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Range Band Adjustments (was RE: Fire Control lock-on)

From: "Dean Gundberg" <Dean.Gundberg@n...>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 16:33:31 -0500
Subject: Range Band Adjustments (was RE: Fire Control lock-on)

Sylvester Wrzesinski wrote:
> As well, I find changing rangebands to
> be mentally cumbersome... you get people thinking.... "okay, normal
band
> is 12... minus 2 for dodging and ecm, plus one for enhanced sensors.
so
> it's 11. So it's not 11 away... 22? no....". It's not so bad with most
> rangebands, but with grazers you start having to think of multiples of
> 16 or 17.

Actually they way the proposals work, you wouldn't have to worry about
16 or
17 unit range bands.

For example, Stealth 1 causes a ship attacking it to use 5mu range
bands, a
reduction of  1/6th or 16.7% and that percentage of reduction should be
carried over to all range bands, whether they are 6mu base or 12 or 18mu
base.  When applying that to a beam battery, you use 10mu range bands
since
its base is a 12mu range band, which is double the 6mu so then you
double
the 5mu.  Thus on a 18mu Graser range band, against Stealth 1, you use
15mu
range bands, much easier to deal with than 16 or 17.  Stealth 2 modifies
the
6mu range band a second mu to 4mu, so now beams use 8mu range bands and
Grasers have 12mu range bands....wait, 12?  We have seen that before and
that shouldn't be hard to deal with.

We know Jon doesn't like range band adjustment.  We just hope something
better comes along OR Jon changes his mind if we keep on mentioning it
over
and over again ;-)

There are a couple ways to talk about range band adjustment and I think
that
is where some of the issues come from.	I just find range band
adjustments
hard to describe in rules but easy to play with.

Back to our Stealth 1 example.	Fire at the stealthed ship is resolved
using
5mu (or 10mu, or 15mu) range bands which is a reduction of 16.7% from
normal.  Another way of looking at it, is that the 'effective' range of
the
target ship has been increased.   A ship at 10mu being treated as if it
were
12mu away is an increase in range of 20%.  So we could say, Stealth 1
increases the 'effective' range (not the actual range) by 20%.

To some, this increase in effective range may be easier to understand,
but
when a Stealth 1 ship is 22mu away, adding 20% to 22 to get an effective
range of 26.4mu isn't as quick and easy to many as seeing that 22mu is
in
the 3rd 10mu range band so only class 3 and larger beams could hit it.

Jon agrees that doubling had halving ranges is easy to do, but it
doesn't
have enough granularity for ECM, stealth and evasion where the above
proposal is much more flexable.  My point in this post is just to make
sure
that the range band adjustment methodology is understood, and not to say
they are the only way of doing things.

Dean Gundberg

Starship Combat News
The latest information on Space Games and Miniatures
http://www.star-ranger.com
dean@star-ranger.com

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