Meditations on the Biplane Part I -- Feedback

My discussion of dogfights have stirred up quite some commentary, not all of which I've had a chance to really address, and some I cannot (yet) address.  I take that sort of enthusiasm as a good sign, and I wanted to tackle a specific post here, by the esteemed Salsathegeek.  His commentary is especially important to me, as he's played a fighter ace, and his experience is one I seek to improve by updating these rules.  If he likes them, then it's a sign of a job well done, and if he doesn't, it hints that there are further problems, so I take his feedback seriously.

I should point out that he's not exactly criticizing me so much as expounding on what I'm talking about.  I don't really feel I need to "defend" myself (I think creators should avoid defending their work anyway; it should stand on its own two feet), so much as expand on some concepts and address why I'm doing certain things, and what it might look like if I didn't.  That is, I want to explore, rather than refute, his feedback.  I want to see what I can take from it and what you could for your own settings.

What is a Space Battle?

So what, precisely, is the problem that Salsathegeek sees?  The core of it is around missiles, but the general thrust is that I should use the model that most closely fits the expected performance of my setting.  I don't remember if I discussed it here on the blog, but I know I did on the chat, and I've argued that Star Wars space battles seem to draw their inspiration from WW1, WW2, and Top Gun.

Now, the fact that Star Wars draws inspiration from WW2 is a fairly well-known fact.  The use of fighters and bombers which launch from carriers and then attack enemy battleships is clearly drawn from the pacific campaigns of WW2.  But if we stop and actually look at how the battles take place, we see a different picture. The fighters lazily take multiple seconds to soar over a mile-long battleship, more like they fly over terrain than they zip past it at super-sonic speeds.  They fly close enough to one another that they could wave or fire a pistol at their opponent, if such a thing was an option.  You can see from the picture that the ships involved are very close.  If this was a sea battle, you could reasonably swim from one ship to another.  This is more "age of sail" distances than modern "I fire a cruise missile over the horizon" distances. Furthermore, the primary weapon of choice is the gun, not missiles.  If you put all of this together, you get biplane combat from WW1.

The fighters of WW1, as you will see shortly, would be easily outpaced by a modern car.  They struggled to climb at any pace, and fought close enough to the ground that you could reasonably hit one with a rifle, if you were a good shot.  They moved fast, but not so fast that you couldn't try to outrun one as it came low to strafe the ground.  They moved at human-intuitive speeds, rather than the breathtaking speeds of modern combat.

Modern combat is dominated by missiles.  Does Star Wars have missiles? Well, Salsa points out the proton torpedo, but I think I would compare that to the bomber-mounted torpedo from WW2: you would dive low to the water, drop your torpedo, and it would take off and hit the ship below the water line.  It certainly acted nothing like the modern missile, and Star Wars doesn't seem to use proton torpedoes like missiles; tey certainly don't use them against other aircraft.  A better example would be the concussion missile, but tellingly, if you click through and check the sources of that link, it only shows up in one film: Return of the Jedi, and I'm not even sure when it was used (I'd have to go back and watch it).  The vast majority of its appearances in Star Wars is in video games, starfighter games in particular.

The problem with modern air combat is that it's not especially cinematic or fun, and worse, you probably don't understand it.  I certainly didn't before doing some homework.  Binkov has a pretty good breakdown of how air combat works(part 1 and part 2; note that the real intent is to compare the F-35 to the Su-35, but it does give an idea of how modern air combat works out).  What struck me is that it's all about how many missiles you carry, how well you can jam them, how well you can avoid detection in general, and they worry about the best approach route, etc. What we don't hear about is cannons, aerobatic maneuvers, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants tactics and instinctive improvisation, all of which are hallmarks of Star Wars.  Salsa points out that when you include homing missiles, they will necessarily start to dominate the game, and that this is undesirable.

This might sound like I'm supporting, rather than refuting, Salsa's point.  But I said as much at the beginning, yes?  The point here is to explore, and to look at options, and Salsa's point is not wrong, but that doesn't necessarily mean I should jump on the Biplane-model right away.

The Iterative Method

My approach in all of these things, as my regulars by now likely know, is to go through an iterative cycle of rinse and repeat.  It looks something like this:

I need a thing.

• Does something exist that can support that?
• if yes, test it out to see if it works
• Did the test work?
• If yes, use it
• If mostly, then customize it
• If no, try something else.
• If no
• Try out something else, if it exists
• Make your own
• Decide maybe it's not important ("Do I really need it?")

I need dogfighting, so first I tried GURPS Space Combat.  You can read about it in Iteration 3.  It worked well-enough, so I customized it, but I found I had to customize it more and more, and now, I'd like to try the Action dogfighting. I'm pretty sure that won't work out as well as I might like and I may have to customize that, and/or use a completely different system, but I'm going to try to stick with it because it's a system that works well with pretty much any vehicle, and it's fairly simple and straight-forward.

So far, though, I'm still in the testing phase, and the Dogfighting rules were written for modern aircraft. Does it even work with biplanes?  I imagine so, but do we know for sure?  Why don't we find out? I'd like to write a post on just that.

I've not settled on the modern aircraft model and, even if I did, that doesn't mean you might not be better off with a different model.

The Psi-Wars Dogfighting Model

As noted above, I've not explicitly settled on a model. I've chosen some values already, but we're still in a design process, so that can be changed.

So why not a WW1 model? The truth is, biplanes had carriers.  They dropped bombs on targets.  You could update them a little, especially their look, but keep the feel of it the same.  In fact, why not keep everything WW1-ish?  Look, the AT-AT is bulky and slow, just like WW1 tanks.  The combatants use single-shot or semi-automatic weapons, just like in Star Wars.  If you picture Star Wars as a 1920s pulp film only set in space, you're actually spot on for what it is, as its a pastiche of the old pulp novels.

So why not go that way?  The main complaint I have with "WW1 in spaaace!" is that if you took a Sopwith Nova and brought it into the atmosphere and pit it against a modern fighter, the modern fighter would win.  Star Wars has lots of similar problems (Abrams > AT-AT; M-4 carbine > E-11 blaster rifle).  We intuitively expect sci-fi technology to make modern technology obsolete.  GURPS is especially brutal when it comes to this, as players readily have access to all books, so if we introduced a crappy blaster rifle, someone will ask to take a TL 8 rifle into battle and just by asking that, make a mockery of the setting.

Fighters have less of a problem with this, though players could point to the Dogfighting Action craft for comparison (and be countered with something like "Well, those are better in atmosphere, but these fighters operate efficiently in space!")  But we run into distance/speed issues pretty quickly.  If a fighter moves at biplane speeds (~100 miles per hour), it would take a long time to get anywhere on a planet.  The first transatlantic flights, via biplane, took literally weeks, nearly a month.  Interstellar travel isn't that important as we can just hyperjump from system to system, but I think the average player expects that a vehicle that can travel interstellar distances at the snap of a finger could get from one place to another on a planet in a handwave during a session, rather than a grueling, multi-session journey.

In a sense, the best way to handle scale and technology would be to make it a strict TL 6^ setting set in some completely odd world, such as some sort of aetheric plane with floating islands instead of planets, where your aetheric fighter can cross from one side of the island to another in an hour, and that's fast, because most inhabitants travel on the backs of squiggs or whatever.  You must admit, that rather fits the Star Wars aesthetic better than many of its fans would admit.

But, as I'm often a fan of saying, Psi-Wars isn't Star Wars, and needn't adhere to it.  Homing missiles show up in Wing Commander and Strike Suit Zero and any number of other space combat sims.  They introduce an alternate form of attack and defense: dodge blasts, jam missiles.  Moreover, why couldn't Psi-Wars be like modern warfare set in space?  I think there are some limitations here, as I don't see Psi-Wars as nearly as "technical" as modern warfare;" I think there's arguments to be made for settings rife with hackers, encryption, multi-layered jammers vs low-intercept-burst sensors and shoulder-mounted radar systems that wire into a targeting computer that displays its output on your HUD, but that setting is not Star Wars nor Psi-wars (it is very Halo, though, and I explored similar ideas in G-Verse), but there is a balance in there, we just have to find it.

So Psi-Wars dogfighting concepts aren't done.  I will note that the rules I'm using, the Vehicular Chase rules, should cover anything.  I mean, it covers cars and motorcycles and speedboats, so I'm sure it'll cover biplanes as well as it covers jet fighters.  The real concern here isn't whether the rules will cover it, but what options to we include (Missiles?) and what scales we use (How fast should fighters go?)