RE: FT Taskforce and Fleet Actions

>From Ryan's original post
> Any asteroid belts will have a maximum safe speed for transition 
> across, this is represented either by picking your way through safely 
> or by using thrust to go around in the 3rd dimension (abstracted just 
> like in Ship action scale).

>Some of the idea is to keep units from ignoring it entirely. Its not 
> insubstantial and is actually quite a significant size considering. 
> It also makes for more possibilities of that belt being some sort of 
> barrier in a way.

It's really not going to be, though. If you want genre SF,its fine to
have a
dense asteroid field, but if you're going for 'realism', a field like
ours
is utterly ignorable as a nav hazard.

> Where do you get your easily obtained isotopes, metals, silicates and 
> carbon chains for industry? Well, I'd think asteroids would be bloody 
> great places for that. Lots of intra system commerce between there 
> and the factories around the Near Gas Giants and inner planets.

In that case individual asteroids could be the targets of fleet actions.
But
you'd never have more than one (or a binary pair (much) less than 1 MU
across) on a FT tactical map during any single battle.

> Granted space is big. But what is the granularity here? NASA has fits 
> every time they send something through the field. Some smaller chunks 
> that are hard to map are always the bigger worry. Even still, closer 
> to earth we're still finding damnably big rocks (3-6 Mile Pluse size) 
> really close.

The reason NASA has fits going through the field is _not_ because of the
hazard, but because its so hard to pass _close_ enough by an asteroid to
get
bonus science on the way to your final objective. The Mathilde flyby for
NEAR and the Ida and Gaspra flybys for Galileo took a heck of alot of
planningn to make happen at all. 

As for FTL limits, I like the Idea of a System limit based on stellar
mass
with commensurately smaller planetary limits. Scott field did a PBeM
where
the planetary hyperlimit was a tactical consideration. He set the
system's
"Hyperwall" - controlled by Starmass, if I recal, at a little over 1 AU.
An
Earthlike planet's hyperlimit wason the order of 200 MU.

For Ryan's game scale, I'd up both of them. Make a Sol-type star's
hyperwall
say 5 AU or 10 hexes. Make jupiter and saturn's hyperlimits 2 hexes and
Neptue/Uranus 1 hex to keep the strategic scale rather than tactical.
(that's a pretty steep exponent even so, given the sunis on the order of
1000 times Jupiter's mass. it measn that bases on outlying planets and
moons
are more exposed than system cores, as well they should be.

Or you could base hyperlimits or hyperwalls on some completely different
High-SF quality. For example, go whacked out and say the total biomass
on a
planet determines the hyperlimit (Earth's would be say 5 or 10 AU). Or
you
gould say that the FTL limit  is subject to hyperspace "tides" that
sweep in
and out of the system based on some PSB mechanic. That could mean that
on
rare occasions, even core worlds could be subject to direct assault, and
defensive fleet movements would have to take the tides into account.

Noam