10-27-2011, 02:14 PM | #11 |
Join Date: May 2008
Location: CA
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Re: GURPS Spaceships: Murphies, their fixes and alternatives
Ah. Yeah, that's pretty dumb. The acceleration required to dodge shouldn't change with time (though it should change with distance), only the amount of delta-V.
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10-27-2011, 02:19 PM | #12 |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: GURPS Spaceships: Murphies, their fixes and alternatives
Why should it change with distance? That's the distance scale of the combat model, not the size of the ship or anything else real.
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
10-27-2011, 03:10 PM | #13 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: GURPS Spaceships: Murphies, their fixes and alternatives
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The more problematic thing about Spaceships comabt is that at any scale at which I have tried to set up battles during the playtests there were never situations when there was any advantage to be gained by maneuvering. This might be so becaue it is realistic. In all but a very small number of cases. If you want to have spaceships maneuver like WWII fighters you need to have their speeds be in the same ratio to lightspeed weapons as WWII fighters are to machine gun bullets. That will be very fast indeed. So the situation becomes, ships miove into range and begin firing at each other. Lethal results occur long before they can move enough for it to matter in terms of where tehir counters are on the mapboard. Again, this is very likely to be realistic. Another findamental problem possibly related to realism is that armor does not keep up with weapons well. Unless, perhaps ships are so undergunned that they can not penetrate their own armor at all. One of the example ships was like this (I think it was Ares-class and may only be in Designer's notes). It mounted nothing better than a Secondary Battery and had 3 armor systems on its' front hull. With a Main Battery much less a Spinal Mount that armor could be penetrated easily. This is particularly the case for high-V kinetic strikes. As long as their launching ship starts from Mars TL8 ASATs will make hash out of a SM+14 Gibralter battlestation. Sadly, this is realistic too and it's why I don't set up my Space campaigns so that combatants have the opportunity to accelrate for long times with Newtonian drives. The opportunity for small objects to create big booms whiel giving the defender mere seconds to react makes space stations and other "fixed" targets almost indefensible. I'm not sure it's a Murphy to say "Because of its' comitment to realism Gurps Spaceships makes many common adventure situations untenable". but it's so.
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Fred Brackin |
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10-27-2011, 03:54 PM | #14 |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: GURPS Spaceships: Murphies, their fixes and alternatives
The only problem with that is that there is no reasonably simple solution that allows emulating, say, SW or ST.
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10-27-2011, 04:07 PM | #15 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: GURPS Spaceships: Murphies, their fixes and alternatives
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This is why I suggested in the playtest that you set the defualt Hyper factor to 100 since the that was the range multiplier for X-ray lasers in space in 3e. That way 2 fighter armed with such weapons going at it in atmosphere or space were dealing with basically the same combat situation. Since 4e doesn't increase weapons ranges in space the way 3e did, probably no range modifier would be necessary. You'd set the hyper factor isntead to give you the same "move into range, move out of range" you got in atmospheric combat.
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Fred Brackin |
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10-27-2011, 04:08 PM | #16 |
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: GURPS Spaceships: Murphies, their fixes and alternatives
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10-27-2011, 04:14 PM | #17 |
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Kentucky, USA
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Re: GURPS Spaceships: Murphies, their fixes and alternatives
The few bits of ST space combat I can recall offhand were pretty simple. Sure, the bridge crew was saying lots of stuff, the the visuals presented had nothing complicated going on (stand there and trade shots until someone is disabled/explodes), the fights were either static or moving but with a constant distance between combatants. I imagine you would only need to adjust shield values and weapon damage to get the right feel. Is that what you did? Or something else?
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10-27-2011, 04:52 PM | #18 |
Join Date: May 2008
Location: CA
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Re: GURPS Spaceships: Murphies, their fixes and alternatives
Specifically, it should scale with distance-between-targets. Basically, it should scale with how much time it takes for an enemy salvo to arrive. A salvo launched from closer in should require more acceleration to dodge.
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10-27-2011, 05:17 PM | #19 |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: GURPS Spaceships: Murphies, their fixes and alternatives
That would be scaling inversely with range, and basically unrelated to the hex size/combat scale. Insofar as those things are related, that would be the opposite of the way the rules as written have it scale.
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
10-27-2011, 06:52 PM | #20 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: GURPS Spaceships: Murphies, their fixes and alternatives
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You do need to make some rules adaptations (for one thing, you probably want 6 rather than 3 "sections" for Spaceships -- front/center/rear is wonky to start with but not the most problematic thing in the 2D setup, in 3D front/rear/top/bottom/left/right makes a lot more sense.) You might need to have a software aid to deal with quaternions if you wanted to handle rotation in detail, but you can handle on the same level that Spaceships does, generalized to 3D, without any special additional aid. And even much heavier systems like AV:T don't try to deal with multi-axis rotation (AV:T does go beyond Squadron Strike and GURPS Spaceships by dealing with angular acceleration in one axis, but I wouldn't bother with even that in 3D generalization of GURPS Spaceships; I'd aim to be a little lighter than Squadron Strike, not heavier.) Quote:
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Tags |
house rules, houserules, murphy's rules, spaceships |
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