Re: [VV] Agility

John Atkinson wrote:
>> I'm not sure precisely what you mean? Why would a ship be clumsy in a
hard vacuum? How would a ship be agile? I understand what you want in
game terms, but I don't understand what it means in real-world terms? <<

Effectively, how rapidly a ship can change its velocity vector and/or
facing, including small perturbations about a mean vector so as to be a
more difficult target for enemy fire. In this context, "clumsy" means
that it's relatively easy to predict where a ship will be by the time
weapons fire with a finite transit time arrives; agile means that the
target is more unpredictable, lessening the probability of incoming fire
hitting -- requiring barrage patterns like heavy flak, for instance,
using more weapons to do a given amount of damage.

> Well, it is unclear if it means anything in real-world terms. The way
I understand it, an attempt is being made to make an analogy between WWI
destroyers and battleships and hypothetical starships. In WWI,
destroyers were more agile than battleships because they had less
weight. This was done by the simple expedient of having no armor. <

And smaller hulls, weapons, etc., all of which had an effect on the
overall balance of forces restricting or allowing the ship to manoeuvre,
but many of which do not apply in space -- waterline length, for
instance.

> Now, if an interplanetary ship:

> [a] uses rockets for propulsion
> [b] relies upon armor that masses a significant fraction of the total
mass of the ship

> the agile analogy might hold. But if either or both conditions are
*not* true, the analogy will not hold.

More to the point, it becomes a matter of how much acceleration a ship
can generate in any given direction, which is what the MD "Thrust" can
be considered as a quantification of. If a ship can generate (and
withstand without breaking) a certain acceleration, then it doesn't
matter how big or massive it is; what is important is the direction(s)
that the ship can accelerate in, and how fast -- that is, how big is the
sphere of possible locations for the ship given a known transit time for
weapons fire.

Phil