In any case, BT space combat is SUPPOSED to be very Age of Sail with Warships trading broadsides, but with fighters thrown in for that standard Sci Fi space combat mix. Under the original rules, combat would/should have skewed heavily towards a fighter/carrier paradigm because Warships were basically glass cannons.
Snipped the first part for brevity-- I totally agree. At the time that BattleSpace came out, I was very disappointed, and ended up switching my space gaming to other systems even for playing BT space games.
My own preference is a modified Age of Sail approach also. The key characteristics of sail warfare are ranged batteries (check), broadside arcs (check), wind gauge (no check) and the importance of formation (no check).
Formation was absolutely essential. The british were the masters of this kind of warfare, and I seem to recall that they flat-out declared that any captain who broke the line would be hanged (Nelson famously ignored this and empowered his captains to make their own tactical decisions, to great effect). Partly this was to avoid accidentally hitting one another, and partly due to the complexities of maneuvering, but mostly so ships could concentrate fire on the enemy.
For the most part, I don't see anything in BT mechanics that encourages good formation discipline. Sure, you want your ships to concentrate fire, keep at your optimum range while staying out of theirs, and keep your enemies in your best fire arc. But fleets (certainly in BattleSpace, as far as I've seen so far in modern BT also) fight like collections of individuals. No offense, but the space rules play out like a bunch of mechs slugging it out on a map with no terrain.
One way to encourage fleets to stay in formation is with forced movement. If there are per-turn limits to how much you can change facing (not just a thrust cost), and if your movement in
this turn depends largely on the orders you gave
last turn, then suddenly you have to plan ahead and move in packs or your formation will fall apart. Finally, you want big rewards for concentrating fire across multiple ships. Two ships ganging up on one should get major bonuses versus having one ship with twice the firepower. That encourages ships to work together.
Age of Sail essentially had two kinds of warship (I'm drastically oversimplifying, but this holds up reasonably well). The first was the Ship of the Line. They came in different sizes, but didn't vary all that much and ultimately designs were driven by economics and fashion. What mattered was that they were armed and armored to serve in the line of battle. However, there's also a need to have a naval presence at actions that fall short of actual war: showing the flag, exploring, raiding, harrying shipping, suppressing local rebellions, etc. So a smaller, faster vessel bulks out your fleets numbers and lets you cover more ground. These smaller ships (frigates) were faster and lighter and not really suited to naval battles, but came in very handy nevertheless.
OK so you're ready for me to assign WarShips as Ships of the Line and PWS's as frigates, right? Wrong. You could do that, absolutely. But look at how the tonnages range in BT: from two hundred to two million tons. I just don't see how you can have consistent rules that don't create some optimal tonnage range, and so why fight it? Even in-universe, subcapital weapons mean that warships are going away. I don't see the need for a mechanics buff to retain a unit that isn't any more fun to run than a large naval dropship, which can be plenty stompy in itself.
So gameplay-wise, we want the four elements I mentioned above. Since in all the fiction, Captains are absolutely essential to a ship, we want some way for a Captain to make a personal difference on the tabletop, rather than just as the guy who arranged for a high crew quality modifier. We want our sweet spot for ship size to be in the middle of the construction range, with advantages and disadvantages for going smaller or larger. That suggests a point of diminishing returns; perhaps after a point, doubling your weapons load should result in only a minor bump to firepower. We want different weapon classes to have different advantages and disadvantages.
We also want fighters. They're an important part of the setting. They're also a source of some of BS's problems: they already had mech-scale weapons for ground combat, so suddenly the entire Weapons and Equipment Table had to be supported at the naval scale. So what makes a fighter different than a combat DropShip? In BT, Damage is Damage (mostly), but as long as Aerospace Fighters and DropShips have the same combat role it will remain hard to keep the rules so balanced that having exclusively one or the other doesn't defeat a balanced force. Rock-paper-scissors helps a bit, but let's think of ways to get them playing different and complementary games so people will want to make sure they pack both along in their fleets.
Anyway, I'll write up my ideas of how to do all this next.
