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Here is a set of house rules for spaceship combat which can be added onto the Starfinder rules to take acceleration into account. Here is my Starfinder Velocity Vector Map Unlike most maps, this map maps velocity of each ship instead of position, you use it in conjunction with a Starfinder Position Hex Map. The Velocity Vector Map tells you in which direction your spaceship will move and how fast during the movement phase of the next combat round, the green square in the center indicates that your ship is stationary relative to the frame of reference of the battle map. All the players and the GM use the Velocity Vector Map and place ship counters on it to determine each ship's velocity on the battle map, they then use the ship's movement rating to move their counters on the velocity Vector Map, and the Velocity Vector Map, not the player, determines which direction the counters move on the Main Battle Map. So what do you think? Would this work? The Battle Map determines the ranges and actual positions of each ship on the map, but the Velocity Vector Map determines velocity and direction of each ship's movement.
Starfinder Charter Superscriber
Just noticed you made a separate thread. I like it in concept. I think it would need some work to reach a good playable version, though.
Some points:
1) How do you determine facing on the Main Battle Map(MBM)? Just retain the facing from the Velocity Vector Map(VVM) relative to the center hex?
2) As I mentioned in the other thread, you could use some sort of counter, and start back from the center every time you go off the edge. Each counter could be color coded for different ships, and would have a value of 5.
3) Is the velocity constant? I.e.- do you continue with the same velocity if you change nothing?
4) I take it this changes speed rating into acceleration instead. If so, it would probably be wise to also house rule changes to speed, or ships are going to be going very fast after a few rounds.
Congratulations! It looks like you have truly discovered the opposite of fun!
When does relativity apply?
Starfinder Charter Superscriber
Fardragon wrote: Congratulations! It looks like you have truly discovered the opposite of fun! 'Cause you're the Sole Arbiter of Fun (TM)?
Shadrayl of the Mountain wrote: Just noticed you made a separate thread. I like it in concept. I think it would need some work to reach a good playable version, though.
Some points:
1) How do you determine facing on the Main Battle Map(MBM)? Just retain the facing from the Velocity Vector Map(VVM) relative to the center hex?
2) As I mentioned in the other thread, you could use some sort of counter, and start back from the center every time you go off the edge. Each counter could be color coded for different ships, and would have a value of 5.
3) Is the velocity constant? I.e.- do you continue with the same velocity if you change nothing?
4) I take it this changes speed rating into acceleration instead. If so, it would probably be wise to also house rule changes to speed, or ships are going to be going very fast after a few rounds.
1) Yes, same as always, the facing on the velocity map is the same as the facing on the position map. When a ship accelerates it accelerates in the direction of its facing on the velocity map.
2) Yes a valid point.
3) Yes, the velocity vector map helps to keep velocity constant. A ship doesn't simply stop when it turns off its engines. What the engines to is change the ship's velocity. If for example, the ship's movement rate is 1, it can move 1 hex in any direction on the velocity map, this is an acceleration rating, if the ship enters a planet's atmosphere, this turns into a speed rating and it moves like an aircraft when its in an atmosphere.
4) Well I guess you would need a bigger map with smaller hexes, and of course you would need movement points if you were going to track fuel usage.
Shadrayl of the Mountain wrote: Okay. So if I understand right, this would then change your ship's speed rating into an acceleration rating? I think if you added a counter of some sort, and just start back at 0+counters each time you go off the edge, that could work pretty well. Also, you'd probably want to alter the scale of the position map, or change the speed ratings, or things could get crazy.
Edit: noticed you created a thread for this, so I moved my other comments over there.
Here is my battlemap, this is used in conjuction with my Velocity Vector Map to plot spaceship movements while in combat. The scale is 10,000 miles per hex, I find it a very useful scale, as a lot of battles will tend to occur in the vicinity of worlds, and I have included all the standard world sizes
Diameters
S 500 miles
1 1000 miles
2 2000 miles
3 3000 miles
4 4000 miles
5 5000 miles
6 6000 miles
7 7000 miles
8 8000 miles
9 9000 miles
A 10,000 miles
B 20,000 miles
C 30,000 miles
D 40,000 miles
E 50,000 miles
F 60,000 miles
G 70,000 miles
H 80,000 miles
I 90,000 miles
J 100,000 miles
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Fardragon wrote: Congratulations! It looks like you have truly discovered the opposite of fun! You know these are house rules, you could always not use them and have "Star Wars" style combat in space. My feeling is that a spaceship is not an airplane, and should be treated differently. While not wholly realistic as it uses a 2-d map, it is a step in the right direction of representing movement in space. Why would you want to represent the point of view of someone who flunked physics? You know the type that thinks heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, that you need to constantly apply thrust to maintain a constant speed in space, that sounds propagate through space, and all you need to survive in space is a breathe mask.
The Sideromancer wrote: When does relativity apply? When traveling close to the speed of light, relative to your opponent, you can at most get one shot off, and so could he, you both roll to see if you hit or miss one time only, and after that the combat is over, as both ships have passed each other and moved out of range. There is no point in using a battle map in this situation.
Tom Kalbfus wrote: ... and all you need to survive in space is a breathe mask. This is... actually kind of true. Of course, it's not sustainable over a long period of time, but in a pinch, as the biggest threat from space is the lack of air in a vacuum, which can cause your eyes to evaporate, the blood vessels in your lungs to vaporize, and an insane amount of decompression on your chest. With a properly-designed space mask that covered your eyes and provided oxygen (think Star-Lord's mask), you could easily survive short trips into the void.
(Freezing is actually less of a concern because space serves as a surprisingly good insulator- not much convection going on.)
Anyway, carry on. Just a note from the scientist in me.
The Sideromancer wrote: When does relativity apply? Given the in-system journey times (non-drift) and assuming a) stellar systems are of a similar scale to RL and b) Newtonian mechanics, starfinder ships would have to have accelerations of around 300-400 km/s/s. which means you would start to notice relativistic effects after around 700 seconds of acceleration, and exceed light speed in around 1000 seconds (20 minutes).
The consequences would be that the combatants would not be able to see each other - the fight would be over.
Of course one can infer that relativity does not function in the Starfinder universe in the way that it does in our own. But in that case there is no reason to suppose that conservation of momentum functions in the same way either.
Starfinder Charter Superscriber
Obviously, accelerations have an upper limit. You can't exceed the speed of light with regular thrusters. The base assumptions do seem pretty crazy fast, though. They're still substantially slower than light speed, though. Given the minimum time of 1 day for the maximum distance (sun to Pluto), the Starfinder thrusters produce a maximum velocity of about 0.22 light speed. Even given doubling that, to account for acceleration/deceleration, it's still 0.44, or not even half. There's nothing implied that would suggest thrusters that can exceed light speed.
Also, we have no data on non Drift long distance travel, as far as I'm aware. We just know that the in-system 1d6 days is 'not much faster', which is a pretty loose definition.
Your calculations assume instantaneous transitions from rest to maximum velocity (and back). I.e no conservation of momentum. You need to use s=0.5 a t^2. (Twice, to allow for deceleration). Which gives much bigger values for required maximum velocity.
And you don't stop accelerating when you reach the speed of light. Time gradually slows down so measured velocities relative to you (and your velocity as measured from an external rest frame) doesn't exceed c, but you can go on accelerating until your fuel runs out.
Shadrayl of the Mountain wrote: Obviously, accelerations have an upper limit. You can't exceed the speed of light with regular thrusters. The base assumptions do seem pretty crazy fast, though. They're still substantially slower than light speed, though. Given the minimum time of 1 day for the maximum distance (sun to Pluto), the Starfinder thrusters produce a maximum velocity of about 0.22 light speed. Even given doubling that, to account for acceleration/deceleration, it's still 0.44, or not even half. There's nothing implied that would suggest thrusters that can exceed light speed.
Also, we have no data on non Drift long distance travel, as far as I'm aware. We just know that the in-system 1d6 days is 'not much faster', which is a pretty loose definition.
Obviously these ships have artificial gravity generators to counter the effects of these extreme acceleration. 300-400 km/s/s = 30,000 to 40,000-Gs of acceleration, so you need artificial gravity generators in the front of the ship that pull you forward at 30,000 to 40,000-Gs in the direction of the ship's acceleration. It still takes energy to accelerate the ship, and I presume some sort of fuel is used, and that it runs out before we get close to the speed of light. So at this stated acceleration, in 6 seconds a starship such as this will accelerate to between 1800 km/sec and 2400 km/sec, for the sake of easy math, lets just say it accelerates to 2000 km/sec in a 6 second round. In a combat round that's 12000 km/sec. if we go with the 300 km/sec value in acceleration, we can achieve a speed of 10,000 km per combat round in one combat round, or one hex in the velocity map and 1 hex per combat round on the battle map, does that seem fair?
The next thing we have to decide upon is how much fuel it takes to do this, and how many combat rounds in total a ship can accelerate at this rate.
And what do you propose to do about pilot manoeuvres?
As I don't have the core rules, perhaps you could explain some of those pilot maneuvers to me. A ship can maneuver on the velocity chart the same way the core rules allows ships to maneuver on the space chart, however two ships that are next to each other on adjacent hexes on the velocity chart aren't necessarily near each other in real space, it just means that their velocities are close to being the same. I made the velocity chart hexes big, because there are an unlimited number of ships one can place in any of these hexes, having a bunch in the hex simply means they are all traveling at the same velocity in the same direction no matter where they are in actual space. So let me guess at some of the potential maneuvers. Planes like to do loop de loops and chase each others tails in order to shoot out the engines. In a spaceship, the engine is what does the accelerating. a barrel roll is simply unnecessary, in the vacuum of space, a ship can simply rotate 180 degrees and fire upon the ship that is pursuing them. This sort of maneuvering occurred in the 2003 Battlestar Galactica show for instance. For Star Wars fans, it simply looks wrong for a winger spaceship to simply rotate 180 degrees while in space, but spaceships in space don't have to obey the laws of aerodynamics. A wing is just a useless appendage in space, or it may be used as a radiator fin to cool the engine. To slow down, you turn your ship around and fly backwards while firing the engines. Would that be a problem with the pilot maneuvers?
I'm fairly gob-smacked that you are re-writing the space combat rules without actually reading the starship combat blog.
It's all in the "collected information on Starfinder" document anyway.
The "Slide" and "Audacious Gambit" manoeuvres look particularly problematic for conserving momentum.
Fardragon wrote: And what do you propose to do about pilot manoeuvres? One thing they'd let you fire "off arc", manoeuvring on one vector but still being able to fire on another without having to reduce your acceleration in another. Where normally turning you ship means you'd either accelerate in the direction you were now facing or not accelerate at all, this would let you accelerate in one direction and still fire in another - this does assume most weapons have narrow firing arcs, like the fighter we've seen, rather than turrets with larger firing arcs of 180 degrees or more. Perhaps you can improve the manoeuvrability of your craft, or fire when within the same hex/square when that's normally forbidden.
Another would be to allow you to change the initiative order, so you could move after an opponent but fire before them. Or allow you to hold back from firing on your turn because the target you want is going to move into a better position as it moves.
Fardragon wrote: I'm fairly gob-smacked that you are re-writing the space combat rules without actually reading the starship combat blog.
It's all in the "collected information on Starfinder" document anyway.
The "Slide" and "Audacious Gambit" manoeuvres look particularly problematic for conserving momentum.
I saw the slide, didn't see the Audacious Gambit. In space, moving sideways is accomplished by reaction control thrusters, of the kind that are used to orient the ship. You rotate the ship 90 degrees and yo fire up the main engines to accelerate in a direction perpendicular to your current direction of travel, if you do this at a constant rate of acceleration, the ship will follow a parabolic trajectory.
Starfinder Charter Superscriber
Fardragon wrote: Your calculations assume instantaneous transitions from rest to maximum velocity (and back). I.e no conservation of momentum. You need to use s=0.5 a t^2. (Twice, to allow for deceleration). Which gives much bigger values for required maximum velocity.
And you don't stop accelerating when you reach the speed of light. Time gradually slows down so measured velocities relative to you (and your velocity as measured from an external rest frame) doesn't exceed c, but you can go on accelerating until your fuel runs out.
Well, I'll concede the 0.22 figure doesn't account for acceleration/deceleration. The 0.44 was just an 'eff it, just double it', though. I think your acceleration figures are way off, now that I've done the math, however.
Isn't it impossible to actually reach the speed of light via regular thrusters with an object that has mass, though? That would require infinite energy as I understand it. I'm not a physicist, though, I just do this for fun.
Regarding actual rules, yeah it's kind of early to house rule things. I think we know enough about the starship combat system to say conservation of momentum isn't in there, though. I'm a big fan of simply putting on a veneer of accuracy on things. So I would find something that simulates it entertaining, even if it's not super accurate.
The thing with relativity is it all depends on your rest frame. You are correct that it is impossible to accelerate through the speed of light, but that doesn't mean nothing happens as you continue to accelerate towards c. Time slows and length contracts, so the journey time does seem to reduce from the point of view of the passangers. But when they arrive less time will have passed for them than the rest of the universe.
I'm a Physics teacher with a degree in Astrophysics and 4 years as an Astrophysics postdoc.
Starfinder Charter Superscriber
That's cool. Still might want to double check your math.
Yes, not working things out in your head is good. Assuming a distance of around 4 billion km can be covered in 6 days, the acceleration only needs to be around 60 m/s/s (6g) ignoring relativistic effects. Which could be just about survivable. Maximum velocity after 3 days constant acceleration would be around 15000 km/s, so ignoring relativity is valid.
The solar system is a lot bigger than that, but I can't see much interesting happening beyond Neptune.
Of course the real problem is you need to match the velocity vector of your target, which means working against (or with, if moving in) the gravitational pull of the Sun. Which makes this kind of calculation very unrealistic.
Which determines the character of space combat when momentum is conserved. The "Honorverse" novels of David Weber have it about right. You spend hours or days trying to get within range of your target, then there is a few seconds exchange of fire, followed by more hours of manoeuvring. And you never come close enough to actually see your enemy with the naked eye. Which is why you never see this kind if combat depected on TV or film. It's just not visual enough. Babylon 5 cheats by making combat take place at ridiculously short range and low velocity.
Visuals don't matter when you are role playing, we go by word descriptions and moving pieces on a board. I don't see the need to do things the same way they are done in Star Wars, as we are not watching a film, we don't need to hear sounds in space, we don't need spaceships acting like airplanes, because we can't do a good job of simulating that on a role playing table top either. There are people who watch nothing but Star Wars type movies, and when they imagine screaming space ships banking and rolling, strafing each other and so forth, but that is not what I imagine space travel to be, that is fake space travel. We're not making a film out of this we are not trying o sell movie tickets. So I figure if we don't have to do too much calculating, we might as well get momentum and inertia right, the velocity board saves a lot of calculating. I figure this is a magical universe we're talking about, so save the impossible stuff for magic to do, and not have "phony rubber physics" if we can help it. With a calculator and a piece of paper, we can also do combat in 3-dimensional space, but for some people, that would be asking too much, so two battle boards and two pieces for each spaceship should do nicely.
Why not just write your own SF RPG, or play Traveller, since most of your posts seem to boil down to "Changing Starfinder to be just like Traveller"?
Not quite, I have problems with Traveller as well, namely that it is too deadly and not as much fun to play. Characters have to avoid combat in order to survive, the weapons don't get used as much. There are different levels of abstraction for Traveller combat, some of the sets of rules for Traveller are like what I just described, others simply abstract it out, don't use a map at all and rely on range bands instead, that is most unsatisfactory. Now it seems to me that if Traveller can have multiple sets of rules for space combat, why couldn't Starfinder? Now what happens on a planet's surface and what happens in the corridors of spaceships is the same, my rules don't change those situations, they only apply to space combat. I am providing it as an option, and besides to give us something to talk about while we wait for the Core Rules to come out.
1) I don't recall Traveller being all that deadly, but I did play the original rather than d20. Modern/advanced weaponry should be pretty lethal though, if you like realism.
2) range bands are quite sufficent to describe two objects (including two fleets) moving in space.
3) Starfinder seems to use a lot more "abstraction" than Traveller, from what I have seen so far.
4) Starfinder's space combat rules are designed to be similar to ground combat, and henced easily learned. However, if you want a different system you need to do more than mess about with vector grids. You need to rework the manoeuvre system, and probably weapons and sensors too take much greater ranges into account - you might have missiles taking hours to reach thier target for example. weapon arcs become irrelevent as ships should be able to rotate with complete independence from the direction of movement. And time scales, you will need to ajust those.
5) Hard to quantify, but there is the matter of tone. Starfinder has a very high level of fantasy, it's even more fantastical than Star Wars. To me complex vector calculations don't seem to belong alongside magic missile spells, gods, and human-sized insects who don't collapse and die under the weight of thier own exoskeletons.
Starfinder Charter Superscriber
Yeah, it's definitely ignoring some issues that keep it from being very accurate as a calculation, but it is just a game. Like I said, for games a 'veneer' of realism is often better than actual realism. For instance, my made up number of 0.44 light speed turned out to be sort of rightish. (I get about 0.576c when I did the math for going to Pluto in a day)
Weapon ranges also fit into that category. As long as you have a way to see the target (easier said than done, of course), you could hit with lasers from distances that would take hours by missile.
I'll have to check out that 'Honorverse', sounds interesting.
I really wonder, though, since your whole argument is based on 'why bother'- why waste time telling us not to do it? I don't know if I will use this idea at all, but Tom did come up with a fairly easy to use system. If you're not personally interested, why waste our time telling us in such detail?
Full Thrust (space wargame) handles inertial vector movement quite easily.
Fardragon wrote: 1) I don't recall Traveller being all that deadly, but I did play the original rather than d20. Modern/advanced weaponry should be pretty lethal though, if you like realism.
2) range bands are quite sufficent to describe two objects (including two fleets) moving in space.
3) Starfinder seems to use a lot more "abstraction" than Traveller, from what I have seen so far.
4) Starfinder's space combat rules are designed to be similar to ground combat, and henced easily learned. However, if you want a different system you need to do more than mess about with vector grids. You need to rework the manoeuvre system, and probably weapons and sensors too take much greater ranges into account - you might have missiles taking hours to reach thier target for example. weapon arcs become irrelevent as ships should be able to rotate with complete independence from the direction of movement. And time scales, you will need to ajust those.
5) Hard to quantify, but there is the matter of tone. Starfinder has a very high level of fantasy, it's even more fantastical than Star Wars. To me complex vector calculations don't seem to belong alongside magic missile spells, gods, and human-sized insects who don't collapse and die under the weight of thier own exoskeletons.
My system doesn't require any vector calculations at all.
Lets start with an example:
Here is my Vector Chart, I've widened it to include another velocity magnitude. Lets say you have a starship with a movement rate of 4. At the beginning of battle that starship counter starts out on the green hex in the center of this map, this hex is labled 00000, the first two hexes indicate how many hexes the counter is from the center, and the last 3 digits indicate an angle on degrees from 000 to 359. The hex in the center has the default angle of 000 degrees. Your movement phase begins, so you move your ship from the green hex in the center four hexes, which are labeled "01000", "02000", and then you go to "03020", and then "04030" Your counter remains at hex 04030 as you have used up your movement points for this round.
Now lets go to my Battle Map, I've widened it to cover two planets. Go to the hex with the circle labeled "Caprica" in it, now repeat the movement I just showed you with the velocity chart, move your counter 2 hexes to the right and then two hexes in the 60 degree direction toward the top of the map, that is your ships new location, and for as long as you ships counter remains on Hex 04030 in the velocity chart, your ship on the battle map will continue to move two hexes to the right and two hexes upwards at 60 degrees every single round.
If you choose to move your ship on the velocity chart to a new position, for instance from hex 04030 to hex 06080, then your ship on the battle map will now move in a new direction. You count the hexes from the green center hex to the new postion you counter is in, the hexes would be 01060, 02060, 03060, 04060, and from there you go to hex 05072 an then to hex 06080, and you duplicate that pattern of movement from the center hex to hex 06080 onto the battle map from your position last round to your new position this round, and you repeat that movement to a new hex for as long as the velocity counter hex remains in that position. Your velocity chart tells you how to move your counter on the battle map.
I don't see any calculation here, the charts use precalculated values, and you are just using those, all the work has been done for you, you don't need to pull out your calculator or do any vector additions. this is done graphically on the battle map.
Tom Kalbfus wrote: In space, moving sideways is accomplished by reaction control thrusters, of the kind that are used to orient the ship. You rotate the ship 90 degrees and yo fire up the main engines to accelerate in a direction perpendicular to your current direction of travel, if you do this at a constant rate of acceleration, the ship will follow a parabolic trajectory. I suspect Harrier-style vectored thrust are the most likely engines on spaceships that are expected to do a lot of manoeuvring. A bulk freighter might get by with main engines and some manoeuvre thrusters to save money, but a ship that needs to turn fast and often should go for something that permits acceleration in multiple directions from each engine.
It's not really "realistic" in any way shape of form though. It's the gravity of the Sun that dominates all movement within the solar system.
Ignore gravity, ignore conservation of energy, you may as well ignore conservation of momentum too. It's not a more important law of physics than any of the others the game violates all the time.
Bluenose wrote: Tom Kalbfus wrote: In space, moving sideways is accomplished by reaction control thrusters, of the kind that are used to orient the ship. You rotate the ship 90 degrees and yo fire up the main engines to accelerate in a direction perpendicular to your current direction of travel, if you do this at a constant rate of acceleration, the ship will follow a parabolic trajectory. I suspect Harrier-style vectored thrust are the most likely engines on spaceships that are expected to do a lot of manoeuvring. A bulk freighter might get by with main engines and some manoeuvre thrusters to save money, but a ship that needs to turn fast and often should go for something that permits acceleration in multiple directions from each engine. Indeed. The way you design spaceships, and the way thay look and function is very different if they use vector movement. You would design them so they could apply thrust in any direction - they wouldn't really have a front or back.
Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Society Subscriber
And that's why borg cubes and borg spheres are awesome :)
Bluenose wrote: Tom Kalbfus wrote: In space, moving sideways is accomplished by reaction control thrusters, of the kind that are used to orient the ship. You rotate the ship 90 degrees and yo fire up the main engines to accelerate in a direction perpendicular to your current direction of travel, if you do this at a constant rate of acceleration, the ship will follow a parabolic trajectory. I suspect Harrier-style vectored thrust are the most likely engines on spaceships that are expected to do a lot of manoeuvring. A bulk freighter might get by with main engines and some manoeuvre thrusters to save money, but a ship that needs to turn fast and often should go for something that permits acceleration in multiple directions from each engine. Why? Is rotating a spaceship that hard? If you want a main engine along all 6 axis's, then you are going to require 6 times the weight, and six time the plumbing to deliver fuel to all 6 engines, that would be less payload for cargo and passengers. I don't think rotating a ship requires as much thrust as accelerating it at multiple-gees, I think you have only one main engine to do that, and you have smaller thrusters to point the ship in the desired direction you want to accelerate in.
Harriers redirect the thrust from one engine, they don't have multiple engines.
As for how difficult it is to rotate the ship, it would depend on the size of the ship. Conservation of angular momentum. Ceratinly for a large ship it would be easier (and waste less fuel) to redirect thrust or rotate the engine unit seperately.
Capital Starships aren't very maneuverable anyway, the are not expected to outmaneuver a fighter, they are usually heavily armored and armed, thus they don't need to do violent maneuvers, they move slow and steady, more concerned with getting somewhere, and instead of evading enemy fighters, they shoot them down with their big guns our launch a squadron of fighters themselves. "Star Destroyers" don't do loop de loops or barrel rolls.
You want "realistic" vector motion, then invoke Star Destroyers as the way a "realistic" capital ship should move?!!
Even Star Wars has to recognize scale. In Star Wars the big space ships are analogous to ships, while the small ones are analogous to planes. As far as Star Wars is concerned this is World War II in space. And World War II ships and planes have to obey certain laws of physics dealing with size. An Aircraft carrier or a battleship doesn't turn on a dime, for instance and neither does a Star Destroyer.
Most Naval vessels in World War II don't eve try to evade a dive bomber, instead they try to shoot it down, the same applies towards Star Destroyers and X-wings. Am I explaining the obvious to you? Of course the same mechanics that operates on an ocean surface or in an atmosphere doesn't apply in space. Star Wars assumes most of the audience has experience with planes and ships, so they can't get away with a Star Destroyer acting light a fighter, but they can get away with an "airplanes in space" movie, because unfortunately, most people even in the Early 21st century have no experience with true spaceships. Most except for a few astronauts have never been in space. I am hoping that will change soon, and when it does, all those "airplanes in space" movies will seem extremely dated, So I want to try and get some aspects of space travel right at least for posterity, rather than wait for a time when people go on trips to the Moon for a vacation.
I was born and I grew up in the 20th century, I was 10 years old when Star Wars came out, and even older movie was 2001 A Space Odyssey. I remember playing Star Frontiers with similar rules to space movement that I outlined here, and that was in the 1980s, so how come now in the 2010s are we getting space travel even more wrong than we did then in the popular imagination? I was wondering when some of reality will catch up with science fiction. I would like for Science Fiction to be other than just another type of fantasy that can never happen. that is why I like fictional spaceships to be portrayed as moving somewhat realistically, that is my approach People in the 21st century are supposed to be laughing at those dated Star Wars movies that got just about everything wrong. How come that's not happened?
Yes, everyone knows Star Wars modelled the motion of space vessels on ships and planes. Everyone (including the people making the films) also knows it's not realistic. Most of them also know that what you think is realistic - isn't.
The reason space ships are portrayed the way they are (and it predates Star Wars - see the 1930s Flash Gordon serials) is that realism would be slow (Have you seen Sink the Bismark or Battle of the River Plate?), and there would be nothing to put on the screen, since the combatants would never come within visual range of each other, and there would be no bright laser beams or plasma bolts flashing around - just stealth technology nuclear missiles and the occassional invisible x-ray laser.
Orbital velocity is not slow! If it were slow, space travel would be easy to achieve and a lot of us would be living out in space. Perhaps you are familiar with O'Neill space colonies There was a time in the 1970s and early 80s that people thought that those things would be common place in the time were living in today. What would a science fiction movie be to one or the residents of those colonies? Would they watch an "Airplanes in Space" movie, if they actually went to work in space? I guess part of it is that this time I live in is a rather big disappointment, when I was 2-years old, men were walking on the Moon, and now they're not, and I have to put up with "airplanes in space" movies and people's misconceptions about space travel.
I think when Star Frontiers came out, the Apollo Space Program was much more recent, the people designing the game had actually seen the Apollo missions on television, and they had some idea how space travel would work. Now those astronauts are old men and we had this long period of launching shuttles orbiting satellites and launching space probes to distant planets, but everyday experience with space travel is nonexistent, so the millenials get "airplanes in space" because the don't know any different, it does seem like we are moving backwards sometimes.
Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Society Subscriber
I prefer my space operas (and Starfinder and other sci fi stuff) to be coolthentic over authentic when it comes to spaceships and space combat.
That said, I'm all for people trying to figure out stuff that works for them and their groups, so keep up the ideas :)
So you like stuff that can never happen. Seems like science fiction is going more than halfway to meet fantasy, if you ask me. Why not have some contrast, have a realistic science fiction setting meet up with some unrealistic fantasy, otherwise why not play Spelljammer? Spelljammer is 100% fantasy set in a type of fantasy space called wildspace. Nothing in Spelljammer is scientific except perhaps the scale of the planets and the Solar Systems you explore. So you find it cool when the GM makes "screaming sound effect" out of his mouth when he holds the models of spaceships up in the air while he rolls he dice with his other hand to see what damage the weapon causes? ;)
Tom Kalbfus wrote: Even Star Wars has to recognize scale. In Star Wars the big space ships are analogous to ships, while the small ones are analogous to planes. As far as Star Wars is concerned this is World War II in space. And World War II ships and planes have to obey certain laws of physics dealing with size. An Aircraft carrier or a battleship doesn't turn on a dime, for instance and neither does a Star Destroyer. Star Wars isn't the only possible model though. Star Trek or Lensman don't follow the same paradigms, which after all aren't exactly obvious ones considering the differences in manoeuvrability for ships and planes are simply not a good analogy when everything involved is moving in space.
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Tom Kalbfus wrote: So you like stuff that can never happen. Seems like science fiction is going more than halfway to meet fantasy, if you ask me. Why not have some contrast, have a realistic science fiction setting meet up with some unrealistic fantasy, otherwise why not play Spelljammer? Spelljammer is 100% fantasy set in a type of fantasy space called wildspace. Nothing in Spelljammer is scientific except perhaps the scale of the planets and the Solar Systems you explore. So you find it cool when the GM makes "screaming sound effect" out of his mouth when he holds the models of spaceships up in the air while he rolls he dice with his other hand to see what damage the weapon causes? ;) Sure, you could do that. Go and write it, someone might even like it. It's not what Starfinder is doing though. Starfinder is Guardians of the Galaxy unrealistic science fantasy meeting equally unrealistic heroic fantasy.
And I think you are being highly insulting to film-makers if you believe they truly don't know what it's actually like in space. There are even films like Gravity and The Martian that try to depict space travel realistically (although The Martian does get highly implausable at the end, and not just because Sean Bean doesn't die). They just don't make blockbuster action movies that way, because it's not very actiony. The space travel in Avatar is fairly realistic. There just isn't very much of it.
And yes, I know that everything moves in space with a massive orbital velocity. The slowness come from trying to match one unimaginably massive orbital velocity with a different unimaginably massive orbital velocity. Again, you seem to start from the assumption that everyone is an idiot but you.
E. E. Doc Smith is fun, since the whole basis of his FTL is the cancellation of inertia.
Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Society Subscriber
Tom Kalbfus wrote: So you like stuff that can never happen. Seems like science fiction is going more than halfway to meet fantasy, if you ask me. Why not have some contrast, have a realistic science fiction setting meet up with some unrealistic fantasy, otherwise why not play Spelljammer? Spelljammer is 100% fantasy set in a type of fantasy space called wildspace. Nothing in Spelljammer is scientific except perhaps the scale of the planets and the Solar Systems you explore. So you find it cool when the GM makes "screaming sound effect" out of his mouth when he holds the models of spaceships up in the air while he rolls he dice with his other hand to see what damage the weapon causes? ;) I like there to be some realism, but if realism means I need to first get my PhD in astrophysics and mathematics I'll pass.
Anything that bogs down to: "you spend 2 hours maneuvering, roll once for attack, then spend another 2 hours maneuvering for another shot" is not my kind of fun in space opera. I like my dogfights in space, even if they are completely unrealistic.
It is just a simple chart, not a PHD in Astrophysics!
We need to level this up. I demand an acceleration vector map for determining how one moves on the velocity vector map.
Why? You are only accelerating when your engine is on. When your engine is on, you are using up fuel. You fire up your engine when you want to move from one place on the velocity vector map to another, when you turn your engine off, you stay put on the velocity vector map. (Gravity effects are insignificant compared to these speeds) so long as your ship remains on one spot on the velocity vector map, your ship will keep on moving in a straight line as the vector map instructs (In th direction from the origin point at the center of the vector map, to wherever you have left your counter on that vector map.) The vector counter does not move unless you fire your engine to move to another hex on that vector map, according to the ship's movement rate.
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