Dogfighting 3 - A multi-party dogfight

So far, I’ve handled dogfights “as the rules are” between two fighters, go get a feel for the rules; between a fighter and a tank; to see how the rules handle a fighter vs a relatively static target; finally, I want to tackle how the Chase rules handle multi-party chases. This is where I crashed and burned before. This time around, I chose to approach it more slowly and methodically, to understand everything else around the system before I approach this. It’s critical that this works, because Psi-Wars is never going to be static one-on-one fights; instead, it’s going to be swooping, gnarled, fiery furballs of fighters with fellow pilots crying out “I can’t shake him!” and heroic fighter aces tackling whole squadrons of enemy fighters. If the Chase rules can’t handle that, then we have no business using them.

We’re also going to do something else a little different: We’re going to use biplanes this time around. Some people have suggested that biplanes are a better model for Psi-Wars than modern fighters. Maybe that’s true. What’s certainly true is that the Chase rules should be able to handle biplanes, and that biplanes are different from what we’ve messed with before. By trying them out, we can check their suitability, and learn some things about how the chase rules are constructed and how they work.

Meditations on Biplanes Part II - The Actual Biplanes

Based on the feedback discussed in the previous post, I thought it might be fun to turn the third dogfighting post, the one where I tackle complex scenarios that aren't one-on-one, into a biplane dogfight.  In principle, I think it should work, as I believe the Action chase system is robust enough to handle biplanes, and I think it'll give us an idea of some of the inner logic of that system.

To do that, I need biplanes, and we actually have four in GURPS.  GURPS Campaigns offers us a "barnstormer," but its stats are a bit dubious, and its unarmed in any case.  The next option are the biplane fighter-bombers from GURPS High-Tech, and I thought I would use those, until a little investigation showed me that they were really bombers, not the sort of fighters that an "ace" pilot would fly.  So, I did a little hunting, and uncovered two iconic fighters from the era: the Sopwith Camel (duh), and the Albatross D.II.

Naturally, one can simply convert real-world stats to GURPS stats with relative ease, but I also wanted to dive into GURPS Vehicles a little, to see how well everything holds up.  These definitely weren't built with GURPS Vehicles, but I'll include some commentary and how I might port some concepts into Psi-Wars.