Wild Black Yonder (working title)

[Joose]

Something else that has occured to me: have you had a look at that X-Wing board game? Its basically just a tabletop wargame for Star Wars but it also has simultaneous turns and stuff. Might be worth having a quick look at to see if there are any concepts you could thieve.

[Dog Pants]

Regarding navigation, things move fairly predictably in space, I wouldn't have thought it would have been out of the question to calculate your safe route and sling yourself off along it. Assuming nothing like another ship or comet intercepts you, and given the scale of space that's pretty unlikely. Not that it matters, as I say I'm not going for hard sci-fi - or rather, anything hard is for the purposes of fluff rather than gameplay mechanics. Game comes first, although don't let me stifle the discussion.

As for the Star Wars game, it's on my Amazon wish list. Didn't you see it while you were looking for Christmas presents for me?

[Joose]

Regarding navigation, things move fairly predictably in space, I wouldn't have thought it would have been out of the question to calculate your safe route and sling yourself off along it.

Thats assuming you have accurate and up to date information on the position and velocity of everything in the universe, but fair enough

I was more thinking of it as a possible source for other ways people can customise thier ships. give them several options and let them chose between them, maybe with different kinds of navigation giving minor bonuses. Ship navigation powered by short range precognition? Have a small bonus to dodging attacks. That sort of thing.

[Dog Pants]

Oh I see, yeah good idea. Although local navigation and FTL navigation are different things, but ships do have a versus of defence and attack, so it could give a defence bonus.

[Dog Pants]

I've hit a bit of a stumbling block today, see what you vaguely interested parties think. The scales I had were as follows:

Battleship - D20
Cruiser - D12
Destroyer - D10
Frigate - D8
Corvette - D6
Fighter - D4

There's a couple of things I don't like about that. First is that fighters are a different creature from the capital ships - they handle differently, are piloted differently, fight differently, and are manufactured differently. Secondly is the jump from Cruiser to Battleship in dice scales - It's a huge leap from D12 to D20. So I've removed Fighter scale, shuffled everything down a die, and replaced the top tier with Station, which will be for fixed facilities and orbital platforms.

Station - D20
Battleship - D12
Cruiser - D10
Destroyer - D8
Frigate - D6
Corvette - D4

The problem now is that I don't have fighters any more. I want to keep them in, so I'm going to have to develop new rules for them which fit the abstract system already in place (and don't gunk up the gameplay). Any suggestions are welcome, because so far I'm drawing a blank. I can always leave that until later in development I suppose.

Anyway. Have the opening fluff piece to place the setting.

For the past two hundred years humanity has explored the galaxy, expanding, exploiting, occasionally warring, but always alone. Thirteen years ago we completed construction of the Intergalactic Singularity Transporter, a facility which allowed ships to cross the vast gulf between our galaxy and the next. This was the new frontier, a new world for the warp-drive age. Virgin planets, many teeming with life, rich with resources, drove a gold rush of government sponsored colonies in this new land. And quickly, at last, we met intelligent life. Spacefaring life. Today our foothold is established, an uneasy peace existing between us and our new neighbours, but little is known about the worlds beyond our own. The aliens seek to contain us, and we know yet more lie beyond them. Rogue colonists have formed pirate gangs and a fledgling independent nation is forming. The new world is on the brink of turmoil, and the tipping point could be as insignificant as a single ship.

[HereComesPete]

Tiered battles and/or dice value shuffle?

With large ships you have fighters - d4, but it's a fighter wing not a single ship. Smaller battles that max out at say a frigate you shuffle the dice so a frigate is d12 and a single fighter is d4?

[Dog Pants]

Varying dice might get a bit complicated but I like the idea of fighters being given dice depending on their number where they can compete with larger ships. For example:

Flight - D4
Squadron - D6
Wing - D8

Still needs some work but it's a convenient way of doing it in principle.

[Dog Pants]

Woo! I designed my first ship! It doesn't sound like much of an achievement, but because of the way ships are derived from lots of components it's taken an age of balancing, research, and maths to get something that feels right. Hopefully I can use it as a reference and tweak the ratios for different roles and scales.

The ship is an extremely mundane 200t, 34m prospecting vessel, the Vendel Skeppsvarv VS-550 Muninn. This wedge shaped industrial ship is used for scanning asteroids for minerals in frontier space, so is lightly armed and armoured, but is notable for its efficiency as it manages to cram both a respectable fusion engine and a fairly fast ram-scoop FTL drive into its small hull. A built in fuel scoop makes it cheaper to run and gives it range, although its limited cargo space means long journeys are limited by the amount of supplies carried for its seven crew.

This makes me happy.