BIG fleets.

Hello: As everyone who stopped by the UFTP knows, I'm working some Legend of
the Galactic Heroes rules for Full Thrust. Now LoGH fleets are BIG and are
made up of hundreds or even thousands of individual ships. The question is how
to simulate this in FT. A few of you guys came up with some ideas. However, I
lost my copies of these posts. Also, does anyone else have any good ideas?

Later,

In message <Pine.OSF.3.96.970915151230.3496A-100000@alpha1.csd.uwm.edu>
> "<Mark Andrew Siefert>" <cthulhu@csd.uwm.edu> wrote:

> Now LoGH fleets are

How about buying hundreds or thousands of ships, and using a REALLY *BIG*
table?:)

> On Tue, 16 Sep 1997, Samuel Penn wrote:

> In message
funny man. you have hundreds and thousands of dollars to spend on models, big
tables and building a gym to hold them all...?

Seriously, you'd have to use some sort of multiplier to let one model
represent dozens or more identical ships, and work out a system to accurately
reflect damage conditions to those ships. A dozen little
corvette-type ships won't take damage like one Superdreadnought, and the
rules would have to reflect that.

Maybe some sort of adaptation of the fighter-squadron rules in FT, with
counters on the model base to record losses.

Really successful rules of this system would get across the sheer mass &
firepower of hundreds/thousands of ships _without_ forcing us to cough
up for ridiculous numbers of ships...it's probably possible, but I'll leave it
to others...

Hmm, is this issue not unlike the difference between SG and DS? I really
imagine you would need a different set of rules to reflect teh mass combat.
Anything else is likely to end up a patch work effort not doing the FT ruleset
justice. Perhaps this is another addition to be included in the FTIII? Owen
Glover IT Services

> ----------

One way to resolve this sort of action would be to use a modified
sqadron system.  _Masters of Orion_ by Origin Systems resolves this by
having all ships of the same type move and shoot as one large unit. The fire
is resolve with 1 gun killing a maximum of 1 ship regardless of damage
potential.

Following this on to massive scale combat for FT, have ships of the same type
massed into squadrons (amounts organised by players) & use a marker to denote
numbers. Missiles & fighters are arranged in squadrons of the
same type. Antimissile/fighter fire is abstracted a little with *DAF
fire being resolved as from one ship (ie. a design with 4 PDAFs rolls 4
die. Each _kill_ will destroy an amount of fighters/missiles equal to
the number of ships in the squadron.)

        When resolving ship-to-ship fire, roll for damage as normal
(lots of dice!!!) & apply against the target squadron. Divide the total damage
scored into the damage point of the target (1 ship) & this is the number of
ships destroyed. However, the maximum that can be killed is equal to the
number of firecons used against the target squadron. (eg. cruisers kill a
maximum of 2 targets per ship.) Split fire against 2 or 3 separate squadrons
can be used, but this reduces the number of available firecons as normal.

The only problem with this system is there is no room for threshold checks due
to sheer numbers, a minor drawback, but an important one.

(w) Brendan.Robertson @ employment.gov.au 'Neath Southern Skies

In message <Pine.OSF.3.96.970915151230.3496A-100000@alpha1.csd.uwm.edu>
> "<Mark Andrew Siefert>" <cthulhu@csd.uwm.edu> wrote:

> Now LoGH fleets are

I ask why bother? Just do what you do in standard figure war games where one
man equals 30 men. You play with the standard rules and the figures are not
1:1 representational

The same applies in FT. Your cruiser represents a cruiser squadron of 30 ships
and you play as normal. The weapon hits and damage are all taken as
destruction to the squadrons firepower and effectiveness. Its offensive
capablity is abstracted to the cruisers weapons. This way you aren't trying to
bend FT to do something it wasn't designed to do and your games don't bog down
and you don't need thousands of models. I really don't see what you gain by
keeping tallies of supposed component
ships - the abstraction already exists and has been done for you.

If you want a more visual feast - just use more FT ships or several
models to represent the logical cruiser unit etc.

The same applies to missiles - one counter equals a swarm if the
*DAF gets it the massed fire of the squardon managed to kill the whole swarm,
if it gets through then they didn't get them all.

Its a thought anyway

> Brian Burger wrote:

> Brian Burger wrote: