The Core rulebook mentions that, in contrast to regular combat, the starship combat grid does not have a defined scale. Also, a round in starship combat is no specifically defined period of time.
Edit: Also, all starships have a size of one hex if not explicitly stated otherwise.
Edit 2: Core rulebook p. 316
It makes no difference for the actual combat mechanics, but starship scale is given in a table on P. 294. The values for larger ships in particular are very dubious, but they are what they are.
I think the size is on purpose relative vague, so the Starship Combat should not be a strict roll-game but more a Support for a nice storytelling (like the example combat in the core rule book).
To get a good idea of what realist spaceship battles would be like, take a look at the mass effect codes on the topic. The space battles in that happen at distances of up to hundreds of kilometers.
Star wars, while super cool, has one of the worst representations of a realistic space battle. Ships are most likely going to be too far away to be seen out of a window. Fighters would be moving to quickly for pilots to be able to react.
I think starfinder is doing a pretty solid job of emulating a Star wars style space battle with a little star trekky bridge crew thrown in there. A realist simulation would have (if using a 10 kilometer per he's scale, which seems reasonable to emulate more realist physics driven dogfights) would have maps the size of a house.
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Maybe it's a holdover from 80s space games but I've been thinking of grid sizes in the 1000s, if not more, of kilometers. 2 ships in the same hex still can't see each other out the portholes. (Would space ships even have portholes?)
However you want to think of it, remember the space system could be much more detailed but it's not the focus of THIS game.
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It mentions that you can dimension door between ships if ships are both adjacent and stationary. Now if Dim-Door has the same stats as pathfinder, (I don't have the CRB in front of me) then the range is 400 ft plus 40 feet per level.
So you need to be level 10 to cast dim-door? So 800 feet? Minimum?
So each hex is, at most, 800 ft across (if we are teleporting from center hex to center hex). Or 400 feet if we are teleporting from one end of the hex to the other end of the other hex.
I would think that hexes are much bigger than 800 feet -- probably thousands of miles across. So, to dimension door between ships, you would need both ships to be in the same hex with identical velocity vectors (something that can happen only outside of ship combat).
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One hex is approximately 12 gloothurbs across. That's roughly 15.4 xsalnks, if you're familiar with Shirren units of measurement.
Maybe it's a holdover from 80s space games but I've been thinking of grid sizes in the 1000s, if not more, of kilometers. 2 ships in the same hex still can't see each other out the portholes. (Would space ships even have portholes?)
However you want to think of it, remember the space system could be much more detailed but it's not the focus of THIS game.
In Dragonstar a space square is 5000 ft.
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One hex is approximately 12 gloothurbs across. That's roughly 15.4 xsalnks, if you're familiar with Shirren units of measurement.
For all the Ythrikilil out there. This converts to 763.956 Xenkilats
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I'm a fan of the notion of no fixed value. It means the system can be substituted into many styles of campaign without a problem.
If you want a system where there's thousands of kilometres between you and your opponent then you can have it.
If you want Star Wars then you've got it.
If you want battle of midway in space, then you've got it.
It's completely dependent on the GM and the players for what takes their fancy.
Someone mentioned the teleporting between ships earlier. The book states specifically that can't happen during combat, because everything moves to fast for the spell to be working. So hex size means nothing for that scenario to work anyway.
In other words, coming along side a ship in order for dimension door or teleport to work and get your party inside, you won't be running combat on a hex map any way.
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Something to keep in mind is that thrusters with a speed of 4 are of sufficient output as to escape planetary gravity without any current limit as to what said gravity is that I'm aware of, only a variable amount of time.
(Granted, this should not be the case. A ship with speed 12 is thrice as fast as ships with speed 4 - by all rights they should attain escape velocity proportionately faster.)
Which is to say that each point of speed is at least a bit in excess of 6,250 mph (10,000 kph), or 7 miles per second (11 km/sec). With the deliberate nebulousness of how long a given round of space combat lasts, the implicit distances vary wildly.
If space combat rounds are identical to character combat rounds, that means each point of speed covers 42 miles per six seconds. Speed 4 covers 168 miles per six seconds. Speed 15 - the highest 'default' speed without Engineering checks - covers 630 miles/6 seconds per 'move action' or equivalent.
If space combat rounds are a minute, multiply distances and thus scale-per-hex by 10. 420 miles per hex.
And so on.
tl;dr: minimum distance from one side of a hex to a another in game terms seems to be 42 miles.
Yes, but watching 2 fleas on opposite ends of a football field shoot at each other doesn't make for great cover art.
If you look at the artwork, it definitely seems as though the scale for Starfinder ship combat is akin to that of Star Wars.
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Yes, but watching 2 fleas on opposite ends of a football field shoot at each other doesn't make for great cover art.
If you look at the artwork, it definitely seems as though the scale for Starfinder ship combat is akin to that of Star Wars.
The same applies to Honor Harrington, though, and we have text confirmation that in the HH series, a distance of one light-second is considered pointblank and a distance of 100,000 kilometers is suicidally close.
The Harringtonverse uses very high-yield nuclear-pumped x-ray laser warheads as I recall .... there is good reason that distance is considered a Bad Thing. :)
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tl;dr: minimum distance from one side of a hex to a another in game terms seems to be 42 miles.
It seems somehow strangely appropriate that the answer is 42.
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The Harringtonverse uses very high-yield nuclear-pumped x-ray laser warheads as I recall .... there is good reason that distance is considered a Bad Thing. :)
Shipborne lasers are x-ray (and I can't recall what is used as an exciter offhand), missile lasers are bomb-pumped x-ray lasers, and ships also carry grasers, which we have not yet figured out how to lens.
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On the extreme end of the scale, the range of a light laser is 5 hexes. If we were to assume that a light laser's range is equal to one light-second, that would make the length of a hex just a shade under 60,000 kilometers...
I dunno ... direct-fire space weaponry should be hitting within the same second it is fired. Granted, the delay from firing to striking being explained as light-seconds does run into a wee flaw ...
That is the long-range laser/p-beam weaponry. 186,000 miles (1 light-second)/20 hexes = 9,300 miles per hex. (15,500 km, approx.)
The shorter range direct fire weapons simply lose kinetic energy/disperse across a wider target point/hull cross section, oft-times resulting in a glancing blow that does nothing more than 'carbon-scoring' at best (not hitting for damage).
I'm more inclined to run with a light-second being 200 hexes (maximum firing range for long range direct-fire weapons) for a result of 930 miles per hex.
930/42: 22.143 ... perhaps a space-combat "round" is 132 seconds (22 ground-pounder combat rounds)? ;)
Edit: amusingly, this dovetails quite nicely with each point of thruster speed being 7 miles/second (11 km/sec). Too funny.
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On the extreme end of the scale, the range of a light laser is 5 hexes. If we were to assume that a light laser's range is equal to one light-second, that would make the length of a hex just a shade under 60,000 kilometers...I dunno ... direct-fire space weaponry should be hitting within the same second it is fired. Granted, the delay from firing to striking being explained as light-seconds does run into a wee flaw ...
That is the long-range laser/p-beam weaponry. 186,000 miles (1 light-second)/20 hexes = 9,300 miles per hex. (15,500 km, approx.)
The shorter range direct fire weapons simply lose kinetic energy/disperse across a wider target point/hull cross section, oft-times resulting in a glancing blow that does nothing more than 'carbon-scoring' at best (not hitting for damage).
I'm more inclined to run with a light-second being 200 hexes (maximum firing range for long range direct-fire weapons) for a result of 930 miles per hex.
930/42: 22.143 ... perhaps a space-combat "round" is 132 seconds (22 ground-pounder combat rounds)? ;)
Edit: amusingly, this dovetails quite nicely with each point of thruster speed being 7 miles/second (11 km/sec). Too funny.
I'm certainly not opposed to hexes being shorter than 60 megameters (though again, remember shells in flight in WW2 naval engagements took several seconds to hit the target!)
In general I think any approximation of space combat that generates space battles that look more like the Battle of Savo Island or the Battle off Samar is good. ;)
One hex is approximately 12 gloothurbs across. That's roughly 15.4 xsalnks, if you're familiar with Shirren units of measurement.For all the Ythrikilil out there. This converts to 763.956 Xenkilats
Which is exactly 4 Florbs. This makes for an easy conversion. Which is why you should use Florbs as your base measurement, even though the race that invented Florbs died out more than two centuries ago. Sadly, finding a mechanic who can calibrate your sensors to measure in Florbs is... difficult to say the least.
Ah, this topic has been bumped. Fortunately, it's after Alien Archive, which has provided some food for thought. The Novaspawn in that book is a huge 'starship' - less than 2000 feet long - and has a tentacle attack it can use against ships in the hex immediately in front of it. The art does not particularly support the notion that these tentacles are a few orders of magnitude longer than the creature itself, so it does not entirely mesh with several proposed space battle ranges here.
That aside, consider that there is a certain level of necessary absurdity to the system no matter what scale you decide it is. Even on the small end, a hex large enough to accommodate a Dreadnought could physically fit a number of Fighters or Shuttles without complaint. On a large scale, there's really no reason ships can't share hexes, given the enormous distances involved. And yet in both cases, a ship of any size takes up one hex, and excludes the presence of any other ship of any size.
Trying to infer speed from things like time to orbit only adds an additional layer of absurdity to the abstraction.
If you wanted to fight around Absalom Station, would it be a single hex? Or would you make it several hexes large?
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I'm thinking everything short of planetoids and similarly extremely large stellar objects should probably fit in one hex.
Also, hex sizes should remain abstract. It's just easier to handle that way. Defining it just opens up a stellar can of worms and generally limits, rather than promotes, game options.
Which is exactly 4 Florbs. This makes for an easy conversion. Which is why you should use Florbs as your base measurement, even though the race that invented Florbs died out more than two centuries ago. Sadly, finding a mechanic who can calibrate your sensors to measure in Florbs is... difficult to say the least.One hex is approximately 12 gloothurbs across. That's roughly 15.4 xsalnks, if you're familiar with Shirren units of measurement.For all the Ythrikilil out there. This converts to 763.956 Xenkilats
Unfortunately, the only mechanic in the Pact Worlds who can perform a Florb calibration is an elf who learned how during the Gap. He knows how to do the conversion, but has no idea how he learned it and doesn't know how to teach anyone else.
Does a Gap survivor even know they are capable of Florb calibrations until they try?
I think they might if they know how to do it well, especially if they learned by rote. I know that the area of a 10x10ft room is 100 sq feet without having to think about how I know that. I just memorized my multiplication tables a long time ago, same as many people.
If they can convert florbs in their head because they memorized some table of values or something, they may not remember the table or how they learned it but may auto-convert everything any time they see a value that's convertible to florbs.
Of course, I don't know how they wouldn't be able to reverse engineer that table to teach it to someone else. But now I'm getting really wonkish.