Interesting space dogfights

[Christopher Weeks]

Another late comer.  I'm really much more concerned with the "fluff" than the system.  An Aurthurian space setting is cool and seems to me like it demands a distinct lack of capital ships.  

Can they just be prohibitively expensive?  (I'm not coming up with a way to make it plausible.)  Or maybe as in Steven King's Dark Tower books (to mix genre) the world has moved on and monolithic ships used to work (which adds even more cool setting to explore) but they just don't any more.  Or even, the weapon known as The Little Doctor in Card's Ender's Game books makes mass work against you.

Anyway, I'm envisioning small groups and singleton long-range fighters pilotted by knights occassionally bumping up against larger groups of poorly (by comparison) equipped and trained rabble.  Is that what we're all seeing?

Chris (who had more to say when he started)

[DevP]

My solution for keeping capitol ships out of a space setting is making them either severly Jump-impaired, or just to big for any sort of jump whatsoever. (insert tech jargon about exponentially more energy required for higher mass jumps, etc.)

[AdAstraGames]

Hmm, not sure I agree with the conclusion although I agree with much/all of the argument. The reason is simple: why engage at only 3km/sec relative when you had to achieve at least 5km/sec delta V to get to Earth from Mars, or vice versa? In fact, why not keep the pedal to the metal and arrive at 10 or 15 km/sec and fire your flechette crowbars from there? If your target accelerates toward you, closing vectors might be in the order of 20 or 30 km/sec.

We call this the drive by shooting doctrine in AV:T

Two reasons:  1) Delta V isn't quite unlimited for the carrier in this doctrine -- perhaps a few hundred kips (kilometers per second), and the carrier probably thrusts at a few 10ths of a g.  2) A closing pass at 15 kips will result in mutual assured destruction if the carriers are doing it -- they can't evade well at all.

Evasion parameter is a function of missile delta V and target's ability to change orientation and thrust.   I've gone through this enough times in AV:T to be able to give a set of parameters that allow a dogfight-like engagement.  I also know where the buttons are that force what you're describing.

Finally, while it only take 3-5 km/sec to go to Mars, that's assuming you're doing a once-per-26 months launch window and are willing to wait 10 months to get there.  Once you start doing constant thrust drives, your travel time drops and your delta V requirements go up.

And of course, if you acquired 10 or 15 or so km/sec leaving mars orbit and entering a transfer to earth, you would not need to keep your engines burning; thus the problem with detection is somewhat obviated by simply coasting in on very high relative velocities and using the drives only to manoeuvre once you arrive, or to enter an attack run only a few hundred or thousand klicks out.

Two reasons:  While an interstellar drive will be very bright, there are other emissions signatures that can't be avoided in space that are unlike anything else in the sky. Life support requires a crew compartment, a crew compartment requires liquid water temps.  Liquid water temps, by conduction, will make the hull about 250K radiating surface, which can be seen a LONG way away (not as far away as the main engine, but a fair distance).  

Onboard power generation with nuclear or fusion sources will require radiators outputting at high temperatures.

Once your main engine turns off, I know what your vector is, and I can plot ahead to where you WILL be.  If you change vectors, your engine comes on, and I get more data to plot again...and stealth goes away.

Oh and if I have your engine spectrogram and brightness, I have your exhuast temp, and a pretty good idea of your exhaust velocity...which I can cross correlate with your observed displacement to determine the MASS of the moving ship.  Doesn't tell me if it's a carrier or a freighter (if they use the same drive) but it does tell me it's NOT a radar baloon.

Before we go into a tangent on trying to build shrouds or decoys for concealment, I'm going to ask that you remember that we're trying to make something for Jake...and I don't think Jake wants mutually assured non-detection to be a probable result.  (And I don't think Jake wants me to trot out detection parameter math for radiation against CBR and 5K background temps)

Dogfighting this aint, but I think it has its own dramatic appeal of riding in on a torch at ridiculous speeds.

This should really move over to my BBS so we don't cause Jake's head to explode.  Check out my SIGs URL.

[contracycle]

Again, I have no major nits to pick with the above.  I agree its OT and not to the original spec, but I'm not getting any feedback on my latest suggestion so what the hell.  One day I'd love to see a hard science game that isn't a top down boardgame.

So it seems to me we know what we want: Fun Dogfights.  IMO the only important topic is how to make that work; all the rationalising and technobable should be constructed after we have a mechanical system.  Any more candidates for driving the actual play action?

[Jake Norwood]

Ah, now here's somewhere where I feel that I can intelligently contribute, instead of going "rah rah team!"

The technobable had gone over my wee head, but actual play and setting/premise I all understand and encourage.

Re: Arthur and Spaceships

A huge part of this entire idea is going to be space-age fuedalism. This will affect a lot of things, including the idea of capital ships. Why?

1) Nobody wants someone else's capital ship in their territory. Such a maneuver is the same as building a fort on someone else's land, and therefore an act of war. Fear of such could even lead to a cold-war style stand down where everyone agrees not to build them and gangs up on anyone that does.

2) Capital ships require a lot of full-time manpower with military training--in essence, a standing army. One of the characteristics of the feudal period was the lack of substantial standing armies. Each lord has his own retinue and then levy, but no one lord is willing to give up his personal power for the "good of the monarch." Not only does history show this, but the Arthurian myth is based around the idea that Arthur managed to unite the britons only during his lifetime. Thus non-military labor to build such ships or fortresses is feasable, but not to crew them. Make sense?

3) The jump-gates that only fit smaller vessels has a lot of potential, too, I think. After all, real space travel, even at light speed, is just too slow. Therefore a capital ship that had no jump-capablity is simply doesn't make sense except as a defensive measure.

Jake

[Loki]

I can see what you mean, but at the same time the idea of Camelot as a giant space ship (rather than a stationary castle) is pretty darn cool. At least an orbiting space station in geosynchronous orbit man!

[Harlequin]

As a final note on the realism train before we break back to on-topic: Star Wars isn't, in more ways than just the one.  As the same GM I referenced earlier said, "Yes, but you see, in Star Wars they have hyperdrives - but not laptops, or VGA graphics.  This is because the first movie was made in the seventies."  But he's right - any assumptions about detection or anything else get derailed by the fact that if you're trying to stick to movie emulation, your tech parameters have to be based on their (apparently very very bad) computation base, among other issues.

[In the SWRPG, IIRC, the basic time requirement for entering hyperspace involves working out the math, which takes periods of tens of seconds or minutes.  And can conceivably be done by a smart, skilled navigator, by hand (!), in comparable time.  Think about the computer that implies.  Doesn't it frighten you that the Death Star's laser was probably controlled by something with the basic capabilities of a Koko III?]

Dogfighting-wise, I had a TROS-esque thought on it, helping me to get past my objections to the inclusion of initiative in the system.  The thought was that I can see, even in a classic dogtail situation, cases where either starfighter could be 'leading' - with that word used as in formal dance.  If the pursuer is calling time, then he is in control enough of the situation that when the defender moves to dodge, he compensates easily (as he has a smaller angle to move through).  If the pursued ship is calling time, this means that his evasions and the like have the attacker in the situation where, although he's nominally on the opponent's tail, his target is swinging back and forth too quickly on his screen to pin down, and he has no decent shot.

Put that way, I say go TROS all the way.  But re-parse the physical situation into the ruleset, because if you look at it this way, most of the use of "evasive maneuvers" per the movies is to give the defender initiative; that's it.  Keeping the initiative, as the pursued party, means that you are already dodging enough that he hasn't yet had a chance to fire - try to keep it that way.

One way to handle this would be with a version of my "Push" house rule for TROS (posted to those boards awhile back)... where in addition to rolling dice for maneuvering, either player can also spend dice directly toward the initiative.  For this version, drop the activation cost; when either player wishes to enact a maneuver, let them spend additional dice to "Jink" (if being tailed or disengaged) or "Lock" (if tailing someone - identical other than in name, unless we choose to differentiate).  Successes on the maneuver, plus the dice on spent Jinking/Locking, become your initiative total (instead of just maneuver successes as in base TROS).  This would give a nice balance between "trying to establish control over the pacing" versus "trying to accomplish X."  It's been working like a charm in my swordfighting game, and I think would be even better here.

Combine this with the "you're either tailing, being tailed, or disengaged" and you get three sets of maneuvers, kind of like proficiencies in TROS.  In fact, tracking proficiencies in the three areas separately (with a -2 default or something so you can just buy a specialty if you like) would be quite cool.

Disengaged Maneuvers:
(Offensive)
Long-Range Fire [Activation cost 2, roll an attack]
Firing Pass [Next Exchange you both can Fire and Evade ala Block and Strike, no activation cost for you; your net successes on this roll are an Activation Cost for his shot, if any, during the pass.]
Tail [Activation cost 1, gains dogtail position if successful]
Relocate [Used if there's terrain or large ships nearby, to move the dogfight into or near to that fixed point.  Opponent need not follow. MOS indicates how deeply into that terrain (asteroids, for example) you get.]
(Defensive)
Evasion [Basic dodge]
Break Off [Flee the fight]
Roll And Close [As Firing Pass, but used defensively with an activation cost and/or higher TN]
Pursue ["Defends" against Relocate - distinct from Evasion partly in intent, and partly see ship stats and STN/MTN, below.]
Full Evasion [As in TROS]

'Tail' Maneuvers:
(Offensive)
Lock In Sights [Net Successes roll into dice on next shot]
Fire [Yup, you guessed it]
Relocate [Breaks off your tail and lets you go elsewhere - useful against defenders trying to smash you on asteroids.  I say we wait 'em out.]
(Defensive)
Evasion [Y-Wings shoot backwards, turrets shoot from the ground, etc]
Full Evasion [As normal, but note that this loses your tail status]
Follow Through [Defends against Breakout, Hotshot, and like maneuvers, see below]
Follow Around [As above, but loses you the Tail status, although net successes on this maneuver do turn into bonus dice on a Tail attempt next exchange.]
Pursue [As above]

'Dog' Maneuvers:
(Offensive)
Breakout [Disengages the tail]
Turret Fire [Ships with rear-facing weapons only]
Reversal [One of several maneuvers - Immelmanns etc, sudden stop-and-start tricks - which turns you from the 'Dog' into the 'Tail'.  High TN and/or Act. Cost.]
Relocate [Moves the dogfight toward some terrain or large ship, or away from same.  The nice thing about being the 'Dog' is that you get to decide where we go, or he drops the tail.  If near usable terrain already, then:]
Hotshot [Turn 90 degrees and go between two pillars, or through an asteroid tunnel, or whatever.  Pursuer may either Full Evade and lose his tail for sure, or use one of the Follow actions.  If you win, net successes indicate damage to the pursuing ship.]
(Defensive)
Evasion [You'll use this a lot.]
Evade and Break [Higher TN and/or Act. Cost, breaks the Tail status as well.]
Evade and Reversal [TN nine; dodges the shot, and puts you in the tail position if successful.]
Full Evasion [From the 'Dog' position, this does NOT break combat; instead, it allows the pursuing ship to move the action further from, or closer to, any terrain present, and the tail stays.]
Pursue [Activation Cost 3 when done from this position - if the Tail wants to leave, it's hard to catch up.]

I'm using terrain here a couple of ways.  In an asteroid field or tunnel system, I'd have a Terrain roll as in TROS, failure means taking damage.  You don't need to be in this confined a space to use the Hotshot maneuver, though; you just need something solid and interesting to be nearby.  Hotshot probably uses the terrain TN as its TN, with a minimum of four or so.  "Nearby" is deliberately left undefined; the various Relocate actions put your ship, and the duel if the other guy wants to come with you, "nearby" to any available object (or not "nearby" anything at all, which is almost always an option).

Phew!  That was longer than planned, but it holds together nicely, once you parse it like this.  As a final note, I could see starships having an ATN (used for firing), an "MTN" (Mobility TN, used as the DTN and also for actions like Tail, Reversal, and Hotshot), and a "STN" (Speed TN, used for Relocate, Break Off, Breakout, etc.).  That plus the damage your weapons do, and the ship's toughness, would give us a nice five-stat detail range for any starfighter.

A fairly typical set of sequences might be: Tail 5d/Evade 1d(Jink 3d) - Tail is established but the 'Dog' has initiative.  Relocate 5d/Pursue 2d(Lock 2d) - the 'Dog' pulls the fight into the asteroids, but the 'Tail' gets the initiative.  Fire/Evasion, Hotshot/Follow, and so on.  Yum... I want to try this, now.

- Eric

[Harlequin]

Mmm - terminology change for the above.  Not "Offensive" and "Defensive" maneuvers - even in TROS that's not strictly true and here it's actually misleading.  "Proactive" and "Reactive" instead.  Whoever has the initiative is the one taking Proactive actions from the appropriate list.

That should help...

- Eric

[Mike Holmes]

I'm not sure that I get your point about the computers? Are you just pointing out another unrealistic thing (because I could go off on a loooong list on that tangent if I were of a mind to). Or are you saying that info-technology isn't being taken into account in the model at this time? If so, are you saying it should be, or that, like inertial movement, that we should just continue to ignore it?

Jake, do you want to consider the effects of electronics and such in terms of the model, or should we just sweep that under the rug? The simplest thing to do, IMO, is to say that all ships are created equally in terms of these things and that its the human edge that's making the difference.

Mike

[Harlequin]

I'm saying that the tech assumption is basically that computers are about as useful as a calculator is today, and that if we're trying to be faithful we should model that.  Yes, it's unrealistic, but more to the point it's a genre thing which we should preserve - which in turn makes many of the other unrealisms work just fine.

Certainly we might want to occasionally model a ship with better or worse targeting characteristics - both from aids like the "targeting computer" in Luke's cockpit, and perhaps from more accurate weapons or something.  In keeping with the Arthurian model, one of the things I found when GMing Pendragon is that knights (in any remotely gamist CA) care about their gear, and the fine details thereof.  Straight out of Shakespeare (Henry V) - "My horse is the fastest horse in all the kingdom." "Your horse, yes, but I have the finest armour."  Not a direct quote but the sense is there.  Give "Arthurian" starfighter pilots half a chance to distinguish between their vessels in any little way, and they'll go for it.  Having different ATNs in the above post is exactly an example of this.  

So I'm not quite suggesting we ignore computation entirely - but it falls by the wayside and can entirely be compensated for with an edge in skill or luck.  The genre demands this.

- Eric

[Jake Norwood]

Jake, do you want to consider the effects of electronics and such in terms of the model, or should we just sweep that under the rug? The simplest thing to do, IMO, is to say that all ships are created equally in terms of these things and that its the human edge that's making the difference.

Mike

The differences in ships should be like differences in weapons and armor, but not so much that they completely dwarf skill. IOW I see the ships as manually operated tools.

Jake

[contracycle]

I like Harlequins proposal a lot, I could really see that working in first person play.  I agree the technology aspect is going to be heavily rationalised, but this could well be an opportunity.  Also, the one major issue of concern in my mind - multiple opponents - is going to require some rationalisation too.

I don't think its too hard to make computers go *poof*.  The red queen principle of eternally self-levelling competetion can be cited to abstract computers to some field other than immediate consideration in the resolution.  Perhaps before launching each ship downloads the latest to-the-nanosecond patches and updates and revisions, so the important thing is not the specifics of the software but how old your batch is.  This could even be exploited as a sort of timer mechanic to govern long term stretches of play, in that if you've been wandering the wilderness and you come up against a fresh-launched patrol, they have a real edge, your software is ancient by comparison.

Mark Rein Hagen wrote a space game which never saw print to the best of my knowledge, but the document was huge.  One of its features which sticks in the memory was the way you would set up default messages that your ship broadcast every time you encountered another ship or entered a system or exited a jump or whatever.  Identity was an important theme, he had also rationalised huge runes on the sides of ships, so this would also include affiliations and missions statements.  The beautifully ironic thing about the status broadcast was the default setting "Declaration of Friendly Intent" which nobody ever changed.

I think this is good inspiration for using information systems as heraldry and as personal expression.  The medieval inspiration can be drawn from fanfares and so forth, and from naughtical flag conventions too.  So perhaps you would really arrive to discover a station broadcasting a message equivalent to flying a flag at half mast across a whole system.

Some rationalisation for not the obligation but the necessity of personal insignia.  Computers and intelligent agenst being so good, and so reliable, patterns of user behaviour and detectable and identifiable.  Thus, your software could watch an enemy vessel and, by comparing against the known characteristics of that vessels software, predict which pilot is in command.  And if you can't hide it, you might as well flaunt it.

[Mike Holmes]

Public encryption keys as Heraldry. Cool.

I think that all the points at which you have to create BS explanations are opportunities. Once you have a bunch of BS rolling, it starts to take on a life of it's own, and some of the setting comes from abstractions based on the convergence of your BS facts.

I'm looking forward to that pointin this design. Often this is the point at which some designers allow problems to creep into their scheme rather than fix them. Personally I vote that we try to make the BS as internally consistent as possible in the end. Even if that means going back and forth at times (which really bothers some people).

One point needs some "plausibilizing." That's the lack of crew. The problem in Medieval times in creating a large standing army had to do with the fact that your agrarian economy teetered constantly on the verge of collapse. You just needed a large proportion of your populace to feed everyone. In an advanced culture that has to be replaced by something, otherwise your scarcity of manpower for crews becomes hard to buy.

While thinking about this, it occurs to me that an odd way of handling this would be to say that everyone has laws that prevent you from conscripting, and that the populace really doesn't like the idea of fighting for these lords. So, basically, there are very few volunteers to fight. Would need a little work to be really plausible, but it could turn things on it's ear in a neat way if worked out correctly.

Mike

[Harlequin]

Funny - that aspect doesn't bother me at all.  If we're looking at a world where the starfighter is very much a manual tool, with a lot of hands-on skill involved, and a high price tag, then you get two reasons for lack of proliferation of crew.  It must take a real gift to fly a starship purely by hand, and that can't be common.  And the high price tag means that maintaining a huge standing army isn't economically feasible, compared to keeping a small flight of fighter craft.  So you end up with a situation comparable to the Arthurian model.

Interestingly, there may be meat in looking at the discrepancy: in the medieval analogy, it was the lords themselves who had horses and armour.  You didn't take your strongest and most agile farmhand, even if he could nominally have been better than you, and give them to him.  A lot of this (apart from pride and preconceptions) was because you had spent your life training for this role.  Moreover, the required expense produced small passels of knights supported by individual lords.  So rather than the "Rebel Alliance" model shown in Star Wars, modeled on modern armies, one might see a given contributor (a nation, a planet, a star system) able to support only a small number of fighter craft - single digits, up to double digits for wealthy systems, etc - and having a caste of some sort which trains for this job from birth.  The methodology of choosing that caste could vary greatly... inheritance on one world (this is the Prince's Starfighter, you dolt, it'll never be yours), meritocracy or selection for genetic traits on another, no doubt selection by omen on another.

This would give the "heraldry" a lot more punch, if you could reasonably expect that (a) anyone flying a starfighter is a Pilot, capital P, and (b) there are so few of them that know can expect to recognize many, and learn others quite quickly when brought together.

In fact, if we wanted to strain the analogy, it strikes me that in a world without the computation to build truly faithful simulators, one could really justify "tourneys" of friendly starfighters with (for example) the lasers turned down in intensity until they were basically markers, judged by watching passenger ships of the peerage.  It's a conceit, perhaps, but it's one that generates a lot of play potential, all of the betrayal/intrigue/competition made possible by the tourney format - running Pendragon I often found that tourneys were some of the most memorable sessions.

Oh, and with regards to my above list of maneuvers et al, I think we can rationalize the list somewhat and fill in one or two missing items, mostly fleshing out the distribution of "do it via superior speed" vs. "do it via superior maneuverablity."  If there's consensus that this would be a good way to do the job, then I'm inclined to suggest that we open a new thread for specific system discussion and start hammering that into shape.  Any takers?

- Eric

[contracycle]

Hmm, gonna have to disagree with Harlequin a bit.  Perhaps it's just the orientation of my training, but I balk at anything remotely SF that does NOT have computers.  Too much of the space math requires stuff that humans just cannot do in their heads reliably enough to build a social system on without computation.

But, that does not mean that computers have to be significant in play in any meaningful sense.  Tied in with setting rationalisation, it can be done I think.

Now it has to be said, my Disbelief meter generally goes *sproing* every time I see some sort of ancient society in space.  In my view, material conditions determine the political format.  But that said, a particular formation can be duplicated by working backwards top construct an artificial society that duplicates those points.

For this reason, I would be inclined to shoot for something pretty far out, with serious questions about the humanity of the characters.  Perhaps Dune is an inspiration here, and we assume some sort of drug-like dependancy that, say, makes the superhuman reflexes necessary for space combat available.  Alternatively, genetic modifiation and cybernetics can be called on to explain unusual social paramaters for a highly technical society.

I think there must be something specific and rare that makes these systems work, so that the feudal lords can maintain their monopoly on violence.  If populated planets, I assume, will be the equivalents of fiefs and cities, then something must be introduced to prevent those populations of millions or billions from being able to take up arms themselves.  The tech that drives the fighters and the capships must be localised and controlled (as in the controlled substance sense).  I fully agree with Harlequins proposal that the fighters occur in small numbers and that the pilots are high in a caste system.  This also obviates my concerns about squad on squad combat, in that numebrs will be low enough for players to plausibly engage in small skirmishes.  I also think the capships will need to have some sort of doomsday device that can and do present a real threat to the populated planets subordinate to the lords.

Which raises another interesting point.  The castle/ships must be dependant on those populations too for something, must be a required resource of something that justifies conflict between lords over territories.