Re: [FT] Asteroid Collisions

At 10:43 PM 1/14/01 -0500, you wrote:
>On Sun, 14 Jan 2001 19:08:32 -0800, Sean Bayan Schoonmaker
><s_schoon@pacbell.net> wrote:
>
>>It's looking like this is the "preferred" method ;-) from the replies 
>>I've seen thus far.
>
>I'll put in my two cents worth and agree.
>
>In the pre-dreadnought rules I'm (still) working on, I have more
complex
>running aground and collision rules. But this is with vessels that have
a
much
>lower speed limit. Also, the maximum speed of the ship is dependent on
the
>number of hull rows left, so I was able to come up with an easy
mechanism to
>work out collision damage. The upshot is that if the ship is going
close to
>full speed, it will be crippled or sunk outright.
>
>This seemed reasonable for ships in the pre-dreadnought era moving at
18
>knots. If you use the semi-official FT game scale, you'll have
horrendous
>speeds even for a relatively slow moving ship. I can't see a ship
surviving
>even a relatively low speed collision. The comments made about the g
force on
>even a partial hit were bang on.
>
>Keep it simple. Hit an asteroid, go boom.

What I think that I'm gonna do is use my foam asteroids, call them
asteroids, but treat them like the debris fields from More Thrust...as
someone suggested to me a few weeks back.  I'm just going to assume that
each asteroid represents a reasonably dense cloud of rocks; they'll
still
block LoS, but they won't be instantly lethal if you go through them.

They will almost certainly become big solid blocks once people get used
to
playing FT again, though....

John X Crimmins
johncrim@voicenet.com
  "...is one of the secret masters of the world: a librarian.
They control information.  Don't ever piss one off."