[Antiquation!]

Hello fellow forum-goers,

I was curious as to whether or not it would be possible or desirable to implement a "telescoping" turn mechanic ala EABA v2 in GURPS without breaking the current combat system in two.

For those unaware of what I mean by "telescoping turns", the quick-and-dirty description is thus:
Combat starts out on a 1-second timescale, where every action is minute, immediate and important. Each turn afterwards, the time represented roughly doubles (at, say, turn 5 a combat action represents 15 seconds worth of time; at turn 7, a minute). This continues up to a maximum limit (one minute actions in EABA), where turn time "stabilizes" and simply continues normally from there without further telescoping (it could also be "reset" back to a one-second timer to repeat the whole process, if desired for some reason).

Mechanically in EABA v2, this time extension simply functions like an increasing generic action bonus, split and applied to any actions performed in that turn (with penalties for multi-actions, etc). Effects are multiplied via a table similar to GURPS' speed/range table (but with different scaling) for the purposes of figuring ammo expenditure or distance moved during that turn and etc. depending on how much of the "turn mod" was spent on the individual action, giving you a concrete number of what can be accomplished with the action depending on how much "turn mod" was spent on it.

Essentially, this begins to abstract factors more and more and allow "cinematic" turn lengths where things like hacking can be attempted in a single turn (offsetting time penalties using some or all of the turn mod bonus), in-game time limits can easily be played to full duration without dropping out of combat time (say it's 15 minutes until the cops arrive to break things up, then that's a tangibly short number of turns using telescoping time; if using default 1-second time scale the entire time, that's a LOT of GURPS turns spent in combat without dropping out of combat time for lulls and positioning).

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Obviously GURPS has some ingrained mechanical assumptions stemming from the default combat turn length, which has been making me wonder how much retooling would be necessary to make a system like this work. I think it would be interesting to explore as an option, even if not necessarily used for every combat.

Anyone else thought about something like this? Any good ideas on how to implement something like this, or any fundamental blocks to a concept like this functioning?