Dogfighting: Gunner or Vehicle Skill?

[Anders]

Or you could use Piloting as a complementary skill. That would be another way to solve it.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

... "Dogfighting Action!" article for using the Action rules in dogfights.

This is something I'd be interested in, but I don't actually have the Action series (although I'll probably end up grabbing it eventually). Are the rules in that article complete enough to be used on their own, or do you need the Action baseline to get them working?

There looks to be plenty of other stuff in that issue worth getting (particularly the "I've Got a Great Idea" and "Fortunately, I Saw This Coming" articles), so I might grab it regardless, but knowing this would be useful.

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Add in leadership and tactics for running a wing, and you've got a decent set of stats to build some strategies around and niches to differentiate your fighters with.

Rerolls from Tactics (using the rules from Martial Arts, which I favor over the map-placement option) are always useful. Leadership at a penalty (for doing multiple things at once) could allow you to inspire while flying around, for the typical +1 to Fright Checks and self-control rolls. Spaceships 3 also allows this to add +1 to Tactics (presumably +2 on a Critical Success, as normal); I'd handle that by letting one person who is currently benefiting from Leadership get a reroll without using up one of the Tactics-enabled rerolls. You can only get this benefit once per combat (or, rather, once per instance of rolling Tactics for rerolls).

Another note: you usually suffer penalties for doing multiple things at once (as noted above for Leadership). For small fighters (SM +4-6), the cinematic rules in Spaceships 4 allow you to do this at only -1 instead of -2 or -4. If using those rules, I'd argue that piloting and firing a truly fixed, nose-mounted weapon are practically the same action, so you suffer no penalty (or only a -1 on one task - your choice). With more realistic rules, I'd still halve the penalty (flying and targeting are essentially the same action, but your attention is still somewhat split) - Piloting and Gunner are usually at -4 to do both, so you're instead at only -2.