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

> Sylvester Wrzesinski wrote:
so
> it's 11. So it's not 11 away... 22? no....". It's not so bad with most

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.

Several people said variations of:
> > As well, I find changing rangebands to be mentally cumbersome...

This is one of those things where it's a lot easier to *do* it than explain
it. It really doesn't take much in the way of mental
gymnastics (hey, *I* can do it....QED).  For Stealth -1, you lay out
the measuring tape between the ships, then you say "six, twelve, eighteen..."
as you point at 5, 10, 15....

Put a couple of cruisers on the table and try it. I'll bet half the people
who're wrinkling their brows now will be able to work it easily within a
couple of rounds of fire. (And I'll bet further that most of the remainder
will grumble "I haven't tried it but I still don't like it."). I could be
wrong, of course.

Why not just say "stealth 1 adds six inches to all ranges"? Well, a lot of
people feel that stealth ought to be more effective at long range than it is
close up, and the straight addition version, while admittedly simpler, doesn't
give that effect.

> On Saturday 25 June 2005 01:15, Laserlight wrote:

I put a cap of a factor of two change to the range, so at most you can double
the range or halve the range with stealth, ECM, fire controls and the like.

This 'sort of' has the effect that stealth can't make that big a difference at
short ranges (a ship 4" away can't have an effective
range of more than 8", even with +12" of stealth).

Changing the band does do this effect better, but it's still somewhat
granular if you're changing the 6" band - what happens when you have
more than 5" of stealth+ELINT effects?

You might have 4" bonus from stealth, 4" of ECM up yourself, a blanket 2" ECM
bonus protecting your fleet from one ELINT vessel and another ELINT vessel
jamming your attacker with another 6"
giving a total +16" range modifier.

How would you stack from lots of sources if modifying the band? You run into
the same problem if basing it on a d6 roll. Either things don't stack (not as
interesting IMO), everything is restricted to about 1" modifier, or you need
some mathematical operation to make it all fit.