Re: [FT] Evasion

At 09:34 AM 11/20/98 -0800, you wrote:
>My thoughts on Evasion and Evasive Maneuvers are thus:
>
>I take it as a given (read: without need for rules representation) that
all
>ships are doing their utmost to evade as soon as they have an enemy on
>sensors. For one ship's evasion routine, the other ship has a
prediction
>routine... ad nauseum
>
>My next point varies slightly depending on what you think the FT scale
is,
>but given that beam weapons travel at - or near - the speed of light,
the
>odds of moving a large vessel enough to make a difference are not good.
>
>Even "small" FT ships mass many tonnes, and even given the larger
>accellerations and compensators, they don't really jink well. Current
day
>destroyers "evade" in a sense, but a turn left or right doesn't even
phase
>a cruise missile. Too much bulk and inertia.
>

Basically, my ideas upon evasion came about after purchasing a handful
of
White Stars in FT scale.  Standard FT movement, be it cinematic or
vector,
is not an accurate representation of the way these ships perform on B5.
Or, as another example, look at the Millennium Falcon in the Star Wars
movies; it is only their high manueverablity that allows such ships to
survive.  That, and a writer who has a vested interest in their
survival....

Evasion is not realistic by any means, but it does reflect the
performance
of small, fast ships in certain movies and TV shows, and that was all I
was
going for.  The physics of it hold no interest for me, and the realism
is,
frankly, irrelevant.  All I was looking for was a simple mechanism that
would allow me to use the ships, as they appear in B5, in some scenarios
that I am working on.

Whether it will work the way that I want it to remains to be seen.

John X Crimmins
johncrim@voicenet.com
  "...is one of the secret masters of the world: a librarian.
They control information.  Don't ever piss one off."
  --Spider Robinson, The Callahan Touch.