"Does 3D space combat add any strategy?" Topic

G'Day

Well I'd like to buy the game and give it a try but at $110.00 AUD it's going to be to rich for my taste for the immediate future.

Yes $110 AUD that's what it's listed as here in Oz at Milsims, "FSP ADA11000 Attack Vector: Tactical $110.00". I'd doubt attempting to order direct from the US would be much cheaper, it's been my experience that postage from US is a killer.

Cheers

Derek

Borrible:

Books:
80 page rulebook ( around 65,000 words, lots of explanetary diagrams ) Perfect bound
32 page shipbook, full page class history opposite the ship sheet. Saddle stitch.
48 page setting book ( about 35K words ) with a campaign map. Saddle stitch.

Components:
48 box minis, full color, die cut.
116 injection molded pieces.
8 laminated ship control cards
2 laminated weapon reference cards
2 double sided hex map sheets
3 10 sided dice.

Material on the web site:

link

I did not advertise here -- I was surprised to be the cover of this issue on the web site. I'm happy for the coverage.

Oh, and the blurbs in question are from Jerry Pournelle and David Weber, writers of military/hard SF. Words alone fail to describe the depths of legal do-do I'd be in for falsly attributing quotes to either of these gentlemen.

As to "not enough info":

Vector movement? Got it. Even have a flyer explaining how it works, and why we do it differently ( tracking displacement as well as velocity change ) .

Fuel tracking? Yes. Look at the ship sheets in the download library.

Play aid support? All the play aids needed for the game are freely downloadable PDFs.

3-D? Yes. Explained in a free downloadable PDF.

Lasers? Yes. We know the wavelength and aperture of the mirrors, the power going into them ( in real world units ) the power coming how, where the waste heat goes, and how big the spot size is.

Samples of the rulebook? Yes, the first four pages of the rulebook are on the web site.

Sample ships? Yes, sample two page ship spreads are on the web site, so you can read a class history.

Sample counters? On the web site, including the layout of a box miniature sheet.

Setting information? On the web site, with downloadable campaign maps, including op move maps for a star system, and planetary icosohedral maps.

What else should I be providing?

Greetings, Again:

Well, shill or not (insert VBG), here I am again.

If anybody is in the central NJ area and is interested in the game, I'd be happy to run some sessions when I get my copy. That way you can take a look at the quality of the product (physical and background, etc.) and decide ahead of time whether the $$$ is worth spending.

And if you do end up buying it, Ken will be happy and I'll be happy as I'll have found some new gaming partners! Winners all around!

Mike Zebrowski: Ok, I think 3D may eliminate the unrealistic divide and/or surround tactics of 2D space combat. That sounds interesting. The choice of weapon arcs vs. armour is easily done in 2D so that's not convincing.

GSI Staffmonkey: Fighting in orbit? It's all about delta-V.

You send a fleet into deep space and I'm just going to ignore it. There's nothing of value there. An attacker must threaten something! Are you going for that tiny space lab at the L2 trojan or my Helium-3 lunar mining operation? Gee, I wonder...

You send a fleet towards my planet and I will engage it with short range craft. You're at a huge disadvantage because most of your launch mass was fuel and life support. My short range craft are supplied by bean stalks, well armed and light weight. The defender is not going to give up his delta-V advantage.

In short, space flight is about getting from point A to B. If point B doesn't support life, you're already dead.

KenFox:

Another factor is 3D adds a lot more weapon arcs to cover.

The typical 2D hex-based game has only six arcs that a ship has to cover with each arc being 60 degrees. Some games get up to 12 30 degree arcs. A single 360 degreee mount can cover all of the arcs.

AV has 62 30 degree arcs. It is impossible to cover them all with a single weapon mount. This gives ships multiple blind spots that they compensate for/taken advantage of.

Ships can also roll in 3D. (They can roll in 2D, but this tends to generate a bucket full of "special case rules".) This means that I can keep my nose at Ship A, shoot at Ship B off to my port, and then roll to bring my starboard weapons to bear on B while maintaing my strongest armor pointed at A.

Deep Space intercepts:
Think wet navy in the 1800's. Commerce raiding is an effective way to cripple a colony that is not self-sufficient. The typical medium freighter costs around 1,300,000,000 dollars. So losing the freighter would also be a serious blow to a company and a boon to the capturing nation.

Raiders would strike ships when enroute from the jump point (which is near the star in AV) to the planet. Ships hunting the Raiders would have to intercept them in deep space as well.

Mike Z

I’ll add my two scheckels….

I started playtesting this game about 3 years ago. I hadn’t seen the playtesting through to publication, which is a shame as I’d have loved to have received the traditional “playtest copy” - hey, Ken, if you read this . . . .

Anyhow…

Sometimes I like easy buckets-o-dice games - and at those times I’ll play any GW game and enjoy myself. Sometimes I like a mix of thinking and dice - and I’ll play the vast majority of historic miniatures games that are out there and I’ll enjoy myself. Sometimes I like to really engage the grey matter. This is the game for that.

It’s fun (in a very cranial way) to know that you can change the spin, pitch and yaw of a ship. Not just flip the ship over, but engage your attitude thrusters to start the process of rolling the ship at a given rate, and figuring when that roll will have your nose facing the direction you want, when you need to engage counter thrusters to stop the roll at the time/facing that you desire, and seeing what that changes, tactically - while my opponent is moving in direction A but applying thrust in direction B, while changing his facing counterclockwise . . .

I had read The Mote in God’s Eye, by Niven/Pournelle, and was intrigued by the challenges of maneuvering warships with “real-world” physics in 3 dimensions in open space. Years later I started reading these rules and I realized that they emulate it really well.

I like the damage system - best example that I can give is that used in Centurion.

I like the science behind nearly everything - I like the history and background - I like the flavor of the different ships.

One disagreement I would have is the time it takes to start playing. Twenty minutes may be a good time for learning 2D movement and shooting with basic lasers, but for neither myself nor the 2 engineers I played with did twenty minutes get us playing the full blown system. All systems have a learning curve, this one is steeper than most.

That having been said, it is also a very rewarding learning curve. The rules are just plain cool.

But it’s not for everybody. It’s definitely a niche game (highly realistic combat) within a niche market (Sci Fi Space Combat), as one mindless basher has already said. Still, it's a great game.

Much has changed since that version, Jon; while I agree 20 minutes is optimistic, things *have* been streamlined since the Delta-V playtest kit. The damage model has also undergone a complete refit - it's nothing at all like the old one. Less predictable, arguably faster.

KenFox: Where intercepts occur depends heavily on tech assumptions, somewhat on tactics and strategy, and somewhat on workable mechanics.

Tech assumptions: AVT ships use a torch drive that has a reasonably efficient 4 milligee cruise thrust mode - but no beanstalks. Argue math with the folks in the physics end, I'm just a messenger there. :)

Strategy and tactics:

- If you decide to engage the enemy "near" the planet, you're risking your orbital facilities; the definition of "near" obviously varies depending on the exact nature of the weapons and thrusters available.

- There are essentially two intercept orbits towards any incoming force. One of them brings you towards them slowly - small crossing vector. One brings you in with a huge head-on crossing vector, and, as a result, it's largely suicidal, since the kinetic energy involve is such that spitballs become quite deadly. In addition, if you use that intercept, and some of the enemy ships survive the barrage (and thus blow past your ships), you're suddenly in a pursuit to get to your planet before they do. If you use the slower approach, you have less of *your own* intercept vector to overcome if things go wrong.

You're correct that the defenders want to maximize their advantage in delta-v. So we assume that intercepts of forces inbound to a planet or base occur several days from the base: gives the defended object time to react to your defeat if the battle goes badly, but saves fuel for the defending force, too. It also happens to be outside the gravity well of the planet....

Intercepts also tend to occur near the star, as forces try to intercept freighters, escorts, or raiders, or deny the enemy access or transit through the system. (The hyperdrive initiation points are at the stellar poles. Yes, a major handwave assumption. :) )

Back to the planet and orbital combat, though....

The other problem with orbital combat is that while we'd like to do it, we have not yet figured out how to do it in a manner that is both physically correct and also playable.

*Part* of the solution, at the moment, looks like this:

- Make the map inertial. We do this anyway for the space battles: put all vectors common to all ships onto the map. Thus if you have a vector of 10A, 4B, 4+; and I have one of 8A, 3C, 2-, we start the game such that you have a vector of 2A, 4B, 4+; I have 3C, 2-; we've put the common vector of 8A onto the map.
In orbit, this means that the map is moving at the rate of a given orbit.

- Now we add some extra rules to deal with orbital motion. If you thrust in the direction of orbit, you rise in Z because your orbit changes. Thrust against the orbit, you fall in Z. There's a couple other rules I cannot recall offhand that are generally workable-sounding, at least in theory.

- The problem comes after the combat. The combat itself is going to take only a small fraction of an orbit. However, if your ship has thruster damage, we want to know if it's going to smack into the planet over the next 24-48 hours - "you survived, but you're dead anyway". *Now* we're hitting scary maths we have no idea how to simplify, and I, personally, have no idea how to set up, let alone solve. Talk to our maths/physics geeks for more. :)

Mike Zebrowski: Re: "wet navy" ... but I thought you said the game was realistic! ;) Deep space intercepts aren't possible. Flight paths in do not overlap flight paths out. They may intersect, but if the timing is slightly off then the would-be terrorist is screwed. A boarding action is completely out of the question due to the huge relative velocities.

I agree that ship design is more interesting in 3D. Blind spots are uncommon in 2D games. On the other hand, a fully developed military space craft wouldn't have any blind spots either. Weapons would be mounted in an open grid -- a single weapon could easily cover 270 degrees. Kinetic weapons would be tough to mount, so those would be best combined with the propulsion system.

Does "AV: T" accelerate the ship when a kinetic weapon is fired?

Does anybody know if any "AV: T" games will be run at Origins?

JamesSterrett: Thanks for that info. I see where "AV: T" is coming from now. It's closer to reality, but still far enough away that space combat is fun. You're doing Larry Niven, not Robert Zubrin. ;)

I was not aware that you had a pre-game phase that normalized the map to the ships' relative velocities. Cool.

The orbital rules sound interesting. Spherical coordinates might help. I'm still undecided whether 3D really is worth it, but I'd love a more realistic acceleration and gravity model. Obviously "AV: T" can be played in 2D. How much faster does the game play then?

I don't think anybody will ever fight battles in deep space. An arms race is more likely -- mega-dollars spent on space craft that will never see a fight. (It's also unlikely that future criminals will use warships for the same reason that we don't see drug cartels using aircraft carriers now.)

The "realistic" space battles that interest me are those tied to planetary fights, i.e. two or more powers on the same planet are attempting to achieve space superiority. This type of fight seems inevitable.

Since powered armor is a hotbutton for me, and I demo AV:T, Phoenix's remarks have my sincere attention. I really want to know what con he was told the things he reported, because if it was me I want to a) apologize for what he seems to have heard and b) try to figure out what I really said that was misconstrued.

See, I do doubt it was me that said that I couldn't see why anyone would play that sort of game - not given the money I've spent on little pieces of metal over the years.

The other thing that gives me doubts it was me was that laser range is _not_ a hot-button for me. I've learned a lot about it watching AV:T develop, but I wouldn't have been on about lasers being short-ranged and why that was so.

But, Phoenix, if the con you list is one I've done a demo at -- or if it's a store at which I've given a demo -- then I'll assume it was me and I'll give you a sincere and heartfelt apology.

And with that a slight change in topic to respond to KenFox.

Ken, a curiousity. ASSUMING (grin) that you don't have an infinite energy system, then surprisingly intercepts are a bit more likely than you'd think. Try this little exercise to see why. You've seen the diagrams showing the path a ship has to take to get from Earth to Mars - where the ship intercepts a point that Mars will be at when the ship gets there? I'm assuming the answer is yes. So let's begin with that. Now, you're the commander on Mars, and you've got ships that are basically just as powerful in terms of propulsion. When you launch them to intercept the oncoming force, you don't aim back along their path, but rather at a point where they _will_ be some time in the future - a few days, a few weeks, whatever your capability is.

Notice what happens. The two intercept curves are not reciprocal. In fact, they're (probably) inside perpendicular. And if your intercept fleet intends to come home after interception, the actual path of the intercept fleet usually merges with that of the invasion fleet somewhere along the latter's path, because the ideal orbital path to Mars is the ideal path regardless of who is using it.

Since you asked about Origins - yes, there'll be a demo team. There has been for the past two years, and Ken's gathering a team for this year as well. Drop on by and give it a try.

Final note -- how hard is this game? Well, I've taught two 11-year old girls and a 12 year old boy how to play, only one of which is mine. The fact it bores them is probably more of an insight on my personality than it is on the game (grin) as they're equally bored by Full Thrust - though the boy thinks the GW stuff is interesting. But all three can play it, and learned it and were playing it in an afternoon.

If you want to read a fairly in-depth discussion regarding this game by a group not affiliated with Ad Astra, check out:

b5wars.net

look in the Banter Room for a thread entitled "Vector Movement Question"

There's a lot of issues discussed, mostly in terms of 'would B5 Wars players be interested in this game' but I think the deeper you go into the thread the more interesting and relevant it will be to others.

The thread is also fairly dead so there's not much point to posting anything further to it, by the way. It might save a lot of typing by some people to see that a lot of things have already been said.

Phoenix, please contact me with the name of the person and the show the incident happened at.

2-D versus 3-D play:

I used to teach the game in 2-D and then teach it again in 3-D. I no longer do this, for a number of reasons.

3-D builds seamlessly from 2-D. It does not contradict or add any special cases to what you do in 2-D -- because we built 2-D to handle 3-D from the outset.

It also does not detract from play speed; the math is something that, once you've done it a few times, you do in your head, like counting hexes.

Even seekers only add about 10% to play speed, with a few hundred in flight...

2-D DOES differ from how most would expect it - for example, we don't do "top down" views of firing arcs (the classic SFB "FA arc"). We do a "shoot a bearing" system.

Step 1: Is the target lined up on a hex row or spine? (standard wargamer terminology). ("It's, um, on the hex spine, between A and F")

Step 2: How many hexes away is it? How much is the difference in altitude? ("OK, it's 9 hexes out and 2 hexes up.")

Step 3: What's bigger, between those two values? ("Um, 9?")

Step 4: Multiply the smaller one by 4, the 4 is a constant. ("Um, 3 times 4 is 12.")

Step 5: Which is bigger, smallerx4 or bigger? ("Um, 12 is bigger than 9.")

And there's the scariest math you currently have to do -- the rest is graphical and trying to describe it here won't work -- just download the PDF on the web site.

We start the scenarios out with chocolates at different altitude levels, and let you shoot bearings, fly by them and kill them (and each other) as a familiarization tool.

One teacher, one student, I can generally get someone to the point where they're thinking about what they want to do, rather than HOW to do it, in 30 minutes. James Sterrett can probably do it faster... a table full of 4-6 people takes about an hour, because I have to repeat things multiple times.

The first turn takes 40 minutes to an hour. The second about 40 minutes, the third about 20-30, the fourth about 15.

Once someone's played 4-5 turns, they've absorbed everything other than seekers, which requires a lot of familiarity with the concepts taught.

(Jon Perry, the teaching script is so much better than what you saw in mid 2001 that it's the difference between Urdu and modern English.)

The hardest part of teaching this game is teaching people to think outside the box. They expect that all we're doing is additional rules on top of the "standard wargame rules toolkit", rather than replacing around 70% of the "standard wargamr rules toolkit" with what we do instead.

Orbital Mechanics:

There were a lot of discussions on how intercept combats would work. Lots of them, with lots of scary math.

As James described, we're trying to figure out how to model short period orbits as a combat variable.

[Warning, digression into nasty, scary math coming. Skip now if this may bore you to tears; this is Ken "thinking out loud". Please reply on the Ad Astra BBS as I read this one about once a day.

I don't want to hijack the thread here, but DO want to show the kind of thought that goes into the design of the game, since it may be useful buying info.]

If a planet is a sphere, an orbit can be seen as a hoop around a sphere.

The hoop will be defined by its eccentricity (how far away it is from being a true circle). It will be defined by inclination (what angle it deviates from the equator of the sphere by), and by its period (how rapidly you travel around the hoop).

Now, that's taking the model from the outside view.

From the perspective of someone on the ball, looking up, an orbit is a track against the sky for the subtended section you see.

From the perspective of someone on a ship in orbit, I recommend a frame of reference that's rotated at 90 degrees. The planet is "down". Prograde/retrograde is thrust in directions A and D (assuming an A-F rosetta). Thrusting at a 90 degree inclination to your current orbit is thrusting in directions B/C and E/F. Thrusting directly up and directly down modify the eccentricity of your orbit.

An orbit height is a measure of energy.

Now come the really counter intuitive bits.

If you thrust prograde, your orbit will get more eccentric because you're adding more energy to it. If you continue thrusting prograde, you will do what's called a "breaking spiral", assuming infinite thrust. (The "breaking spiral" is how you reach escape velocity with a low thrust engine, and consumes more total delta V than the alternative, described below.) Furthermore, when you add to your orbit energy, your altitude goes up, but your speed relative to the frame of the map decreases. As your orbital energy increases, the ratio of how much goes to "up" versus "direction A" changes -- and when the amount to "up" reaches a certain threshold, you hit a new orbit height, at which point your velocity relative to the OLD orbit height changes (and usually down). (The reverse happens if you thrust in a retrograde orbit -- your orbit height drops, but your velocity relative to the surface of the planet picks up.)

If you thrust directly "up", you alter your orbit's eccentricity, and will eventually turn your orbit from an elongating ellipse into a parabolic arc. If you have a high thrust engine, this is the fastest way to break orbit.

If you thrust at 90 degrees off of prograde, but in the plane of the map, you don't change your orbital energy, but do change inclination.

The tricky part is this: Assuming your current orbital energy is the map frame of reference, and A is prograde, down is "towards the planet", where do you go when your nose is facing direction B, up at a 30 degree angle, and you burn for 2 minutes at 1 g? How do you translate that into map movement? You're accumulating energy in all 3 "directions".

Some of your energy goes into each of the three "buckets" (prograde, up and inclination), and we're close to a rule of thumb for how to split it based on existing mechanics), but the end result of map movement is just counter intuitive.

I'm using some really broad rules of thumb here, and a lot of rounding. Anyone who knows REAL orbital dynamics, please contact me!

A 500 km orbit is going to cover 2 pi*r hexes, where R for an earthlike planet is going to be around 6760 km. As 20 km to the hex, that's going to give you 338 hexes for R, which gives an orbital circumference of 2124 hexes

Your orbital velocity will be around 7.5 km/sec (Pulled from a lookup table), which is 6 hexes/segment, or 48 hexes/turn. You'll be doing one orbit in 44 turns and 2 segments.

The direction of "down" for force application will precess by one AVID window (30 degrees) every 3 turns and 5 segments, which needs to be kept track of.

Thrust of 1 g at a 500 km orbit for 2 minutes (one turn) gives you 8 hexes/turn of velocity change; thrusting in B (30 up) looks like it will give you 5 hexes in B, 2 hexes in "up" and one hex in "D". Your orbital inclination is now going to be shifted from 2120 hexes in A, to 2115 hexes in A, 5 hexes in B; your orbit height just gained one altitude level that applies from roughly turn 40 through turn 5 of your orbit, and will drop by one altitude level from turn 19 through 26, unless you apply a burn in exactly the same direction around turn 20. (This is "circularizing an orbit", and can require several burns at different places.) When you're done, you've recircularized your orbit by another 20 km, which re-does the initial calculation for how many hexes your orbit is, your orbital energy and orbital period...

Complicating matters are the atmosphere (about 160 km above the ground) and the Van Allen Belts, which start at about 3600 km over ground, and extend to around 20,000 km over the ground. (Geosynchronous height is around 36,000 km, and your orbital period is long enough that we can just about ignore orbital mechanics.)

Your 500 km orbit height is 25 hexes over ground. The atmosphere is 8 hexes over the ground. The Van Allen Belts are around 180 hexes over the ground.

If your eccentricity drops you below 8, your ship burns up. If your eccentricity increases past 180, you start taking radiation doses every turn and eventually kill your crew.

We think we know how to apportion the mix of forces when you thrust at every angle used in the game, though it's a nest of special case rules. I hate special case rules...

It's forcing people to calculate semi-major axis (orbit height over ground) and multiply by 2*pi every time they burn that sucks rocks, on top of tracking where your minimum and maximum orbit heights are (And we may be wrong on apportioning the mix of forces).

I'm still playing with this, trying to find a clean way around this. I've tinkered with play aids, and asked questions of people who know more than I do. If/when I know how to make this playable, I'll publish it for short period orbits, but it's the last major design hurdle in front of me.

It's on low simmer, and it's something I want to add when I can find a gameable solution to it.

Comments should follow on to the Ad Astra BBS.

[End of Scary Math Digression]

Alrighty then...

That was fairly straightforward.

Kevin

KenFox:

"I see where "AV: T" is coming from now. It's closer to reality, but still far enough away that space combat is fun. You're doing Larry Niven, not Robert Zubrin. ;)"

Yes - the physics is real, but that doesn't mean we know how to do the engineering. :)

"I was not aware that you had a pre-game phase that normalized the map to the ships' relative velocities. Cool."

It isn't a special phase so much as an underlying assumption - but it is a known, explicitly considered assumption. The mechnic actually comes up for use in play: if everybody acquires a map-breaking vector in some direction, remove the portion of it held by the smallest ship from all the ships, to place that part of all the ship's motion onto the map's frame of reference and keep everybody from skidding into the next room. Doesn't work in the few scenarios where there's a relatively fixed object....

Underling:

*laugh* Sorry, there's a reason why I put the disclaimer.

That's an example of something that ISN'T in the game, because I can't make simple enough to be playable...and that's about three orders of magnitude more complex than everything else in the game.

YUM!

Physics in a straighforward way, easy to grasp. Intelligent discussion, intelectual shenanigans about the "realism of a simulation"...

I like this thread and, even when I was not that interested in the game when the addy appeared, I might be willing to try it out, eventually.

Whatever the case may end up being, this proved a lot more useful, interesting and enlightening than the hobby newsbit, lads. =D

Okay, gravity: If measured in Gs (10m/sec^2), gravity will have a significant bearing on near planetary combat, particularly as one assumes a direct scale relationship to the size of a spacecraft. Indeed, the more realistic the scale is, the more significant the effects of gravity become! If your planetary circle is simply a dot on the map, then either you are assuming spacecraft with greater than planetary masses (which is absurd), or you are assuming that a spacecraft utterly dominates a region of space tens of thousands of kilometers in diameter (which is equally absurd).

Secondly, what's so hard about simulating gravity? It's simply a constant acceleration vector aimed at the center of a planetary mass. The ship is accelerated along this vector without regard to orientation, etc. in every time segment (whatever you use). Managed properly with inertial movement, this will naturally produce orbital effects.

The convention was Rockford. I did not see his name.

Maybe he was not trying to be insulting. Still, I worked very hard on the models (one took more than a month to complete) and it hurt.

Whatever the case, Ad Astra has already expressed an apology as much as he can. I thank you for it and will put this down to a misunderstanding.

The game sounds very interesting. Hopefully, it will do well.

Phoenix,

On the one hand, I'm relieved - never did a demo of any sort in Rockford, so it wasn't me. On the other hand I'm very unhappy that your enjoyment of your game was ruined. That it was someone tied to our game just makes it feel as though I should be apologizing anyway.

*sigh* the idiots will be with us always. If only they'd just wear signs or something.

As I stated in an earlier post, I am a full thrust kind of guy. If anyone plays the game in the Orlando area I will give it a try. I just think the game is to expensive to buy just to see what it's like......Doug

Phoenix:

Thank you for the information, and thank you for accepting the apology. I was at RockCon, and that idiot was probably me. While I had two assistants there, my assumption is that since I spent the most time at the AV:T table, it was probably my error, and not theirs.

I admired a lot of the gorgeous paint jobs there. I know full well how much work goes into painting one of those things, since I cannot paint a model to save my life, and it looked like the Warhammer folks were having a blast. I played a pick up game late on Saturday.

There was a person I was talking to in the Warhammer tourney who'd played in the AV:T demo the previous year. We were discussing some of the interesting scale discrepancies in WarHammer -- you can extrapolate how far gun ranges are by how far the infantry figures move, compared to their sizes.

The conversation then went to comparing Warhammer to BattleTech, where a crew mounted machine gun has a range of 90 meters...which BOTH of us found silly. (BattleTech makes perfect sense if the ballistic weapons are firing Nerf bullets, and the armor is bubble wrap....and one of these days, I'll set that up as "BattleTech: The LARP!")

You might have walked into that while Dave and I were talking and laughing.

I was the guy who, late on Saturday after packing up at the end, got lent an army of something with a lot of artillery and realized I could use the AV:T play aid with two rulers at right angles to accurately place artillery barrages on the table. (Not that it helped. Darned skimmers overran my position after one salvo...)

Parzifal:

I'm copying your second comment (and my answer to it) onto the Ad Astra BBS.

I for one will be checking the game out simply for how it handle the mechanics; I might see if I can "reverse engineer" it serve as a system for lower tech ships (think nuclear pulse vessels).

Also, while people might cringe at the 55$ price tag, remember you're getting a complete game, not a "starter set" or the like. I tend to think it would be worth the cost.

And the game defintly won't be everyone's cup of tea. Heck, I didn't think it was going to my cup of tea when I first heard about it. I didn't "warm" to the game until I started to do some serious investigation into actual space flight and the numbers involved for an unrelated project that Attack Vector began to have any appeal.

And a lot of Attack Vector guys come across as a little arrogent, I do see it. But it's becuase they are rightly proud of what they accomplished. I haven't seen this much development work go into a game, ever.

In any event, I suspect Attack Vector will go right up onto my shelf that also holds games like Babylon 5 Wars, Star Fleet Battles, Hard Vacuum and Full Thrust. I have plenty of room in my heart for it ;) .

-Will

KenFox :

Deep Space intercepts:

The High Trader map, which AV will use to generate intercepts, is based on "energy states" and not distance. Ships in the same space are motionless, relative to each other.

In the real world, we are already performing deep space intercepts with probes being sent to asteriods. Given that a freighter in AV takes 10 to 16 weeks to go from the jump point to a planet 1 AU away, it would be trivial for a ship with a higher delta-v to match its path and overtake it, assuming that it was in a good position to do so.

Parallels to the 16th-18th century wet navies do exist. Ships were sent on long missions and were often out of contact with HQ. Commerce raiding was a popular past-time. Ships were often captured, instead of sunk, as the the prize money was a great incentive. However, capturing a ship was largely a matter of luck and knowing where to wait. The difference in sheets and who had the wind when the ships spotted each other was the major determining factor in if a raider could capture a merchant ship.

In AV, much of the same logic applies. If a commerce raider is in the proper position and has a higher delta-v, it could catch up with a merchant vessel. It would be more akin to a wolf running down a deer than two football players colliding. Capturing a ship would be more preferable as they are extremely expensive. This doesn't have to involve boarding combat. All the target has to surrender and extend its radiators. I suspect that most crews would have standing orders to surrender rather than fight it out if they are clearly out-gunned and unable to reach safety in time.

Weapon arc blind spots:

While it is possible to cover every arc, there are trade-offs. Most ships in AV have weapons covering the majority of the arcs, but they are mostly defensive weapons (point defense systems). Offensive weapons are very expensive, chew-up lots of energy, increase crew size, ect... There is only so much room in a ship and only so much money with which to build it.

The ship that I was flying, the Wasp, could only fire its two main mounts (two lasers in each) once before discharging most of its batteries. It was then a slow process of recharging the batteries from the reactors. Recharing the batteries generates heat and the Wasp only has so many heat sinks. I believe that the Wasp can fire its main guns roughly 6-7 times (24-28 total shots) before the heat sinks are full and I'd have to surrender or flee.

"Does "AV: T" accelerate the ship when a kinetic weapon is fired?"

No, the amount of recoil is lost in the scale of the game. (I actually have a spreadsheet on my PDA for this sort of question. Usually to argue why ships can't fire projectiles at fractions of light speed.)

AdAstraGames, JamesSterrett, Mike Zebrowski: Thanks guys. You've answered my original question and a lot more. I hope I can find your game at Origins.

I'm still a little suspicious of the realism of intercepts or parallels with a 19th century wet navy.

I agree that a raider could intercept -- the physics allow it -- but it doesn't seem profitable. The raiders need to buy a multi-billion dollar ship. They need to "park" it in the middle of nowhere (fully fueled!) and consume life support for an indefinite time.

Sure, governments can launch intercepts now. But the probes take years to get there and never return.

Anyways, I've got no problem with mixing real physics with Space Opera. It reminds me of Harry Turtledove's book about time travelers arming the ACW Confederates with AK-47s. That was a hard simulation of the effect of automatic weapons on a 19th century battlefield. Just pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...

KenFox :

I think that you are confusing commerce raiders with pirates and privateers.

Commerce raiders are regular navy and are fully funded by the government. In a conflict where direct invasion is not an answer, disrupting the other guys economy can be rather effective. (The private sector starts to lose money and begins pressuring their government to sue for peace or allocating more ships for escort service). For the navy, it is just another type of mission, such as patrol or escort.

Commerce raiding is expensive, which is why the capture of ships is preferable. The governement can sell the ship (and the goods on it) to their own private sector as well as ransom the crew to offset the cost of raiding.

Mike Z

Nope, I'm not confused. I just don't see a workable business model there. Ships cost billions and require a huge support infrastructure. A government (or mega-corp) is going to gamble that investment in some low-return high-risk adventure?

The raiders can't operate in their home system, so that means attacking commerce in the enemy system -- out-numbered and without support infrastructure. The re-fueling problem alone sinks this plan. Even if raiders do manage to take control of a merchant ship, what are they going to do with it? It's a big hunk of mass without enough fuel to change course.

It's much more profitable to hire out warships as escorts to prevent piracy (or non-payment!) once a merchant fleet arrives in orbit. This also gives a convenient excuse to establish over-whelming space superiority in a new system.

KenFox - all this depends on a variety of assumptions. You can, to get to a question I keep forgetting to answer, get a lot more detail at Origins (draft campaign maps and the like) - Ken Burnside, Kirk Spencer, Corinne Mahaffey, and I should all be there. :)

@Ad Astra; you almost had me convinced I should give this game a serious look at and maybe even purchase it but then you blew it and bad mouthed two games.

Certainly, Battletech and Warhammer have their bad points but I think that those points are more for playability than for realism. Both games ranges are limited because of the scale they are using, Battletech hex = 30 meters, and because one map is only 17 hexes by 15 hexes and most players have a limited amount of space. Frankly, many Battletech and Warhammer players would probably agree that the ranges are strange but have realized that it is a playability and map size issue not a realism issue. So, before you go and bad mouth other games maybe you should talk with the game's players about these issues to find out why they think the ranges are as they are.

I will still give your game a look at but I am now less inclined to buy it.

KenFox: It's much cheaper to send in a few commerace raiders to disrupt trade then sending in the fleet guns blazing to try and *capture* the system. And it's not a "business model", it's a military strategy. Also, in the Ten Worlds the powers that be don't have giant battle fleets to fling at each other with impunity; with the number of ships they possess commerce raiding makes a lot more sense.

-Will

Typhoon:

You will (undoubtably) think what you will. However:

1) I still PLAY BattleTech and WH40K. If I play them, do I get the right to point out their flaws in my eyes?

2) If you play AV:T, will you take the time to point out errors that you find so I can fix them?

For example, if you halved the movement rates of all Btech units (and halved the speeds needed to get a firing penalty based on target speed), and made hex sizes 100 meters, the weapon ranges and published kph movement rates actually match up; the map size gives you more maneuver room, and the tactical envelope changes. You also get weapon ranges that make sense -- an AC-5 actually hits out at about 1800 meters, comparable to a small calibre tank gun, MGs go to 300 meters, which is about what you'll get from a two man MG.

Ship costs:

One econ point on a ship is roughly 200,000 dollars. So these warships (and freighters) don't cost tens of billions; they cost tens to hundreds of millions.

A Wasp at 1747 econ points is 349.4 million. A freighter at ~270 econ points is 54 million.

That's still expensive...but not crippling. (And the entire economy of the Ten Worlds is in the realm of 490 billion...which is below the rounding error of the US federal budget.)

"@Ad Astra; you almost had me convinced I should give this game a serious look at and maybe even purchase it but then you blew it and bad mouthed two games."

Quite frankly, I'm more inclined to look at AV:T now that I know the designer HAS given 40k3 a little crap.

Hmmm...

Of course, there is the fact that he plays it.

:)

Kevin

"Parzifal:

I'm copying your second comment (and my answer to it) onto the Ad Astra BBS."

Well, that's fine (and it's Parzival, not Parzifal), but in all honesty I'm not likely to bother reading it there, so you might as well respond here.

Parzival, thanks for the correction on the name.

Orbits are defined by 5 variables. Gravity interacts differently with 4 of them, and doing orbits with short periods in AV:T requires lots of recalculation.

Your model makes sense if and only if you assume the ship is at rest for each time point measured in its orbit, and can treat its thrust as discontinuous in that process.

In reality, you're doing a vector addition while conserving angular momentum, and things tend to be...wonky. :)

I recommend Niven's Smoke Ring books for a rule of thumb on how thrusting with regards to an orbit might look from someone on the inside of the solution set.

Spock: Captian; Kahn's pattern displays 2 dimensional thinking.
Kirk: Helm -1000 yards
and the rest is history....
so yeah 3d is cool in a wargame of spaceships for me; don't know if i'd like it in huge fleet actions; but definatly in smaller games or duels..

My question never did get answered. Can you create your own ship designs? I want to use my Trek ships.

Thanks,
John

John: I wrote earlier:

It does not do "Well, I want to fly the Millennium Falcon against the Enterprise." pickup fight. Again, generic space battles is something that's already done more than well enough by other games (Voidstriker II, Starmada, Full Thrust).

There is currently no "design your own ship" system, though I'm working on ways to develop software to do this (if nothing else, it frees up MY time).

That being said, my business partner have a friendly wager as to how soon we'll see a fan-designed modification to do Star Trek/Star Wars/Bab5 on the web after it hits general release.

He's saying under a week. I'm saying about a month. :)

KenFox :
You are assuming that every star system can be classified as friendly or enemy.

In the AV setting, there are roughly 100 stars that have been explored, but only 10 of them have colonies. As finding a jump route between a given pair of stars takes a university rearch team decades to find, if one even exists, none of the 10 worlds connect directly to each other. When a merchant ship travels, it spends the majority of its time in neutral systems.

For example, the shortest route between Galt's World and Damso is 4 jumps. In any of the three neutral systems, a merchant can be attacked by commerce raiders waiting at the jump point.

The raiders can set-up a fuel depot in the system as well. After they capture a ship, they can refuel it and be in the maze of jumps long before anyone realizes that the ship is missing and sends out ships to look for it. Raiders can also be fitted with cargo and fuel pods that would extend their cruise duration.

Mike Z

Ken, that's not a fair bet. I mean, somewhere around here I've got the brief email discussion we (you, me, and IIRC Eric F. and James B.) had about converting SFB to 3D. I'm not going to dig it out, but we used the SFB optional 12-point facing rules to integrate with then-DV's 12 point facing, made the tops and bottoms match the side for shielding. There was a bit of fun with weapons bearings. I don't recall offhand what we did about "slips" - IIRC the 12-point took care of that.

And I've played with it once since then - in the last 9 months or so - converting turn rates to pivot/roll charts, and making a hash of the horizontal/vertical remainder charts (for 32 impulse turns - shudder). Funny thing, though - it wouldn't be that much slower than a 2D SFB game played that way. Now if you tried to modify the damage to AV:T style it might get... interesting. Oh, and I think the "missile" mode of AV:T shellstars would make the Kzinti a much easier ship to play -- even with a fleet.

So it's not a fair bet, because it's already almost there and you helped write it. (grin)

Mike Zebrowski: How can a raider "wait" at the jump point and hope to catch something coming out at 1% light speed?

Fuel depots don't make sense either -- if you have enough fuel to dock with a fuel depot, then you have enough fuel to get where you're going. A merchant vessel would certainly use the minimal-fuel course, even if that meant using robotic crew.

The fluff behind "AV: T" stretches the imagination almost as much as Warhammer or Battle Tech. You guys should remember that the next time you're slamming another game's physics...

By the way, "AV: T" interstellar travel seems heavily inspired by "The Mote in God's Eye" by Niven and Pournelle. I really enjoyed that book and look forward to playing games set in that fantasy universe.

Kenfox,

You're bringing at least a few erroneous preconceptions to the board. NOT "you're wrong", but rather as with most green/purple positions your root assumptions aren't the same as those of the other side.

For example, there is indeed a "minimal fuel" course. It's called a "Hohmann Orbit" (or sometimes a Hohmann Transfer). It pays for this low fuel use by taking large amounts of time. By burning at rates sufficient to generate acceleration measured in milligees, the time to destination can be cut by 75% and more. Thus the non-Hohmann vessel can make two complete trips (at least) in the time the Hohmann gets from origin to destination once. There is also the point that the FTL travel "handwave" requires fuel. Oh, not for the jump itself, but to get into the right position. The drives of AV:T use reaction drives - accelerating by the push of a fusion torch. Since the particles have to come from somewhere, fuel matters.

I've seen some folk who have to swallow their knowledge to sustain disbelief on various subjects - physics, usually, though it may be lasers or orbital mechanics or the need for radiators. Me, one of my big swallows is when logistics is butchered. Doesn't mean I don't enjoy the heck out of a number of games, just that when folk start talking about how "realistic" or "important" the supply or purchasing system is, well, depending on who I'm with I'll debate or bite hard on my tongue. Worse, I'll start to lecture - and unless my wife or a friend willing to tell me I'm lecturing stops me, I can go on in nauseating detail. Contributing to the AV:T development means that I've done a lot less tonguebiting. Doesn't mean it's a perfect reflection, but it's a lot closer than most, and usually without significant burden to the player. (Heck, for tactical pickup games it's invisible. Start a campaign, though, and those fuel depots start making big sense.)

hmmm. I see I'm lecturing. I'll stop now (grin) - let someone else discuss the "1% of lightspeed" issue.

KenFox:

Where did you find the reference of "jump" at 1% of light speed? Wherever it is, I need to find it and fix it, because that's never been part of the setting.

1% of C is 3000 km/sec. Most ships built to date have under 150 km/sec of delta v total with full tanks on cruise mode. Fortunately, high cruise transfer orbits tend to take between 10 and 30 km/sec for the systems described; so refuelling makes a certain amount of sense. (Most refuelling points are also cargo transfer hubs...)

There is always a trade off between fuel spent and time; unfortunately, it's both quadratic and dynamic depending on the positions of planets in the system you may or may not want to visit. We have a solution to this that we're in the process of double checking, since someone else may have found a persistent error to fix.

This means that we can give a range for a minimum time/max fuel burnt transfer (brachistone orbit transfer) or a minimum orbit energy transfer (hohmann) and a range of choices in between.

Most of the choices used are closer to hohmann than brachistone, because brachistone orbits eat fuel like nobody's business.

I haven't seen any of the "AV: T" fluff except for what you guys have posted here. I'm waiting 'till after Origins to pick up a copy of your rules.

I'm not sure what you mean by "most ships built to date." Are you talking about your virtual "AV: T" ships?

Mike Z said the "jump points" are at the Sun. I assumed most of your ships were fusion or antimatter. Is 1% of C a reasonable number in a world with FTL tech? Isn't about 10% of C the max for a fusion engine? Do you have to click your heels three times to enter a jump point?

Anyways, the image of a raider parked on a star waiting for a merchant vessel to drop on buy is amusing. Even if the physics work out, the business model seems to have some holes. (Oh, wait, that would be "military strategy", eh? :)

My only point here is that all games bend reality, some a bit more than others. Is Full Thrust's physics wrong? Maybe. But does it matter much? "AV: T" presumes jump points. Is that wrong? Does that matter much?

Ken:

Since we don't actually have an FTL drive to baseline against, we're bending physics to get one to work, and we're trying hard to make it as...innocuous as possible.

However, aside from that, everything else in the game hews the most accurate physics I can find....and we used FTL because a solar-system only game gets kind of stifled for things you can make space combat out of.

While our ships have fusion torches, the maximum speed is based on exhaust velocity and fuel fraction; this gives most ships a total delta v (top speed) of about 150 kilometers per second from their starting point.

C is 300,000 km/sec. 10% of C is 30,000 km/sec, 1% of C is 3000 km/sec.

As a rule of thumb, a ship with a fuel fraction of 63% gives you total delta v equal to the exhaust velocity. If your exhaust velocity is 3000 km/sec, a fuel fraction of 63% means your ship can change velocity by 3000 km/sec. An exhaust velocity of 3000 km/sec is pretty high.

Nothing that we've built in the AV:T/Ten Worlds setting comes remotely close to the delta v needed to reach 1% of C. In fact, our typical exhaust velocities are under 1000 km/sec for cruise mode, and lower than that (with higher fuel flow rates) for combat mode.

That being said, you don't need to know what the fuel flow rate is -- you just scratch off bubbles on your ship sheet. We did the scary math so you could blow things up. :)

Ken wrote:

"My only point here is that all games bend reality, some a bit more than others. Is Full Thrust's physics wrong? Maybe. But does it matter much? "AV: T" presumes jump points. Is that wrong? Does that matter much? "

You're comparing apples to alarm clocks.

As you mention, all games bend physics.

There remains the degree to which reality is contorted, and I can say that there's a lot of product differentiation in that area.

There are at least three games that do "generic wet navy combat with spaceships" -- Starmada, Full Thrust and Voidstriker II.

Most other space combat games are variations on "wet navy combat" with spaceships. SFB grew from watching Balance of Terror while playing Jutland. B5Wars is a direct "spacehips are like wet navy ships" port. Zocchi's Star Fleet Battle Manual is nearly identical to his variant on the Fletcher Pratt naval minis game.

I'm saying mine is different; it doesn't do this. It does work from some clearly laid out parameters in the settings and physics model.

Is it better or worse? Not for me to say. *smile*

Jump Points:

The generic SF jump point is a location in space that a ship can fly to, activate some gizmo, and appear at another jump point light years away. The real defining characteristic of jump point FTL travel is the railroad system of jump points that is generated. Travel from point A to B usually involves points C, D, and E.

AV calls their jump points "Hyperspace Termini" or "Rabbit Holes". Ships fly to a specific point near a star, perform some complicated math, access one of the bands of hyperspace and then (hopefully) appear at their destination star's hyperspace termini. From there, they have to perform a new set of calculations before jumping to the next star. The band of hyperspace that they access determines how far they can go.

The effect that AV jumps points have on tactical combat is nil. It takes way too long to do the fictional math for it to be finished during a combat. As the rabbit hole is a fairly large volumn of space, the odds of a ship dropping into the middle of a combat is virtually nil.

(The preview edition of AV, called Delta V, had rules for doing the jump in combat, but it would take a combat that lasted well over a hundred turns for a 50/50 chance of making a safe jump)

Fuel Depots:

When dealing with reaction drives, fuel depots make sense. Fuel is mass. When chasing down a ship, being able to shed extra mass will mean that your fuel costs will go down. After the battle, you can retreive your extra tanks.

Think of it this way. Cars don't haul 600 gallon tanks behind them. The extra mass kills their gas milage. Instead, they stop at various fuel depots to resupply themselves.

In AV, the effects of lightening the tanks is factored in as virtual fuel.

Commerce Raider:
What holes are there? It is hard to debate them if you don't enumerate them. Most Commerce Raiders pull a double duty. When they are not actively chasing a ship down, they would be patrolling.

Just a Fan:
I just want to remind people that I am just a fan of AV. Everything that I've said so far has either been publicly available (through the AdAstra message boards, 10W Yahoo Group, or in the Delta V preview edition) or based off of the information found in those sources. I've been mistaken for an "Official Game Company" member in the past (such as on the FFG boards) and the signs of such a mistake are showing up in this thread.

Mike Z

"Wow, after Mr. Siefert put out the call to arms on the Ad Astra message board, here come many of the Zealots from that board telling us how many they have on order. Very surprising.

Send in the shills....

Rev"

I can't believe how you're trying to call these guys arrogant with the way you're talking. Did you ever meet my Black Kettle over here, Mr. Pot?

AdAstraGames: I'm just an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to imagining space travel. I liked Robert Zubrin's "Entering Space". Is there anything inconsistent between Zubrin's world and "AV: T"? Is there tech that Zubrin postulated that "AV: T" doesn't have yet?

I enjoy hard science fiction. Internal consistency is more important that conforming to current science. I don't mind if a game bends reality, but the denizens of the new world must truly live in their world.

Mike Zebrowski: Cars don't use fuel to stop, so that's a bad metaphor. If a spaceship will eventually need the fuel, it's probably safer and more efficient to just bring it with. A re-fueling stop is going to burn a lot of fuel -- or the fuel must be accelerated to match the ship.

Do the "AV: T" jump points require a stop-and-knock procedure to "enter"? I can see where fuel depots close to the jump point make sense. However, if ships don't need to stop, they wouldn't. The velocity will be needed to escape the (next) star.

Here are some thoughts on why commerce raiding won't work:

1. The most valuable interstellar commodity will be Earth species -- raw genetic material. The second will be information. Everything else will (eventually) be found in-system because that is the requirement for founding a colony. New colonies will bring what they need and grow their manufacturing capability to match demand.

2. Merchant ships will use a minimum-fuel course because time is not important in interstellar trade. If time were important, local (in-system) companies would own the market.

3. The pre-plotted courses won't give raiders much room to maneuver a stolen ship. It's like trying to steal a ballistic missle. Sure, you might take control, but all the important decisions have already been made.

4. There are very few destinations for a merchant ship. It's much easier to catch the raiders fencing the goods than it is to prevent the theft. Patrol ships aren't needed for defense, only for offense.

5. Offensively it is much easier and much cheaper just to destroy enemy ships. German wolfpacks did not capture merchant ships; they sank them.

6. Small warships will be used primarily for escorts, not for patrol or raiding. Space is too damn big to patrol. Market demand for escorts will allow more investment in escort technology and manufacturing. Patrol ships will be relegated to rescue and retrieve operations -- and treasure hunters.

KenFox,

A lot of your points depend on assumptions - that's when they become green/purple debates, because this person's underlying assumptions may not match that person's assumptions, even with the best of intentions. See, we've discussed these and a heck of a lot of other things over on the Ad Astra lists. There are over 11,000 messages on a very high signal-to-noise Yahoo list (actually, two - the "worldbuilding" and the "philosophy" lists). Additionally, we had and have lost a couple hundred messages when the Ad Astra server crashed, some of which were reference citations on some of these subjects.

Some assumptions are legitimate frame of reference. Others are challengable. As one example, let's take your point two, that time is not important to cargo vessels. I will challenge that on the simple basis that a ship has a fixed lifespan - that is, when you purchase it parts will wear out. As time goes on parts are more likely to fail, eventually reaching the point where it is cheaper to build a new ship than to refurbish and repair the old one. Please do not assume that a ship in space won't wear - I'll ask you to look at the observations of satellites in orbit subject to the "solar wind", and I'll ask you if "vacuum welding" has crossed your mind, and I'll point out that a lot of the ship is not exposed to vacuum but is instead exposed to the fusion energy ball or the fuel or the atmosphere in which the crew lives. You have 't' time in which to make as much money as you can. Nominally, you make M money per full load delivered. Now if you can deliver (for example) 1000 full loads at low speed delivery rates (using just "back and forth" routes - a to b to a ...), then as mentioned already you can deliver four times that or 4,000 full loads at the slightly higher rate. If the cost of fuel (and wear) to make this delivery is less than 3 times the cost of not using it, then the ship is more profitable when it goes fast. Now you also have to consider "fuel" for the crew (and passengers if applicable). A crew will need four times the food, air, and water for the slow trip - which while it may not cost as much in money, certainly takes away from the space in which you can carry sellable cargo. Of course, the supplies might be balanced by the fuel, so we might find this to be moot.

Note the assumption in there, because as I said root assumptions matter. *IF* fuel is so expensive that moving at 4 times "no-fuel" speed costs more than 3 times the "no-fuel" speed, then the no-fuel route is the better choice. Assuming of course that extra crew supplies is balanced by fuel requirements.

Again, if this truly interests you - if you want to discuss it, to make it more fun or more accurate (or best of all both) then I invite you to go to the Ad Astra site, use the links there to get to the Yahoo lists, plow through the messages to avoid saying the same things already said (and to know where you have an uncovered insight), and kick right in. Trust me, you're welcome.

If, however, you're complaining merely because it's not how you see the univers working, that's fine too. Play the games that interest you. Heck, buy AV:T but make the scenarios and background match the way you think the world works - it's done in every other decent (aka fun and/or interesting) game I've played, I expect to see it with this one.

But don't tell us we're mistaken without doing the work to see how we got here, without knowing our root assumptions. That's as bad as, well, to borrow a situation that still makes me wince, it's as bad as walking up to someone who's spent time and money on really good power armor models and sneering how they couldn't possibly work in the real world.

I'm not complaining.

I'm just providing a counter-point to the idea that "AV: T" is a future space combat simulator. The game has piqued my interest regardless of the simulation aspect -- and frankly most games overly concerned with simulation are not good games.

A little humility is good for a fortune teller. Those power armor games may be right... ;)