RE: [FT-AAR] First contact (long)

G'day,

> Sounds like fun, if a bit fiddly.

Fun yes, fiddly to some extent - that's why I'd keep it for smaller
match-ups, something to give them an extra fun twist and put the faster
engines to the test ;)
 
> Nice piece...

Thanks.

> I've got to write up some fiction soemday...

There used to be a general website that collected GZG fiction, not sure
if
it toppled over with the failure of free websites to be truly free
anymore.
 
> Good enough. One point: the German for 'Captain' is 
> 'Kapitän'. 'Kaptein' is sometimes used colloquially. 
> 'Kaptain' is mis-spelled English ;-)

Its Kapitän in my word doc, obviously not something that came across
cleanly
to the email text. Though being me it was a fair assumption to consider
mis-spelled English, I'm good at that ;)
 
> Could you give more details about the rules you used ? Did 
> you use vertical speeds or just level changes ? How did 
> you handle weapon arcs and ranges in the vertical dimension ?

Basically it boiled down to:

1) When writing orders you could MD up and down as well as forward.
2) Do horizontal vector movement as normal
3) Do the same as for horizontal, but in the vertical (as we assumed,
for
simplicity sake, your ship's axis was always on the horizontal this came
down to update vertical height and speed)
4) Firing - ideally measure as normal (that's why we're after some
telescoping stands) and originally we held a measure up above the
position
of the fig on the table top so you could measure true range, but it was
a
bit of a drag without the telescoping stands doing it for us. So as a
fudge
for that night we just added the horizontal range to the difference in
the
vertical heights of the firing and target ship and then read the range
off a
quick chart I did up. The chart wasn't supposed to be more than a fudge
so
the 2 minutes of work behind it consisted of (horizontal + vertical) *
0.75
and then grouping the results into 

h+v    effective range
0-9    <= 6

etc.

Like I said a fun fudge that worked for the night, but I reckon
explicitly
representing the position with telescoping stands would be faster and
would
make me feel better than the dodgy firing table ;)

When you were placing SM's you also had to state what height they were
at
(cutting the distance out you could place them horizontally obviously,
so
that the entire range wasn't > 24)

One unexpected bonus of going 3D was that it kept things interesting for
longer - ended up with twice as many turns in the game as people got
used to
having to cope with people diving away etc - and on a smaller table
(about
half the size we normally play on)

Cheers

Beth