GURPS Spaceships: Murphies, their fixes and alternatives

[cmdicely]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Spaceships combat has two-axis scalability (time and space). Unfortunately, it doesn't necessarily conserve important features of combat over scale changes. Ignoring the time-scaling issues with weapons previously noted, there's a problem with Dodge. To be allowed to dodge under either combat system, your ship has to use a certain amount of thrust.

Are you sure? The only limit regarding thrust I see in the Basic system is that you have to acheive at least a +0 acceleration bonus (p. 60). AFAICT from the rules on Acceleration Bonus (p. 54) if you don't Drift and expend any thrust at all, you have a +0 bonus (the table provides a thrust amount needed for each +2 of bonus, and you have to halve that to get a +1.)

OTOH, the SS3 requirement for a velocity change of 1 hex/turn does create this problem.

How much is dependent not on any property of your ship or the attack to be dodged, but rather on the combat scale in use. I'd suggest simply setting a constant minimum delta-V that must be burned in a turn to allow a dodge, and allowing that to be burned whether or not it's sufficient for the ship to accelerate significantly at the combat scale.

Since the amount of delta-V a ship can burn in a turn is timescale-dependent, doing this either leaves dodge ability as scale dependent, or creates a new Murphy wherein in Dodging a ship can burn fuel more rapidly than its engines otherwise allow. So I'm not sure this improves anything.

What you need to do is to adopt a constant number of G's of thrust and a constant time (like 1 minute, not number of turns, like 1 turn) over which it must be applied in order to qualify for dodge, allowing the time to be made up of a sequence of turns prior to the attack (including the turn of the attack) if the time is longer than the shortest turn scale.