To float or not to float

I had an interesting idea. Why not do a semi-floater?

Background: In the 80's I used to play a lot a game called
Dreadnoughts. It was written in Basic and ran on my C64. I had copied it
from a book and later extensively modified. Later I rewrote the whole
thing, much improved, for Unix in C.

As you might guess, the game was about naval warfare in the age of
dreadnoughts. Anyway, it used a floating map, but the map wasn't quite
freely floating. It didn't center to fit maximum number of ships, and
being "off-board" was not without penalties.

The game centered the map on the flagships (or the points where they
sank). If you were off the map thus defined, you were off the screen.
And
if you lost your radio antenna while off the screen... well lacking
orders
the contrary, the crew had ideas of its own.

How to adopt this to FT:

First, pick the flagship. Ignore the lily-livered concept of cruiser
flagships and pick the most expensive ship you've got. Tell your
opponent
too.

Obviously, with real miniatures you don't want to float the table every
time one of the flagships moves. Define a "center area", let's say
20x20MU
in the center of the table. As long as the center point of the flagships
is in this area, don't float. If it wanders off, float to recenter.

If you are off the board and get a bridge hit, or otherwise lose
contact with the main fleet, you're gone. If you are off the board and
out
of reasonable weapon range from the edge (class-3, let's say), you don't
get to place a mini but must plot moves on paper only. 
OR: Apply your regular hard-edge penalties.

If ALL enemy ships are off the board at any time, the battle ends.

Now, this is obviously not without some problems, but it does prevent
the
battle from spreading out too much while still preventing tactics such
as
parking your most important ship in a corner.

-- 
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