Federation Commander

This topic went in a direction I never figured. I guess I was trying to figure our how to assess damage to a planet and track it. 200 pts seem to be the answer.

Seems to take forever to finish off a planet in StarFleet Command, not seeing how much damage is done each shot makes it seem to drag out ---

I think 200 pts. of damage per hex side is the unofficial standard. But anyone can pretty much do as they please.

Let me try and put it a different way: You can't damage a planet with a starship's weapons. Heck, even ramming the planet with the starship and perfectly timing the explosion of its warp core won't damage a planet. What you can do, however, is damage the surface of a planet. The surface of a planet can be rearranged all day, if you keep shooting at it.

What those 200 points on a hex side do is blow up crap on the surface of a planet. A city. Multiple cities. Infrastructure. Bases. Whatever. It is outside the scope of the scenario, so we don't specify exactly what is being blown up, and simply use some arbitrary damage point total to achieve. What that arbitrary value is will be set in the scenario. If you are making the scenario, then you get to figure out the appropriate value.

But, make no mistake, the actual planet itself isn't being harmed. You can take a ship and shoot at a planet until the ship falls apart from old age, and you are not going to harm the planet. Heck, you aren't even gonna crack the crust. You will scour the surface and remove everything above base bedrock, but the planet itself is utterly unharmed.

What the Federation Commander Answer Guy said answer the question. I want to figure out how to damage a planet - possible to remove a resource from a empires access or make a planet unusable for some tactical reason. 200 pts makes sense.

Thank you

Removing a planet from an empire's resources...

Not really possible, At least not permanently. All 200 points (per hex side) will do is destroy the mines and farms and factories, all of which can be rebuilt. The resources (land for crops, herds of livestock, minerals in the ground) are still there, but have to be accessed again. Might take it off the resource list for TWO years.

F&E establishes that the most damage you can do will only take a planet off of the productive resource list for two years, and that's 200 points per hex side for a colony of 10 million. For a major industrial planet (Earth. Vulcan), 2000 per hex side would be about right.

2000 points per side! Wow, that's going to take a while. What you really need is a big mining ship and a bucket of gloopy red stuff to fire at the planet's core. Anyone know where I could get some of that?

I suppose you could have the FedCom equivalent of strategic bombing, where devastation of a planet and its associated industrial base could be used to deprive an enemy of industry and/or resources, but there's really nothing in the Star trek canon to support the idea that such tactics are ever used. In the episode Mirror Mirror, I believe that the ISS Enterprise was prepared to resort to terror bombardment if they didn't get the dilithium concession or whatever, but Kirk from our universe countermanded the order. Apparently the Mirror Universe guys used terror and mass murder, but they were seriously bent. Nothing was ever shown that would lead us to believe that the Klingons, Romulans, or any other race in the standard Star Trek universe did that sort of thing. The builders of the Doomsday Machine did, but they seem to have paid for it with their lives, which kind of makes sense if you think about it.