"Why little 3D space combat and lots of 3D air combat?" Topic

Ah, the old chestnuts. :)

"Up is just a different direction…"

"Until you have four objects, you can do it in 2-D"

"Distances are SO VAST that it's all 2-D anyway…"

Let's go take these in order.

1) "Up is just a different direction…"

While this is somewhat true in flat space, there is a dynamic that's similar to up/down dynamics in short period orbital mechanics. What this argument is really saying is "Facing doesn't matter".

Turning your weapons to face a target in 3-D can have trade offs you don't want to deal with; when combined with vector movement, and the need to re-orient yourself to apply thrust for a tactical situation that's developing three turns down the road, the facing matters. A lot.

2) "Until you have four objects, you can do it in 2-D"

When using vectors (or anything dealing with momentum, even some cinematic movement systems), the combined effect of vectors and current and future positions quickly shows why this doesn't work. Let's give a very simple example:

One ship is facing direction A on a hex map. It has a vector of 3A, 2F, and 7+ (going up). Its opponent, 20 hexes away, is facing direction E, and has vectors of 7D, 2C, and 2+

Now, you can consolidate that down to "One ship moves, the other doesn't", but that's more work than actually tracking their vectors and current positions against the reference plane. It also creates a lot of counterintuitive bits in maneuvering.

3) "Distances are SO VAST that it's all 2-D anyway…"

This one, depending on your tech assumptions, is only partially true. In any situation where you'll have 2-D maneuver, 3-D maneuver is also a possibility. Any distance that's so vast that 3-D maneuver doesn't matter will effectively be 1-D maneuver, a'la "The enemy's gate is down".

If you're dealing with, say, UV lasers and ion drives, this is a valid assumption…and is about as interesting to put on the tabletop as, oh, accounting textbooks; your maneuver is very much akin to having two guys with RPGs sitting on the top of bullet trains going in the opposite direction, trying to shoot each other.

Attack Vector and Squadron Strike (and SITS) are all different takes on 3-D space combat. All of them require learning how to do three things that are very different from what other space combat games do.

1) Map your map orientation to a spherical reference frame, called the AVID. You have to be able to visualize that you're drawing marks on the surface of a sphere for this to make it work. There are people who either can't do that, or find it more work than they want to deal with. Particularly for people who come from games where there aren't hex grids and everything is done with rulers, this feels alien and wrong and more work than they want to deal with.

I've made a couple of play aids out of embroidery hoops and a Nerf ball marked up like the AVID to make this easier for people to grasp.

2) Shoot bearings to other objects on the table; this is the step that's automated the most with the Range/Angle Lookup Table, but that builds off of the spherical reference frame mentioned above.

3) Map firing arcs as an overlay of this spherical reference system. You're counting the spaces on the surface of the sphere from the target bearing to the Top of the ship, and the closest of Left/Right/Nose/Aft, then performing the same counting exercise on an isometric view of your firing arc.

Now – once you know how to do all of these steps, they're fast, and there's a heck of a lot of math I've done so you can play quickly.

If you can master these three steps, which of these games is right for you is a matter of personal choice. If you find them all too much work, that's fine too; there are plenty of fine games out there covering this space; I recommend Starmada regularly to people who want pew-pew-pew spaceship action, and find Squadron Strike a bit much.

To help you decide:

AV:T works to get the science as right as possible. It does require that everyone know the rules; you have to be able to handle the play aids given, and it offers control (and lack of control) in a lot of places that are very strange. It's the largest break from conventional 2-D space games, has segmented movement and power generation and heat storage and weapon recycle times. It does take both players knowing the game to make it play fast, but when that occurs, it's remarkably swift.

I can reasonably run 3-4 ships at a time in AV:T. Most people can't do more than 1-2. It's a high detail, low unit density game.

SITS is a snapshot of an earlier version of Squadron Strike; it keeps the core 3-D mechanics of AV:T, but tosses out segmented movement, fuel tracking, power tracking and heat tracking. Ship orientation matters because the top and bottom surfaces are covered by the impenetrable wedge of the Honorverse. Combat is missile driven, and a lot of effort went into making the missile resolution system run as quickly as possible with die rolls to find out how far off the average your defense systems are, rather than "Roll to hit, roll ECM saves, roll decoy saves, roll counter missiles against each inbound, roll point defense against survivors, roll sidewall saves…OK, now roll for damage…guys? Guys?".

I can run 4-8 ships at a time in SITS. My experience is that most people playing the game can do something similar.

Squadron Strike takes the preplot simul move from SITS and mates it to a ship design engine that's player accessible, a faster damage allocation system, and a lot of scary math hidden in the ship design engine so that players can use it without doing it. If you want to know how a 3-D fight between a Battlestar and an Imperial Star Destroyer would run, this is the game for you.

It's also got options for non-vector movement, and where AV:T made every decision against the metric of "Is the science right?" followed by "Does it make the game more enjoyable?", Squadron Strike works from the metric of "How can we make this play faster?" and "Does it make the game more enjoyable?" and "Can we isolate that as an optional rule?"

heheheh I called in a direct strike from the AdAstra…hehehh…"full volley aye aye sir!!!"

Hi

As a side issue. Some years ago at a Comdex, I had occassion to meed the Lucas people who did the spaceship fights for the starwars movies. While they started with film strips, they had all played M&M with a group in LA.

I found they were "fans". Anyway, they said when setting up the motion computer with the models, they actually used M&M stats! The Millenium Falcon was an A20 Gunship.

Thus rolling into the turns and all.

R

Oh, excellent, Rocky! Quite excellent!

There was a generally weak Season 2 New BSG episode called The Captain's Hand that showed a fair bit of evidence of someone in the writer's room having been through an AV:T demo or having played the game.

The "They're attacking the top of the ship and blowing off the radiators/heat exchangers" is right out of AV:T. The nomenclature where Apollo describes swinging the Pegasus' nose down and rolling 60 degrees to starboard to take it out of the strafing run for the next set of Vipers is almost exactly how you'd describe it in game.

Huh… I definitely need to get a copy of either AV:T or Squadron Strike, then (both if I can afford them). Especially if SS handles multiple ships well (I don't like SFB anymore, takes too long to play a single turn, let alone a game).

Actually, AdAstra brings up a perfect point as to WHY there aren't as many 3d games: it's not necessarily intuitive to think in terms of spherical geometry.

For example: during many exercises onboard ship, I ran part of the tactical plot, tracking where the BG's boat was by bearing, so I'm used to thinking in terms of contact's range&bearing from my position. Most naval officers/gamers think in terms of range, bearing, and angle on the bow, which is a ONE-Dimensional intercept solution on a 2d 'map'.

Good fighter pilots think in terms of Energy, and consider energy 'vectors' as opposed to location. It's a sorta-3d thing (move differently in Z-axis than you do in X-Y plane).

Very few people even try to do close-orbital stuff in-game… the math is a killer (I certainly can't do it personally), and the motions are rather non-intuitive to most people (too used to a grav field and atmosphere, probably). I'd bet that AdAstra has looked at that playing field and said 'not going there if you paid me a LOT of money'

Similarly, thinking in terms of spherical relations is not something that most people do. The only people that do it on a regular basis are astronomers and astrophysicists!

I'd bet that AdAstra has looked at that playing field and said 'not going there if you paid me a LOT of money'

I looked into it long and hard, and intuited a reasonable way to do it; then spent about two years trying to figure out a way to EXPLAIN that reasonable way to do it to someone who actually understood orbital mechanics. They then went through and put real numbers under my intuition, then tried to explain it back to me, and THEN I started designing the play aid.

Once the play aid and procedure were defined, the rest fell into place.

One of the things that helps this for AV:T is that the game scale is 20km/hex, and thrusts are measured in 8ths of a G increments. This means that most of the really frustrating aspects of OM happen at a resolution level above tactical combat, or are subtleties that are lost under the brute force of 125 milligees of thrust. :)

The OM rules are in Nexus Journal #1.

AV:T has about 15-20 copies of the game in stock, none with cover wraps. If you're looking to buy one for a reference copy, get AV:T soon. We're moving on a lot of projects, and that's going to mean AV:T goes temporarily OOP sometime this year.

My standard admonition applies: PLAY the tutorial. Don't READ the tutorial.

You can download the tutorial here:

PDF link

You can download the Deluxe Ship Control Cards (still being tweaked from playtesting) here:

PDF link

(Note – those Deluxe Ship Control Cards look terrifying; they're busy, there's a lot going on, and it's a jumble of text in strange places. Don't let that stop you; everything is there has a reason, the entire sheet is laid out the way it is to facilitate the flow of events on the Sequence of Play cards)

There are also fold up box minis and origami tilt blocks here (needed to play through the tutorial)

PDF link

they had all played M&M with a group in LA

M&M ?
-Kle.

Hi

Mustangs and Messerschmitts…..

this is a WW2 flight sim with wheeled trolleys and models done in the late 70s derived from modeling I had done for the AF.

Back when McEwen was using the system for space ships, it wasn't common to have a calculator that could do the range/vector geometry. Well, at the University we had machines that could do it, but this was the day of mainframes and a "programmable" calculator cost several months pay for 128 BITS of memory.

Found that slide rules were actually faster! Anyway, we later kind of PO'd some by simplfying the vector part to straight "a plus b" method to calculate the gun ranges.

As Gwarda complains in the "flying versus fighting" thread, the loss of precision didn't hurt the game.

Rocky

Thanks, Ken. Now to scrounge enough $$ to get a game…I hate being a starving college student!

Ok, so where do I get a copy of Nexus Journal #1?

Lion: Check out our web shop:

link

is the page for all of the Attack Vector line, including the minis and decals…and Nexus Journal #1

3D combat is difficult enough, but you can rip out a lot of the calculations that you'd otherwise need by simply nerfing certain weapons and tactics and awarding bonuses that simplify player workload, such as flying ships in pairs. I also agree that a+b is acceptable enough.

Ah, the old chestnuts. :)

"Up is just a different direction…"

"Until you have four objects, you can do it in 2-D"

"Distances are SO VAST that it's all 2-D anyway…"

I think it makes all the difference in a space game. The Claw formation from Homeworld was one of the best (although not implemented that way) because you could hammer a small group of heavy ships from the sides by using a few smaller ships.

Squadron Strike sounds interesting, I may have to pick it up! Like the look of the Brit (very 2300AD) and Russkie ships. Not so much the Japanese but to each their own!

Chacun son gout.

I have played a variety of space games over the years, including ones using momentum, and optional 3D.

I find momentum a PITA to deal with and much prefer the games using warpdrive or whatever.

I know 3D is more realistic, whatever that means when we're dealing with SF. However, I don't think I could be dealing with representation of 3D positioning using variable length stands and so on.

It occurs to me, that in space, a "fleet" would box the compass. E.g. if you had nine ships they would all "fly" facing different directions, appearing from any distance like a "cube" of eight corners, facing outwards, and a ninth ship in the center (the "mother ship"? hehe). To my knowledge, no sci-fi show has ever done this visually; all "fleets" drop out of hyperspace facing "up".

And in fact, extending this further, ships would not be designed with a top and bottom, at, all: rather, a ship would be a fully facetted design with no blind spots, capable, of course, of "flying" in any position. But "fleets" would still be symetrically balanced, "boxing the compass", as that kind of formation would allow for the swiftest maneuvering to any threatened point….

Hmm, I always thought it had more to do with derivation of rulesets backed up by player effort….the fighter type games had a tendency to come from WWI and WWII aircraft bases and so were more likely to include some form of 3D or pseudo 3D and still allowed for a lot of people to use a 2D fudge. However that base could often just end up going for 2D and getting accepted because of the idea that all these things were all too often doing fantastic things ignoring physics anyway so whats one more abstraction.

Whereas I thought a lot of big ship fleet action games were simply naval wargames themed to space and so tended to more often settle on a 2D plane as the rules worked and again the abstraction just got accepted.

Obviously there are exceptions on both sides, but to me the why 2D in space argument always seemed to go back to derivation and ease of use (or laziness due to the heavy fictional element if you prefer).

Rocky,
The comment about Star Wars using M&M aircraft to model the flight is interesting. I had heard they also studied WWII movies like the Battle of Britain.

Obviously the Star Wars fighter scenes are all done like aircraft dogfights. Impressive to look at, but when you start thinking about the physics none of it really makes sense.

For an X-wing to move the way it does in the movies (in space) the entire surface would be covered with thrusters pointed in all different directions.

If you look at the models or the stats you would be hard pressed to figure out how they even change direction?

"Maneuverability is afforded by a system of etheric rudders that change thrust vectors."

Whatever the heck that is? (Sounds like flaps to me)

So basically you cannot look too hard at the science. Star Wars fighters (and many other movie based ships) fly like aircraft, and in a more scientific approach the vehicles and the movement would look quite a bit different.

"…Star Wars…WWII movies…"

the Death Star finale always seemed to me to closely match the end of "633 Squadron".

Just as a warning – there are at most two copies of Attack Vector left in inventory; we'll see if more countersheets show up after the move, but we're trying to finance an office move right now.

Lampyridae:

Most of what I've done in my designs is try to strip out as much of the calculation as possible; the 3-D aspects require learning three new skills. If you find those skills difficult to implement (and some do) then, yeah, it's fiddly.

On the other hand, I remember using trig tables to look up bearing angles and Manhattan Distances ("Distance out plus distance up".) Which were awful.

Doug Larsen:

It depends on your technology base. I prefer systems with some sort of momentum tracking; this means that your space combats become less dependent upon formations, and formations are harder to maintain, particularly when there are maneuver threats to deal with.

As mentioned uptopic, you can pick a set of technological assumption sets that render maneuver (as a whole) pointless.

Alright- I'm no astrophysicist, however, I don't understand 1 thing: why the spherical movement?

I understand that space is an amorphous object, but a simple cube of unrestricted dimensions would work better right? You could convincingly play the game out on a hex board, intersected by another hex board. That would give fudged angles of "level", "straight up/down" and then two other orientations for "up/down, fore/aft". If you really wanted to, you could toss another hex into the mix for your rolling, but that's assuming that the guns can't traverse up or down.

I despise spherical geometry and avoid it at all costs. What I don't understand is why anyone else would willingly use it. Unless you count the battle as being in orbit. Which could be even harder to do because you are constantly fighting the force of gravity (which is stronger at lower "altitudes", the poles (stronger depending on how far you are from them), and having a massive globe blocking your view. Wouldn't it just be easier to play in naked space, AWAY from a planet, and run it more akin to a 3D flight sim?

Hi

cptn, yup you are right, and in varios eras, I have played games with all your suggestions.

I am pretty laid back about it. I can do a lot of the math in my head, and I KNOW the limited "reality" of, say, Star Trek.

In a sense, as a game you can design the game in servral ways and be equally correct and incorrect!

What I prefer to do in SF and Fantasy games is to accept some fictional environment as "real" and game that.

Rocky

Captain:

The short answer is because, really, it does work better. A lot better.

The movement isn't spherical; the orientation nomenclature is, and it's divided into 30 degree solid angles.

Since this game is played on a hex grid, 30 degree angles are easy in the map plane – "Does the target bear through a hex side or hex corner?".

30 degree "pitch angles" give you, from top to bottom:

+90 degrees
+60 degrees
+30 degrees
0 degrees
-90 degrees
-60 degrees
-30 degrees

30 degree angles also means that tilt blocks and box miniatures work nicely – you can show a 0, 30, 60 or 90 degree pitch (or roll) easily on the map with them.

I've played what I refer to as "XYZ" transformation games. Your ship is at coordinate X,Y,Z, with vectors of A,B,C, top facing direction J, left side facing direction K, and nose facing direction L. From there, you have to figure out if your guns can bear on a target at X1,Y1,Z1; or rose yet, figure out where you have to face to get the shot next turn.

This is the obvious way to do 3-D, it's the way 3-D was done for 30 years or more. It'll cause most people's brains to fry like eggs from calculation overload.

The system I use takes all those transformations and reduces them to "counting spaces on the surface of a ball". While it's a little strange at first, it is much simpler for the end user.

I think I understand where the whole problem comes in with my theory now- using 3 intersecting hexes works great for the positioning of a ship, but is terrible for measuring the ranges because you don't have those hexes in the empty spaces between ships. So you're doing hellish Trig work.

I'm curious how your sphere method works though, because a sphere is really just a single plane wrapped around itself. You have a 2D board projected on a 3D space. What do I do if my ship is flying higher from the center of the sphere than theirs is? Can I shoot "through" the sphere by angling my vessel towards the center? How is all of that measured?

Captain, the best place to point you at is here:

PDF link

which is a 2 page PDF we run in our catalog that walks you through doing a firing solution (and a few other things) for Saganami Island Tactical Simulator.

Hi Guys: There is a free download of "Starwar 2250" the three dimensional starship combat game located at link You will problably also want "Starship" (also free at the same adress) which is the design manual for Starwar 2250. This is actually a reasonably simple 3-D game. Give it a try.

Thanks John McEwan

It looks painful. Surely the rules could be stripped down into just "space combat rulez only?" I don't need to know what lunar-conjunction dance ceremony the intelligent marsupials perform on the planet that I'm carpet-nuking…

That's what Excel is for.

On the other hand, I remember using trig tables to look up bearing angles and Manhattan Distances ("Distance out plus distance up".) Which were awful.

Not only "awful", but a waste of time.
You have miniatures. Representations of the object.
Measure the distance between them. That's all you need.

Turn right 30 degrees, and "up" 30 degrees. You have a new facing. Done and easy.

The math is fun for some people to play with, but in the end most is made comepletely irrelivant because you can see and measure the real distance.

Obviously the answer to the OP is that there isn't much of it because people overcomplicate it for some reason.

"a 2 page PDF we run in our catalog that walks you through doing a firing solution (and a few other things) for Saganami Island Tactical Simulator."

I looked at the short version of AV a while back and decided it wasn't for me.

The refutations of "the old chestnuts" are, of course, an ad, and they largely brush under the rug the fact that "it doesn't work that way" is predicated on a fixed plane being present: the game board. The plane of the game doesn't move, so of course the ideas that "up is just another direction" and "it take four to force 3D" break down when you add a fixed plane. It effectively increases the spatial complication by two or three "bodies", and is why "up" is no longer just another direction and why even two combatants becomes a 3D+axes of rotation issue.

In a space fight, it DOES take a fourth body, either a combatant or obstacle, to force 3D, because the range-space is always defined by the points the first three combatants are at. It isn't a fixed plane. The rotation axes of each combatant have no effect on ranges, and only affect the ability to change ranges or bearing weapons if the timescale of the "game" is small enough for facing and rotational inertia to be a concern. With a longer timescale that drops away. All that matters is your ability to change the range to your target vs their ability to change that range. Highest operational thrust wins.

Highest operational thrust wins.

Not quite accurate: Highest ability to control the range wins. *IF* I can set up a 'lightning strike' (one-shot pass) on a crossing vector, you're dead. I might have some severely hurt ships, but you just took kinetics with serious delta-V. It's the space equivalent of the submarine ambush.

When the highest *realistic* thrust is about .2 gee, there's a problem. Most space-combat games overstate thrust by orders of magnitude (like the Honorverse's 500 gee drives), or even the Jovian Chronicles or AV:T fusion-powered rockets (.4/.8 gee and ~2 gee respectively). I agree with Ken, once you start really tracking inertia, you almost need to go 3d. Even Full Thrust actually works better in 3d (I've tried it a couple times, but figuring the height correctly is an exercise in trig that I just don't care for).

Don't get me wrong, I like the simplicity of 2d gaming. But I was a submarine 'driver' (qualified Helmsman/planesman) and AV:T or Squadron Strike flow about like modern submarine combat. Sure, you know where your opponent is in space, but there's still a lot of waiting to get into a firing position, and careful maneuvering to make sure you're pointed in the right direction to avoid the target's return fire. I'm used to thinking in 3d (even if the usable part of the third dimension is only 3x the length of the ship). Ships take time to turn, Farstar. Minutes, in fact, and that's when we have a working fluid to push against. How fast do you think 10 ktons will turn when your main drive is only capable of .4 gee? If you're lucky, your maneuver thrusters can generate .1 gee, and it's usually less.

I remember a fighter-combat game set on the moon (Moondragon?) where you based your movement off of your position last turn. Doing that for more than a couple ships gets tedious really quickly.

Ships take time to turn

Thus my statement about time scales. A game that operates in seconds or individual minutes will care about facing. A game that operates at 10 to 30 minutes won't.

As for flipping a ship, that's actually easier in space than underwater, even at the one-minute-turn scale. Spin gravity makes it a lot slower, yes, but a ship that doesn't use a carousel or hamstercage (or some other gyroscope) and has good moment arms on its attitude thrusters can flip over faster than you might think.

*IF* I can set up a 'lightning strike' (one-shot pass) on a crossing vector, you're dead.

That's not a fight, either. If all sides aren't in the same inertial frame of reference, I don't need a game.

I remember a fighter-combat game set on the moon (Moondragon?) where you based your movement off of your position last turn. Doing that for more than a couple ships gets tedious really quickly.

In 3D, you're darn right it does. That's really the answer to the original question posed by this topic. To usefully game lossless vector combat requires two markers per combatant and works better with three. On a flat map that's fairly easy. The need to make all markers 3D positionable gets stupid quickly, even if you just use more markers to indicate elevations. Its why most vector space games are on hex grids, as one of the tedious operations (measuring) is vastly simplified.

If you want an actually plausible hard SF space combat game, play something like the full vector movement rules from Traveller Book 2: Starships. You will need a gynasium in faily short order, but space is big.

Most people seem to want space oma o be short range knife-fighting style air combat in space. Considering how inefficient a "fighter" is as a weapons platfrm in vacuum this highly unlikely. For proof run the numbers on the NASA boondoggle (err I mean space shuttle) for lifting mass into orbit the old Satrn V was much more cost eficient, an that was with out reusing.

Space combat is likely only going to hapen near points of interest, and even most of that wil likely be round based.
A couple of handfulls of rocks in the rght place will effectively deny an orbit to everybody for a long time. A problem we are already having with space junk in near earth orbit.

Newtonian physics and the huge distances of interplanetary space mean that unless we get some currently fictional technologies (most of which have little or no practical real world basis) space combat just isn't oing to happen.

At least ot the 3-D ig fleets of spacesips types we all sem to want.

Khan didn't forget the third dimension. He forgot sensors, range, and opening distance as a defense. Start Trek space combat is ludicrous as a model. And let's not forget that those ships are moving faster than their weapons…. (or are using handwavium holes in the script, err wait the Trekkies call them "warp bubles" same thing) to justify things. At least in Star Was fleets drop back into nrmal sublight space to fight.

Hi

Not a trekkie, but I have done rules for paramount with my friend Scotty(Michael Scott). Err, I think trek combat isn't at FTL.

Need I point out that StarWars fighting in normal space still has the A20 as the model for the Milleneum Falcon? WW2 in space.

You are likely correct about space fighting unlikely though in history is replete with examples of experts deciding combat has become impossible, and others figureing out new ways to kill.

Most gamers never see napoloeonic combat either! Even it they were alive in 1812. I think the point is that you can "game" anything. If your source material that you are gaming has crocked science, or none at all behind it, doesn't change the game.

Lets see, starting with FTL?

Rocky

Actually, which Trek game you're playing changes whether you're doing combat at FTL or STL speeds. I *think* (haven't played the FASA/Paramount game) that most of the movie combat is STL, but Star Fleet Battles/Federation Commander is FTL combat. Not that it really matters, since both are played on a hexgrid, and the definition of Speed is simply a function of hex-size divided by turn length in fractions of an hour.

For example, AV:T uses .125-gee acceleration increments and 20km hexes (I forget the timescale for each turn, I bought Squadron Strike instead), while Squadron Strike has something like 19,000km hexes and 6-minute turns with 1-gee acceleration increments. Jovian Chronicles uses 500m hexes and .1-gee acceleration, but they've got smallcraft with 2.5+gee capabilities.

And between the two of use, Farstar and I have finally gotten to the heart of the matter: hexless 3d quickly becomes a tedious array of measuring and moving markers, which distracts from actually figuring out *where* to move and when to engage a target. ergo, not a very fun game. I'd much rather think about when&where to move, not how I'm going to get all 3 markers into the right spots. I'm a ship-captain (or maybe even an admiral), not a physics student running an experiment.

*IF* I can set up a 'lightning strike' (one-shot pass) on a crossing vector, you're dead.

That's not a fight, either. If all sides aren't in the same inertial frame of reference, I don't need a game.

Well, you do still have a game, because both sides are trying to set up for their optimal engagement range, it's just a very different kind of game (more suited to Campaigns than a one-off 'meeting engagement'). First edition Jovian Chronicles abstracts the pre-shooting maneuvering to an opposed piloting roll (winner shoots FIRST at their preferred distance). I need to get a copy of Lightning Strike to see what the differences are.

Hi

In WW2, the USAAG had these wheeled trollies for positioning ID models by instructors to illustrate persuit curves and the like.

I use them now for Mustangs and Messerschmitts. McEwen used the same stands for his space ship rules back in the early 70s. I don't remember the name, but I am pretty sure I have rules somewhere. He even cast a line of buck rogers type ships for the game. The rules were actually integrated with the Star Guard rules of the time. The math didn't work well, but the system was actually a lot of fun(something McE and Scotty were good at).

At the same time, Scotty and I were playing a board game a lot called "Triplanitary" that used hexes and also did a simple vectered thrust and so on. All that is desired except it was two dimensional. It was simple enough that I thought it no problem to convert to 3D and the stands. But I never did and neither did Scotty that I remember.

Rocky

And between the two of use, Farstar and I have finally gotten to the heart of the matter: hexless 3d quickly becomes a tedious array of measuring and moving markers, which distracts from actually figuring out *where* to move and when to engage a target. ergo, not a very fun game.

I know people who've taken AV:T and gone hexless with it. I think they're making their lives more challenging than they have to.

Doing this requires learning the three skills mentioned above:

Record your orientation on a spherical reference frame.
Shoot a bearing to the target
Map the target's bearing to your firing arcs.

This takes practice and repetition, and lots of people who go "I just wanna blow up TIE fighters" go "Waaaay more work than I want to do." If you're used to "OK, he's in the front 90 degree arc, I can shoot…" then, yeah, you're right. Way more work.

And that's a perfectly reasonable decision.

I'd much rather think about when&where to move, not how I'm going to get all 3 markers into the right spots. I'm a ship-captain (or maybe even an admiral), not a physics student running an experiment.

What separates the flyers from the targets is that the flyers learn to shoot bearings from their future position markers to their target's future position markers, and use that to determine 'where do I point my ship?'

Farstar's commentary is correct for a wide range of initial tech assumptions. It's arguably the likeliest set of tech assumptions based on what we know now – no Magic Fusion Torches, ships puttering around at single digit milligee thrusts.

In that environment, you might as well just roll dice. You don't have maneuver decisions to make, and the primary use of lasers will be to blind sensors, so that kinetics can hit – and it gets back to "parking garages lobbing tomahawk missiles at each other, dodging by continental drift."

Using gyroscopes is possible in space, but turns out to be woefully inefficient in terms of mass on the system, and something of a hazard in combat. (You're storing a LOT of kinetic energy in that gyro). We still do (see Hubble). Most commercial satellites use RCS thrusters and clever trailing tether tricks.