> At 07:35 AM 11/9/98 -0800, Schoon wrote:
One house rule we've tried is that each rotation and each main drive burn
reduce the ship's available thruster points.
For example, your thrust-2 SDN would have one point of thrusters, so it
would only be able to "turn" or "burn". A thrust-4 cruiser could thrust
then turn or turn then thrust. A thrust-6 destroyer can turn, thrust
and turn again.
This makes the big ships pretty ponderous, but not ridiculously so.
My biggest problem with it is that it doesn't really represent the
acceleration over time question into account; if you do a full burn from your
main drive, that should be it for the turn, you wouldn't have time to do
anything else. Conversely, if you perform all these maneuvers you should not
still be able to get in your full main drive burn.
> At 08:52 PM 11/9/98 +0100, Oerjan Ohlson wrote:
How about a flat 2 thrust points per course change (any heading)?
It's a more elegant way of doing essentially what I've described above and
also takes the time factor into account as well. If you spend 1/nth
(where
n = thrust rating/2) of a turn rotating, then that's 1/nth of a turn
less for your main drive to be running.
Jeff spake thusly upon matters weighty:
> My biggest problem with it is that it doesn't really represent the
Or not. Let's assume my ship is a km long with thrusters to match. I should be
able to spin 360 degrees in (assuming about a tenth of a gee rotational accel
and a 180 accel, 180 decel burn to bring us to rest) 80 seconds... which is a
real small smidgeon of 20 minutes.... and 0.1 g is a pretty lax acceleration.
I'd expect more like 0.5 g in rotational acceleration (or more!) thus giving
us 36 seconds to spin the ship (now my math is probably gimped here... in
fact, I'm quite sure it is, but not by orders of magnitude). And if an
un-grav-compensated fighter can pull 9Gs in a turn, I'm sure smaller
frigates and such could pull 5 Gs under grav compensation. Even if we only got
the 0.1G sleepy acceleration of the ponderous merchant tug,
it still only accounts for 1/20th of our turn. Not worth addressing
on that scale of granularity! Now, if you rotate off line of movement, thrust
for a goodly chunk, then rotate back, there is an argument that your guns have
been offline, but given the fact that you can't do a roll in FT to bring your
farside guns to bear (although someone had some neat ideas a while back on
this front), and my previously mentioned comment about coming into range but
not being penalized for that, it seems penalizing you or restricting you is
not very fair.
But, YMMV, and if it makes the game play the way YOU want it to play, go right
ahead.
/************************************************
> Jeff Lyon <jefflyon@mail.utexas.edu> wrote:
[snippetty]
> It's a more elegant way of doing essentially what I've described above
In retrospect, I've become convinced that my "solution" has some rather
large holes, and I've come to like some of the other ideas better - this
one among them.
[I knew I shouldn't have put in the comment about physics - especially
since I KNEW it wasn't right.]