A (or rather two) Solution to Midturn Firing

> Noam Izenberg wrote:

> Here's a potential hardware (on the gaming table) solution to the

Interesting, but there are several major problems with it:

> 1) For each ship or group of identically moving ships, you'll need a

Here's a problem with this solution: My units often fly at speeds varying
between 10 and 30+ (40+ if using cinematic movement), and generally
changes speed from one turn to another. I usually have at least ten ships per
side, divided into four or so squadrons. That means... well, it means that I
have to have a *lot* of strings prepared for the battle ('cuz marking off a
new string whenever I need one also slows the game down a lot). Not one string
per speed and squadron, perhaps, but not too far from it either.

You suggested elastic strings below. Unless you have a good way of fixing
those strings securely to the gaming table (mine is of glass, so I can't
easily do that), this sounds like a very good way of catapulting your
models into walls, other players and similar :-(

> 3) Each player marks down what segment his weapons fire and at what

Another order phase? Ah well... Deciding what to shoot at tends to take a lot
more time than deciding where to go even now, at least IME. I'd estimate the
fire order phase to take at least three times as long as the
movement order phase :-(

> 4) Fire is revealed simultaneously and taken care of in chronological

Some questions:

* What happens when a ship loses its engines mid-turn?
* When you move an entire squadron, the position of each ship won't agree with
the marks on the string (assuming one string per squadron to simplify things).
Reasonably easy to figure out where the units will be, though. * How do you
handle fighters and missiles?

> While not inherently horrendously clumsy (IMHO) there are Limitations

Not horrendously clumsy, at least not in theory, but... there are some
additional problems:

> - Weapons should not be allowed to fire faster than once per full

Won't work very well for point defences, though. Or, rather, it will work, but
it will render them pretty much useless.

> Requires some record keeping that could get cumbersome in large

No. Requires quite a lot of record keeping that will get very cumbersome in
large engagements. I'm used to keeping track of shield regeneration and
primary beam fire rates in Starfire; this is a lot worse since it includes
every single weapon instead of just a few.

> - It adds _some_ extra time to the turn, but not nearly so much as the

IE, when you've learned to find the strings you're looking for...

> - It's probably cumbersome for large fleets, unless they group

See my comments above.

> Interesting benefit:

Well... this is what the under-way fire is all about, so it shouldn't
come as a surprise :-/ One benefit which you didn't mention is that
Wavegun and Nova Cannon will intercept their targets during the move rather
than at the starting or end points only; similarly missiles would get a much
larger interception envelope if they're able to attack all along their path.

Although this is an interesting proposal, I don't think it will work very well
in practise. The problems I see with it far outweigh the advantage it gives
IMO.

> Then Jared wrote:

> ** Multi-segment combat system **
There
> were two firing segments per turn - one at the movement midpoint

This is easy to implement and doesn't add much complexity, but it doesn't
really solve the problem - as I noted in an earlier post, it just
doubles
the speeds where the lack of under-way fire becomes a problem. For
short-range weapons (Class-1 batteries etc), the trouble speed goes up
from 13 to 25... which is still well within the speed ranges I'm used to
flying at.

Later,