I am proposing tying a ship's size directly into detectability and combat making it less practical for ships to just keep pulsing jammers and sensor pulses at eachother whenever available.
As part of this heavier ships (when using automated fire) would have a slight lose of accuracy (created by sliding the target by a weighted random from the actual target) when fighting down, this effect would be strongest on missiles with missiles locked to smaller ships suffering turn rate penalties and extreme cases simply tailing off. Smaller ships would be detectable from shorter ranges than larger ones.
A ship's vulnerability would be determined by its "Signature", this before any modifying values would be (2x*(y+.5z)) where x is the shortest side and z is the longest. Besides being hastily thrown out nonsense this formula would mean that a ship built for passive stealth would be unwieldy, poorly armored, and very flat. I repeat, the number is more about being lightweight and being easy to explain than as a final proposal.
The signature could be further reduced by the use of a jammer, from here in "ECM". This has the advantage over a passive layout of less stringent rules but does have a few major draw backs. A ship would need to divert power and/or reactor time to actually running the ECM, the ship is detectable from the ranges as if it weren't reducing its signature, and the penalty to effective signature is stronger on ECM than on passive when being hit with active sensors.
On the attack a ship's basic number is tonnage based using a formula I have yet to make up. This would be improved by sensors. While not actively cycling them the sensors would be counted as passive, this would provide a benefit but a weaker one than if they were active. If the ship were to switch sensors to active three major things would happen: the ship's detection power would jump, it would gain a large bonus on ships running ECM, and the ship's own signature would skyrocket.
The ultimate goal being reducing gigantism and creating more strategic and tactical decisions. Or atleast making people build escorts.
As part of this heavier ships (when using automated fire) would have a slight lose of accuracy (created by sliding the target by a weighted random from the actual target) when fighting down, this effect would be strongest on missiles with missiles locked to smaller ships suffering turn rate penalties and extreme cases simply tailing off. Smaller ships would be detectable from shorter ranges than larger ones.
A ship's vulnerability would be determined by its "Signature", this before any modifying values would be (2x*(y+.5z)) where x is the shortest side and z is the longest. Besides being hastily thrown out nonsense this formula would mean that a ship built for passive stealth would be unwieldy, poorly armored, and very flat. I repeat, the number is more about being lightweight and being easy to explain than as a final proposal.
The signature could be further reduced by the use of a jammer, from here in "ECM". This has the advantage over a passive layout of less stringent rules but does have a few major draw backs. A ship would need to divert power and/or reactor time to actually running the ECM, the ship is detectable from the ranges as if it weren't reducing its signature, and the penalty to effective signature is stronger on ECM than on passive when being hit with active sensors.
On the attack a ship's basic number is tonnage based using a formula I have yet to make up. This would be improved by sensors. While not actively cycling them the sensors would be counted as passive, this would provide a benefit but a weaker one than if they were active. If the ship were to switch sensors to active three major things would happen: the ship's detection power would jump, it would gain a large bonus on ships running ECM, and the ship's own signature would skyrocket.
The ultimate goal being reducing gigantism and creating more strategic and tactical decisions. Or atleast making people build escorts.
