Re: [GZG] The Great Premeasuring Monkey Dance

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http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lRichard:
"The efficacy of search sensors in FT is proven by the fact that it
requires special circumstances for anything present in the area not to
be featured on the map."

TomB:
Touche -- nicely done. As I infer positional uncertainty from the dice
rolling from weapons, you infer some positional certainty from the
presence
of models. That sword appears to have two edges.

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I noticed this morning my prior math was off.... so let's fix it:

500m ship (easy to work with). 10K km MU. 20 min turn. Range 30 MU =
300K
km. Speed 20 MU/turn = 200K km/20 min = 600K km/hr.

So, an active scan on this ship has to cover 60 MU (60K km, which is
1/5th
of a light second). During that time, the ship will have covered 33.3
km.
That's a sizable degree of uncertainty for a 500m ship. (Note: I am
aware
that this is how far the ship moves, not how variable its endpoint is,
but
this just show's how critical it would be to have an accurate track...)

If we assume the ship can change its speed by 4 mu/turn, the actual
endpoint
variability in a two-dimensional setting (3-dimensional settings are
heretical) is 80,000 km/20 min = 240,000 km/hr. That means the endpoint
variability is 13.3 km. That's still a huge amount for a 500m ship -
that's
26 ship lengths.

That sort of variability seems to me to be adequately represented by
measuring limitations. :0)

Of course, how hard is it for weapons of the time to fill a 13.3 km
spheroid
or off-spherical volume with sufficiently damaging fire? Hard to say.

If you drop to 1,000 km mu and leave turns at 20 minutes, you drop the
size
of the spheroid to 1.33 km, which is still notable with a 500m ship, but
a
significantly easier challenge. (If you scale down the time as well to a
2
min turn, nothing changes).

If you drop to 100 km per mu, and stay at a 20 minute turn, you end up
with
a 0.133 km spheroid which isn't very challenging when your ship is 500m.

So a lot depends on assumptions. But I still don't think you can
(necessarily without knowing what an mu is, how long a turn is, and so
on)
say that pre-measuring is inherently justified because we can magically
locate the target to a high degree of precision.

And Indy, I put DS and SG in the same sort of category, so where I
mention
one I usually mean the other. The pre-measuring I've seen in ground
games
has led to things I wish I'd never seen at the game table they were so
cheese-laden.

T.

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