Re: GenCon Review with a GZG Emphasis (part 3 of 4)

On Wed, 12 Aug 1998, John Atkinson wrote:

> Huh?	Three digit speeds. . .100 inches on an 8' table puts you 28 
> inches off the other side.  

Forget the table. There is no table in space. The table is just a
convenience for the *players*. 

> What's the point in that?  

There's no shooting during movement in FT. Two ships, 40" away, facing
head on, with 40" speeds will not be able to shoot at each other
(assuming
max cl-3 beams) even though the pass within a hair's breadth. There are
a
number of uses for this.

Well, let's try this for size: Your vanilla sensor range is 72", IIRC.
By
hitting three-digit-speeds, you can be on top of a well-known enemy
(space
stations, docked ships, ships in orbit etc.) without giving them any
time
to react.

More generally, "strike" type ships armed with close-in weaponry
(especially the one-shot variety) want to spend as little time in their
enemies' generally longer effective range as possible. Once your speed
exceeds the weapon ranges by a fair margin, you become a rather
difficult
beast to hit.

A very simple example: You want to hit a station with sub-pack armed
strike ships. Assume the station has class-3 beams, max range 36". You
have thrust 8. What you DON'T want to do is start at the table edge with
a
lame 10" speed or something. You start out 117" away at standstill, step
on the accelerator and full thrust until you're 37" (spd 32") away. All
this time he can't shoot at you. Then reduce accel to 4", move to 1"
away
(spd 36"), fire and on your next turn hit the pedal again moving well
out
of range before he gets another shot -- thus eliminating any advantage
he'd get from having longer-range guns. Take the range farther out and
the
speeds much higher, and you're likely to largely bypass any defending
fleet. There's infinite room for a running start in space.

Ofcourse it's a bit harder to do with a moving target, but the basic
principle remains the same: The higher the pass speed, the less time he
has to shoot at you while jockey for position. I could imagine a
high-thrust, lots of class-1 beams ship built to do something like this. 

It doesn't even have to work. Just possibility that it *might* work will
encourage someone to *try* to pull it off, resulting in a game about as
fun as having your teeth pulled ("My ship is looping around your
neighbor's front lawn for another attack pass").

A couple of weeks ago we tested the FB with a NAC vs. FSE fight. FSE
capitals notoriously lack class-3's so when the situation got tight, the
FSE players remembering the old golden rule of "all A-batts or death"
wanted to fly off-board and build enough speed so they could pass
through
the 24-36" range band without getting shot at. We discussed the issue
and
finally convinced them not to try such a lame tactic. They ended up
winning anyway... 

Or maybe your goal is to exit ships intact off the defender's table
edge... the higher the speeds get, the more glaring is FT's lack of
shots
_en_passant_.

> And what's that 
> about free pre-measurement?  I assume that the distance between any
two 
> points on the table (including points occupied by ships) is readily 
> know.  I've even taken to marking the positions of capital ships as 
> they will be if they continue on the same course and speed as they
were 
> last turn.  Which makes nice aim points for SMLs, and is a mental aid 
> to ship movement plotting.

Why leave it at that? You could mark *all* the possible locations of
*all*
the ships. You could do statistical analysis on weapon fire exchange
from
each of the possible position combinations. You could do that for all
possibilities two turns away. Three turns away. Four turns away. Five
turns away (and take Monday off work). Etc. ad nauseum. This is
basically
how chess computers work, and they're pretty darn good these days. Why
not
use the same tactic to WIN?

I for one want to finish the game before midnight more than I want to
win.
Therefore I don't do quite everything I legally could to maximize my
chances, playing "seat-of-pants" instead. 

> >mindset of some gamers. The guy had even built a weapon system around

> the >FTL-out-near-other-ships bug... 
> 
> Only robot ships.  

Sorry, I don't understand your comment. Have you read the article? The
proposed weapon system consisted of "missiles", essentially mass 2 (?) 
(robot) ships with nothing but drives. You'd launch them and have them
hit
FTL in the midst of a dense enemy formation.

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