Re: Vector Rules

Excerpts from FT: 7-Oct-97 Re: Vector Rules by "Imre A. Szabo"@sprintma 
Status: RO

> Does the Space Shuttle use its main engines to rotate???

I never implied main engines were used to rotate....

> No!  It uses lots of small little manuevering thrusters to do so.  

Well, not that many (only a couple clusters, I imagine warships would
have lots of backups...).

>There
> is no reason why a billion ton supper-battleship couldn't rotate, stop
> rotating, and then fire its main engines in one turn.  

Exactly my point, re: 1 rotation point starts and stops one arc of
rotation.  (I *am* kinda assuming you're replying to my last message...
you don't really make it clear.)

>Remember
> micro-gravity.  It doesn't take that much thrust to rotate and stop
> rotating a billion to supper-battleship.  

Gravity is irrelevant.	We're talking *mass* here, and inertia. 
(Remember, acceleration = Force/mass.  No gravity term....)  An eight
million tonne SDN (Honor Harrington universe) can *not* turn on a dime. 
They even have some trouble rotating on their axis to bring up their
impeller wedges instead of their sidewalls, fer chrissake!

And even if you're using smaller ships, all you need to do is bring down
the time scale a bit, which isn't really stated anyway, as the big ships
will still 'react' more slowly than the small ships.

> Rotating should cost ZERO thrust.  The little guys will still be able
to
> out manuever the big guys because they have more (often much more)
> thrust.  

Hmm.  Not always, and this would make superships *much* more powerful in
a vector universe.  One of the only things stopping my SDN from going
and killing all the smaller ships was that it couldn't turn put it's
guns on target after the initial pass -- the little ships kept dancing
away.

It also keeps the supserships down to a fairly low velocity, as you'll
otherwise drift off the map.

Actually, something I wouldn't mind seeing is the ability to purchase
seperate main engine and maneuver ratings, ie you can have a ship with
*huge*... maneuvering jets and roughly the same-size engines.  Your
ability to "push" should be maxxed out to your engine power, though. 
(Of course, there was always that one ship, in Frontier: Elite II, that
had larger retros than mains....)

>For game play I would limit rotating to once per turn, either
> before or after main engine fire. 

Yeech.	No, thank you: the ability to turn, thrust away from something,
and then turn back and fire is a wonderful thing.  Though I guess you
can't allow that if you have free turning, which is another point in the
favor of limited rotation in my book. ^_^

> A more time consuming method would be that each ship has one free
> rotation and can purchase more rotations for one thrust each.  This
> would allow a thrust 8 destroyer to rotate (free) thrust for 2, rotate
> (1), thrust for 4, and rotate (1).  The thrust cost for each extra
> rotations is for the main engines NOT thrusting while the ship is
> rotating.  In other words, this is the loss of thrust the main engines
> could have generated while the ship is rotating.

Hmm, not bad, but I don't think it adds much to what the seperate points
system can do.

		    Aaron Teske
		    Mithramuse+@cmu.edu