Proposed Setting Revisions for 2011

[Wes]

Based on your feedback, I have amended my proposed changes:

- Disallow FTL combat
- Disallow FTL weaponry
- 3 light-seconds (900,000 kilometers) maximum engagement range for starship combat
- Require all ships to list STL speeds in metric format (km/s)

I've started a wiki page for the above rules.

We should start working on:

- Revised anti-FTL rules
- PVP Rules

Any revision to FTL methods in general (CFS/Fold) and STL (acceleration vs top speed) would be handled as a separate revision.



What do you guys think?

 

[Fred]

I'm thinking that as a GM, I'm probably not going to religiously follow the 3 light second rule in my plot. There are reasons why firing from closer is more advantageous, but I won't put an artificial limit on it and say 'you can't because of this rule'.

It breaks the 'show rather than tell' philosophy. I'd rather see site tech encourage enforcing that maximum engagement range rather than an artificial ruling.

For example, Distorsion shielding: the Nadesico-style shield bubble that actually bends beams as they come close to a ship rather than absorb it. I figure having a closer point-of-origin for an attack would have the beams bend less and thus be potentially more accurate.

Using it like that rather than as part of an abstract pool of hit points would likely be more faithful to the shield tech as it was in the first place and support the range limitation rather than apply it in a contrived metagamed fashion.

Aether weaponry having a tendency to pierce distorsion shielding could have some of its popularity explained in that because of that property, they're more accurate at longer ranges than most other beam-based weaponry.

 

[Abwehran Commander]

I honestly think 3 light-seconds is still too short considering laser/beam weaponry. While 3 seconds does give vessels a chance to evade, it isn't that large a window.

For one, if we go to the acceleration method of travel rather than the velocity, maneuvering will be a lot more difficult. In fact, evasion would be impossible even at 10 light seconds because you have to wait for the maneuvering thrusters to push the mass of the ship out of the way of the attack.

 

[Soresu]

Not really sure how to feel about the meters per second bit. But, depending on what is presented that may change.

Although how will this removal of FTL weaponry effect current FTL torpedoes?

 

[Firebrand]

I honestly think 3 light-seconds is still too short considering laser/beam weaponry. While 3 seconds does give vessels a chance to evade, it isn't that large a window.

For one, if we go to the acceleration method of travel rather than the velocity, maneuvering will be a lot more difficult. In fact, evasion would be impossible even at 10 light seconds because you have to wait for the maneuvering thrusters to push the mass of the ship out of the way of the attack.

Evasion wouldn't be impossible. it'd just require some... modifications to ship build. So you can strafe and/or slide.

 

[SSharp]

You still need to move a lot of mass.

 

[Gallant]

I've read over several posts in this thread about CDD/CFS that I agree with, so I would like to toss in my few cents about the systems in general - knowing that it has been discussed elsewhere, of course, I will probably repeat a few other opinions in ignorance of them. No offense intended.

I had - and still have - a lot of trouble explaining CDD/CFS to anyone. Every once in a while I'll get a PM asking about it, and I am somewhat at a loss. It's been 'nerfed' several times now, since the site got started up way back when, and the movement seems to be towards something a little more believable and a little less plot-magicy. Personally, I've always ascribed to fold theory, because it follows an understandable concept of engineering. However, the CDD/CFS system being so combined and integrated shows what is, in my opinion, a complete lack of common mechanical sense. A basic rule of thumb is not to put all of your eggs in one basket, but this is what happened when we decided to throw the word 'combined' in there. Folks just needed some system to put in their ships to make them go forward. What you got, was a one-page, STL/FTL package you could peg onto your ship. Yay.

Now, obviously - Wes said it himself or implied as much - this needs to be changed, and I have a suggestion;

Point 1; I suggest limiting Aether, in order to explain the write-off for the CDD/CFS.

What would happen if it suddenly were discovered that Aether wasn't limitless, and was in fact very steadily going away or becomming ineffective?

I just wanted to throw that writing/thought prompt out there, so it could be seen and thought about this year.

 

[Abwehran Commander]

I honestly think 3 light-seconds is still too short considering laser/beam weaponry. While 3 seconds does give vessels a chance to evade, it isn't that large a window.

For one, if we go to the acceleration method of travel rather than the velocity, maneuvering will be a lot more difficult. In fact, evasion would be impossible even at 10 light seconds because you have to wait for the maneuvering thrusters to push the mass of the ship out of the way of the attack.

Evasion wouldn't be impossible. it'd just require some... modifications to ship build. So you can strafe and/or slide.

The problem is inertia. A 100,000 metric ton vessel cannot be moved very easily even in zero-g environments. Since we may move to acceleration rather than velocity, vessels no longer move fractions of the speed of light in an instant. While we could give vessels higher accelerations, inertia still delays a movement.

At ranges of 3 light seconds, a laser will hit a vessel in three seconds. This means a vessel has a three second window to evade, which means only low mass vessels like strike craft could evade in time and only if the pilot/AI were given enough warning.

There is no way a warship in the thousands of metric tons could avoid light-speed weapons in such a small window of time.

 

[Jimmy]

Well, I guess we can always go for a more Star Wars-ian feel as far as combat goes. Close range blaster fights, STL weapons, fighters zipping around, things being very explodey. Not the most accurate, but give me gameplay over reality any day.^^

 

[Fred]

Let's not touch aether for now? Let's not open another can of worms?

Let's change things slowly, gradually? Just so we can notice what works, what doesn't and keep gradually creeping in the direction of 'what works'?

I think disassociating CFS functions for the 'not putting all your eggs in the same basket' clause is one good way to start. As Gallant mentioned, it's just good engineering sense.

Presently...

Combined Field System

• Star Trek-style warp speed FTL propulsion.
• Hide in a pocket dimension hidey-hole and call it 'stealth'.
• Star Trek/Nadesico-hybrid starship shields.
• Omni-directional phaser beam of doom that you should not fire if you want your shielding to do its job.

So, onward I go from this and reference my plotship and this will get wall of textish (bear with me, I took a long time to mull over what follows). I've been working on a refit for... some time. A long time. I was brainstorming over it, trying to figure out ways to make it into a better player plotship than my current one.

CFS was one of the elements that came up, because I disliked its swiss utility knife approach. I was planning on performing surgery and piecing it apart.

Pocket-hole stealth dimension were going to die; there are other ways to stealth without resorting on a multi-dimensional cheat few people can actually mentally picture. The same with projected energy beams: SARP's having a lot more accent put on point-defense/turreted weaponry.

FTL propulsion is left, and I suppose I could've called it Continuum Distorsion Drive and been happy with it, but the truth is... I hate that name. So it's not okay... but I'll come back to that later.

Based on a conversation I remember having/seeing with Wes some time ago, I was thinking of preserving CFS, but in another form: purely the defensive system one. As I pictured it, my ship was really going to have three modes of protection that were less designed around the idea of a gradually ablating energy bubble, but a diverse array of protection methods to defend the ship.

Because, even if I don't always agree with Uso doesn't mean i never pay attention to him. A depletable energy barrier concept is all well and good in the eyes of a Star Trek fan like me... but it's true that its dumb and that the shielding systems behind that actually shouldn't have a hit point-style measurement. It's one extra variable too much to track in mass combat too.

So, thinking on those line, here's what my new Combined Field System would've looked like:

• Distorsion Shielding: protective energy envelope that bends space around the vessel thus causing straight-line beam weaponry to be diverted and is also the first line of protection against radiation emissions (including scalar). Less effective on projectiles, not effective at all on homing missiles. (no scalar field premature detonation: no one ever wants to use that while GMing anyhow)
• Gravimetric barrier: conformal graviton bubble generated around the ship to counter projectiles, blunting impacts, prematurely detonating guided warheads. Not really effective against beams, but will still grant a degree of protection to emissions like scalar ones.
• Energized (polarized/electro-magnetic) armor: EM power would make the hull several magnitude more resistant on impact points, and would help spread the heat impact of an attack over a wide surface of the ship's hull, thus making heat saturation less severe.

I figured that the above would not require big 'shield hit point' changes if we weren't ready for that, since I'd expect that the gravimetric barrier and energized armor would run most of the time in passive/ready mode and 'harden/brace' for an attack when one is incoming (that's what quantum computers are for). That 'high-activity' setting is likely not one a ship can afford running indefinitely on account of limitations such as heat-generation, power drain and such.

Boosting/optimizing the new CFS is still possible. Techs could flush coolant to the problem section. Those in charge of managing the shield system could just as easily divert power to a select system in order to increase survavibility: distorsion shields being extended allow for more bent targeting vectors, gravimetric barriers enlarged could make the ship safer from the blast radius of a stopped missile, reinforced energized armor could better disperse incoming beam attacks, etc...

Now, shield systems in themselves aren't exactly well defined. I don't recall having seen detail put in shield generators in most KFY ship submissions. Perhaps hybridizing propulsion and protection is not such a bad idea; I'll get to that shortly.

Moving on and back to propulsion systems.

After touching base with several people, here's what I thought I'd do for the Miharu-refit's propulsion system.

For starters, I'd give it honest-to-god main thrusters and maneuvering reaction-control thrusters. Like, fusion thrusters. The kind that lets you go at 5 kps on their own in short order. Not exactly great for interplanetary travel without a lot of acceleration, but these keep into account acceleration. I can picture having Miharu do a strafing run on the 2 km long Takumi cruiser, lobbing torpedoes that have a 300 meters blast diameter and zipping away. The visuals for the smaller ship making a close pass on the larger one just feel right there and on that scale even slower delay-to-impact weapons like railguns would be credible.

Then comes what I'm calling the Gravimetric FTL drive, which is my replacement for CDD. Why? CDD as a name suck. Second, gravimetric drives in this setting do the same thing as CDD propulsion anyways, except on a sublight scale (just like Star Trek impulse and warp drive are pretty damn similar except for scale).

For reaching higher sublight speeds, tweaks are done on the FTL drive to make space more 'slippery' - a term coined by Gallant. That would still have the ship depend on its thrusters for maneuverability and forward impulse rather than creating artificial freefall, but it'd allow it to reach our higher .3c sublight speed fraction for significant movement while still giving us our instant acceleration we've grown used to having. The system would also provide the much higher intraplanetary FTL speeds we've grown used to seeing, with my target for Miharu-refit being 21 000c.

Then, there'd be fold, for interstellar travel. That'd probably work more or less the same as it does now for the most part.

With this layed out, I was planning on adding more functionality to the said systems. Sublight thrusters would definitely be the to-go system for space maneuvering, with precise inertia control not seeing as much use as it presently does (when I see Yukari make precise sublight maneuvers using CFS propulsion rather than Miharu's STL drives, it strikes me as wrong).

Gravimetric FTL drives could easily serve stealth and protective functions. That gravimetric barrier field I mentioned earlier ought to be generated by this system, and stealth could be provided by using them to create a gravity well to bottle up the ship's emanations (heat, light, exhaust waste, etc...) with certain caveats, but it would almost achieve the same aims as CFS pocket-dimension stealth. Perhaps even projecting mass shadows to generate those interdiction effects we may need to revise or not.

Key point here would be that the Gravimetric FTL drive would not be able to do all of that at the same time. Generating shielding at maximum strength (as Uso indicates it should always be anyhow rather than diverting power to reinforce it) would make it so that there would be very little resources left for the hardware to render space more 'slippery' for higher speeds. If the ship was to escape at FTL speed, it would need to adjust itself for that, creating a combat vulnerability as it prepared to depart. toying with these optimizations justifies why we can still keep 'transfer power' in our vocabulary while giving credence to more practical engineering notions.

Note that interplanetary FTL is presently necessary when interdiction ranges are as large as 1 AU. 8 minutes to closing to a target at 1c is a long time to manage at an entertaining pace in our roleplay. Well, it's for me and the way I manage my plotship, anyhow.

Fold drives wouldn't be too different, but with greater speeds to achieve interstellar transports. Again, it'd likely see alternate uses such as using the distorsion field to deflect radar signals, for example. Maybe even be the seat for quantum-based communication hardware (our interactions do tend to be in realtime when we do it, so, this is pretty mainstream in SARP).

* * *

The above was what I was going for. I think this is good. Perhaps not absolutely science-accurate or a perfect compromise to everything that needs to be adjusted, but some of those are small enough tweaks to gradually lead SARP propulsion tech in perhaps a more desirable direction.

I'll admit I was hoping that by showing its credibility by example, KFY might turn to eventually base its propulsion/defensive systems on that standard too since I really care about this arrangement; I think it works very well from a GM/plotship point of view - most especially on possible player interactivity - and it also even gives some concessions to arguments Uso has been holding for awhile now.

 

[SSharp]

Good job, Fred. I agree 100%.

Also, it was my understanding that you could only see light once it was there? You really couldn't see a laser fired from 3 Light-Seconds away. Once you saw it, it had already hit.

 

[Tom]

My knowledge regarding technology is extremely limited, so I'm posting to chime in with Jake.

As stated by Fred, I think any changes that are made, however large or small they be, benefit interactivity and player RP potential.

If I could offer one suggestion, and this is just me speaking here: try not to drift too far into the "hard-scifi" side of things. Poor people like me just can't keep up with plotting dimensions in space combat and estimating time-of-impact for starship weapons.

 

[MissingNo]

Also, it was my understanding that you could only see light once it was there? You really couldn't see a laser fired from 3 Light-Seconds away. Once you saw it, it had already hit.

That's true...this could get messy. Sensors can't detect things in realspace faster than lightspeed, so if the charging-their-laser time is moments, it would take longer for the energy indications of the charge to reach the targeted ship than it would for the beam to reach that same ship's sensors.

You would have to have probes at a position closer to the ship firing to get the information in time to make a dodge attempt. Since probes can transmit sensor data through FTL comm channels, that would reverse the gap between the lightspeed beam and the STL sensor data and give the target time to react.

Now that I think about it, isn't this a form of refraction? Think of the way water makes a straw appear "bent" when you put part of it in the water. That's what's happening here, but with time.

Target would see the flash of the laser at the same time that the laser hit the target. This is something that basically makes being one light-second away and ten light-minutes away meaningless: The laser reaches the target at the same time as the visual indication that the laser was fired reaches the target. It's like standing in a stream and seeing a fish swimming under the surface: You see the fish, but it isn't where you are seeing it. (In this case, the target sees the shooting ship, but that image isn't when they perceive it as being, if that makes any sense.)

The difference would be the probes. That would be like sticking a periscope into the water to see the fish. Now the refraction is gone, and you can see the fish where the fish really is. By putting a probe closer to the firing ship, the target can receive the sensor data showing that the firing ship has indeed fired before the light reaches the target showing the firing, assuming the probe has FTL communications ability. If the probe is within one light-second of the firing ship, then the data gives the target ship as much time as its distance allows (in other words, it makes being one light-second away and ten light-minutes away mean something again).

 

[Zack]

Ship A and Ship B see each other in space and decide to try to kill each other. Both ships are X light seconds away.

Ship B sees ship A as it was X seconds ago. Ship A appears not to be firing but Ship B knows this is just a result of the lag time so Ship B makes an evasive dodge. Assuming ship A has taken aim at some part of Ship B, its weapon will strike some area of the cross section of ship B facing ship A. If you know how fast ship B can accelerate then you can work out how long it will take Ship B to escape the danger zone.

Ship A sees ship B at the start of the fight and decides to fire. It knows that ship B is X light seconds away and the laser being fired will take X light seconds to arrive meaning they are effectively having to hit a target 2X light seconds in the future from where they see ship B is at. They can target the ship directly or they can start laying down a pattern of shots around where the ship is hoping that they will be making evasive maneuvers and will instead have moved into the area covered by the saturation fire. To effectively cover an area they would have to have enough lasers being fired only a small distance apart (a bit smaller than the size of ship B) hoping to score a hit.

Of course this is less true if your subspace radar isn’t jammed by interdiction.

Also, Fred’s gravity-stealth is a black hole (the ship destroying kind)

---
As for the proposed rules:


Also, what does this mean? : Combat while at FTL speeds is not possible in the SARP.
Does that mean I can not fire my weapons while at FTL speeds or I can not use FTL systems while in combat. If the latter when does combat start and end? Perhaps more importantly why is this the case? Can I still throw things off the ship while at FTL speeds or work on the hull? Does this mean that FTL is now just ‘god mode’ meaning when it is on a ship can’t ever be hurt?

It would be far better to just state that anything larger than a few grains of sand entering/leaving an FTL bubble causes it to collapse and turn off. However even then nothing really changes, I don’t think anyone has been using their weapons while their ships are at FTL speeds with the exception of ramming speed + FTLs, effectively turning the ship into a weapon.



There are no FTL weapons in the SARP, other than FTL torpedoes, which are capped at 12c. :
I don’t see why only torpedoes would be capped at 12c. After all if you say that smaller FTL drives are less effective you should be capping power armors, fighters, and other small craft at 12c as well. Also saying there are no FTL weapons doesn’t really provide a reason why characters can’t make FTL weapons. It should really be changed to something like FTL effects need an FTL generator nearby.



Engagement Ranges: Do these scale with the speed of the weapon? They also don’t take into account spreading your fire out, different sensor types (FTL and non FTL) or provide any explanation on what to do if you fire multiple weapons (Can you roll on each weapon individually or sense they are all firing at the same target do you just make one roll?)


---

I also don’t think these rules are going to accomplish anything, especially with GMs already saying they are planning not to follow them.


Edit:

Also I assume this means that the MASC drive is being removed from the setting to comply with the no FTL combat thing?

 

[Firebrand]

Despite Uso's blatant hatred for the Iroma , He does bring up a somewhat sticky point. The MASC Drive is similar to CCD, but it operates on different principles. While CCD Creates a pocket universe, MASC Drive compresses space in order to work, and so does 80% of all Iromakuanhe space travel technology. Does removing CCD/CFS mean that MASC Drive gets removed as well just for looking like it? I don't see why the Iroma should be punished for having a unique form of propulsion.

Also, since people do seem to want to move to acceleration in space rather than top speed, I support it. However, i think moving to Meters per second squared might be too complicated for people who aren't as physics savvy. I think that we should instead use Acceleration in Gs, since G represents a basic standard that everyone is familiar with (Gravity on earth's surface).

 

[Soresu]

I think we're keeping the CDD and just separating its form and function from the CFS, Five.

 

[Fred]

Again, I do not seem part of this 'everyone' Five refers to.

 

[Wes]

Any revision to FTL methods in general (CFS/Fold) and STL (acceleration vs top speed) would be handled as a separate revision.

 

[Fred]

Geez, way to lead the conversation, Wes. You just go and toss that quote at us without even giving us an idea about the direction you'd like to have things go after all this talk.

- Revised anti-FTL rules

That's wholly dependent on the FTL methods in general (CFS/Fold) and STL (acceleration vs top speed) we end up using along with the type of pacing we wish to promote in our roleplay setting.

- PVP Rules

Don't care. PvP has no place on SARP, as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Wes]

The quote was meant for the people still discussing FTL propulsion in this thread that is no longer about FTL revisions.

To be honest, I'm not sure where to take it from here. There doesn't seem to be much of a consensus other than people agreeing that FTL weapon use inside an FTL field is wrong.