Help me love Spaceships

[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.