A Solution to Midturn Firing

Here's a potential hardware (on the gaming table) solution to the
'firing in midturn' problem.

1) For each ship or group of identically moving ships, you'll need a
length of string that is equal
to the distance moved by your ship, marked off in 10 (or some other
arbitrary number of units)
segments.

2) Place the string between the start and end movement points of each
ship. You now have 10 equal
chronological segments marking the location of each dhip through the
turn.

3) Each player marks down what segment his weapons fire and at what
target (can have weapoons fire
on different segments if he has enough FCS's).

4) Fire is revealed simultaneously and taken care of in chronological
order.
- A ship firing on segment 3 fires from his segment 3 location at the
segment 3 location of his
target.
- A ship marked as firing on a later segment that has its weapon damaged
on an earlier one cannot
fire the damaged weapon.

While not inherently horrendously clumsy (IMHO) there are Limitations
for which YMMV:
- Weapons should not be allowed to fire faster than once per full turn,
so a weapon fired on segment
10 of one turn couldn't fire on segment 1 of the next and would have to
wait until segment 10.
Requires some  record keeping that could get cumbersome in large
engagements.
- It adds _some_ extra time to the turn, but not nearly so much as the
impulse by impulse drag of
SFB, especially once some experience with the new hardware is gained.
- It's probably cumbersome for large fleets, unless they group movement.
- Given the wide variety of speeds, elastic string, or a set of
pre-marked templates would be the
thing to use.

Interesting benefit:
Allows strategic option of holding fire for optimum range, and strategic
limitation for close range
movement.

My tuppence (This is a British game, yes?)

Noam