Nathan Brazil said:
An intermediate map perhaps where stutterwarp efficiency is reduced to speeds less than light speed. Here the central map is but one hex. I am not too familiar with 2300 space combat, but it was my understanding that there is a point that stutterwarp efficiency drops off to less than light speed.
I like the basic idea you have here NB, but the problem is that 2300's rules as written are set up so that even in the intermediate domain of your scheme (the 'shallows' in 2300AD parlance) stutterwarp is still completely dominant. Furthermore the Well, where stutterwarp efficiencies collapse to the point of tactical irrelevance, is set at the 0.1 G threshold, which is so tightly drawn given the weapon and detection ranges in the game that stutterwarp vessels dominate there as well. You can sit in the Well all you like, but your stutterwarp-enabled opponent can simply park a missile at the Wall above you (on Earth that would put them at a range of about 15,000 km) and then shoot you full of holes with a laser that has an engagement range that is measured in light seconds.
I think to get some tactical interest for non-stutterwarp craft like the OP wants, you would need to reduce the engagement ranges for starship weaponry massively and do something about the G-threshold of the Wall, such that gas giants (at least) and perhaps also terrestrial worlds generate a Well which cannot be entirely covered by the revised engagement envelopes of starship weapons.
How about this - set the Wall at 0.01G (this will multiply the radius of the Well by the square root of 10 - 3.16) and drop the hex scale for starship weapons by a factor of 20 (ie from 300,000 km to 15,000 km). The radius of the Earth's Well would go from ~20,000 km to ~60,000 km (which would be 8 hexes from Wall to Wall at the new scale - for comparison Jupiter's would be 150 hexes) - meaning that stutterwarp vessels at the Wall could threaten in to about geostationary orbits but if you wanted to reach any deeper it would require dropping platforms down into the Well to duke it out in an interface/orbital realm where Newtonian mechanics are the order of the day.
Now under this scheme non-stutterwarp craft are still largely immobile - you would need to spend a combat turn boosting at 11G to get a 1 hex/turn vector at this scale, whereas stutterwarp vessels can cover anything up to ~100 hexes/turn (depending on the warp efficiency they can muster obviously). You might want to nerf the effectiveness of stutterwarp in the Shallows down to something akin to the new scale, but that would make the transit across the Shelf a much bigger deal so could have unintended consequences for the rest of your game universe.
Stutterwarp efficiency is entirely tuneable by the GM, since it is imaginary tech; it's much harder to crank down sensor ranges to match the reduced weapons ranges if you want to remain credibly hard-SF I think, since we know that currently available tech is easily sufficient to track a target in space at the sort of ranges we are talking about now. So out in the Shallows you will have fast-movers in a goldfish bowl trying to gut each other with shivs - the challenge is no longer about trading off range and emmisions profile for a sensor lock (the 'blind-mans buff with bazookas' visualisation of the original game), but more about how you get in sufficiently close to your target and then match pseudo-velocity for long enough to get a killing shot (my preferred visualisation would be the starship engagement in 'A Fire Upon The Deep', but something a bit more 'dogfighty' is probably an easier sell to gamers).
Regards
Luke
