Quote:
Originally Posted by soltakss
You can make it as complicated as you want, to cover many eventualities, but it basically boils down to "Shoot, Dodge, Absorb Hit"...
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Only at such an abstract level that you lose any setting specific colour from including starship combat in the first place: in which case, why bother?
Star Trek space battles involve large damage control crews rushing about the ship, and critical command decisions about angling deflectors (or shields) in particular directions, energy allocation and involve primarily beam weapons: it feels rather like naval warfare of the late nineteenth century.
Babylon 5 space combat on the other hand has predominantly projectile based weaponry (with preposterously short ranges, but that's a separate topic), and no forcefields / shields (on earthforce ships at least), plus small fighter craft providing screens for the larger capital ships: it feels like WWII mixed naval and air engagements (BSG goes even further and explicitly models Naval aircraft carriers directly).
If it's worth the effort of including Starship design and Combat in the game with rules, then those rule sshould surely capture the distinctive features of the Starships in the setting that make them interesting? One of (few) things they got right in the
Serenity RPG was the extent to which Ships have personalities. But the same rules would be entirely inappropriate for say a B5 game, where ships are treated as technological tools. And rules that would work for B5 or
Serenity would struggle to represent starships from
Blake's 7 or
Dune.
Starships need a bespoke solution, tied to the setting IMO: a BRP Space book would need, as the core book does with "powers", to provide several different but easily adaptable example systems that all build on the core BRP systems but address some of the different archetypes of Starships from SF. A Star wars/Babylon 5/BSG "small fighters, dog fighting combat" type setting, a Star Trek / Honour Harrington "navies of sail in Space" feel, a CJ Cherryh-esque "Jump-riders and FTL distortion universe", a Niven / Reynold's style NOT FTL universe and maybe a Dune style "starships never fight" set up should cover it...
So, who wants to write it then?
Cheers,
Nick Middleton