Space Opera

This is something that we have been off and on working on for about as long as we have had the universe idea. BUT, we can never agree on it. I mean we just constantly argue about how to balance between what makes sense and what is accurate and keeping it simple but keeping it realistic.

A common misconception about space is that... "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space." - Douglas Adams

You watch so many Space Operas... always running into another ship or some nearby planet. Which is entirely unlikely because of how ginormously huge that space is. The distances are so huge that unless you have someway to bend physics and break the speed of light, then it will take forever to send messages across space, and assuming you can only come to a fraction of the speed of light, take you forever to get anywhere.

On top of this, the entire concept of ships in combat just sitting still and slugging it out wouldn't really make sense. Although some give the concept of old naval ships doing that, they really didn't. You know what I am talking about? The era of Caribbean pirates, the thing is it was all about maneuvering the ships around, constantly moving and passing each other to try to hit the enemy without letting the enemy hit you.

Take into account the other factor that... space doesn't have friction. Without friction, or some interfering object... an object in motion... stays in motion. So ships don't just drift to a halt, they keep going. And going. And going.

Now factoring this together. It can be complex, or simplistic, or people get confused about it, or annoyed that they have to do math...

One of the possibilities is a simple matter of acceleration. This piece has an acceleration of 2". So this turn it can move 2", next turn it can either increase the momentum by 2", thus to 0, or increase to 4". And so on. Then you put some simplistic factor for turning, say every round while moving, halfway through it's movement you can turn it by 60 degrees. 60 degrees because we plan on using hex bases and that is pretty easy to do then.

Easy, right? At least I thought so.

But some people get annoyed by the idea of acceleration, and having to keep track of momentum, and moving... always...

Here is a negotiation then. A ship has a minimum and a maximum movement. One ship, for instance, has a min-max of 7"-11". Their momentum is about 9" and they can either increase of decrease that by 2". But it is streamlined so you don't keep track of an ever changing number, you just now how much you have to move and how much you can move. Some ships, that can achieve higher acceleration, have a min-max of, say, 5"-13". But in general, all ships have a momentum of 9" with the movement on either side of that.

This system requires ships to be moving always, so you never have it where people just park their ships and hammer each other... this is not Star Wars, or Star Trek, or Battlestar, or Mass Effect, or Stargate, or I could keep going on and on. This is more like David Weber, especially more like Jack Campbell, and significantly more like wet navy.

Although it does have a significant difference from wet navy... your movement is in one direction, but you can face your ship in any direction. So wherever the enemy is, you can rotate your ship so the weapons point that direction when you are passing by.

It has a lot of work to go still, and we wouldn't be planning on releasing this in the 2105.

Saying that however, it does have potential with the Tactical. BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED!

If you disable a ship's engines then you can come up alongside of the ship and board it. Okay, there could be potential things about why that can't happen, or arguments about the difficulty about that, but let's keep it simple stupid. You disable a ship; you then get your ship turned around to come up alongside of this ship, and a disabled ship will still be moving in it's direction until it goes off the board. Once you get your ship next to it then you do a board action, you remove both pieces. At the end of the game, you roll for any boarding actions, either you succeed and get the ship, or you fail and they board you and take your ship; what it means is mostly victory points.

On the other hand, you board the ship... so afterwards you setup a Tactical Game and play out the boarding action, or part of the Boarding action; or you setup a Strategy Game to play out the entire boarding action across some capital ship. If you have the time that is.

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