I've been trying to build some conversion of sea vessels from GURPS to ACKS in addition to playing around with GURPS (3rd ed.): Vehicles and the construction rules in GURPS (4th ed.): Low Tech Companion 3. What I noticed is that the SHP of vessels in ACKS seem to be roughly linear with the length of the vessel, but the SHP of fortifications is closer to the volume of the structure. (To complicate things, GURPS 3rd ed. HP scaled with the surface area!) In addition the raft SHP scale with their area.
Which one should be used as a general rule, if for example creating magical flying buildings?
With the possibility of calculating siege weapon damage with the formula on Guns of War it's possible to compare penetration and damage values between systems (and to any real world data) and benchmark these.
Note: Vessels have around 1 SHP per foot of length (and about ½ of GURPS 4th ed. HP) and stone fortifications have around 1 SHP per 12 cubic feet of wall (or ton of mass).
Also AC of both types is based on the material (and possible angling/rounding bonus), and not modified by the size of the construct (unlike monsters). The increased thickness of ships of war and the English naval ship rating may have been the original source of the Gygax/Arneson decreasing AC, but in ACKS this is not the case. Here SHP are the measure of thickness (linear scaling) and thicker walled ships should have more SHP.
The different treatment of SHP could be thought to represent two different things: Enough damage to breach the structure (to sink a ship or allow egress into a fortress) vs. enough damage to completely demolish the structure. Reading some historical anecdotes (no real data or statistics) I was surprised how many hits ships could survive without sinking.
To have an idea on the the amount of SHP for ships of the line, I'll have to calculate some real world gun penetration vs. hull thickness data and compare to ACKS gun damage. I'm suspecting that getting the ships' endurance in line with the size of the guns carried (and required to breach them) will lead to either increasing their SHP, requiring more breaches to sink larger vessels or taking hull thickness into account by increasing AC. Going backwards into increasing ACs for ships would incidentally eliminate the need for a structural saving throw for them. I'll have to think about that when I look into streamlining firing broadsides of tens of guns in naval battles.
As an example "Sovereign of the Seas", a 1st rate ship of the line is 170' long (ca. 170 SHP) has 20 "cannon of 7" (36-pdr cannon), 28 culverin (18-pdr gun) and 54 demi-culverin (8-pdr gun). A broadside will do on average around 1800 SHP damage if all shots hit, 800 SHP for a point blank shot with 0-level gunnery crews (assuming ship profile is larger than scatter and either AC vs. to-hit or Structural save). So two similar ships firing point-blank broadsides at each other will either sink or breach each other more than 4 times. To give chance at a 1-round sinking, but having the ships survive more than one broadside on average to keep things playable (and more interesting) would require one of these:
- Multiply SHP by 10 (basing them on volume/mass may give similar result, as the ships tonnage [not actual structural mass!] is 1500)
- Divide damage to SHP by 10 like mechanical artillery
- Increase AC to 9 vs. to-hit
- Increase AC to 18 vs. structural save
As a 1st rater it's estimated hull thickness is 28" (possibly lower as the rating/thickness table is for a later century), compared to 2"-5" of boats, civilian ships and viking vessels.
Anyways, something needs to be made more clear or changed, but more data is needed to know how much. What to change is then another question.
Hello, Esa!
First off, let me say that the SHP rules of ACKS are not as coherent as other aspects of the rules. I focused very heavily on making the economics coherent, but I didn't make as much of an effort in making hit points, structural hit points, and damage entirely coherent - something I regretted heavily as I delved into D@W and then Guns at War.
With that caveat, let's address some of your questions:
Hope that helps!
Esa,
Sovereign of the Seas is actually a bit larger than stated. 170' was the length of her gundeck, but length overall was 232'.
My house rules (which I really need to finish at some point) use tonnage in Builders' Old Measurement as shp. For Sovereign, with a length of 232', beam of 48' and draught of 23.5', BOM is (232-(0.6*48)*48*23.5)/94, or 2438 shp. Barring some sort of critical hit, this ship would survive a few broadsides.
Interesting houserule, though I'd note that if you do this with the ships in the core book, they become 3.5-4.5x as hard to kill
Thanks for the info!
I'll probably set wood SHP to 1/30 cf and calculate the structural volume of the vessels to see how it looks with more examples.
The formula for kinetic damage is also useful, I'll compare it to other formula (game and real world). I already reverse engineered the black-powder formulas for caliber and shot mass. I'll play around with BTRC 3G and some historical examples to see if I can come up with some adjustments for early (medieval) and late (18th century) gunnery.
I'll also see if I can benchmark the penetration vs. general destruction to kinetic energy on various structures.
Hi!
The measurements of the ship vary somewhat depending on the source and which measurments were given. threedecks.org & Wikipedia give them as gundeck 168, beam 46.5 (or breadth 48.3) and depth of hold 19.3, which give a minimum for the displacement which in total is bigger. Burthen tons are 1522 or 1683 (bm tons 1650). With these minimums a prism area is around 11 000 sf, and with the bigger measurements 15 000 sf. With 4" thickness that would be 120/170 SHP. If it was 28" thick all around (highly unlikely), the values would have been 870/1170 SHP. These would be enough to resist the point-blank broadside, at least for a round.I need to find out the total volume of scantlings to estimate the average thickness (and have a ready value for the structural volume) and add that to the plank thickness.
I did a deep dive into ballistic weapon damage while researching Guns of War, as it was tangential to some other projects I was working on for ACKS post-apocalypse and ACKS cyberpunk.
It turned out to be both robustly studied and yet also impossibly complex to model in a tabletop game. As far as I have been able to gather, there are four basic types of penetration, and each of them has to be modeled differently if one wants to be scientific:
I decided to use "plugging" as the model I'd work from, as it is the most likely outcome for both thick,hard plates and for thin, soft materials.
In plugging, the material in front of the projectile from the face to the back fails IN ONE PIECE by being force out of the projectile's path out the plate back, either as a cork-like plug or by being torn in the middle and folded back to the sides as thick petals, all as one solid piece of material the total plate thickness deep. This can be approximated by a flat-nosed projectile slicing out a disk of armor like a cookie cutter, but it also occurs in moderately-thick plates hit by pointed projectiles when the resistance is primarily by tearing open in the center over the tip of the point and wedging the hole open by petal-formation, that is, by pushing the plate material forward as it splits open in the center and then having it bend to the sides, since it is still attached to the armor ringing the impact site.
Another similar analysis can be found here - http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?p=135955. I quote:
"It depends on what sort of material is being penetrated. This gets complicated, but the short answer is that
Things used for armor tend to be elastic solids. This means when exposed to a force, they will deform to distribute the strain of the force over a significant part of the volume of the solid. The thicker it is, the more the "layers" behind the first "layer" can buttress the first layer, helping it to resist deformation and failure (there are not really layers, since the material is uniform).
For this reason, the GURPS formulas for damage where damage is roughly proportional to the [square root of the] kinetic energy and DR is roughly proportional to armor thickness tends to reflect real life trends.
Now, things get more complicated when the armor gets thicker than the typical radius of elastic response, or when the projectile is travelling supersonically in the armor medium, so it simply does not have time to respond elastically (in either of these cases, penetration is going to be roughly linear with energy).
Things also get complicated when the projectile itself can deform - in an extreme case you would treat it as a fluid plume interacting hydrodynamically with the armor medium (shaped charge explosive jets fall into this regime)."
Hi!
Thanks for the elaboration of the model behind the numbers. The relation of the penetration dept to the square root of kinetic energy seems to come up in different sources and data set, so it seems pretty usable.
How did you come up with the kinetic energies for the black powder weapons? The amount of powder per shot mass in Guns of War seems high. The data for Trafalgar era naval guns I came across gives powder mass as 1/3 of the shot mass and it seems that was cut down to 1/6 for close range shots. The velocities (and energies) calculated from the damage dice feels low too. Is that because of the difference in technology? (late medieval to 17th Century guns vs. late 18the Century to early 19th Century naval guns)
8d10 gun (18-pounder), 44 SHP on average, 193.6 kJ KE, velocity 207 m/s (690 fps)
From "Ship structures under sail and under gunfire" by Fernández-González I found the "table average ideal penetration in oak in centimeter with 1/3 charge" from Le vaisseau de 74 canons. 4 vols." by Jean Boudriot as 120 cm (48") and velocity at 100 m (333') as 400 m/s.
BTRC's Gun's, Gun's, Gun's gives a maximum safe charge of 33% at TL5 and 38% with energies of 1,7/2.7 MJ, muzzle velocities of 470/618 m/s and penetrations in wood as 117/154 (TL5 being 1400 and TL6 1700).
1/3 weight charge of black powder for the 18-pounder is 6 lbs and has ca. 9 MJ (and a muzzle velocity of 1000 m/s). With 10% total efficiency it has a KE of 0.9 MJ, velocity of 316 m/s. 3G would give it's penetration in wood as 123 cm.
I'm not trying to be pedantic, I'm just looking for ACKS benchmarks to compare to other data and models to figure out things.
No one ever needs to apologize for being pedantic on the Autarch forums!
The amount of powder used was taken straight from the sources. The era I worked from was 100-200 years earlier than the data you are working from and the firearms, the cannon, and the powder were all more primitive.
The kinetic energies were calculated by reverse-engineering from cannon's range and ball weight.
Powder charges changed fairly rapidly. Fifteenth-century guns using mealed powder used a charge of about 15% shot weight (and had barrels only 5 times the caliber of the shot). In the sixteenth century, with corned powder slowing the burn rate and improved powder quality, barrel lengths increased to 14-50 times shot caliber, and powder charges were 50-100% of shot weight, with some small cannon having charges of 117% shot weight. Later gunners found this was wasteful - using 1/3 the powder would provide 2/3 the muzzle velocity, and it didn't drop off as quickly, so the penetrating power was even closer. Rifling dropped powder charges even further by eliminating windage (the gap between a cannonball and the cannon) and allowing all the energy to be transferred.
Oh! So basically nothing was constant black powder guns. :( I'll have to make sure I do comparisons only within the same era/TL. And the baseline for ACKS guns is 16th Century?
I would say late 16th/early 17th century.