UN Forces briefing

UN anti-pirate patrol

You wouldn’t have believed it if you had been told it in a bar, but your admiral briefed you twenty minutes ago that Jardine Mathiesen LG has sent an unescorted heavy freighter through the pirate infested A’den system carrying - of all things - 33 strike boats. You’ve been ordered to scramble your squadron into the system to escort the freighter and interdict any pirate attack on the freighter. You must leave immediately with whatever vessels in your squadron are fully crewed. Your mission is to ensure that the RMS McGuffin exits A’den safely. Failing that, the cargo cannot be allowed to fall into pirate hands.

Possible opponents; the area is a nest of pirates. Pirate vessels are more poorly armed and equipped than yours. Jardine Mathiesen don’t seem to have been completely candid about the contents of the ship, and they still haven’t told you the destination of the cargo. It’s entirely possible that it may become necessary to arrest the McGuffin and escort back to base. You may have to deal with resistance from the ship. Your instructions are unclear on how much force is permissible.

Point of entry to A’den; the jump node for Novy Yoreki. You have no idea where the McGuffin is going, but you know it’s coming in through the Gouanbou Kong jump node.

Available force Either your own force or the following
2 x Comet CVE re-equipped with Marine boarding craft (four craft per ship, each with two Marine crew and a single PDS armament) 2 x 362 724
1 x River I CH 328 1052
2 x Lake III DD 260 1312
2 x Hunter I FFH 188 1500

Readiness; Roll greater than the crew boxes for each ship on 1 d6. For each box more than your dice roll delay departure of that ship by that number of turns. If using your own force and any vessel has more than six boxes, those vessels enter only once all other vessels in your force have arrived on table

The playing field

A’den; the venue

The system is uninhabitable, but through a freak of chance it contains five major jump nodes which allow hyperspace travel to fixed points elsewhere at a fraction of normal fuel costs. However, the presence of the nodes distorts local space to the point where normal jumps to other destinations carry much the same risk as trying to jump too close to a solid object of some kind.

Pirate activity in the system is a constant low level problem.

Drifting debris and radiation zones in the system are a navigation hazard, although the routes between the jump nodes remain clear through a mixture of occasional sweeps by specialist vessels and the side effects of the jump nodes’ distortion of local space.

The navigation hazards and generally uninhabitable nature of the system have led the major trading nations to conclude that there’s no practical way to maintain a base in the system, and their anti-piracy efforts are confined to convoy escort, occasional Q-ship operations and very rarely a punitive strike when shipping companies have started complaining loudly enough.

No permanent pirate base of operations has ever been identified and it is generally assumed that pirates are staging out of another system.

Practical effects

1. Going to FTL is at all times as hazardous as going to FTL with another ship within 6 inches
2. Movement within debris zones is dangerous - roll below your M-drive rating on one d6 or take a hit equal to your current speed divided by your M-drive rating
3. The corridors between the jump nodes (which will be clearly marked on the grand tactical map) have no debris at all.
4. The jump nodes are arranged in a rosette with each node 72 inches from its neighbor. Each player will be entering through a jump node, and will have some knowledge of where other key elements will start.
5. All movement at first will be on maps. I'm going to use small hexes on hex paper and everyone will need to be levelheaded about the slight fiddliness of counting small hexes on big sheets of paper. The fixed points of reference will be the jump nodes. Debris will be ignored during grand tac movement; commanders will be assumed to deal with it in the background.
6. Once it's clear that units are within detection range of each other, their relative positions will be translated onto the table, and debris will be placed randomly all over the place. (for the quibblers, I'll be putting down about fifteen irregular templates and they'll be placed by dicing locations - start at one corner, roll a direction dice and a d 20 for distance. Place a template, repeat) There's a pretty good chance that you could find yourself either in a template or pointing right at it with no way to swerve...


I'll be managing the initial arguments and running any non-player characters. As much as possible, squadrons will be assigned to the roles within the game to which they're best suited, much and all as it would amuse me to assign on the more entertaining basis of complete unsuitability. This is intended to be at most a two week mini-campaign with a certain amount of pre-battle manoeuvre and two to three serious multi-axis clashes. What it will actually turn out to be as much up to you as it is to me.


And one last thing
It should be fairly clear to you by now that this game will involve boarding and dispersed patrolling and might involve pirates. It will also involve the possibility of pre-game force attrition. So when planning your squadrons, keep in mind that you may need to split your force and that you might not be able to start the game with the full complement of ships you designed. And although you might well have some ideas of your own, I suspect that a force of two optimaxed superdreadnoughts is NOT going to be either much fun or much use.

Monday's game; extra rules

Below, a consolidated and easy to print version of the extra rules which are going to be needed. The next post in the blog will give a piece of background about the arena.

1. Boarding

Boarding is necessarily simplified because I don't want to take all day over it.

1.1 Boarding combats

Boarding combats are dealt with during the repair phase and are considered to involve any ship which had a boarding element in contact with it at the end of the movement phase of that turn.

Each crew box/boarder box rolls a dice. boxes die on a 4 5 or 6, reroll on 6s. Last person to run out of crew boxes gets to keep the ship. Yes, boarding is scary powerful. The flipside is that it's not going to be particularly easy to get to that point and it will cost quite a bit to do it effectively.

Marines count as two boxes (consider it better weapons or better armour, but this all about simple - we're not playing Space Hulk here)

1.2 Boarding contact

Going to contact is adjudicated completely during the movement phase; PDS systems and fighters engage boarding launches as they move into range and can be engaged in turn by fighters and small craft (see 2 below). Using a PDS during boarding means it cannot be used in the fire phase. PDS fire CANNOT be used against a boarding craft once it's on the hull. Boarding requires contact between vessels; by all means send in a frigate as a boarding launch if you like, but don't try to suggest that you're sending out Marines in suits and jet packs from three inches out. Not possible. An actual ship will count as in contact if it can get to within one inch, because it will be tricky in practice to pick a speed which would allow for exact contact with the target.

1.3 Boarding speed

Boarding contact is automatic when boarders have the same speed and direction as the target. (This seems to me to be almost impossible to arrange in real life)

When the target and boarder haven't matched direction and velocity, roll more than the velocity difference on a d6 to manage a controlled collision. For each box of hull armour on the boarding craft, add another d6.

Velocity difference is calculated as follows - if the approach is through the front three arcs of the target, add the speeds of both vessels. If the approach is through the aft three arcs, subtract the target's speed from the boarder's speed.

The speed of a boarder is, in all cases, the number of inches it moved to make contact. So if you're using an actual ship as a boarder, use your listed speed for the turn. If you're using a dedicated boarding launch, you use the distance actually moved to get to contact, rounded up to the next inch. (I realise that this makes boarding launches far more flexible in flight than proper ships; that's my intention.)

1.4 Marine costs

A box worth of marines needs one hull box of mass devoted to it, whether in a boarding launch or otherwise. While passengers (and normal crew) are both free apart from the cost of the hull space to hold them, Marines are a little bit more useful and will cost one point each extra. Keep in mind that the real cost of marines on a boarding launch is much higher than purely defensive marines because a launch needs 1.5 times its own mass in hull boxes as a launch bay on the parent ship on top of its own construction cost.

1.5 Boarding craft costs

Standard cost for small craft is two points per mass carried. This is assumed to give you a craft with the same range as a standard fighter, no armour and no weapons. Weapons and armour can be added at normal costs of mass and points. If you add weapons, you need a fire control system just like on a real ship. I considered saying that without a fire control you could only fire the weapon straight ahead, but a) I can't face the arguments about straight ahead and b) you're always going to be flying straight at your alleged target, aren't you? If all you want to do is shoot up the defences on the way in, keep in mind that you can use a PDS to do that and a PDS doesn't need a fire control. Real weapons need a bit more.

If you want more flexibility in your launch, you have two choices; either build it as a tiny ship with hull boxes and drives, or apply the multipliers used for fighter points. Those multipliers will apply to the full cost of launch including any weapons and armour. So a heavy launch will cost 5/3 standard, a fast launch (36 inch move) will cost 4/3 and a long range one will cost 4/3. If you want more than one improvement, apply the heavy modification first, round up to a whole number and then apply the other. Heavy launches are just better protected against fire - they don't count as armoured for crashing into targets!

1.6 Weapon hits on boarding craft

Every hit knocks out one marine box (That makes every hit roughly equivalent to a normal hit without requiring too much thought). Armour will stop hits in the usual way. Heavy launches will ignore hits in the same way as fighters.

1.7 Prize crews

To run the captured ship at full effectiveness you need to have the same number of surviving "crew" boxes as the ship originally had. For simplicity's sake, the resource constraint is considered to be decision making human minds rather than skills sets - the ships are considered to have sufficient automation that a monkey could kind of run them, but not enough autonomy to know WHAT to do unless the monkey puts down the banana and gives an order. Ships systems are arbitrarily divided into weapons, drives and support. Support covers shields, PDS, and anything else which isn't clearly a weapon. You need one third of the original crew strength to run each of these, so it follows that if you only managed to get a prize crew on board of one third the nominal crew strength you're going to have to choose between running the guns or steering the ship. Two thirds, you can steer and shoot, but nothing else. It's worth keeping in mind that merchant ships have very few crew boxes (only 40% of a military ship of the same mass) and almost no weapons, so keeping a merchant underway will not require a huge number of marines.

2. Shooting up PDS:

Fighters and armed small craft can attempt to engage PDS systems on the way in.

Method A; shoot to kill within three inches the PDS can be engaged directly and eliminated on 6. (This means that the PDS will get off a shot)

Method B; suppressive fire; all weapons systems can be used to throw the aim of the PDS system; each hit cancels out one PDS hit

Armour/shields

As might be expected, my random thoughts on Armour eventually triggered some long emails from my only serious rival for the post of "person who cares TOO much". Amid much thought provoking stuff, here's a thought:

ST uses shielding and armour for each aspect (otherwise how could you stick to genre and demand "All power to the forward shields Scotty").

Which leaves me wondering if it would be nice to have that as a thing to do; put all the power to the forward shields, or the rearward shields or whatever. We could all be mini-Savasku, juggling our power budget to where we needed it the most. Yeah, that's why we don't do it, because it would essentially suck.

Thinking is dangerous

The latest thoughts from an earlier commenter, and my reply

1) When fighting against beam weapons, you can't afford to leave a hole in your armour after it is damaged. The next shot will simply target the hole. So the armour has to be self-repairing in some way, and it will cease to function properly when mobile self-repair resources have all been used up.



2) If you think about it, you should be able to get a much better mass-performance relationship for armour that moves around in response to threats and damage, than from armour that remains static, once you get to the point of having really smart materials (a tech level or two ahead of where we are today). At the tech levels represented in Full Thrust, no one is going to be able to afford to waste mass budget on static armour.

On 1) I have a very different vision of the thing - if the attacking systems were accurate enough to throw a round down the hole they'd just made, we wouldn't be rolling for damage on systems, we'd just be picking the thing we wanted to knock out. In my view at the the kind of ranges we're talking about, the spread on a beam weapon bathes the whole ship in a warm and toasty glow, and burns through at some random point.



On 2) it's superficially attractive until you start to think about it, then you ask how the armour can actually know where to go. All the energy systems are coming in at the speed of light - how can the armour possibly react fast enough? Smart's one thing, faster than relativistic is another!

Yet more thoughts on armour

On the way into work this morning I had some spare processor time left over from not falling under a truck and I think I figured out why the designers of FTII didn't bother with armour arcs - other than the obvious "too much like hard work" reason.

Guns are armour. From a purely practical point of view, you try to set up your firing solution so that you don't get too much return fire, so you try to come in at the target from an angle which doesn't expose you to the enemy guns. Which means that ships should, in the long term, getting fewer attacks from the direction in which they can put the most firepower. This is generally the front, and then the forward side arcs. Which is pretty much historically where armour gets concentrated too. So since the natural reluctance of your enemy to get shot at is having the same effect as more armour, why bother keeping track of it?


Just as well, mind you. I hate to think what twisted compromises and insanity would be needed to implement armour for different areas. You'd have to cut the price or up the effectiveness. Probably easier to up the effectiveness, at least until you get to very small ships like those ESU and NSL corvettes with a single hull box and a matching single armour box. It would make for a really awful optional rule; give people the option to convert each armour box into five boxes which could be parcelled out over the various arcs of the ship, each counting as a "proper" armour box for that arc only. It seems like a superficially fair and balanced idea until you stop and think about it. Then you realise that in practical terms, you'd find that people would armour the living hell out of their frontal arc and charge in all guns blazing, confident that it will take the enemy a long time to shoot through the frontal armour since it's effectively five times as thick as it should be. And really, not having armour on other aspects isn't that big of a deal if our own games are anything to go by. Of course, there would be some amusement to be derived from shooting up people like that with ignore-armour weapons.

There's also the irritation of trying to work out which arc you've been hit in, but we overcome the opposite problem without too much trouble. Still, none of it seems worth the aggravation.

More thoughts on armour

And some more thoughts come in. As a further Rorschach test, ask yourselves whose mind works this way:

Alteratively, some types of armour on a ship dissipate the force of the attack throughout the whole of its structure. In some cases, it may be a unimolecular structure. In others, all the armour may be in a single quantum state, and react uniformly (as a superfluid might).

And some other types of armour may be able to do something similar to the kidshield thing. Some ships may be covered in nano-scale field generators, but only able to power a small share of them at a time. And damage may mainly be manifested in burning out redundancy in power distribution.

The Sa'Vasku may have a biological form of this, or may actually have semi-sentient kid-tiles rushing around to catch incoming fire, and patch up holes.

And perhaps some other bioship types may take damage analogous to shock, that is much more debilitating than the damage they take directly.