Re: UNSC beta and FB3

On Fri, 12 Mar 2004 14:13:58 +0000 agoodall@att.net writes:
>Glenn wrote:
>
>> I think all of you know that the 'space navy' aspect is one of the
>> assumptions I personally question as 'best' much less 'most likely'
>> possible future but then I was 'tainted' while in the USAF in my mid 
>to
>> late 20's.  
>
>Geez, Glenn. Is that the best you can do for a _rant_? I mean, it was 
>polite and well thought out! Where's the swearing? Where's the venom? 
>Where's the off-the-cuff remark?
>

I save that for people 'intellectually unarmed' because I have been
sliced, diced, and shredded by people MUCH better at it then I am. 
There
was this classmate of mine, she had a tongue sharper then the
switchblades of the gang-bangers...  but I digress.  Let's just say I
was
less violated by the switchblades I saw from the wrong side then by her
acid laced verbal skewering.

>Seriously, though, I agree with you to a large degree. There isn't 
>much realism in the whole space navy concept. There are far more 
>likely scenarios for interstellar conflict than the navy metaphor.
>

I suspect if we ever get to that point (I personally doubt it but that's
just me and my wacky religious beliefs) I suspect it won't look like
anything we have envisioned today.  FTL alone should put past
assumptions
about space combat on their ear.  Maybe something like the old SPI space
board game where the psionic gifted crew 'pictured' the ship jumping
through space.	One spilt second 'here', the next somewhere over 'there'
!

>The problem is that the "space navy" concept has been around since... 
>well, a long time. 1950s for certain, I'm almost certain it was in 
>play in the 1940s, and probably goes back further than that. It hasn't 
>much changed, either. I haven't read any of the Honor Harrington stuff 
>(for the most part they came out after my disasterous trip to World 
>Con in '94, which turned me off most literary sci-fi), but it was 
>still very much a part of the sci-fi I have read. It's a hard metaphor 
>to break, and it's the one most fans want to see in a spaceship game.
>

Actually I do accept that sine I remember reading in the mid to late
1950's Andre Norton SF (can't even find most of it today) and the in the
background models there seemed 'space navy' based.  As a certain
literary
character said, "Tradition!"  I expect Jules Verne and contemporaries
used sailing models for their space travel (except for the men shot to
the moon by a cannon??) so it may have sprung from that model?

>For what it's worth, it doesn't _really_ play out like WW1 or WW2 
>combat. Try adapting FT to WW1 or WW2 (I've been doing it for the 
>Russo-Japanese War) and you find that you have to do a lot of 
>tinkering to make the game system work. This is even more of the case 
>when you use vector movement. 
>

Okay, I stand corrected.  Maybe I should have said it seems more like
WW1
or WW2 naval wargames then naval warfare. <grin>  A much more tenuous
'reality'.

>FT, though, is artificial. It always astounds me when people start 
>arguing about ship systems based on "realism" (and I've been guilty of 
>it myself) considering the artificial nature of FT. It's two 
>dimensional, not three. It assumes certain things about 
>faster-than-light travel which are theoretical at best. You can't do 
>full vector movement with missiles and fighters because it unbalances 
>the game. You can't just drop hyper-fast rocks on people because that 
>would unbalance the game, and make it not much fun to play. I don't 
>know how interstellar combat would work, but it's not going to work 
>like FT!
>

He he, Well it is science  __fiction__...

>That having been said, it's a fun game. I personally wish you could 
>play larger battles with it, but I'm not sure it's practical given the 
>size of the ships (I'd like to see FT fleets in a scale similar to 
>Hallmark's 1/6000 scale ships, with a game system to support it!).
>

Now you've done it.  <grin> I am still trying to work 1:6K ships into my
war game budget (I have a current whopping total of four) and now some
evil genius will be thinking "...Fleets of 1:6K spaceships..." and
making
my overstretched war game budget strain to fill another addiction!

>--
>Allan Goodall		    agoodall@att.net
>http://www.hyperbear.com   agoodall@hyperbear.com
>
Gracias,
Glenn

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