FT High Speed (was GenCon Review)

Oerjan Ohlson
> Mikko wrote:
Ask
> your enemy to explain how he could determine the position of your
Rather than artificially limit speeds ("Falling off the table kills you,
because, uh...because I say so, so there!"), let us either: a) devise a reason
for them to be low, eg: i. make a ship buy fuel mass; ii. say that your
likelihood of a fatal misjump increases with your speed relative to the jump
point (if you use them) or to the gravitation field
you're jumping out of/into (maybe not, as stars do move relative to each
other). iii. apply sensor rules. b) devise tactics to deal with them. "High
speed strike incoming? Scatter
a few more minefield-missiles, Joe, and get me a six-pack while you're
up."

Fuel requirements would in my opinion be a VERY GOOD THING unless you can pull
unlimited power from a vacuum (but see Encounter with Tiber). However,
developing tactics would be even better. Anyone on this list who keeps up with
DBM will recall how Invincible Warbands became a handicapped army when the
Roman players figured out how to use their troops; the same could well apply
to Invincible High Speed Strikers.

There was book called "Hellburner" by C.J. Cherryh (I think, I borrowed it)
that had a strategy like this (Super high speed passes), but they kept on
burning out crews...

They were using computers to assist the pilots and most of the gross
navigation and actual firing was done by the computers with the pilots and
gunners doing little more than fine-tuning things like picking the
targets and deciding minor cpourse changes. The idea was that it was going so
fast (even with computer assistance) that the reaction times efectively kept
the crew at about 200% capacity for nothing more than about 2 minutes, but the
crew came out of it feeling more like 2 hours.

I recall comments about hundreds of a second decisions as the sensor data came
in too fast for virtually anyone to interpret, but it required a human pilot
to allow for a certain level of "intuition." Note that the crews were
specially trained and outfitted.. I think there may have been some
"cybernetics" involved (I would think there would have HAD to have been as I
don't think that humans can react in a hundreths of seconds scale without
it).

It been a while since I read the book, but thats the general gist of it, I'm
certain someone could find corrections, but its pertinent...

Later,

Ryan