship Display, that display still has important information needed. My diagram is simply to increase the detail of damage allocation.

First thing's first: Damage will be applied from the direction the shots came from: front, port, starboard, or aft.

Surrounding all 4 sides of the ship is a level of armour. This must be blown through in its entirety for any given side before any damage is applied to the hull. This means you can take hull damage if, for example, all your front armour is gone even if you have armour on other sides, provided the shots originate from the front arc. This armour can be distributed as the shipwright sees fit, but the total is taken directly from the SNE Data Sheet.

The number of shield boxes on the diagram is provided by the number of shield dice icons on the shield track from the SNE Ship Display. The front shields of my cruiser has shield dice 3-4-4-5-6, so I have 5 "Front Shield" boxes on the diagram. Each one that is destroyed is functionally the same as marking off one shield die icon (directional shields mean that instead of 5 shield die icons, my Ship Displays have 20, thus requiring 20 shield boxes on the diagram). You can see here this also makes it possible to completely knock out shields protecting a given direction.

The number of thrust, weapon, and ECM boxes are taken from the number of "non-zero" boxes on the SNE Ship Display (except this ship has no ECM, thus no ECM boxes). Destroying one box on the diagram is functionally similar to destroying one box on the SNE display.

Weapons are a bit confusing so I'll do my best to explain. Each weapon bank in SNE has only two damage levels: "Damaged" and "Destroyed", regardless of how many physical weapons are in the bank. This is problematic to represent more detailed without the need of re-calculating the number of attack dice as individual weapons take damage. I've tried to reach a compromise in the diagram. Each individual weapon is still represented, but grouped so that we can abstract the the detail to the SNE level.

The turrets in this case are easy, there's two per bank. This means we only need 2 boxes per bank on the diagram. The first hit on the bank results in a "damaged" state for the bank, and the second box destroys that bank.

The Laser Clusters are more problematic, since their's only two banks and each consists of four weapons. Ideally I don't want to do only 2 boxes per bank as there are physically more weapons. The compromise is to combine boxes into groups. On the diagram you can see that each bank has 4 boxes and they're grouped into two groups each (the dark gray boxes). The premise is that both boxes of a group have to be destroyed to result in the "damaged" status. When the second group is destroyed, the bank is destroyed.

Other ship systems such as hyperdrive and cargo are represented by individual boxes as per SNE (hyperdrive is one box, cargo is one box per 50 points, etc). I've abstracted "munitions" down to 3 boxes, since 1/3 are destroyed at a time as per SNE. Not sure if I like that or not.

The light gray boxes are just hull boxes. They represent superstructure, non-critical systems and the like where the ship can takes damage without loss of significant systems (functionally identical to the hull boxes on the SNE Ship Display)

How Damage Allocation Works:

IMO this is the cool part . The numbers along the tops and sides of the diagram represent where the damage physically hits the ship. Damage allocation requires more than just six-sided dice. I've made provisions for the full range -d3, d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20 (though 20 is insane and won't likely be used, unless on a starbase). Some people might not like this because now you need unique dice to allocate damage, but using multiples of sixers (like 2d6 to generate numbers between 2 and 12) screws with the number distribution (results cluster around the center of the range with the outer numbers coming up rarely**).

A quick example of how this works: The cruiser has no front armour left and takes 1 point of damage from the front. A roll is made on a d8 to see which column the damage gets applied to. It comes up "5". The "Front Shield" box in column 5 is marked off. This means the front shield track has taken 1 point of damage, and the front shields are now operating at level "4+" instead of "3+" (as per the SNE Display above). If the ship took two or three or more points of damage, you'd roll 1d8 for each point, marking off the next undamaged box in the appropriate column. If a "5" came up again a second front shield box would be destroyed.

In the diagram below we scored 5 points of damage to the front of the ship, with rolls of 1, 3, 5,5 and 6.

<IMG src="http://www.rimworldproductions.com/Warfleet/Revision_5S/dallocv2/dam1.jpg"></IMG>

The hits in columns 1, 3 and 6 all hit gray "hull" boxes, resulting in no system loss. Two successive hits in column 5 however have destroyed 2 shield boxes.

On the next turn the ship takes another 3 hits through the front. The results are 5, 7 and 8:

<IMG src="http://www.rimworldproductions.com/Warfleet/Revision_5S/dallocv2/dam2.jpg"></IMG>

The result of "8" hits hull, with no more effects. "7" hits another shield box, reducing the front shields to "5+", and the hit on column 5 is applied to the next undamaged box, which is again, a gray hull box.

When damage is taken from the sides the application is identical, except you go across the rows instead of up or down the columns.

Weapons with Dx2 and Dx3 traits:

Whereas in SNE these weapons simply cause more damage, in this system their damage is allocated differently. The roll to hit is done the same, but instead of multiplying the damage and rolling for each point on the allocation diagram, you roll once for each hit and apply the entirety of that hit along the same column or row.

For example, the ship takes a hit on the port side from a Dx3 weapon. Normally a single hit with a Dx3 weapon would mean multiply the damage by 3 and technically score 3 hits. In this system you score 1 hit that marks off 3 boxes on the single row (we'll assume the damage allocation roll was a 5 on 1d10):

<IMG src="http://www.rimworldproductions.com/Warfleet/Revision_5S/dallocv2/dam3.jpg"></IMG>

This single hit has bored into the side of the ship, damaging the port turret bank and knocking out a shield box. The third point hit gray hull. Two more successive Dx3 hits to the same spot would blow a hole clean through the hull!

I haven't played around much with how the different traits would apply damage (Cts and Prx would both apply differently to the diagram), but this gives a lot more options for how different loadouts apply.

[size=85]** This may be more realistic, as we can assume gunners aim for centre mass and thus will hit more often toward the centre of their target's profile, however it becomes problematic when arranging systems on the damage allocation diagram.[/size]

How conversion works:

I'll straight up admit there's a bit of pixie dust and unicorn blood involved in the conversion from SNE to this system. You can get the diagrams close, but they'll never be as near mathematically accurate as SNE's system. In the quick number-O-magic I did I came up with errors of between 5%-10% in the number of hull boxes. There's other factors to take into consideration too, but I'll get into that.

The first two considerations are that you have to represent the systems using far more boxes, and those systems have to be represented on a grid with a number of rows and columns that neatly fall within a die range. So basically, your grid has to be one of the following:

<IMG src="http://www.rimworldproductions.com/Warfleet/Revision_5S/dallocv2/grid.jpg"></IMG>

For the initial conversion, I took the number of hull boxes on the SNE display and multiplied by 5. This gave me a starting point. The cruiser above has 14 hull boxes, which results in 70. I used an 8x10 grid for 80 boxes instead of 6x12 for 72. 6x12 looked funny, though in an actual prototype of this system it would be the far better version to use (3% error instead of 13%, which is a little high -though the smaller grid would result in a far more cramped allocation diagram).

The shape of the grid does matter, but I prefer to keep them pointy as oppose to fat, unless the ship it represents is also fat.

For armour I did a straight x5 multiplier and rounded to the nearest whole number. In this case 8x5 = 40, so that gave me 40 armour to distribute around the diagram. The Starsail has an armoured prow so I chose to put a huge chunk there and sacrifice it elsewhere.

As for placement of the actual systems on the box, that's more or less up to your judgment, but the placement significantly impacts how the ship performs. Clustering the systems toward the outside of the hull means that systems will go down quickly upon taking damage, but might represent a civilian ship where ease of access for maintenance is priority. A stand-off ship with heavy weapons might cluster them toward the interior of the diagram, meaning it will be able to take quite a few hits before losing systems, but those systems will start to drop very fast once the hull has be blown through. For most warships the best compromise is probably spread the systems out around the hull.

With this system one can maintain a degree of consistency between the relative power of the designs, however it isn't perfect and it is quite possible to make two warships of similar point value perform VERY different. This isn't necessarily a disadvantage but care must be taken. And like I said, it isn't perfect and you won't be able to achieve the same kind of mathematical perfection between designs inherent in SNE.

For my own ship in this diagram, I followed the placement of the systems on the model I built of it.

I've only done a few conversions so far of ships straight from my SNE Ship Displays. I haven't specifically re-worked any of them yet for this kind of damage allocation system. As I said it's really in the early phase and I just started toying with it. It will certainly make maneuvering far more important and, IMO, opens up a lot of options for SNE without overly complicating anything. It increases the amount of die rolls so will slow down combat a bit.

A secondary effect is that ships -especially the larger ones- will be far more survivable and are far more likely to be crippled and become "combat ineffective" rather than be destroyed outright.

For my universe setting all of the above fits in well with the fiction. Battles are rarely fought between fleets and salvaging (or stealing!) hulks after a battle is common.

I think this system has some nice advantages -it really emphasizes the importance of maneuvering and positioning, makes smaller vessels far more deadly to larger ones, and overall just expands the tactical options available to players. Simply closing into range and slugging it out won't work out so well anymore. I don't think it will effect overall balance too much as long as the creation of the damage allocation diagrams is done carefully. Like I've said several times this is really an early concept.

If anyone has any opinions, comments, suggestions, or criticisms I'd love to hear them.</r>