Re: Sensors or firecons?

Robert Makowsky wrote:

>Why not spin your ship up to a couple of hundred RPM
>before you enter combat then?
>
>Magic
>  
>
Complicatons with such a tactic include inertial stresses on the
structure and components of the ship as well as on the crew.  It would
also pose a potentially insurmountable technical challenge to get your
own firecons and weapons systems to track and fire effectively.  Of
course, you knew that... *grin*

Again, this is degrading into debating PSB, which gets dogmatic, but if
you're going to use a "roll" maneuver as a defensive tactic, it isn't
JUST the spinning that's effective in attentuating the damage, it's
varying the speed that the hull is rolled at, otherwise the targetting
systems would just compensate for the roll in order to put a beam weapon
on the same general spot in the hull for as long as possible.  Also, it
isn't just "rolling" along a single axis.  Pitch and yaw wobbles would
be used to make effective weapons fire more difficult as well.

If you don't like the "wobbly spaceship concept", then PSB the
application of "spare" thrust as evasion into some way of "flaring" your
drives at enemy ships so that the sensor signature is "washed out" with
noise, etc...  Kind of like high-beams washing out the image of
night-vision goggles.

For the record:  I'm not that keen on using spare thrust to evade fire
and modify lock-on or to-hit rolls.  IMO, there's really no way to keep
that from introducing way to much book-keeping and delay into the game. 
In suggesting ways that it could be justifiable by PSB, I'm pretty much
playing devil's advocate.

--Tim