Question about SSM missiles and Shell weight

[josant]

All SSM missiles like scud, ATCMS, lance, etc. have a shell weight of 0.
If you look at any photo with the results of the missile impact, you can see the crater left, much larger than that of an artillery round.
Could this be a bug like the one with self-propelled mortars, that also had no shell weight? If so, it is easy to correct with the editor

What do you think, should they have a shell weight according to their payload?

[cathar1244]

Greetings Josant,

A couple of thoughts.

First, the database for TOAW II wasn't like that of TOAW I in certain aspects. And some of the equipment definitions seemed to have been rushed out; this aspect of SSMs may be one of those instances.

As for gameplay. My guess is that most conventional military forces in a war would use SSMs to strike strategic targets-- fixed air defense installations, airfields, military bases, etc. (The Ukraine war seems to mostly demonstrate their use as weapons to terrorize civilians, at least from the perspective of Russian use.)

If the SSMs are given a heavy shell weight, will players of modern scenarios use them solely to reduce entrenched enemy positions ? It would work in the game, though I doubt actual military forces would use them that way if only because the missiles are expensive and not present in great quantity.

The other way to look at that, as an equipment designer, is to not care how gamey those effects may be. Players can use house rules to some extent to mitigate play issues.

This is one thing I don't like about the superheavy artillery pieces in TOAW. Despite the mantra that "rate of fire is why the AP rating of artillery pieces drops as bore diameter increases", that is ignored for "sexy" equipment like the German 80 cm gun ... the thinking appears to have been players want to see a huge effect for employing such equipment even if, in actual operations, the rate of fire was probably considerably less than one round fired per day.

Whatever else the equipment database should be, it should be *consistent* .

Cheers