Yesterday I dove into the basic theory of capital ships in my GURPS Action chase update. Today, I round it out with a look at
truly long range combat, and gaining a tactical advantage on your opponent.
Remote Combat
Lando Calrissian: Yes, I
said *closer*! Move as close as you can, and engage those Star
Destroyers at point blank range!
Admiral Ackbar: At that
close range we won't last long against those Star Destroyers!
Lando Calrissian: We'll last
longer than we will against that Death Star! And we might just take a
few of them with us!
--Return of the Jedi
GURPS Action’s Chase rules do not extend beyond “Extreme,”
because we begin to struggle with horizons and ground clutter at some
point. However, Dogfighting Action! includes two new ranges: Distant
and Beyond Visual, which represent ranges made possibly by the
extreme distances of air combat. I want to add two more: Remote and
Beyond Remote.
Once we get into space combat, ranges begin to widen to an
impossible degree. Orbital bombardment takes place from distances up
to 100 miles away! In principle, one should be able to blast another
target in space from such a distance. Of course, this is
“point-blank” in GURPS Spaceships, and too extreme a
distance begins to diminish the “in your face” visuals of
Star Wars and Psi-Wars, but nonetheless, I think there is room for
powerful artillery ships blasting one another from a phenomenal
distance, or at least a
seemingly
phenomenal distance.
Every range band in the Action
system is roughly five
times as far as the previous band. Extreme is up to
a mile, while Distant is up to
5 miles, and Beyond Visual is “beyond that.” If we
follow the progression, Beyond Visual would end at up to 25 miles,
and “Remote” would end at up to ~125 miles or -27 to -31.
We need to answer a few questions
before we can introduce a new range band, as there are always degrees
of distance between ourselves and every object in existence, but most
such distances are not tactically relevant.
We need to know if Remote is tactically relevant: can a ship at that
distance coordinate others, can it attack, can it be attacked, and
can people reach it on the time-scales of GURPS Action Chase
sequences?
For coordination and attack, the
answer is an easy yes. We can easily have communications and sensors
devices with ranges at about 100 miles, which is roughly the range of
Remote. We can also easily attack out to that distance with pretty
much any blaster weapon of any reasonable size. In fact, it’s
so easy to attack from
100 miles away that I’ve reduced
the ranges of blasters. I’ve included the details in the new
version of my Vehicles conversion. Suffice it to say, only
Super-Heavy capital turrets and most super-weapons have this sort of
range now, as opposed to even fighter-level cannons.
A greater problem with an attack
are the accuracy penalties. For a capital ship firing an aimed
blaster cannon at another capital ship from 100 miles away, we’re
looking at an average crew skill of 12 + an SM of 13 + 5 from sensor
lock and targeting computer and +9 from accuracy – 30 from
range penalties, or 9, which is less than a 50% chance of hitting.
We’ll need some ways to improve this, as well as some
reasonable ways to defend from such a long-range attack.
The trickier question is if it
can be attacked or if a ship can reach it on the GURPS Action
time-scales. In principle, we can say a ship is unreachable
(say, 10,000 miles away) but is freely able to shoot you. This does
not create fun gameplay, naturally, as combat occurs on vast,
strategic distances and over exceedingly short time-scales, similar
to how an ICBM-based nuclear war would go. This is not what we want.
So, can we reach a ship that’s about 100 miles away in a
minute? Or, more accurately,
can we go from between 125 and 26 miles away to between 25 and 5
miles away from a target within a minute at our chosen speeds?
Our target speeds are about 1000
mph for a fighter, 600 miles per hour for corvettes, and between 300
and 100 miles per hour for a capital ship, and
an action turn takes one minute. In a single minute, a fighter can
cover 15 miles, a corvette can cover 10 miles, and a capital ship can
cover between 5 and one-and-a-half miles. Frankly, this already
begins to cause problems at dogfighter distances because going from
beyond visual (minimum of 5 miles away) to distant (minimum of 1 mile
away) is beyond the possibility of slow capital ship. In
the best case scenario, a fighter reach a target at 26 miles away in
two minutes; 125 miles takes closer to 10 minutes. A corvette can
reach a target 26 miles away in up to 3 minutes, while 125 miles away
takes nearly 15 minutes. At 300 miles per hour, a capital ship will
reach a target 26 miles away in ~5 minutes and 125 miles in nearly
half an hour. It is not possible in any account to really interact
with a remote target in exactly one minute, though it’s not so
far away that it’s really beyond the chase rules: in most
cases, you could hand wave things away and suggest that the target is
reachable on a 5-minute scale rather than a 1-minute scale, or that
you can reach the target, but you’ll suffer several attack
attempts.
If we take all of this together,
it suggests we should treat remote carefully if we’re going to
use it at all. To be useful in combat, we might add an “aiming”
action which represents something similar to using the Dead
All of this together suggests we
should treat remote carefully, if we’re going to handle it at
all. First, remote requires
some sort of time-consuming “precision
aiming” action where
you carefully line up your shots, the
same idea as Precision Aiming from GURPS High-Tech; we can grant a +4
to hit, but also a +2 to dodge, representing the fact that at such
distances, even a slight evasive action can offer considerable
defensive benefits, and also mimics the Telegraphic attack rules.
This gives a capital ship a roll of 13 or less to hit a target, but
improves another capital ship’s dodge from an average of a
pointless 2 to a possible 4, while corvettes and fighters are
effectively impossible at that range. Second, I would require a
minimum of 100 mile range on weapons, comms and sensors to
effectively operate at that range. Third, I would argue that a
Remote vehicle cannot
gain advantage on another target (you’re too far away to
meaningfully outmaneuver your target at any speed). This helps
reduce the lethality of the remote ship: you’re firing with a
more limited number of your guns, your target is hard to hit, and
your opponent can adjust his force screens so they face your
direction. A generic battleship is only going to hit with two or
three of this super-heavy cannons, and against a target with 10k
force screens, he’ll fail to penetrate DR at all. You really
need a super-weapon to operate at such a range, or you need to target
a less well-defended vehicle. Fourth, when it comes to movement, we
can treat moving from Remote to Beyond Visual as a two-shift
move. This is a little
cinematic, as it means that a fighter can move from remote to beyond
visual in a single minute with a good roll, while corvettes will
typically require two minutes, and capital ships will require a lot
of rolling to successfully chase down their target, unless their
target is static (which is possible). Finally, I would make this an
optional rule: it’s an interesting scenario when dealing with
orbital bombardment or when tackling a super weapon, and it’s a
good place to park your carrier if you want it help coordinate your
battle, but it’s probably more detail than necessary in any
other cases.
Formation and Tactics
One important element of GURPS Spaceships is the ability of the
commanding officer to exert his tactical acumen to grant his vessel a
benefit over his opponent. The Officer template excels at Tactics,
and thus we would expect them to be able to bring their excellence to
bear against opponents here too.
The first and most obvious way in which an Officer can gain the
strategic upperhand against his opponent is with the already existent
foresight rules. I’ll
talk more about Lucky Breaks
later, but suffice it to say, Foresight can translate directly into a
Lucky Break, in the same way that Serendipity can.
However, I’d like to make
tactics more directly useful, moment by moment. I can simply borrow
the tactics rules from GURPS Spaceships, but I want to revisit them
and see if we can return to base principles and see whether or not
they still fit. After all, the Chase rules don’t use tactics,
nor does the Dogfighting rules. Why should we? What sort of benefits
would they provide?
In reality, I do think you see
tactics in chase scenes! Random mooks who simply point their
vehicles at the enemy and drive as fast as they can tend to be less
effective than, say, law
enforcement officers who coordinate their various vehicles, from
helicopters to a fleet of squad cars, to catch their opponent, or
back them into a blockade. This feels like
a form of tactics that might offer some sort of complimentary bonus
to chase rolls.
When it comes to dogfights, we
definitely see the use of tactics as well. A
good example of this was the “Thatch Weave:” if a less
agile fighter had a zero on its tail, it would “weave”
with its wingman to bring the zero into the sights of its wingman.
Larger capital ships would also maneuver with one another to maximize
their firing arcs while minimizing their opponent’s firing
arcs.
All of these examples of
coordination have something in common: they involve coordination
between multiple craft. GURPS Spaceships doesn’t require this,
but it assumes teams of characters on one ship,
while we’re going to see teams of characters on
multiple ships, and thus
requiring formations
might be an interesting idea.
Formations are a concept also
from GURPS Spaceships, but is semi-visible in the GURPS Chase rules
in the concept of “chase groups” with leaders. We can
call these formations.
We can do a few more things
with formations: consider that the job of many smaller capital ships
are as “escorts,” we can allow a ship in formation to
“block” another ship in formation. We can also allow an
area jammer to protect everything within that formation. Finally,
formations of two or more ships can engage in tactics.
GURPS Spaceships gives tactics
the ability to apply a +1 or -1 to dodge, but this is often not
useful to the very ships that will want to use tactics the most:
Capital Ships, as they often have an abominable dodge. Instead, I
suggest the following: in a formation of two more ships, a character
within the formation may make a Tactical Coordination
action against a single target (either a single vessel, or a single
formation); if the target is a formation, that target may roll
Tactics to resist in a Quick Contest. If successful, the formation
may gain one of the following benefits
-
Defensive Tactics: Opponent
either has -2 to hit the vessels of the formation, or the vessels of
the formation gain +1 Dodge.
-
Defensive Tactics:
Opponent either has -1 to dodge the attacks of the vessels of the
formation, or the vessels of the formation gain+2 to hit the target
vessel or formation.
-
Pursuit Tactics: +2
to chase rolls against the target for this turn
In practice, this allows capital
ships to reduce their opponents’ barrages by a hit or two,
which might mean the difference between life and death.
