so, let's talk space navy campaign rules, (and how they need to be different)

[Cannonshop]

Space, is big....okay, if you haven't read Douglas Adams, the joke falls flat and if you have, you know I overuse the quote too often.

so we'll put that aside.

Campaign rules for Space Naval have to be different.  it's not just the differences in size, it's also the difference between waging a ground/ocean war, and waging a war in three dimensional frictionless space that has no fixed 'up' or 'down', (at least, until you get close to a major gravity well) and where detection ranges are artificially shortened to fit a 48x72 inch playing area comprised of one inch hexes that represent 18,000 meters (eighteen kilometers) and is sectioned out of an environment where, if you put earth on one edge and the moon on the other, and kept the same hex scale, you'd need a high school gym for your playing surface.

minimum.

For campaign scale strategic rules then, we're going to have to do something about the utterly myopic, blind, sensor ranges...because they're outdone by a cheap tasco telescope from the 20th century, or a slightly less cheap one from the 19th.

Space is big, and there is no cover in most of it, nor things to hide your drive plume, and simple triangulation can tell someone not only how far away you are while you're burning, but how fast you're accelerating.

or decelerating.

there is precious little stealth, in space.  The best you're going to manage, is 'security through obscurity' or the simple fact that space is really, really big and no guarantee exists that a defender is looking in the right direction.

or clever enough to process what they're seeing before it becomes old data.

Let's make it worse, and account for something called "Light Delay".  Between Earth and the moon, it's a few seconds.  Earth and mars, it's minutes, out near Jupiter? hours.

IF you're looking from the surface of an earthlike world in a sol-like star system, the Zenith and Nadir points are HOURS away at light speed.

means by the time ground stations have gotten the alert using radio, the report is several hours old.

The battle can be over before the command authority on the planet knows they're being attacked.

this, is what you're dealing with inside a solar system, nevermind on an interstellar scale.

(though to be fair, if you have HPG's or pre-nerf Black Boxes, you might know sooner, or know the neighboring systems are under attack before your telescope array spots the force coming for you inside your own star system).

Movement to contact is going to be tricky, you might want to bunker in and scream for help on the HPG...assuming Comstar didn't take it offline so the Clans could arrive uninterrupted.

But...what if you don't want to do what's repeatedly failed utterly?

Well, there are a few things...

1. if it's an invasion force, or significant military raid, coming in on the Zenith or Nadir (because L1 insertions are HARD), they're going to be mostly coming in at one gee (to get the ground troops to your surface in a condition to fight. Higher gees aren't good for human beings over a period of hours, never mind days.)

That means, they have to follow a pretty direct line from arrival, to surface, and depending where you are in your orbit, and whether you bothered to chart enough to know how long the light delay is from a given stable jump point, you can calculate the path they have to take to get to you...and where (roughly) they have to be at any given time aftr you've made the calculations.

This makes interception possible well beyond the moon's orbit, never mind atmospheric interphase.

It's a geometry and calculus problem-both things that can be automated if you're disnumeric or a graduate of an American public High School (tongue in cheek reference here, but keep in mind Catalyst's developers felt that fractional accounting was too difficult for the average player, even on vehicles...and they couldn't agree on an order of operations with BV2.0,  so we have to presume some ignorance there.)

so, guys, how do we model this?  the 'Campaign' in this case reflects the space in time before everyone is in that two-mapsheets combat map.

Oh, and 'After' they've left it.

2. should there be penalties for overstressing the 'cargo'?  human beings don't turn into superman after living under high gravity-they end up with shorter lifespans and lots of medical issues instead, including joint pain and crushed spinal discs.  a trip and fall on the deck could be fatal because human bones aren't that tough, and so on.  what about the crew? 

[AlphaMirage]

The problem with intercepting incoming troops beyond lunar orbit is that you only get a single shot at it [using High-Speed Closing Engagement (HSCE) rules] and if that doesn't work you cannot get back to the planet before the survivors arrive and execute their initial invasion plans. You also cannot call upon any planetary Aerospace Fighters for backup (just refuel them in-flight) plus any assault dropships or other orbital defense assets (moon bases FTW).

I think the Radial Sector-based Capital Map for Alpha Strike is preferable for a planetary volume engagement as it takes into account, thrust and the difficulty of sector occupation. We used it yesterday and it was time intensive but not mentally complex to resolve engagements, that was also only our first go at it and a fairly large fleet battle.

There is also the interplanetary Radial Capital Map for a whole Star System that could be used (with the P zones accounting for not only the N/Z but all non-standard points). Sensor detection would thus be something like having the higher initiative as you can see which sector the enemy is intending to go into and thus can engage them with your forces. Although for all of those engagements they should be HSCE unless they occur in a planetary orbit or upon mutual agreement.

As for overstressing the cargo, will a few minutes of planned for and mitigated high-gs be that damaging for the trained crew? Perhaps an initiative or P/G Penalty for a few days after being subjected to >1.5gs.

[idea weenie]

I thought the Zenith/Nadir points in the Sol system were ~10 AU away (a little past the orbit of Saturn)?  That would be ~80 light-minutes, or an hour and a half at most instead of hours.


The first thing I would do for the campaign rules is introduce a mass multiplier to the KF core costs, so the core for a 200 kton vessel costs more than twice the core of a 100 kton vessel.  This alone gives smaller vessels a reason to be usable.

I'd also want to reduce the costs of KF cores in general.  Take any existing canon or fanon warship, and figure out how much of its total cost is from the KF core.  If you can find a Warship that has less than 80% of its final price caused by the KF core, please post it here or a link to it with cost breakdown.  (Chances are it will be a vessel with mobile HPG and Large Naval Com-Scanner systems)


Space Station Costs: instead of the 5* cost they currently have, you get a discount to their cost based on where they are constructed and how much help you have.  Building them over an industrial world in a Pressurized Repair Yard and nearly no security will give a heavy discount, while building them in an uninhabited system with Dropships only delivering the parts so they have to be assembled on-site will have a higher multiplier.  Similarly, building a station in orbit over an industrialized planet by sending up the parts in Small craft will also be expensive.  But once that first Space Station with a Repair Yard is built, the bootstrapping begins.


Structure/Weapons/Armor:
Internal structure is not limited by engine thrust.  There are two sets of internal structure - thrust-based and armor-supporting.  Thrust-based means if someone takes out structural members A, B, and C, you still have structural members D, E, F, G, H, I, and J so you can keep the 5/8 thrust going.  Armor-supporting structure is what provides the primary source of Threshold values.  Increasing this requires effectively taking the ship apart and putting it back together (contrast with current civilian Dropship designs able to slap on layers of armor and freely increase their Threshold).

Armor: Not limited to Internal Structure tonnage.  Provides protection, but very little Threshold value.  Easy to improve, but solid hits will punch through it unless the armor is very thick.  (You can now build actual Battlestations).  Capital Armor protects vs standard weapons on a per-weapon basis, so if you want your ASF to perform an anti-shipping strike then you need anti-shipping weapons (i.e. PPC, Gauss Rifles, AC/20, instead of just putting in more Medium Lasers)

Weapons: weapon types provide different advantages:
- Kinetic - shortest range, requires a lot of Threshold to stop (NAC, NGauss)
- Laser - long range, uses Coude Turrets to give a wider field of fire, requires very little Threshold to stop (can fire into their installed arc or either of the arcs on either side; so a Fore-mounted NL array could fire into Fore-Left, Fore, and Fore-Right arcs)
- Particle - long range (not as much as laser), can only fire into its installed arc, needs more Threshold than Laser to be stopped by armor

Targeting Computers can be added to direct-fire capital weapons.


Engines:
Higher acceleration engines take up more percentage points than lower acceleration engines on a per-point basis.  For example a 1/2 engine might only need 4% of the ship's mass, a 2/3 engine might need 9%, a 3/5 would need 15%, aso.  This lets you have plodding convoy vessels with lots of cargo and escorts with lots of weapons/toys/sensors, and faster raiders (but not that much faster).


Station-keeping Thrust: It is 0.01 G, not 0.1 G when used.  Jumpships hanging out at the Zenith/Nadir points will burn an amount of fuel proportional to their Burn-day tonnage to reflect maneuvering inside the limit.  if a Jumpship wants to go to the planet, it can only do so at 0.01 G, so it will take 10* as long to get there as a Dropship traveling at 1 G.


Recharge Station Batteries: It takes a mass of Batteries equal to 1/10 the mass of the receiving vessel to provide enough power for 1 charge.  So a Recharge station with 12 ktons of Batteries can recharge one Merchant Jumpship at a time.  This avoids the situation of a single 100 kton Battery being fully used up to recharge either a 50 kton Scout Jumpship or a 2.4 MTon Leviathan Warship.  The Recharge station will have a Solar Sail of varying (and often quite large) size based on the local star and how fast they need to recharge the Batteries.


KF Core:
The KF core is optional, but Monitors are only used to defend critical points. They are not used in offensive operations.  All Monitor designers know that building one of these vessels is effectively admitting you can never regain the offensive, even in your own star system.  But do the politicians know this, or are the only looking at the amount of weapons and armor you can put on one?


Warship Design and Construction times: find something that makes sense, as a 2.5 MTon vessel should take longer to analyze than a 100 kton vessel.  Not 25* as long, maybe larger vessels can have more design teams able to look at the different parts?


Warship sensors: give them more range, larger ships get longer ranges compared to smaller (but it takes a vessel 8* the mass to get double the sensor range), and allow them to install multiple Naval Comm-Scanner Systems to extend the ranges.  However the benefit from Naval Comm-Scanner Suites is equal to the square root of the number of NCSS.  So if you want to get 4* the sensor range compared to a single NCSS, then you need to install 16 of them. 

[DevianID]

So I put out a crude map a while ago, where I crunched the 10 AU earth-like into 1 day turns with appropriately sized hexes.  It was zenith or nadir, to the sun, top left to bottom right corner with the planets in a pendulum like orbit.  The map is basically a 3d cone on 2d paper, and worked fine for a zenith to planet path.  No changes to combat or rules or anything, but when you plot the route you do end up with lots of 'crossing' engagements, and the final big engagement near the planet at relatively low velocity when you can match the velocity of the invasion force after it has shed lots of its velocity from the burn in.

I hate the fuel consumption rules, as transit drives make fuel logistics dumb, so I recommended that ships not using their transit drives for the day receive a +10 initiative bonus (which would stack with the existing init bonus granted by the naval comms suites) with the penalty of massively higher fuel costs of the turn on a dime tactical drives.  In effect, if you were firing off your strategic transit drive for that day, you were easier to see, and were super committed to a path, so had to move first.  So while this wasnt double blind or anything, you could choose not to fire the transit drive for a day (and stop blinding yourself with the output of that crazy high energy transit drive) to see where the ships that WERE firing the transit drives (with their crazy hot heat expansion drives) had vectored themselves, and move after them in initiative order (thanks to a shorter duration higher G burn of the tactical drive made later in the day).  I found that sensor rules were pretty much not usable, as you can pretty easily detect the enemy jumping in, but cant use sensors to resolve any weapons fire at any relevant long distance... aka, firing missiles and such in bearings only headings in the days before crossing wasnt possible, the main crossing happens so fast that the weapon attack sensor range for usable bearings launch missile strikes doesnt exist in addition to the normal crossing missile fire.