"Most "Scientific" Spaceship Rules?" Topic

Starfire was, as the author said, based on WW2 naval battles the Pacific.

Probably the most 'scientific' set I played was SPIs old Battlefleet Mars, all vector movement and really quite believable 1970s era spacecraft. No warp drives, teleported death stars etc.

Attack Vector:Tactical.

Attack Vector:Tactical for me = a huge headache. I agree with Walrus though. It is one of the more scientific games. Same for the old Battlefleet Mars game that Martin suggests. It is on a more strategic scale than Attack Vector:Tactical which means a lot of the science you are talking about does not show up.

Most of the discussion has been about representing Newtonian movement, so I'll use that as an example.

I will suggest simple or complex is very relevant.

I consider Full Thrust to be highly 'scientific', even in 'cinematic'. The resultant 'curve', aside from needing to have velocity change halved in the turn, does convey, VERY SIMPLY (single angle, as it approaches an infinite number of angles), continuously applied thrust.

AV:T tries to include 3D, which is far more 'scientific', and requires serious complications to do so. Some like it, I prefer root canal, and I've had enough of them to know what I'm talking about.

Curiously apropos, as I, like many others, was enticed to play AV:T with chocolate. ;->=

That said, the man behind the curtain in AV:T is sufficiently obscure that I don't sense the 'scientific'.

Now, may I suggest your original question refers to 'internal consistency' of a scientific model. Here, your examples may cloud the issue, as terminology is 'handwavium', by itself.

Doug

Triplanetary by GDW used vectored movement on a hex grid. It was more of a race around the planets than a war game although there were rules for war in it. I liked the fact that each planet had a gravity well that caused you to move to a different end hex if you had entered it.

Squadron Strike is the less-complex version of Attack Vector Tactical, and not only follow's Newton's Laws, but it gives you a choice of how many of Newton's Laws you want to follow.

AV:T and SqnSt (I don't use 'SS' as an abbreviation for anything but the Schutzstaffel) are both highly scientific under your definition, as all the modifications to current science have been chased out through their effects on combat. To a lesser extent, they've been chased through their obvious effects in society, too. The author of both games tried really hard to NOT make the players do much math, and did a good job, IMO. But learning the 3d motions and how to visualize where the target is compared to your ship's heading really makes for a steep learning curve.

Dream Pod 9's Jovian Chronicles (and it's hexless cousin Lightning Strike) are also pretty hard-science. The JC universe has big stompy robots AND conventional fighters. The robots have a maneuver advantage over the fighters, which is explained as the robot pilot shifting the bot's center of mass around the center of thrust like a gymnast. Spaceships have a 'plasma combustion chamber' drive which is somewhere between a VASIMIR and a fusion-thermal rocket, and can run on almost any reaction mass. The preferred reaction mass is hydrogen, but the rules are designed well enough that you could actually do the math to use carbon dust or water instead of liquid hydrogen. JC is very easy to do in 3d, while LS is pretty explicitly 2d. The Jovian Chronicles universe does a pretty good job giving both mecha and interceptors not only different roles, but a good reason for existing in the first place: The orbitals are getting crowded!

Full Thrust has less hard-science showing, but could also easily swap between 'cinematic' (ie, naval/aircraft style movement) and Newtonian movement, so far as to have one force using cinematic movement while the other uses Newtonian. FT is very much like Lightning Strike, minis on a hexless table. Actually, I think that should be more like "Lightning Strike is very much like Full Thrust", though there's a big difference in dice-rolling conventions. Full Thrust also has small craft, doesn't really address the 'realism' of fighters. Missiles aren't well-handled in FT, IMO.

As Full Thrust is free to download, that would be my immediate recommendation. Lightning Strike and Jovian Chronicles can be bought as PDFs, the hardcopy books are OOP now. As far as minis go, Dream Pod 9 brings the JC minis online about once a year for sales, as it's not cost-effective for them to make a bunch and have them sitting around forever. Next sale period is in November or December, I think.

If you want to throw down on 3d motion, I think SqnSt or AV:T handle it better than Jovian Chronicles does. 3d makes for a HUGE change in tactical gameplay.

You know, this is a really interesting question. I don't know if you can say that the new BSG was more or less realistic than any other scifi setting out there, but the show's treatment of their technology sure did a great job of making it *feel* realistic.

The creator of the new Bsg, Ronald Moore, also previously worked on STNG. I read somewhere that one of the things he learned from working on STNG was that the more you tried to explain your tech the less realistic it felt. If you compare the two shows (I am a big fan of both), STNG has a ton of dialogue dedicated to "technobabble" (trying to explain away your handwavium) whereas BSG has almost none.

Instead of spending time on technobabble Moore gave his BSG writers and actors short descriptions of what BSG tech could and could not do and told them not to worry about why. His reasoning was that if the actors played the characters as if the technology were a common part of their everyday life that the characters were aware of and simply accepted and didn't have to have explained to them then the audience would also accept it. After all, we all basically know what to expect from real-world technology even if we don't know exactly how it works or how to build it.

In my opinion, Moore was absolutely right and BSG just *feels* more genuine and real to me than STNG.

I think the same rationale applies to games as well. Less technobabble is more as long as your treatment of the tech in the rules system is consistent.

What I remember from the new BSG was the 'there are personnel working EVA' announcement that was more-or-less in the background at the start of the pilot. It was a no-joke appropriate safety announcement, I've made one almost identical when we had divers working over the side or men working in the sail!

The way 3d complicates tactics is that it changes how you order your maneuvering to line up those spinal-mount shots.

Star Trek: The Next Generation (The one with Capt. Picard).

Queen Catherine,

I disagree on you conclusion that 3d doesn't add anything if you just have two groups of combatants. I have played several games of squadron strike in 3d and it is totally different than playing squadron strike in 2d. Don't forget that you can pitch and roll your ships in addition to moving in 3d. Also fire arcs and defenses in squadron strike (and av:t) after also 3d.

Now if you took something like Starfire and made it 3d, I agree that it wouldn't make any difference because that game doesn't have directional defenses or fire arcs to start with.

Voidstriker is a pretty good rule set using basic vector movement (2D) and ship aspect, and mostly realistic physics and the like:

link

Y'all will have to forgive me, it's been a long time since I took the AV:T intro rules or Squadron Strike out for a spin. With AV:T and SqnSt, your weapons can have pretty narrow firing arcs, and the real 'art of flying' comes in when you're maneuvering to line up a narrow-arc-of-fire weapon like a spinal mount onto another maneuvering target. It's really tough to explain in text…

3d becomes an issue as soon as you have more than 2 objects on the table, but even if you're running a single-ship duel maneuvering in 3d is different. It's different because you have another variable to work with in controlling the range, and also a third axis of rotation to 'fine-tune' the relative bearing from your ship to the target.

AV:T ships have both lasers and railguns, the railguns job is to force the opposing ship into the laser firing arcs (because if you are in the same hex as a railgun volley, you're dead).

As far as the Full Thrust systems go, the basic Missile doesn't do much damage for how much mass it takes up. 2d6 damage for 2 mass, when a Pulse Torpedo does 1d6 for 4 mass and Salvo Missiles do 1d6 warheads on target each doing 1d6 damage for 4 mass. That's a huge penalty to get two more turns range. The MT Missile has a 3-turn range, Salvo Missiles have a 1-turn range, and Pulse Torps effectively have a 1-turn range (they're direct-fire weapons).

Any attempt at applying real physics to a space combat game shows that missiles of some type are the long-range weapons with lasers, particle beams, and railguns having relatively short ranges. Lasers have about a 1000km range (depends primarily on the laser frequency, shorter wavelengths are longer ranged; then on the size of the laser's targeting mirror, bigger mirrors shoot farther), particle beams about the same. Railguns may only have a 100km range, but it depends on the size of the target and whether you're throwing tungsten or nuclear shaped charges.

For my "Ahead Flank" submarine modification, I was using the damage curve of the Salvo Missiles (1d6 warheads on target, each doing 1d6 damage) for my torpedoes, but with the multi-turn range of the Missiles from More Thrust (actually 8 to 13 turns depending on speed). Lots of mods there, to be honest. The torpedo magazine was essentially 'free', didn't cost any mass, and could hold both regular warheads and supercavitating torpedoes (the rules equivalent of a pulse torpedo, but doing d3+1 d6s worth of damage). I was using the PDS rules to represent countermeasures, as even if a sub's countermeasures prevents the torpedo from hitting directly, the torp may still explode close enough to cause some damage.

But that's submarine warfare, not deep space combat. Completely different beasts, except that Full Thrust cinematic movement is naval movement.

Traveller 2300. The Stutterwarp was very nicely detailed on how it worked. My group still managed to poke massive holes in it but we do that with any set of rules since some of them (not me) are fans of movement in space.

The Pulse Torp in FT was balanced against beam batteries and is slightly less efficient per mass than a beam battery, but it does have the advantage that is ignores screens so in the end they balance pretty well.

It is very hard to compare Pulse Torps vs MT Missiles and Salvo Missiles as the missiles are single shot weapons and the Pulse Torp is not and can fire every turn.