"Looking for a ruleset" Topic

A while back I had a rule set for spaceship combat that was clearly inspired by Jack Campbell's the Lost Fleet series but for the life of me I can't recall its name. If this strikes a chord with any of you I'd appreciate some help. TIA.

I'm a fan of the Lost Fleet series and have been looking for something similar.

I dabbled with Starmada Unity rules but it was a bit blerrrggghhh.

Various Star Trek rules were about the same.

Closest I've come to are the old Battle Fleet Gothic rules which are like me, a bit simple :)

But quite good fun.

Anybody with suggestions for other rule sets would be glad to hear.

The Lost Fleet is a little complicated to reproduce due to its very accurate presentation of light lag at interplanetary distances— you aren't seeing where the enemy is, but where he was. I honestly can't think of a way to reproduce that in a playable manner.

However, my own GOBS does have some elements which fit The Lost Fleet— the first simply being that the game is designed to handle extremely large fleets, which other systems simply can't. Another is the generic ship classes— you can easily reproduce the ships of the Lost Fleet and its adversaries. Plus, GOBS has rules for "Gravy" guns (gravity weapons), with the very short ranges and high damage these produce, just as in the novels. (Honestly, that's by accident). And while the standard movement system won't realistically reproduce the actual physics movement of the novels, the optional vector system can do that. As for the formation flying the novels present, that's up to the player to figure out what positions his ships should assume for the best combat situation— which is exactly as it should be, in a game!
But GOBS can't do light lag… but then to the best of my knowledge, neither can anything else.

thegobspage.com

The rules you are thinking of are Colonial Battlefleet by Steel Dreadnought Games. They started as a convention set of BSG rules but had a complete rewrite for publication right when Lost Fleet was coming out so it had a massive amount of influence on the new rules.

Unfortunately due to the author's personal circumstances the promised campaign supplement has never arrived.

Robert