OBT Forum

Just a silly question (I am no Aerospace expert): why do they have different hit-locations according to their mass? Couldn't you just increase the resistance of each hit-location?

Also I do like your new take to destroy ships, it looks easier and better.

  Each box of the central systems-diagram can/will hold something like an internal system or a weapons turret.  That means targets can suffer differing degrees of component damage and lose fighting capability in radically different ways, depending on what gets hit where and when.  Bigger ships have more space for internal components (including turrets), and thus a greater ability to ‘fight hurt’, because they’re less likely to loose all of their firepower to one or two hits.  Expanding the size of the hit-locations reflects the relative sizes of the different categories of ship; it also reflects the larger ships’ greater ability to absorb punishment (by spreading out the hits they do take) without ramping the number of armour-rows in a given block up to impractical sizes.  (It may be an outlier, but under the old system, the Mjolnir’s bow has an armour-block 18 boxes wide, with a depth of 13 SI rows and 33 armour rows, which is probably a little unwieldy for pick-up games.)
  As it currently stands, the only other way to ‘increase the (damage) resistance’ would be for weapons to use different-sized damage-templates when attacking different-sized ships, and tracking which template to use against which category of target would add another step of complexity and juggling to a system that might already be getting too complicated for its own good. 
  The objective is to encourage players/designers to use a mix of weapons for different purposes, like in ground combat.  NGRs, NACs, and NPPCs are mainly meant for hole-punching; large numbers of NLs and missile-warheads either swat down fighters/missiles, strip off huge chunks of armour so the hole-punchers can get into the chewy centre easier, or hope to exploit breaches forced by other weapons.

  That said, I am playing with the idea of borrowing the dice and mechanics used in FFG’s Star Wars games to resolve critical hits, rather than worrying about calculating damage thresholds.  (Dice pictured here.)  The differing shapes and symbols of the dice would make them easier to read for people with colour-blindness than different colours of standard dice, which I understand was a problem with the recent Leviathans game.  And FFG having a readily-available dice-app would be handy for most groups, too.

So instead of having more armour, the bigger ships would have more places to be hit?

  Yes.  On larger ships, the probability curve of the hit-location and centre-point dice should scatter successive hits over a wider area.  And given that larger ships generally have higher SI- and armour-numbers, their protection is likely to be thicker overall than smaller ships, so those scattered hits are less likely to penetrate than the tightly-clustered-and-overlapping hits that smaller ships will typically suffer.

The concept seems pretty sound.