Before anyone says "Don't apply real world physics to a fantasy setting!" I'm not even talking about vacuum of space vs atmospheric flight or ships, this is a rant about vessel movement without ground for friction.
Read the mechanics of combat. None of the pilot tricks take the idea that you don't have to apply thrust in a direction your already moving to keep going that direction. A wrecked engine is still functional enough the pilot can make a piloting check of some sort. Turn in place stops you dead in your tracks, flip and burn requires you to move back the other direction, slide only works forward-port and forward-starboard, and movement "is in a straight line in the direction the starship is facing."
Also, there's no accidental collisions if i read this correctly. Really? a RAW with no accidental collisions? Just rip a story bit out of the hands of a GM why don't ya?
I take it as an abstraction of ships roughly matching vector and velocity for sustainable combat. You're not really swooping around, you're changing your relative acceleration and pushing laterally to curve your weapons in at odd angles. One way to handle mismatched vectors that cross would be to apply the usual rules but put a limit on how many rounds you can engage before one party (with higher acceleration/"speed") has to decide whether to cancel their velocity and pursue for a drawn out chase and future battle.
It's Star Wars style space movement.
There's nothing in these rules that are different to any of the table top space ship games I've seen.
Saganami Island Tactical Simulator (most detailed and an extreme), A Call To Arms (any of those), AeroTech (now the aerospace part of Battletech's Tactical Operations), all of these either in base rules or optional rules have stuff for movement being independent of facing.
1st Edition Aerotech had movement almost identical to Starfinder, including skill-based maneuvers. Ships traveled a certain number of hexes based on their speed, and had minimum move distances before they could turn one hex side.
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What makes you think Thrusters are actually using normal physics principles to move ships around? How do you know they aren't reactionless thrusters that actually DO work the way the space combat mechanics are written? Pretty sure you'll find there's actually no definition of what sort of mechanism 'Thrusters' actually use.
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They are fast as hell since you can get anywhere in a system in 6 days.
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I also doubt any real play testing was done.
Add betier weapon and computer to a ship it becomes much harder to fly.
Yeah, this is blatantly wrong.
Playtesting was definitely done.There are a bunch of guys on these boards who had NDAs because they were playtesting. Plus whoever else they tapped on the shoulder who aren't involved in these boards.
This seems to have popped up a few times in the threads here.
Having said that, I can't understand why the DC s scale like that. I suspect more time playing the game will probably show why.
They are fast as hell since you can get anywhere in a system in 6 days.
3-8, from 1d6+2. Drift Engines are the 1d6. A minor but important difference.
In any event, this does lead to fun numbers if you want to crunch them. If we take Neptune's orbit, for instance, and assume maximum travel time (eight days), then we get even the tiniest starships hitting 2% the speed of light. That tier 1/4 20 ton Racer has more kinetic energy in it than was released from the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated! And this is completely independent of actual thruster power, since that's irrelevant outside of starship combat. And that's all with what is ultimately a fairly conservative estimate of distance; you can easily get distances larger than Neptune to the sun, and still be comfortably in the same star system.
But routinely turning fighters into kinetic kill weapons isn't an entirely normal science-fantasy trope, I don't think, so I won't be surprised if that particular extrapolation goes mostly unused.
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In any event, this does lead to fun numbers if you want to crunch them. If we take Neptune's orbit, for instance, and assume maximum travel time (eight days), then we get even the tiniest starships hitting 2% the speed of light. That tier 1/4 20 ton Racer has more kinetic energy in it than was released from the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated! And this is completely independent of actual thruster power, since that's irrelevant outside of starship combat. And that's all with what is ultimately a fairly conservative estimate of distance; you can easily get distances larger than Neptune to the sun, and still be comfortably in the same star system.
But routinely turning fighters into kinetic kill weapons isn't an entirely normal science-fantasy trope, I don't think, so I won't be surprised if that particular extrapolation goes mostly unused.
This is fantastic idea for a GremEx delivery service. Extremely cheap rates for delivery! Much more expensive if you wish to ensure the package, delivery ship, and/or planet/space station survives the delivery.
They are fast as hell since you can get anywhere in a system in 6 days.3-8, from 1d6+2. Drift Engines are the 1d6. A minor but important difference.
There's another, your physics breaking/FTL drive drops a fixed amount of time off a trip, not a proportional amount?
And yeah, 20 ton kamikazes for the WTH?
1st Edition Aerotech had movement almost identical to Starfinder, including skill-based maneuvers. Ships traveled a certain number of hexes based on their speed, and had minimum move distances before they could turn one hex side.
Aerotech 1 has also been outdated for what, 20 years? AT2r was superceded over a decade ago.
There's another, your physics breaking/FTL drive drops a fixed amount of time off a trip, not a proportional amount?They are fast as hell since you can get anywhere in a system in 6 days.3-8, from 1d6+2. Drift Engines are the 1d6. A minor but important difference.
Not exactly. System travel from a given point A to point B is a fixed time (generated by 1d6+2), while drift travel from any point A to any point B is always a random 1d6. So drift travel can actually take longer than normal travel (with a rating 1 drift engine), you're taking a risk unless your normal space roll was 6+.
This changes if you have a better drift engine and can divide your 1d6 result by 2-5, depending.
Drift travel is said to be non-Euclidean. Hence the distance to Neptune is shorter and the velocity lower.
As an aside, I believe Ian Douglass uses near-c projectiles quite often in his books as weapons. To the point of using sand filled missiles as relativistic shotguns.
They are fast as hell since you can get anywhere in a system in 6 days.3-8, from 1d6+2. Drift Engines are the 1d6. A minor but important difference.
In any event, this does lead to fun numbers if you want to crunch them. If we take Neptune's orbit, for instance, and assume maximum travel time (eight days), then we get even the tiniest starships hitting 2% the speed of light. That tier 1/4 20 ton Racer has more kinetic energy in it than was released from the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated! And this is completely independent of actual thruster power, since that's irrelevant outside of starship combat. And that's all with what is ultimately a fairly conservative estimate of distance; you can easily get distances larger than Neptune to the sun, and still be comfortably in the same star system.
But routinely turning fighters into kinetic kill weapons isn't an entirely normal science-fantasy trope, I don't think, so I won't be surprised if that particular extrapolation goes mostly unused.
I haven't read the ship travel section yet, beyond some fluff.
Is a drift engine d6+2 anywhere in the system, or anywhere in the known galaxy? Big difference is you're travelling light years in days instead of light-hours in days.
There's another, your physics breaking/FTL drive drops a fixed amount of time off a trip, not a proportional amount?They are fast as hell since you can get anywhere in a system in 6 days.3-8, from 1d6+2. Drift Engines are the 1d6. A minor but important difference.
Not exactly. System travel from a given point A to point B is a fixed time (generated by 1d6+2), while drift travel from any point A to any point B is always a random 1d6. So drift travel can actually take longer than normal travel (with a rating 1 drift engine), you're taking a risk unless your normal space roll was 6+.
This changes if you have a better drift engine and can divide your 1d6 result by 2-5, depending.
Ah, let me clarify. The kinetic kill weapon math was not for Drift travel. That was for mundane thruster travel, which has the 1d6+2 days for in-system travel. Drift Engines are the ones that are 1d6 days, and as you indicate, are much harder to weaponize. Perhaps enough ranks in Engineering and Mysticism both would let you get around that, though, and create some sort of horribly lethal interplanar rift.
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So drift travel has a wide variance of time. In a star system it's not very fast, 1d6, however to get to an unexplored star at the opposite end of the galaxy it's only 2d6 days travel, and then the return trip to absalom is always 1d6 regardless of how far thanks to the starstone, also travel to very far systems can be shortened if they have more/stronger beacons. Drift is more like a slow teleport though than it is like fast linear travel.
well, it's actually 5d6 for the Vast, or 3d6 for the Near, but that actually is not in the slightest a matter of distance so much as it is a measure of the density of drift beacons. You could have pockets of Near-density beacons on opposite ends of the galaxy and it would take 3d6 days, while going from one star system to the next in the Vast will take 5d6 days. Fortunately travelling within a system itself is a small enough jump that 1d6 days get it, and of course the Starstone is so strong it's also always 1d6.
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I also doubt any real play testing was done.
Add betier weapon and computer to a ship it becomes much harder to fly.
Yeah, this is blatantly wrong.
Playtesting was definitely done.
There are a bunch of guys on these boards who had NDAs because they were playtesting. Plus whoever else they tapped on the shoulder who aren't involved in these boards.This seems to have popped up a few times in the threads here.
Having said that, I can't understand why the DC s scale like that. I suspect more time playing the game will probably show why.
The Starfinder team has acknowledged it is an issue and will be addressed.
Source: http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2uizv?Space-combat-skill-DC-progression-issue#1 5