Re: Re: Cinematic vs. Vector movement

Jared Hilal wrote:

 >>>So the actions of a ship over several turns look like this:
 >>>
 >>>Rotate ship, MD burn, Rotate ship, Fire Weapons
 >>>Rotate, Burn, Rotate, Fire
 >>>Rotate, Burn, Rotate, Fire
 >>>Rotate, Burn, Rotate, Fire
 >>>rinse and repeat...
 >>
 >>Unless of course you have seen Babylon 5, where the EarthForce
 >>Starfuries behave *exactly* like this...
 >
 >Actually no, they don't.

Yes they do :-) I've spent the last month+ looking closely at them, so I

have a fairly good idea
know fairly well how they behave - at least during the first two seasons
<g>

 >If you watch closely, they burn towards the target, fire straight
ahead, 
stop
 >accelerating, rotate to keep the target in the engagement basket as
they 
pass (al the
 >while firing), then when past the target do one of three things:
 >A) Return to original heading and accelerate away
 >B) remain flying "backwards" and use main drives to decelerate
 >C) turn to a facing almost perpendicular to their original course and
 >accelerate away on a new vector

You only seem to have looked at their behaviour when attacking large 
spaceships. Now, large spaceships have one thing in common - they are
large 
compared to the 'Furies, which means that
a) the 'Furies need to be at close range in order to inflict serious
damage 
so accelerating *away* from the target while they're still shooting at
it 
is directly counter-productive, and
b) the 'Furies don't need to change their facing much (or even at all) 
during the fly-by since they'll have some part of the target ship in
their 
sights anyway.

a) is very similar to the tactics you have to use in Vector if your
weapons 
are short-ranged - if you must close the range to inflict any damage,
then 
*of course* you'll start the battle with a burn towards the target! If
you 
never move into range, you'll never get to fire at all...

(Same with most of the large-ship duels and battles in the first B5
seasons 
- they typically start outside weapon range so the combattants need to
move 
towards one another in order to be able to fight at all... and most of 
these battles are over before the combattants get close enough that
they'd 
have to rotate to keep facing the enemy :-/)

 >Thus, they are not doing a Rotate, Burn, Rotate, Fire sequence, where
 >they repeatedly turn away from the target to burn the main drive for a
short
 >burst, then rotate back to the same target.

Your "where they repeatedly turn away from the target" suggests that
you're 
interpreting "turn" to mean "180 degrees turn or close to it". If you 
instead use the word "turn" to mean "any change of facing" (eg. the
30-60 
degree turns which seem to be the norm in the Vector battles I've
fought), 
then your description of Vector movement is a lot more accurate, but
your 
counter-argument gets rather weaker :-/

You also seem to have forgotten the 'Furies' anti-fighter tactics, where

their effective weapon range is relatively long (probably due to
fighters 
being more fragile targets) compared to the distances between the
opposing 
ships. There are several *very* clear "turn, burn, turn, fire" sequences
in 
Star Fury dogfights, eg. in the battles against Raiders and in "The Fall
of 
Night"
where Sheridan teaches the B5 fighter crews how to fight Centauri) :-)

 >I only made the suggestion because several posts had complained that
in
 >the vector system multi-arc weapons are useless, and that Advanced
Grav
 >drives are overpriced.  To my visualization of the action, this should
not
 >be, so I thought I would reason out the cause and a solution.  My
 >description of the Rotate-Burn-Rotate-Fire sequence went undisputed,
so I
 >will assume that I was right.

Except for your appearent equating of "turn" with "180 degree turn"
(which 
only has come to light in your latest), you were right. However, it is 
important to realize that at least in the battles I've fought the turns
are 
usually only one or two clock facings (30-60 degrees) rather than the
full 
U-turn, and that the burn consequently often is *towards* the enemy (or
at 
least in his general direction, trying to set up or improve on an
intercept 
vector).

 >If you stop and follow the development of the vector movement rules
 >(EFSB=beta test, FB1 = 1.0, FB2 = 1.1) I noticed that my suggestion
was
 >actually the original form of the rules.

You mean "...was actually the 1.0 form of the rule". The *original* 
published form of the Vector rules was the EFSB one, which restricted
the 
turn rate to 1 facing per thrust point spent on rotating - something
which 
your suggestion very explicitly advised *against*.

Unfortunately for your suggestion, you haven't correctly identified the 
problem. (Unfortunately for GZG, neither did we playtesters during the
FB1 
and FB2 development :-/ )

What your suggestion does is to prevent the narrow-arc ships from
keeping 
the enemy under continuous fire (ie. shooting at him every turn) *while 
accelerating away from him*. Trouble is, this is merely a special case
of 
the real problem - and removing this special case while leaving the real

problem unsolved won't make wide-arc weapons any more useful.

The real problem is that the narrow-arc ships can keep the enemy under 
continuous fire *at all*, as opposed to Cinematic where narrow-arc ships

tend to make an attack run and then spend several turns during which
they 
can't fire on lining up for their next attack run (or else come to a
full 
stop, in which case they can rotate freely but make themselves very easy

missile targets and also allow the enemy to control the range).

The reason why wide-arc weapons cost more than narrow-arc weapons is
that 
the wide-arc weapons *in Cinematic* have a much better chance of having
a 
target in arc and thus on average get to fire more shots each over the 
course of a (Cinematic) battle than narrow-arc weapons do. Fewer weapons

firing more shots each per battle give about the same damage-dealing 
capability as more numerous weapons firing fewer shots each, so for a
given 
amount of points you get fewer wide-arc weapons than you could've gotten

narrow-arc weapons of the same type and class. (Kra'Vak pay the extra 
points for better engines instead of for extra fire arcs, but the end 
result is the same: they get fewer guns which get to fire more shots
each 
than the same points value of single-arc human weapons on human-engined
ships.)

However, if 1 thrust point in Vector is sufficient to rotate the ship to

any facing it likes - and in the FB Vector rules it is - then you can 
almost always rotate the ship to point your single-arc guns at where the

target will be after movement. Apart from the player screwing up the 
exception is if the ship's no-thrust end locations - ie. where they'll
end 
the movement if they apply no thrust in any direction - are less than
twice 
the target's thrust rating apart... and even then you usually have a
pretty 
good chance of predicting where he'll end up and rotate your ship
accordingly.

IOW, instead of your single-arc weapons firing every other turn at best,

they now get to fire virtually *every* turn; and since no weapon is
allowed 
to fire more than once per turn the advantage a wider-arc weapon can
gain 
(ie. the ability to get more shots off during the battle
than narrow-arc weapons) becomes very small indeed. Taking 3-arc weapons
as 
an example, IME they only get 5-10% more shots per weapon per battle in 
Vector, compared to the 50-60% more they get in Cinematic - but they
still 
have to *pay* 50% extra even when you play in Vector.

Because of all this limiting the ship to one single rotation per game
turn 
in Vector does virtually nothing to solve the Vector fire-arc balance 
problems. As long as one single rotation is enough to give the ship a 
close-to-100% probability of acquiring a target for its single-arc
weapons 
each turn, and your suggestion doesn't do anything to change this, the 
narrow-arc weapons will remain underpriced in the current FB
("Cinematic") 
design system.

Since we'd very much prefer to use the same design system for Vector and

Cinematic, the only effective option that remains is to reduce the
ability 
to point single-arc weapons in any direction you like in Vector to 
soemthing similar to what it is in Cinematic... and that means
restricting the *angle* through which a ship can rotate in one turn.

(Which is of course the way the original (ie., EFSB) Vector rules
worked, 
and I'm acutely aware that I was one of the main proponents for changing
it 
to the FB1 system back in 1997/98 :-( In hindsight I'd rate that
screw-up 
right down there with the FB2 Sa'Vasku... <sigh>)

***
 >...what this comes down to is how long a turn represents.  In several
 >places I have seen this as high as 10 or 20 minutes.

The current "standard GZGverse" FT time/distance scales use turn lengths
of 
1.67 minutes and 5.32 minutes respectively (100 s and 319 s). The 
corresponding distance scales are 100 km/mu and 1000 km/mu; in either
case 
thrust-1 is ~1 g.

Once upon a time Steve Pugh used the MT orbital movement rules to
calculate 
a game scale where thrust-1 = 1/8 g, 1 mu ~ 1000 km and 1 turn = 19 
minutes. The main problem with this scale is the very low thrust level -

even the fastest Sa'Vasku ships in both of the Fleet Books couldn't
manage 
accelerations over about 1.5 g, and no human ships could do more than 1
g! 
This doesn't go too well together with the GZGverse canon saying that
the 
invention of gravitic compensators was a major breakthrough in warship 
design (since it allowed ships to make far more radical manoeuvres
without 
crushing the crew), so at least in the GZGverse thrust-1 must be rather 
higher than 1/8 g. Of course you can use 20-minute turns and keep
thrust-1 
= 1 g, but then an Earth-sized planet would be less than 1 mu
in diameter. This look rather silly compared to the ship models, and it 
also makes using the orbital movement rule difficult to use... so the
"1/8 
g, 19 minutes" scale has pretty much fallen out of favour.

 >Additionally, battles in film, TV and novels, including single ship
 >duels, often last mere minutes with a fatal conclusion for (at least)
one
 >combatant.  A 10-20 minute game turn means that a ship was reduced
from
 >undamaged to expanding cloud of debris in a single game turn.  I have
 >never seen that happen with any FT capital ships that were not
home-designed.

You've never found your battleship at point-blank range from a Kra'Vak
or 
Phalon dreadnought then? Or been the target of a concentrated 
missile/plasma salvo or fighter swarm, suffered a fatal Power Core 
threshold from the first incoming salvo, or... <shrug>

(FWIW quite a few of the larger ships destroyed in B5, particularly in
the 
Narn-Centauri conflict, blow up as a result of secondary explosions
rather 
than as an immediate effect of the incoming fire. The only way this can 
happen in FT is if the Power Core fails catastrophically.)

Of course, in films and TV shows there's also the problem with time 
compression; eg., JMS has repeatedly stated that B5 battles are often 
speeded up in order to fit inside the fixed episode length :-/

 >In the end, the Rotate-Burn-Rotate-Fire sequence can only be justified
 >with a long game turn,

Only if you consider 100 seconds to be "a long game turn".

I once calculated how long it'd take for a Renegade Legion Shiva-class 
battleship (IIRC 2.5 km long, and rather slow - in FT I'd rate it as 
"thrust-2") to turn 180 degrees given Full Thrust Vector manoeuvre 
thrusters strengths (which are capable of pushing the ship sideways at 
thrust-1) and thrust-1 ~ 1/8 g (since that's what the then-current 
"standard GZGverse" scale used).

Turned out that it'd take *less than one minute* - re-running the 
calculation I get 46 seconds - for the Shiva to reverse its facing. Of 
course the transverse stresses on its bow section would be quite 
considerable, but the thruster power is there. It could rotate 180
degrees, 
stop to fire (eg. its huge spinal gun), and rotate another 180 degrees 
within an 100-second game turn. (Being thrust-2 it wouldn't have any
thrust 
left to spend on a main drive burn though <g>)

Smaller ships or higher values of "thrust-1" reduce the time it takes to

spin around even further. Eg., combining your 'side thruster pushes at 
quarter strength' concept with the 'in the GZGverse thrust-1 ~ 1 g'
scale 
you still get twice the effective thrust to spin the ship with than I
used 
in the above example (ie. 1/4 g instead of 1/8 g), allowing the Shiva to
do 
an 180
turn in a mere 33 seconds or an 1714-meter EarthForce Omega-class ship
to 
turn around in 27 seconds; and the comparatively small warships used in
the 
GZGverse (where even an SDN is only 2-30000 tons) could literally twist 
around in seconds.

When even huge ships like an Omega or a Shiva could potentially rotate
this 
fast, even the fastest "GZGverse scale" with its 100-second game turns 
clearly allows a ship to make two 180-degree facing changes in a single 
turn and still leave time for a main drive burn and/or firing weapons
:-7

Regards,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
-Hen3ry