Variant Technology

[Antony]

As you probably know I largely use FF&S1 for the technology in both my Banners Sector PE game and my variant Star Kingdom of Swan/UNH game.

I am changing some of the technological assumptions in the Star Kingdom game, one of the things I was looking at was dropping gravitic focussing and reducing the ranges of any spinal MG or NPAWS to match.

Any thoughts on what other related technologies would be impacted.

 

[mike wightman]

If the ranges are reduced then you will probably find that you can change the length of a space combat turn, reducing it to produce a more cinematic feel to ship combat.
If the range is reduced sufficiently then hyper velocity rail guns/mass drivers, and contact detonating or kinetic kill missiles could be added to the arsenal of ship mounted weapons.

 

[TheDS]

By reducing the range sufficiently, I think you may mean going from 30,000 km hexes to 30 km hexes. Which WOULD be cinematic, because you can actually see what you're shooting at, and is practically the range at which most Hollywood space combat takes place.

 

[mike wightman]

Which is pretty close to the scale of Attack Vector:Tactical.
20km to a hex and turns of 128 seconds broken up into eight 16 second phases

Perhaps "cinematic" was a bad choice of words - would "real time" combat be a better way to put it?

 

[Antony]

One thougth I had, those ND missiles would become very dangerous to lightly armoured vessels. (They have a 1/2 hex detonation range). Also Kinetic Kill missiles get more of a chance with just rapid pulse energy weapons to stop them.

Looks like I would need a very fast anti-missile missile, and something like a phalanx system with ranges of 30+ km.

 

[aramis]

1min rounds put 1G at 18km covered at 1g; and 1g accumulated vector is 36km.

Yeah, 36km is an ugly number, BUT it is what the math works out to.

30km hexes would put time down to about 55 sec.