Random thoughts on campaigning

 I personally find campaigning more interesting than one-off
battles. However, a good, complete set of campaign rules is
missing. What I am going to do now is to outline the desirables of a
good campaign system, all IMHO ofcourse, and see if enough interest
can be found to flesh them out.

Scale

 Obviously, the first thing you need to tie down is scale. How long a
time is one turn? How far away is one MU?

 This will help answering situations like "10000 MU flank march".

Movement

 You need to be able to catch stuff _en_route_, otherwise the campaign
degenerates into a series of raids against stationary targets (with
predictable results on force selection). Yes, this includes those MD8
ships too. Yes, even the ships that DON'T want to fight.

 I must say that the vanilla "fast jump anywhere, no fuel limits, no
speed limits" system doesn't really deliver in this regard.

 Let's take this step by step. First, in-system movement. Assuming you
can't just FTL out next to where you wanted to go (which, IMHO, is
undesirable), you must go there by MD burn. The traditional way of
getting places is full accel halfway, full decel halfway. In real life
the availability of reaction mass limits this approach, but assuming
technomagical reactionless drives or nearly equally magical "infinite"
reaction mass, this is the optimal solution.

 What does this mean? It means that given your max thrust a, your
velocity at any given spot X can be calculated as

 v = a * sqrt(2x/a)  , x being the distance to the closer endpoint

 Thus, if you come from 1000MU away with a MD8 ship, your velocity at
halfway is 

 v = 8 * sqrt(1000/8) = roughly 89 MU/turn

 Now, assuming you *don't* want to stop, your attack pass speed in the
above scenario is 8 * sqrt(2000/8) or roughly 126.

 Now, let's say 1 MU = 10000km, as I believe I've seen used
somewhere. At this scale, earth is a little over 1 MU across, let's
say 2MU to account for the atmosphere and it is about 30MU from the
moon. Hmmm... makes ya think about those fist-sized asteroid minis,
doesn't it?

 Jumping in near Pluto to do an attack run against a target in earth
orbit, we're talking about an attack run in the neighborhood of 570 000
MU, which translates to strike speed of 3020. Let's say 3000 for a
round figure.

 Everyone wants to stop at destination? Jolly good, now we're only
talking about halfway speeds like 2135. Let's be generous and say only
2000. 

 What was fighter max speed again?

 (Note that I haven't differentiated between cinematic and vector -- I
didn't have to, yet. In linear movement they are equivalent)

 This has SERIOUS implications on your ability to intercept things!
(Which in turn has SERIOUS effect on campaign stuff like supply routes)
Intercepting is easier in cinematic, since you only have to match
speed and then turn. In vector you have to match speed AND direction.

 In vector, your only hope of intercepting (ignoring slight chance of
one-turn "swipes") is very near either endpoint. If you have no clue
where he might be jumping in, your choices just narrowed down to
one...

 Cinematic is almost the same, except the you *might* be able to use
patrol ships doing fast speed loops. Let's see. At halfway of the
570000MU the patrol circle is roughly 1780000MU long. Let's say 1.75
MILLION MU. If another MD8 ship is coasting along that line at the
intercept speed, it can adjust position by about 60000MU to achieve an
intercept. Let's be generous and say by 100000MU. Wow, you'd only need
about 17 picket groups, each strong enough to take on the intruder!

 Until you realize space is three-dimensional...

 FTL travel. Several unknown factors:
 - Does it take time in-transit? If so, sow much?
 - If it does take time, can you communicate with ships
   in hyperspace? Can they change course in mid-jump?
 - How fast can you jump again?
 - Do you retain velocity? (Hopefully NOT)
 - Can you pursue someone into/through hyperspace?
 - Can you fight in hyperspace?
 - Does every ship have the same jump range? If not, what is the
   governing factor?
 
 And most importantly, what parameters govern entry and egress points?

 If entry and egress are (relatively) freely chosen (e.g. the classic
"out of gravity well"), you can only really intercept things at the
destination. If both start and destination are enemy bases,
intercepting supply ships just became nearly impossible. This, IMHO,
is not a desirable result.

 This also would allow "deep space resupply", meeting with supply ships
in random empty space, with astronomically small chance of being
surprised. Also not desirable. 

 Therefore, I can see two solutions. 

 a) Limit "jump points" to a very limited set of choices. The classic
 BTech choice of two isn't that bad, actually. The number of "battle
 points" in a system is J+T, or number of jump points plus number of
 relatively immobile targets. The defender basically has to split his
 fleet into J or T chunks (or more), depending on his chosen tactics.

 You could use a "dead" system as a resupply point, but the enemy
 would have a realistic chance of patrolling those points and finding
 you. 

 Still, it would be rather hard to force battle with a foe that is not
 tied down by immobile assets and doesn't want to fight.

 b) Cap speeds. Yea, no speed limit sounds real cool and "realistic"
 and no doubt has sold many a copy of FT, but unfortunately when taken
 to the logical conclusion, in my humble opinion it just doesn't work.

 This doesn't have to be a set maximum speed -- it could be achieved
 with a strict fuel limit too. The Pluto-to-Earth run is roughly 500
 game turns of full thrust. If you only had fuel for 50, things would
 be quite different... Also limits the amount of running away you can
do.
 This also has the positive effect of working in a non-FTL background.
 AND it's realistic to boot. And it'd give the chance to use fighters
 for patrolling in-system.

 But the fuel limit MUST be strict enough, and you'd have to accept
 griping from players who ran out of juice...

 (Or maybe both limitations...) 

The boring stuff

 In a campaign, you are likely to get a number of very one-sided
engagements. These are typically rather boring to play out. Thus one 
desirable is a quick-resolution system. It need not be "one roll to
rule them all", but definitely something that can be resolved without
putting miniatures on the table. An abstract range system like in High
Guard, perhaps?

Supply

 Ships need to have endurance. Three types on endurance come to mind:
 - Cruising endurance, or the ability to stay out there timewise
 - Combat endurance, or the ability to keep your combat effectiveness
   at peak
 - Jump endurance, or how long and how many jumps you can make 
 
 Plus possibly the MD fuel factor.

 The problem here is that the design system does not give a cost for
endurance, which means no special long range patrol designs and no
supply freighters. Probably easiest to solve by assigning mass/cost to
supplies, to be hauled in standard cargo bays. If it happens to be
your own cargo bay, good for you.

 Penalties would have to be assessed for being out of supplies. This
is tough as there is no easy way to give mods in FT. E.g. crew quality
is not modeled at all. The penalty would have to rather harsh straight
away, since we can't really do "-1% per day out of supply".

Repair

 Is it possible to permanently disable systems without killing the
ship? Or do you assume the maintenance crews fix all the thresholded
systems pretty soon after combat is over? If not, why not? Maybe the
"fixed" systems are only jury-rigged to last a little more, only to
fail totally in the long run.

 What kind of facilities do you need to fix hull/armor? How long does
it take, and what supplies do you need?

Reinforcements & recalls

 Who are you playing? Are you the Space Tyrant, only limited by laws
of nature? Or are just one of the admirals, the GM or the system
taking the role of your superiors?

 Personally, I don't much care for the former, but if it floats your
boat, go ahead. You need to model economy, politics, shipbuilding
etc. A LOT of paperwork.

 The latter is a simpler choice (and avoids the strange role-hopping
from Fuhrer to grunt and back). There should be an abstract system to
represent

- applying for reinforcements (what you get should be at least
semi-random)
- resupply 
- damaged ships might be recalled for repairs. *You'd* perhaps rather
  work them to death, but *they upstairs* see the bigger picture and 
  don't quite agree
- UNdamaged ships might be recalled (gamewise, this is a balancing
method)
- you might be replaced (losing the game) if you blatantly disobey
  orders and/or perform sub-par. Or the entire campaign might be 
  abandoned if it's proving too costly.

 The last may seem harsh, but properly used it's a great balancing
tool. It can be used to stop suicide tactics, constantly running away,
ignoring mission objectives etc. etc. AND it can be used to end the
campaign when the result is inevitable but playing it out would be
boring.  

Long range scanning

 FTL radio apparently exists, but what about long range scanning?  Is
there any way to know what's waiting at West BF besides sending a ship
to find out? And once the scout gets there, how close to each ship
must it get to get bogey signature? To get exact class? If we go by
the old (now "on hold") sensor rules, it'd be trivially simple to hide
forces in a system.

Planetary invasions

 The very first question you need to ask is that would there be an
invasion at all? If an unopposed invasion (or defending!) fleet could
just stand there and bombard everything to snot, who wouldn't just
capitulate? Could the defenders hide heavy military equipment to
counterattack when the "skylords" are away? Or maybe shipboard weapons
don't work through atmosphere for some PSB reason (OTOH, if they do,
there'd probably be planetary defense installations). That'd leave you
with the old-fashioned rock method, but it's none too subtle, can't
really target mobile forces, takes time and isn't suited for capturing
things relatively intact.

 You have three basic situations regarding what's down there:

 a) Relatively defenseless civilians only. They'd probably surrender if
 the defending fleet is chased away. At least against a significant
 force (NOT, say, a single scoutship), but you'd have to define
 exactly what constitutes "enough" presence. This does not mean there
 wouldn't be guerrilla or other low intensity combat later on, but this
 is really out of the scope of a naval campaign.

 b) There's only something you want blown up, e.g. enemy military
 installations. In this case you'd probably just bombard them to pieces
 (which does take time etc. but the final outcome is pretty
 obvious). The idea of capturing enemy bases intact may seem tempting,
 but it's very hard and costly to pull off (especially the "and they
 don't blow it up themselves" bit) -- probably reserved only for those
 very special cases.

 c) There's something you want intact, and someone capable of defending
it
 down there. This is when we'd get real ground combat, on various
 scales depending on what exactly is it that you want so bad.

 If you can define believable parameters under which an actual ground
invasion would occur, would this be in a scale we'd want to play out
with DS2? Maybe not, DS2 is pretty low-level. Even if so, an
abstract ground combat system is needed for those who don't want to
play it out in detail.

Something else?

 I probably forgot something... 

-- 
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