What are the changes, and what do the changes do?
1) Aerospace Classification: currently, nothing prohibits a 100-ton fighter from doing Light Air Cover. 60 tons is the breakpoint where we start seeing fighters that care more about armor/firepower than speed (due to the way engine ratings work), so that's where I put the demarcation.
2) Using Gunnery Skill for TNs. Using Regular Pilots (Gunnery 5), this puts the TNs roughly where they are in the BMM (within 1). Matching them perfectly wasn't possible; they're arbitrarily assigning TNs, while I'm having to link them to an existing number.
3) Air Defense TNs: These were massaged slightly. It's very clear that the design intent in BMM was that you want to use Light Fighters to Air Cover against Light Air Attacks, and use Heavy against Heavy. So I messed with the Gunnery Values slightly to emphasize that. However, this also ties in to the next change:
4) Dealing damage to ASFs when using Air Cover. Heavy Fighters find it somewhat harder here than in the BMM to counter an air-to-ground attack, even against Heavy AtG attacks. They make up for this by doing quite a lot of damage to the target ASF. BMM doesn't care about damage to ASFs because it assumes they're 1-shot items, but we DO care because we track logistics. So in this case, Air Cover means that you're tailing the incoming ASF attacker, and get a chance to shoot it down; if you don't shoot it down, it will have taken damage, which in turn makes it easier to shoot down if any further ground fire hits it during a future attack run (since we're keeping a full record sheet for the ASFs in question).
5) Simplified Ground-to-air Calculations. Trying to make the math easier and reduce confusion by removing Altitude and Angle of Attack from the equation and simply installing a fixed modifier. This can often help the ground unit, however, so I made the ASF only hittable if you have a valid LOF to the target hex; not having to count for altitude or elevation again makes things easier to figure on the table.
6) Clarified BSP purchases. It doesn't matter in the BMM whether there's a single ASF doing everything, or if there's lots of ASFs each doing one thing. It DOES matter here, because logistics. So requiring missions to be pre-purchased sticks with the BSP system, but clarifying that a single ASF can do more than 1 thing during a mission also helps. In general, in 10 turns, you're unlikely to make more than 3 passes over a battlefield even using AeroTech rules, so limiting things to a max of 2 passes (and taking away the chance to blow a Special Maneuver roll and crash) seem fair.
7) Allow for other weapons. Adding a damage grouping to ASFs that mount large weapons seems like it should have been in the rules in the first place, but the BMM doesn't actually care about the TYPE of ASF used, only that they exist. Again, we do, and this provides a reason to go get more expensive fighters rather than the cheapest ones possible. Adding the Heavy Ordnance Use is a catch-all; it's not important in 3045, but it will be once we have options to drop smoke bombs, or Arrow IV rounds, or use airborne TAG systems (etc).
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Topic: Aerospace Rules Addendum v0.2 (Read 593 times)