Some questions on Spaceships

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by FeiLin

why are the base relative velocities different based on what scale the encounter is at?

Longer distance scales, like shorter time scales, are used when the drives are higher performance. That is, the ships (and missiles) are normally moving faster. If you had slow ships, you wouldn't choose the Distant scale over Standard or Close. Or to look at it the other way around, if you have slow ships, short-range weapons, and Distant scale, you're going to have a long, boring combat as the ships aren't fast enough to close the distance and get into range.

It's not that the longer scale makes the missiles move faster, as it is that if you're using that scale, the missiles would have to be moving faster to hit such distant (and fast) targets (or else there'd be no point in using them). It's not a direct cause-and-effect (distance makes missiles go faster), but a correlation (fast ships means Distant scale, but also means faster missiles which along with the faster ships means relative velocities are typically going to be higher).

The basic combat system (as well as the SS design system) is meant to be fairly abstract and simple. It's not a system of solving Newtonian mechanics equations to determine the actual speed from exact known positions and elapsed times. Lots of values are approximations and averages, not hard engineering numbers.