Re: Honor Harrington

Rutherford, Michael wrote:
> 
> ><< Another alternative would be to define 10" as energy range
> > and 100" as missile range.	You'd still need a large table
> > to play a game of HH Full Thrust.  >>
> >
> >why not break this up into a long range missle combat setup, 50"
range,
> >representing 1,000,000 km, or 20,000 km/inch) for beginning missile
> salvos
> >and 30 sec. per turn (would allow 1 salvo per turn), and then when
> ships are
> >close enough, 20" or so, change the scale to represent 400,000 km by
> moving
> >the ships out to 40", 10,000 km/inch, range and 5 seconds per turn to
> allow
> >energy weapons to fire once per turn and missile once per 6 turns.
> 
> Interesting idea but wouldn't there be a problem if the opposing
fleets
> don't stay together ie half the fleet at missile range and the other
> half at energy range.
> 
> Michael "Wargh" Rutherfurd

You can't adjust the distance scale and make sense of the table. 
Harpoon
adjusts the time scale when the missiles are flying,  but changing the 
distance scale would mean adjustments for some ships and not others for
HH-FT.

After giving more thought, the missile range is not strictly 1,000,000
km,
but rather the missile's effectiveness is based on the impeller "burn"
time
for the missiles.  Since the HH game would have Newtonian movement
mechanics,
the initial velocity of a missile would match that of the ship plus the 
ejection acceleration.	Missiles can continue ballistic after the
"burn", but
are easy to pick off by countermeasures. (PDAF bonuses...)

If the HH rules concentrated only on the mechanics of the missile combat
and
simplified the energy weapons to an opposed die roll (i.e. high roll
wins, loser dies)
the 20,000 km per 1" and 30 sec. turns would be a good scale to
investigate further.