Up by the bootstraps or, Interstellar Empire sans gravitics

Ha yes, Rikki, the last page in particular is full of gaming stuff I can use. An excellent thread!

Many thanks....
 
Thanks. I'm glad it helps.

I have one race in MTU that doesn't have gravitics and I will be using these rules for their ship designs.

Most ships will move around using no more than 1G. The extra acceleration is for combat. People just can't handle hours or days and 2+ Gees. So G-Hrs of fuel should have maneuvering fuel (at 1G) and Combat Fuel (at max G for the ship).

How much fuel you use in a combat is something that REALLY needs to be playtested. I just haven't had the time to do it.

If anyone would like to try it and post the results here, I would be very interested.

Did TNE use something like this with HePlaR?
 
yep... in Hard Times, too
only instead of g-hours, they used g-turns
It also depends on turn length, if you use some other turn length

by determining how many g-turns of fuel there are, figuring how much fuel used in combat isn't hard. If you used 4-g's of fuel in a single turn, you used 4 g-turns of fuel

if you used .1 g's over 40 turns, you used 4 g-turns, too

It makes space combat a bit more tactical too
Should you evade, knowing it could mean you can't maneuver later at the rate you want?
If you're too low on fuel, you might not be able to evade those incoming missiles, especially if you're on an outsystem vector... what good is winning the battle if you're lost, to float out-bound?
Missiles might even be launched simply to force the opponent to use up their fuel.

( I tend to use a variant of "Fusion Guard" by Bruce Macintosh, a ruleset I found on the 'net a few years ago. You have to allocate g's to maneuver, evasion and aiming for spinal mounts. I don't know if it's available anymore. )
 
the idea I've been fooling around with is to require 2 maneuver drives; main thrusters AND attitude thrusters.

Maneuver g's allocated from main thrusters
Spinal Mount aiming g's allocated from attitude thrusters
Evasion g's is allocated from both main and attitude thrusters with the final value being the average of g's allocated from each for evasion purposes.

main thrusters provides GO thrust
attitude thrusters allow ship to rotated to new heading and allows fine adjustment of heading
the average of both allows for quick maneuverability whereas main thrust alone is useless for evasion because the heading can't change and attitude thrusters alone would only allow the ship to spin around willy-nilly along its present vector.

I suppose I'll have to work out details considering that a short ship would change heading quicker than a long ship given the same attitude thrust.....sheesh, so much inter-related stuff to think about.
 
That seems really complicated and overly fidgety for an RPG. I like the idea of splitting up the M-drive thrust between Movement, Evasion and Aiming, but beyond that is seems like you are just adding detail but not really adding playability.

Just my opinion though, if you like it, go for it!
 
that's okay
I've never seen ship combat as an rpg issue;
I've always seen ship combat as a wargame.

I guess I'm more of a wargamer than anything, anyways.
 
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