Re: Realistic movement thoughts

In message
<Pine.SUN.3.91N2x.970123114232.18615J-100000@byse.nada.kth.se> you
wrote:

> On Tue, 21 Jan 1997, Samuel Penn wrote:
> > (the basic idea behind this, is that since drives are reactionless,
> > there's no reason why they _have_ to be pointing in the direction
> > they're thrusting. It also simplifies things greatly - and you still
> > have an exposed rear arc). 
> 
> Well... my thought on the realistic movement rules is that the drive 
> _isn't_ reactionless - of course, it all depends on your gaming
background!

In which case you should really be bringing limited delta-vees
into the equation. Since FT doesn't use this, then I assume drives
are reactionless. But yes, I'd prefer reaction drives myself.

Having drives use reaction mass (and assuming it takes up a
significant portion of the ships mass when fully 'fueled'), means
the ship's acceleration will change over the course of the battle,
as their mass drops. This is easy enough to model (with almost no
slow down of play), but adds some maths to the initial design stage
(merely a few simple logarithms).

> > I would assume each point of mass gives X thrust. Once the ship
> > has been designed, divide the total thrust by the mass of the
> > ship to get its acceleration.

> Yes, BUT this means capitals will have the same main thrust ratings as
> escorts - they pay just as much mass...

Again we run into the disagreements between the people who believe
small ships should be fast (you), and those who think big ships
should be as fast, if not faster (me for instance).

You should see my rules for working out the effects of armour on
the ships performance. It's a factor of the surface area of the
ship, which for a big ship is proportionally less relative to
drive volume than for a small ship. Armoured big ships work out
much faster than armoured small ships.

> What I found necessary was a
> sliding scale (which I haven't been able to figure out yet) where a
small
> ship can use a smaller percentage of its mass to get a certain thrust
> rating than a big ship does...

It seems very strange to me that you're wanting to add in a big
kludge to force the game to be unrealistic - not just in terms of
the real world (though this point is what we're disagreeing over I
guess), but in relation to itself.

X amount of drive mass produces XY amount of thrust seems a perfectly
simple and sensible way to have things. To then bring in extra
complexity to force it to fit a mould it shouldn't be fitting into
seems a really wierd way of going about things.

> (which I don't like too much, since I'm a firm believer in fast small
and
> slow big ships...)

I'm a firm believer in designing a set of rules which make sense
from a technological perspective. Then the fun is taking these rules
to their logical conclusion and see what sort of tactics they require
to use that technology effectively.

If after doing all the maths, and checking the science, it works out
small ships are inefficient, then they are. Fighters are the ultimate
small ship, so they often work out useless as well (_especially_ if
you're using reaction drives, in which case they often work out to
have toally pathetic delta-vees). The fun is finding this out, and
then finding ways to make them efficient (through new tactics).

Of course, I can see lots of people disagreeing with me over this.

-- 
Be seeing you,					     ARM not Intel.
Sam.					       Acorn not Microsoft.