Huge error in ship combat Manoeuvre Phase
- Thread starter F33D
- Start date
IanBruntlett
Emperor Mongoose
Wil Mireu said:
Maybe a compromise would be to put the maths stuff into a downloadable PDF to accompany certain books?
F33D said:
Dont think you really understood my point - I'm stating that your concern seems primarily with the conservation of momentum while there are more basic, massive, gargantuan concerns. Before you even start figuring out that your thrust disappears, you should examine it calmly and see what it translates into in the game. It is NOT I spend X Thrust and now I am going at X acceleration in that direction over these 6 minutes and I'm done. Not at all.
To say that is the system is flawed, is incorrect because the system has never set out to do what you think it should do in the first place, which is simulate proper G acceleration and De-acceleration.
Thrust is simply an abstract value for ship performance measured in Gs (as others have said). As a math/compsci dual major; I am thankful for this abstractness as it allows me to enjoy the game with any group of friends without getting bogged down in 2-3 people doing vector based movement (while the rest of the group starts flipping through Chive On apps and random youtube vids).
Sam W.
ShawnDriscoll
Cosmic Mongoose
locarno24 said:
It is assumed that the two ships want to dock.
Wil Mireu said:
If only they could role-play though. Instead of quoting Hudson for laughs during everyone's turn. Or trying to ref the game when they are not the ref. Role-players that aren't sci-fi nerds actually are better Traveller players.
ShawnDriscoll
Cosmic Mongoose
F33D said:ShawnDriscoll said:
Only to Ref's who shy away from Sci-Fi
But seriously. One of the players who I play with was one of the rocket scientists at JPL who was on the Mars rover team. GREAT role player.
The role-players aren't thinking they are in a sci-fi setting every time they roll dice. They are actually role-playing their character as generated from the career(s) their character had. They don't tell bad sci-fi jokes either throughout the game session, which is very cool. So more role-play, action, drama, and story gets done. No nerd in the group to show math to that slows down any Traveller game and opens the door to invite the rest of the players to talk about nonsense that has nothing to with the game. I won't even invite those guys to a game. I watch them play on G+ Hangouts and it's painful to see a "game session" of theirs. They might as well just sit around and talk about bad sci-fi movies all night, and not even bother playing Traveller.
Wil Mireu said:
Most? No. Most Traveller players just want a good, fun game. What is being described here _is_ a factor, a recognisable percentage of players, but no where near a majority.
Most people play games to have fun, and any maths more complicated than rolling two dice and adding a DM is not generally regarded as fun (again, we acknowledge there are exceptions).
F33D said:
The issue is not one of complexity - we have never assumed any of our players are stupid (quite the reverse). The issue is one of desire. Do players want to flex their intellectual muscles, or do they want aliens they meet to eat hot plasma death?
The plasma wins nine times out of ten.
F33D said:
Now this will not be an example of a typical player
alex_greene
Guest
Opposed Skill tests: Gunnery skill versus the target's Pilot skill. Modifiers: whatever software, range modifiers and so on that apply.
Other Manoeuvres:
"Let's hide in that asteroid field!" - Navigation to plot the nearest asteroid, knowing full well that the other guy can probably track your movements, and that rock might be the only other thing in the sky right now.
"You're coming in awfully fast to that planet!" - Pilot to generate a slingshot effect to boost speed and fling it away from the conflict on a vector that the bad guys can't follow.
"Hit it with everything we've got!" - Vacc Suit, for the members of the crew standing outside on the hull throwing rocks at the approaching ship.
Other Manoeuvres:
"Let's hide in that asteroid field!" - Navigation to plot the nearest asteroid, knowing full well that the other guy can probably track your movements, and that rock might be the only other thing in the sky right now.
"You're coming in awfully fast to that planet!" - Pilot to generate a slingshot effect to boost speed and fling it away from the conflict on a vector that the bad guys can't follow.
"Hit it with everything we've got!" - Vacc Suit, for the members of the crew standing outside on the hull throwing rocks at the approaching ship.
F33D said:
No I didn't.
But ultimately, the key tends to be matching the game to the players in question. As I said before, the High Guard vector movement works perfectly well to the level of detail someone is likely to put up with in an evening mid-game. It's not 3D but then virtually no ship combat rules-set is, and it does conservation of momentum pretty well.
I use a greenish 'sensor display' mat and lighter green 'blips' with wipeclean space for contact numbers and information - because the players are, I figure, looking at a tactical display not leaning out of the window, and there is no way you can put actual miniatures on a space scale map without them looking silly.
However, as noted, the players are in this for entertainment. I assure you both I and they are perfectly capable of doing UVAST equations for travel times given a couple of minutes, a calculator and a bit of paper. But it is generally more enjoyable to use the in-system transfer times table, knowing the times are only 'ish', and spend those minutes role-playing or dealing with important stuff (like the thing you were heading towards or running away from when travelling between two orbital bodies).
Essentially, I apply the rules for making the players make skill checks:
Is detailled accuracy especially interesting or important?
i.e. is the exact position of two ships relative to one another important to "The Plan" or likely to result in serious damage to the player's ships?
Do you really need to know the transit time to the minute? If the story implies you will be sitting there with a stopwatch towards the end of it, or the players are desperately trying to stay in a sensor blind spot, then yes, it is.
If not, then cut scene to "...as you dock/reach orbit..."
This doesn't hold true for all players, and the more informed you are about actual mechanics, the more incorrect 'fake science' will annoy. I know one person who cannot watch the film Red Tails because the engine noise of the fighters is wrong and it winds him up to the point he can't sit through the first 'strafing run' scene.
msprange said:F33D said:
Now this will not be an example of a typical player
True. :lol:
This is interesting. Based on your demographic data (which I'll grant is correct as you live the marketing side of it) young people today have really atrophied in the Int dept compared to 40 years ago. Now that I think about it, in the U.S. at least, math & science proficiency has gone out the bottom in schools in that same time frame.
F33D said:
Take a physics class, you'll understand then:
From Newton's second law of motion, we can define a force F to be the change in momentum of an object with a change in time. Momentum is the object's mass m times the velocity V. So, between two times t1 and t2, the force is given by:
F = ((m * V)2 - (m * V)1) / (t2 - t1)
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/thrsteq.html
What is your mass again? That is your first side of the calcs, then you have to slow it down, don't forget to include the effect of the gravity wells and vector on both sides. :wink:
I'm sure players will love you for this.
DickTurpin
Banded Mongoose
dragoner said:
Of course, if the goal is just to determine position and velocity, then mass and force are both unnecessary. If we were computing the energy requirements for the motion both are critical, but for the sake of our sanity let's not go there. Given the assumption that the power plant and maneuver drive can provide the force needed to accelerate the ship at the stated rate the computations become quite simple; all you need is current position, direction, and velocity and apply the acceleration and direction to find the new values for each turn.
I would highly recommend using a spreadsheet to keep track of it all, especially if one or more ships is firing missiles while franticly dodging all over the place as you can very quickly have dozens of individual objects to track.
