The problem with all this is that balance breaks down pretty rapidly.
Lets say for example that there's a stinger missile equiv that can hypothetically hurt/destroy fighter sized starcraft. Okay. Cool. Running an actual combat with this generally only yields two results though:
1) the stinger (and your friend's stingers) frag the fighter before it can do anything)
2) the stinger fails to destroy the fighter (or the fighter goes first) and the AT guy(s) gets splattered across the landscape by the damage x 10 starship cannons.
The whole thing is another stripe of (literal) rocket tag and without gutting the system as written, there's not really a satisfactory way of balancing the matter.
Well that's a bit of a False Dichotomy, isn't it?
I mean, what if it ends up looking something like this, where the TIE makes several passes, firing at a vehicle the PCs are on, until they finally knock it out of the sky w/ a shoulder-fired missile-launcher.
There's really a multiplicity of things that could happen - either side could "hold off" the other one until reinforcements arrive (in the form of anti-air or ground-assault), the PCs could make a run for a bunker or cave where the TIE couldn't follow them, they could get in their own ship & engage it on equal terms, a magic-user could try to open up a wormhole to hell & throw the TIE in there (is that a thing you can do in Starfinder? Seems like a thing you should be able to do...), etc...
No, more a fairly consistent breakdown of the two most probable encounter scenarios.
Space craft hits, odds are high the target is either a pile of dust or a cloud of red mist thanks to the damage codes. If you're relying on the dice to not get instantly splattered any time someone decides to strafe you you have an untenable system. If the fighters can't accurately hurt boots on the ground because they take targeting penalties then the pendulum shifts the other way and fighters are screaming metal death traps that no one in the right mind would pilot in atmo because any moron with a rocket is at an enormous advantage.
Systems that try to balance vehicles and boots against each other never work. It never worked in any of the Star Wars systems. It never worked in any of the 40k RPG books. It never worked in several other niche systems that barely anyone's heard about. Thumbs up for Paizo for not wasting the effort honestly.
Then it's a failure of the mathematical system to adequately model (say nothing of "simulate") reality.
I mean, it's not like "armored air vehicles vs ground-based shoulder-fired missiles" is a completely fantasy concept, like "knight vs. dragon" (see the Soviet-Afghan War, for instance). And yet, we have several satisfying systems that can model the latter (or rather, what we imagine it to be), but not the former (which we have ample video footage of), for some reason?I mean how much appreciable difference (for the purposes of a tabletop RPG) is there between fighting a massive, fire-breathing dragon with thick, scaly hide, and fighting a massive armored attack-helicopter gunship that's shooting rockets and machine gun rounds at you?
I think the reason for this is the fact that a multiple-mile-long ship takes the same hex that a single-person fightercraft does. So for that to make sense a hex would need to be at least several miles wide, and typically attacks happen from one hex to the next.Why does everyone assume ships are miles and miles apart when they engage?
Alien Archive shows us that adjacent squares on starship scale is MELEE RANGE. Literally. A big space monster can attack your ship with it's space tentacle simply by being adjacent to it.
That sounds to me like hundreds of feet at most.
Ship battles in most scifi movies get really close. Take Star Wars, for example. They were so tight nit at times that collisions were even quite common!
So where does this idea that they must be REALLY far apart even come from? Real life aviation where missiles can travel long distances?
Also the weapons are often light speed or very fast missiles. Since max (but very poor accuracy) range is 50-150 hexes a single hex has to be huge.
No, more a fairly consistent breakdown of the two most probable encounter scenarios.
Space craft hits, odds are high the target is either a pile of dust or a cloud of red mist thanks to the damage codes. If you're relying on the dice to not get instantly splattered any time someone decides to strafe you you have an untenable system. If the fighters can't accurately hurt boots on the ground because they take targeting penalties then the pendulum shifts the other way and fighters are screaming metal death traps that no one in the right mind would pilot in atmo because any moron with a rocket is at an enormous advantage.
Systems that try to balance vehicles and boots against each other never work. It never worked in any of the Star Wars systems. It never worked in any of the 40k RPG books. It never worked in several other niche systems that barely anyone's heard about. Thumbs up for Paizo for not wasting the effort honestly.
The intention is to give people on foot a chance to not get killed by a starship. You're forgetting that a starship, currently, can fly over a group of people and nuke them anyway, whether they make changes to the game or not. What you're suggesting is to leave it this way and leave everything else that's not a starship with no offensive capability.
Space combat rounds aren't the same as normal combat rounds. Space rounds are an arbitrary amount of time but normal rounds are 6 seconds, and I think that should be accounted for. If they made it so that it acts only once every 2-3 rounds, that could help reduce "rocket tag." Maybe a starship should take penalties for shooting at people, but just enough to still hit common people without too much trouble.
Not all of the starships weapons are one shot kills, at least for light weapons. Gyrolasers and laser cannons do 45 and 50 damage on average, respectively. The lower end explosives do about 70 - 90 damage on average. The suggestion of using cheaper weapons is to balance the encounter more. Damage gets a bit high for the more expensive weapons, like the tactical nuke, but explosives probably need a saving throw, anyway. Yeah, you might get hit for 100 damage, but your party has an extra round or so, as per my made up rule.
Maybe there could be ways to reduce damage upon being higher level.
I don't really get why many people are cringing at the idea of a conversion system to convert normal statistics into space statistics and/or vice versa. Is it because people think monsters should lose automatically against most spacecraft in Starfinder? Well the Novaspawn is a monster with tier 8 starship statistics, but so is the Endbringer Devil with its tier 14 starship statistics that also happens to be a CR 19 encounter. It's not like the Endbringer Devil is CR 50 when it stands because it battled with starships. I can imagine the CR for a starship would be tier +5 to +8 but that's just an assumption. I'm pretty certain that starships aren't meant to beyond the power level of monsters by any intended design choice, even the largest and most powerful starships
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Actually starships can't just fly over someone and nuke them normally. The general assumption is that a starship cannot properly target man-sized stuff and the subsequent wild spray of fire is to be treated as an environmental hazard. If your back is absolutely to a wall that's when you break out the damage x 10 conversion. No it doesn't make sense especially considering the scales of various monsters but Paizo wanted starships (Frankly this could have been easily done by just keeping starships in the multi-kilometer juggernauts and fighters as abstract squadrons but I digress) to be a separate system than boots so here we are. The fact of the matter is with the system as written mixing the two scales is not going to work. The amount of jury rigging required is either going to make it unfun (imagine being the guy in the fighter and getting one turn per 2-3 enemy passes. Sound fun? I don't think so) or it's just going to be rocket tag (both sides just can trade shots at each other). The alternative is that Paizo gives a separate starship/boot stat block for everything and I don't think I need to tell you what an unholy mess that'll make.
As I alluded to, the cleanest break is just reduce starfighters to individual vehicles/monsters on their own, make actual Starships the multiple kilometer behemoths that can't target anything not-starship scale, and make starfighter squadrons their own type of weapon to use in void combat. Really the fly in the ointment with the whole divide are Starship scale fighters that are technically gargantuan size (or whatever). Cut that and the whole thing logically fits together much more cleanly and with no internal jury rigging.
Hey, I'm no game designer. I'm not necessarily saying my method is great. It's just a quick attempt at creating a balanced situation with starships, monsters, and players interacting.
The way it is now it may be a little incompatible, but that's only by the design of the mechanics, not the concept. Your suggestion is a good one. Even the ones I listed I would consider it to be better than it currently is. Ever thought of the idea that someone somehow missed a group of people with a Heavy Nuclear Missile Launcher all because it's "inaccurate?" That's apparently a thing in Starfinder, and I can bet it's probably the only game that this happens in. Okay, use environmental hazards, but don't they use CRs and attack rolls? What would their CRs be, anyway? Starships don't have CRs. That's what happens when someone writes a quick, run around answer with only a closed minded assumption and calls it a rule.
Also the weapons are often light speed or very fast missiles. Since max (but very poor accuracy) range is 50-150 hexes a single hex has to be huge.
Why do people keep assuming that starships must always be traveling at ludicrous speed? They're not airplanes, they don't need to maintain a minimum speed to stay aloft.
If I have a landing craft & I wanna circle "low & slow" while spraying the ground with autofire to clear a landing zone, I don't have be just zipping by everywhere - how exactly do you think spaceships land/dock? They have to slow down sometime.
I mean, if we look at an IRL analogue - the Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunship, for instance - it has a maximum speed of 335 km/h (208 mph, 180 kt) - but it obviously slows down when gunning down infantry.
Also the weapons are often light speed or very fast missiles. Since max (but very poor accuracy) range is 50-150 hexes a single hex has to be huge.Why do people keep assuming that starships must always be traveling at ludicrous speed? They're not airplanes, they don't need to maintain a minimum speed to stay aloft.
If I have a landing craft & I wanna circle "low & slow" while spraying the ground with autofire to clear a landing zone, I don't have be just zipping by everywhere - how exactly do you think spaceships land/dock? They have to slow down sometime.
I mean, if we look at an IRL analogue - the Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunship, for instance - it has a maximum speed of 335 km/h (208 mph, 180 kt) - but it obviously slows down when gunning down infantry.
They don't have to travel at ludicrous speeds, they can choose to travel 0-1 hexes. But since a math exists and ships regardless of thruster speed can travel across a system in a few days, they can all reach ludicrous speeds.
In any case, your comment appears to be entirely irrelevant to the point under discussion, which is why people assume hexes in space combat are large.
Basically, that's how I'd figure the nuclear missile goes (equating it to a lance anyway). Due to the intricacies of orbital mechanics, gravity, and unoptimized targeting computers (or whatever), the nuclear missile is more than likely off target by a fair degree to the point the plucky adventurers are either caught in the outer blast wave for managable damage or outside it entirely for whatever reason.
Or they manage to find a lead-lined space-fridge to duck into in time.