Help me love Spaceships

[The Rampant Gamer]

I'm having a really hard time with Spaceships, and I need some input on how to make it work for me.

Y'see, it's partially the combat system. And it's not just Spaceships that's the issue. Many games that handle man to man combat fluidly switch it up to very long-duration turns in space combat. And the rules in Spaceships leads one in that direction as well, with any game run at 20-second turns, which are still too long in my eyes, requiring really odd pairings of starting velocity and thrust to be appropriate, at 10 mile hexes or longer ranges.

So, I need to get over my dislike of long turn lengths. Help me to appreciate how you keep any level of tension in a fight where you tell your players "You have ten minutes - what do you do in that time? Oh, and you can fire a whole lot of times during that timeframe, but you won't want to, because it's really quite futile and you'll run out of ammo entirely too quickly..."

Let's just discuss that first, and maybe we can come around to how to make Spaceships a little less cookie cutter. I'm actually leaning towards T:ISW ships instead, but am sulking because I can't reconcile how a 1 ton missile launcher holds 1.8 tons of missiles...

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by The Rampant Gamer

So, I need to get over my dislike of long turn lengths. Help me to appreciate how you keep any level of tension in a fight where you tell your players "You have ten minutes - what do you do in that time? Oh, and you can fire a whole lot of times during that timeframe, but you won't want to, because it's really quite futile and you'll run out of ammo entirely too quickly..."

Well for a start, that's not how you say it. You say, "We'll be in engagement range in 8 minutes." The reason why the turns are ten minutes apart, is because you are so far apart and moving so fast that that you have to wait to see the "whites of their eyes". And the way you can make 5 to 10 minutes tense is by dealing a little interpersonal drama into it. Ever watch Balance of Terror? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH7unYCdv6w 52 minute show representing hours of time in the story. During that 52 minutes, each ship opens fire twice. So what did they do for the rest of the time? They argued about whether this would trigger an all out war and whether they could even hope to win against the new weapons. They accused each other of being spies. They mourned their dead. They did damage control. They dealt with a little matter of a toxic coolant leak.

[Peter Knutsen]

Combat in GURPS Spaceships isn't just shooty stuff. There are also - unless I'm misremembering - rules for how characters can do damage control during engagements, and it doesn't make sense to have 1-second turns for emergency repairs.

[Anaraxes]

Assuming the PCs have ship crew positions, like pilot and gunner and captain, they don't have ten minutes of free time on their hands. Don't ask them "what do you do during all that time?" Just ask them "what are you doing this turn?" They're generally busy doing their jobs, so you're not after a second-by-second accounting of every button click on their console, but just the decisions they make that affect the battle (and the story). Power to shields or weapons? Close for a knife fight or keep standoff distance? Finish off that target, or switch to the new threat? Offense or point defense? Keep chasing or break off?

As with any combat, keeping it dramatic means keeping it moving. It doesn't really matter whether you spend an hour resolving ten seconds of man-to-man combat, or an hour resolving two hours of ship combat. If the real-world time drags, it will seem dull.

And if you have personal dramatic hooks, as David Johnston2 mentions, so much the better.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Well for a start, that's not how you say it. You say, "We'll be in engagement range in 8 minutes." The reason why the turns are ten minutes apart, is because you are so far apart and moving so fast that that you have to wait to see the "whites of their eyes". And the way you can make 5 to 10 minutes tense is by dealing a little interpersonal drama into it. Ever watch Balance of Terror? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH7unYCdv6w 52 minute show representing hours of time in the story. During that 52 minutes, each ship opens fire twice. So what did they do for the rest of the time? They argued about whether this would trigger an all out war and whether they could even hope to win against the new weapons. They accused each other of being spies. They mourned their dead. They did damage control. They dealt with a little matter of a toxic coolant leak.

That's actually not how Spaceships combat works. In a 10 minute turn you do 10 minutes worth of shooting as fast as the weapons allow. You also may do 10 minutes worth of damage control and general nonsense, but you probably don't want to distract your pilot and gunnery crew. Or your command crew. Maybe engineering and sensors too. Otherwise the other guy is even more likely to kill you.

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Combat in GURPS Spaceships isn't just shooty stuff. There are also - unless I'm misremembering - rules for how characters can do damage control during engagements, and it doesn't make sense to have 1-second turns for emergency repairs.

Damage control can happen during Spaceships combat, but that depends on the time frame in use. It's pretty nearly impossible at the 20 second scale and the 1 minute scale blocks most of it too.

[Gollum]

I don't own Spaceship, so, even if I know GURPS for more than 20 years now, this question has to be considered as a newby's question...

Every answer above sounds to be fine for huge starships combat, like in Star Trek...

But what about very little Starships, like X-Wings, Tie-Fighters or the ones of Battle Star Galactica? With those ships, combat maneuvers are much more fast. In 20 seconds, such fighters can attack several different targets and dodge several ennemy blows, incoming from several directions... At least, they do it in the movies...

Finally what about a combat with those little ships and huge ones together (like the final battle against the second Black Star in Star Wars VI)?

Does the turn still lasts 20 seconds?

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by Gollum

But what about very little Starships, like X-Wings, Tie-Fighters or the ones of Battle Star Galactica? With those ships, combat maneuvers are much more fast. In 20 seconds, such fighters can attack several different targets and dodge several ennemy blows, incoming from several directions... At least, they do it in the movies...

Finally what about a combat with those little ships and huge ones together (like the final battle against the second Black Star in Star Wars VI)?

Does the turn still lasts 20 seconds?

Those little fighters generally maneuver using some sort of pseudo-velocity system with a very low max speed, "banking" against an invisible medium. In other words, they move like airplanes, and should use mechanics appropriate to that. In Spaceships terms, the dogfights occur at Point Blank range (typically within the same hex, if using the tactical movement rules). I could see something where capital ship-to-ship battles use the long turns, with fighters skirmishing with each other upon entering the same hex, using a much shorter turn (10 seconds was used in the VE2 dogfighting rules, but it was also treated fighter maneuvering in a very abstract manner).

[Dunadin777]

Originally Posted by Gollum

Finally what about a combat with those little ships and huge ones together (like the final battle against the second Black Star in Star Wars VI)?

Black Star? Is that really what it's called in the French version? I'd say that's lame but...no, Death Star is really pretty lame, too. :)



As a veteran wargamer, there's always a cutoff point between large-numbers fighter or small ship combat vs large-scale capital ship combat. Pretty much every system I've looked at tends to fall on the side of favoring capital ships. There may be flimsy 'realism' rationalizations for this, but what it boils down to is that most wargames want you to have to make meaningful decisions for your ships and have a chance at success. If fighters or small ship tactics work too well, swarm tactics dominate and the game (supposedly) becomes boring.

GURPS Spaceships isn't a wargame, but it has a similar issue. You're looking at a system that is meant to be interesting for players. The most common scenario is the entire party crewing a ship--which immediately assumes larger ships--and so you have more rules on secondary tasks to do during combat. Even if players are each piloting a fighter, then you're looking at just a single squadron that isn't going to do much without plot protection or a severely limited enemy in terms of firepower.

I'm a huge fan of the new Battlestar Galactica, and I like the idea of massive battles like those in the Halo universe filling up my RPGs. But those would be nightmarish to try to make work with a consistent, detailed, and generic system.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

That's actually not how Spaceships combat works. In a 10 minute turn you do 10 minutes worth of shooting as fast as the weapons allow.

I was thinking of fast passes.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

I was thinking of fast passes.

In Fast Passes, as the term is used in SS1, everything I wrote holds true. Plus there will only be one turn of combat, which makes dramatic damage control, or I would think having problems with appreciating the so briefly used combat system, somewhat less likely.