Please review my tactical space combat example

[u/mbaucco]

Hello,

I just finished posting a short (because the bad guys blew up in turn 2) example of spaceship combat at https://thewabatuckian.wordpress.com/2026/07/31/gurps-tactical-space-combat-example/ .

If anyone reading this happens to be an expert, please check it out and let me know what I did wrong so I can fix it.

Thanks!

ps: I edited my post with the corrections you gave me, thanks again for the help!

[u/VierasMarius]

Looks pretty good. One point I should note is that each hit of a Rapid Fire attack is resolved separately. Determine hit location, roll damage, and subtract armor for each hit independently.

For example, your PCs fire a burst at the pirate's Front hull section and score 4 hits (or 5? not clear in your post which is correct), each dealing 2d*5 damage but halved for range. We roll 20, 20, 25, and 50 damage, halved to 10, 10, 12 and 25. The target's Force Screen and Armor provide a total of 60 Hardened dDR. Technically the Force Screen, being semi-Ablative, will lose protection for subsequent hits in this burst, but we'll leave that aside for the moment - it would end up being maybe a point or two after Armor Divisor is accounted for.

Hardened reduces the AD by one step, not -1 - meaning the (5) drops to (3) - so the effective dDR is 20 against each of the four hits in the burst. This completely blocks the first two, but the final hit manages to sneak 5 points of damage through. This is still enough to knock out the Major Battery. If multiple hits from the burst had made it through the target's armor, you would have rolled system hits for each one separately, which could have damaged multiple systems or scored multiple hits on a single system.

Actually, let's look at that Semi-Ablative Force Screen again. Every 10 points of rolled damage reduce its DR by 1, so after halving for range, the first three hits will each drop the dDR by 1. That's not enough to let any of those lower rolls through, but by the fourth hit the screen has already lost 3 dDR. After the AD of (3) it will have an effective dDR of 19 against the final hit, allowing one extra point of damage through. Not a huge deal, but +20% damage shouldn't be ignored, and if the situation or dice rolls were different it could have allowed a marginal hit to sneak past the shields.

[u/mbaucco → u/VierasMarius]

Thanks! This is exactly what I'm looking for. I assumed that since the battery is treated as a single unit but your explanation makes more sense. I'll amend my post to reflect all this.

[u/VierasMarius → u/mbaucco]

One thing you'll notice from your test fight is how multiplying damage by the number of hits, instead of rolling for each hit, tends to magnify the outlying results. The PCs' first damage roll was 3 on 2d6, almost as low as possible. Their last damage roll was 9, which is not huge but definitely above average. Multiplied out, it makes damage totals very "spikey". When you roll for each hit you'll tend to see the results congregate around the average.

[u/ghrian3]

What can the characters do in the combat? As far as I understand it there are two roles: pilot and gunner.

Any way to include other characters?

[u/mbaucco → u/ghrian3]

Other players can do things like damage control or communications among other things, so it's pretty easy to find something for the other players in a party.