Interesting space dogfights

[Harlequin]

Or they're stationary entirely - not even able to move about the system, much less Jump.  Any of those would work, by me, for the needed purpose.

And I was worried about printing the art...

- Eric

[contracycle]

Capships could be fairly easily incoporated into this feudal structure, it seems to me.  Obviously, a lone knight flies a single ship; perhaps quite naturally a larger lord puts their whole retinue in one bigger ship.  In effect, each lord would led their own 'battle' incarnated in a physical vessel.

The downside to this is I'm not sure being 3rd technician on a capship is an attractive prospect for a knight with their own fighter.  Alo, if there is not some major limitation to the size bands, there is nor reason that capships couldn't have a tremendous range of sizes that might make the fighters useless.

OTOH, capships seens as carrier bases are not a million AU away from a castle.  OK so they are mobile, but they are still exercising the primary function of providing a safe base for the striking arm, the knights.  The only downside to this is that in this structure the carrier is usually quite vulnerable itself, whereas a castle is necessarily not.

- If there exists a weapon which kills the pilot but not the ship, then Raubritten or the classic "black knight at the ford" image is feasible

An alternative to capturing the fighter per se would be be to have each fighter, when travelling long distance, to be attached to a "support pod".  The pod encases the fighter and serves the carrier for larger things like nominal living quaters and a galley, perhaps some sort of fuel synthesiser, beefed up long distance comms array, that sort of thing.  In the black knight scenario, then, the challenger would first launch from their pod to engage, and thus it would be the pod, with its contents, that forms the prize.  This would be roughly equivalent to the knights wagon and pavilion etc.

Re: Excalibur.  The sword itself does not feature that prominently as a weapon, I feel its significance in indicating the true king might be more important.

[contracycle]

Incidentally, I just converted one of the above HW images to greyscale, and not a huge amount appears to be lost.  That would still be a major pity, IMO, but then I'm known to favour high gloss products.  Lets have that conversation later, anyway - we're talking quite an innovative approach and if it ends up being really something new, perhaps a flashy approach would be worthwhile.

[LordSmerf]

A couple of things.  One on printing and one on the world.

If money were no object (or if the cost is even remotely reasonable) i would advocate the use of a high-gloss printing with full color art.  I have no idea how much this would cost, but i know that similar books of around 150 pages (Illustrated Brief History of Time specifically,) are not signifigantly more expensive with the pretty diagrams and such than other books in their category.

As to the game world.  We may want to reconsider our definition of the term "Fighter."  If FTL travel is instantaneous and operation independent of a base of operations is incredibly rare then the "one man in a cockpit" works fine.  But if FTL travel take time on the Star Wars level (multiple hours, possibly days,) or operation away from a base of operations is prevalent it becomes more problematic.  Confinement to a cockpit for long periods of time can become detrimental (remember the Air Force still uses amphetamines for long missions.)  The solution would be to treat it as a feature (i.e. if you don't rest between FTL "hops" it is similar to making a forced march, you get very tired,) or to expand the size of a "fighter" to something larger (the Falcon from Star Wars or the corvettes from the PC game Independence War.)

I don't really have a preference, and we may not even have to address the issue if the first set of assumptions is in place.  I just thought i'd mention it.

Thomas

[Harlequin]

As a related issue, though, we also need to look at the possibility of a two-person fighter, one with a turret for example, and how that skews the standard on things.  In the "joust," for example, it would be "unchivalrous" to use a gunner whilst your opponent fired his own; moreover, even in down-and-dirty mercenary killin', it's going to be tricky not to give a huge mechanical advantage to a two-person ship over one.  The size of the life support setup is one possible angle on why (a) they're uncommon, and (b) they're not overpowered.

[Also mechanically, it strikes me that both the pilot and the gunner are always involved in taking down enemies, especially if we disallow "turrets" (the guns are too big - think X-Wing lasers - for this) and simply have forward-firing or backward-firing weapons on everything.  I'd rule then that the pilot and the gunner both roll to hit, allocating equal dice, and we use the higher total successes.  The pilot aims the ship, the gunner watches for his chance and fires - it's a cooperative effort.  An advantage, but not an overwhelming one, is warranted.  If the pilot didn't need to spend dice firing, it'd be overpowering.]

[Corollary to the above: Or, turret weapons exist, but are small in comparison to what you can mount fixed.  This lets the gunner use his dice pool when the pilot is too busy, but not to any great effect.]

None of which directly impacts the "how big is it?" issue, but it's worth considering in the mix.  My $0.015 is that the cockpit be big enough to stretch out in, and sleep on the reclined seat (perhaps while parked in a bywater, no autopilots, both for Pilotly thematics and because the "while you sleep under a tree" is good Arthurian story-opportunity), but little else.  Make 'em stop at friendly cantinae, fortresses, or simply uninhabited planets if they don't want to force-march themselves into the Noble Order of the Cramping Knee... helps reduce the "fly through all this junk and get to where I'm going" factor sometimes present in SF, to make journey-stories more feasible.

- Eric

[LordSmerf]

Eric,

Let me see if i understand your position.  A) FTL travel is not instantaneous.  B) Star Wars (roughly) sized fighters.  C) It is a "good idea" to stop and stretch on a long journey.

I like all of this.

Assuming those things the following question presents itself: Do we want to deal with Fuel?  Do you have to refill every so often with a refined fuel(meaning finding a planet with a suffecient tech-base?)  Maybe some sort of naturally occurring fuel (find a gas giant or a star or something?)  Or something that is relatively unlimited (this here reactor will run for 30 years assuming you don't get it shot.)

Thomas

[Harlequin]

Hmm - not picky.  I'd say wait and see what's warranted as the rest of the setting expands itself.  More important in my mind, does a carrier-ship exist?  Can you bring a "wagon" for longer trips, and is it common, unusual, or unheard-of?  Does it actually serve as a carrier, or is this simply a case of bringing a passenger vessel along at the same time?  I like the latter, from the point of view of it being a "viewing stand" where your lady-love can wait and watch the jousting at the ford, yadda yadda.  Which means that the solo flight becomes more closely analogous to a knight "errant" in the classic sense - alone, perhaps even sans squire, riding long distances in armour while on quest.  And really needing a bathroom break, any time now...

Which in turn brings up another question: gender.  Classic Arthurian gender roles have their charm, frankly, but at the same time if they're not handled well they do offend.  The Seventh Sea approach is kind of a compromise, where women have a far greater role than in history yet are far from equals.  Or full equality, where women are considered altogether the equal of men, in which case we need some other way to establish Romance and an analogue to the "fairer sex" if we want to preserve those mores.  [All of this is of course system- or culture-linked, esp. if we have varied races involved, but I'd guess that a certain amount of default/monolithy is good for the health of our analogy.]

Interestingly, painting the Scientist/Technician as the "fairer profession" would be a really fascinating analogue there.  Delicate, hapless, but essential to the true Pilot's life.  Have an assumption that this is traditionally a romantic relationship between Pilot and Technician, but not necessarily male/female in that order.  That would be a funky meld of gender-equality with romantic-bigotry, IMO...

- Eric

[LordSmerf]

Interesting thoughts on Romance...  I'll give it some thought.  It's intriguing, but so far out of my own experience that my initial reaction is paniced disagreement.

I also like the idea of a "wagon" being a passenger vessel.  You can tow your fighter behind it, but getting into it is much like donning armor.  If you're under attack you just don't have enough time.  I also like the idea of a squire having an inferior ship with part of it's bulk used for carrying extra ammunition and/or fuel for the Pilot.

Thomas

[LordSmerf]

On further consideration i've found that i greatly approve of the idea of a Pilot/Technician split.  It perpetuates some of the interesting themes that we want (in my opinion) to keep.  More than that it also implies a level of technical ignorance among the Pilot caste which i think is very cool.  The idea that the "weaker sex" is the one with information and training advantages in technical fields.

So, yes, i give it my stamp of approval.

Thomas

[contracycle]

I had annother thought on the overall imagery here.  I dislike the rebellion theme outlined previously because knights, by definition, are inside the tent pissing out rather than on the outside pissing in.

So heres and alternate thesis.  What we are looking at is a sort of Berserker/Hawks model.  The Big Ships, perhaps, are something akin to the mothership on Independance Day... really, really immense.  Planet-stripping or something equivalent is indeed the mode of production (something which could be termed a 'Locust' rather than a Hawks mode).

This means that the kingdom is the ship.  I would think there should be several kingdoms, and thus several ships, locked in a permanent hot-again/cold-again war as they migrate through the young universe looking for suitable planets to strip.  This is an entirely space based society in which nobody, arguably, even has a conception of planet-bound existance anymore.

Advantages: we have a military or similar role for knights, unleashed en mass by the main vessel or carriers.  We certainly have a vast, imposing piece of megascale engineering for the Kewl factor.  We have a society boxed in and enclosed in a tense social dynamic with absolute carrying capacity limits.  We get some possible overpopulation dynamics as per the late middle ages.

Disadvantages: this prima facie shifts the action to inside rather than outside the big ship.  We'd need to construct external somethings to fight over else the big vessels are in a stand off.

Anyway, the idea here is Camelot meets Independance Day meets Battlestar Galactica.

[Valamir]

Thats a great idea Gareth.  I don't know that you'd need any more justification for knights to fight over than Battle Tech has.  When you think about it, landing giant robots on a planet to brawl with each other is pretty pointless...but it holds the interest.

[LordSmerf]

I like it.  As for justification, how about this?  (Stolen from one of Timothy Zahn's old books.)  FTL travel can only happen with the assistance of a "gate" of some sort.  Essentially the device that initiates FTL travel can not go through itself.  Fighters can simply use the huge gates built into the mother ship, but motherships must construct monstrously large gates in deep space if they wish to move.  This provides a large and vulnerable target.  If we also decide that the tech base available makes it difficult to produce gates (i.e. years) then stealing components for your own operations would be good.  This also allows us to do away with fuel, instead each Fighter can carry a number of small deployable gates (or perhaps be trailed by a ship that does.  This would also give us a good reason for a fuedel system (at least in terms of nobility) because you would swear allegience to whoever could provide you with more gates.

Thomas

[Ingenious]

Excuse my laziness for possibly bringing up something probably mentioned already..(since I'm too lazy to read through 80+ posts)
I particularly like the gating and the motherships and all of that; along with these immensely huge motherships should also be smaller support ships capable of FTL.. not just a huge gigantic mess of fighters like on ID4. These support ships can be responsible for gate those gigantic gates for the motherships. Maybe something the size of a Battlestar from Battlestar Galactica(the original or the recent series)((think the recent ones are smaller)).
For fighters: boost vulnerability(stealing this from Star wars, etc) by making the fighters sub-light so that the bigger ships have to stick around for them..

I'm just trying to make sure we don't end up with thousand ship battles and shit. Imagine the resources needed to build all of that, and then realize the resources and time it would take to play that out. Granted, you could group 10's or 100's of ships together.. in an attempt to speed up play.
-Ingenious

[LordSmerf]

Discussion of the project has slowed.  I'll be pretty busy until after the holidays at which point i'll probably toss up a new thread and see if we can keep this going...

Thomas

[C. Edwards]

Have you considered an organic ship model? The first two things that come to mind are the sci-fi shows LEX and Farscape, but there are many examples in science fiction literature.

-Chris