[Spaceships] Using 20-second tactical combat rounds for all space combat

[Michael Thayne]

I've been struggling a bit with figuring out the best way to run space combat, since the canonical rules leave many things up to the GM. Here's an option I'm tempted by: use tactical combat for everything, no matter what, and also use 20-second combat rounds once you're in weapons range. Longer combat rounds can be used for pre-battle maneuvers, but for the sake of avoiding the weirdness of the rapid-fire rules, weapons range means 20-second rounds.

I tried running a sample combat like this using an Archangel and Xingzhai from Spacehips 8 (with AKV payloads), and 1000-mile hexes. It seemed to work pretty well. I decided the Archangel had been ordered to destroy the Chinese vessel at all costs, and therefore came in at a speed of 50 mps. The first 7 rounds are just the Archangel taking pot shots at the Xingzhai's AKVs as they deploy x-ray warheads and then suddenly they get within MAX range of the 300MJ lasers and everything goes very quickly. The fact that neither side is able to maneuver to a significant degree seems to create dramatic tension rather than lowering it: contact is inevitable, all you can do about it is decide what to target first. Only downside: wouldn't be much fun for a pilot PC in an actual game.

If I ever did this in a real game, I'd likely "zoom in" once the fleets get within some small number of hexes of each other (say the SDVs are 5 hexes apart, because that's what my battle mat accommodates).

Has anyone else tried something like this? How did it work?