RE: Modeling Honor Harrington Ships.

I saw an airplane game called Mustangs and Messerschmitts played  using
a
pole and ring clamp arrangement.  Move the base for movement,  slid the
clamp up or down for altitude, rotate the clamp for pitch and yaw.  As
to
wedges, keep it simple, use a cube. Top and bottom of the cube are
protected
sides are not.

Andy
http://www.welcome.to/Messerschmitt262.net
Special interest group offers a wealth of illustrative and textual
information detailing the legendary Me262 fighting machine. Browse the
links.

 -----Original Message-----
From:	owner-gzg-l@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU
[mailto:owner-gzg-l@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU]
On Behalf Of Aaron Teske
Sent:	Thursday, March 02, 2000 7:26 AM
To:	gzg-l@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU
Subject:	Re: Modeling Honor Harrington Ships.

At 04:11 PM 3/1/00 -0800, Tom G. wrote:
>Nyrath the nearly wise wrote:
>> Tom Granvold wrote:
>> >	My thought is to put each spaceship inside a clear plastic
sphere,
>> > which would have the edges of various sidewalls, etc. drawn on the
>> > sphere.  Then shine a laser pointer from the firing ship to the
target
>> > ship.  Where the laser lights up the sphere is where the shot hits.
[snicker-snack]
>
>   Now all we need is a way to raise and lower the cup to various
heights
>off the table.

As has been suggested... the telescoping poles were used by Moon Dragon.
Oddly enough, Keith Watt (who used Moon Dragon ships for his Solar
Thrust
scenario) was talking about this during the game (dunno if you remember,
Jon -- you may have  been off snapping pics of Grey Day).  He'd used the
sphere-in-cup arrangement, but didn't like it because you could not get
the
ships physically close to each other.  That, and the bases had to be
large,
and could easily overlap and/or tip over... I would *hate* to try this
on a
fleet scale, especially if it's something like... Third yeltsin, I
b'lieve,
where you have a *lot* of ships clustered about as tight as you can get
them.

One thing I was thinking about the scale... instead of trying to model
the
impeller wedge around the ship, just say that the physical size of the
mini
on the map is the size of the impeller wedge, and that the ship itself
is
much smaller.  It's not like that will throw the scale off by much, and
this means that it's easy to tell when two impeller wedges will interact
--
if the models touch, someone's nodes are going to blow....

					Aaron