CT Only: Agility and acceleration
- Thread starter AnotherDilbert
- Start date
I have never liked the way mesons were presented, but that's a verisimilitude versus play thing, and I think I'm being overly critical of it. Mesons have a half-life, so I would expect once they were projected from the weapon that some of them would start decaying immediately, with more decaying as the beam travels along until half of them have decayed at the time interval indicating their half-life, and then the remaining half continue along their way until half of them have decayed, and then the remaining ... you get the picture. I figured the calculation was to arrange for the maximum number of decay events to occur within the body of the target, with the acceptance that a good many would decay before and a good many after. That makes the weapon a kind of rapier which emits gamma rays along its length, which might work well enough for space combat but makes it rather awkward to use for ground combat, not to mention communications. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the physics.
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I know this may be controversial too, as rules don't specify how a ship turns its axis (but I assume it's by using his M-Drives).
If Agility 0 means the drives are not powered, and so are not usable, how can an Agility 0 ship fire its spinal (as it means changing its axis, unless the enemy is kind enough as to put himself in your line)?
See that in MT (whose combat system is quite close) you must line your ship to fire your spinal, an Agility (or Pilot) related task (RM, page 95)
If Agility 0 means the drives are not powered, and so are not usable, how can an Agility 0 ship fire its spinal (as it means changing its axis, unless the enemy is kind enough as to put himself in your line)?
See that in MT (whose combat system is quite close) you must line your ship to fire your spinal, an Agility (or Pilot) related task (RM, page 95)
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
LBB5 says nothing about this. You certainly don't need a functioning M-drive to fire a spinal accurately by RAW. Way below the level of detail of LBB5.
Sure, but you still don't need a functioning M-drive, or any agility, to do it. High agility helps, but a Pilot is as good as a low agility score.
So, a spacecraft can rotate to aim the spinal without a M-drive.
Don't shoot the messenger, I didn't write SSOM...
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
I have it exactly the opposite, but then again I am LBB2 maneuvering.
Agility to me is evasive, main course alteration is accel. If a 4G ship is doing agility-2/accel-2, that is -2 DM to be hit and 2G to apply to increase vee or alter course.
Agility-1+ should allow the ship to at some pivot, aim and shoot the spinal in any direction. Where you would be restricted to an arc is if the example ship was going agility-0 accel-4. The spinal would then be pointed in the direction of wherever the accel is being continuously applied, which might not be forward.
At a true agility-0 no maneuver drive at all, the maneuvering thrusters could still pivot the ship around in any direction.
If Agility does not mean acceleration, then a ship with Accel-4 can easily change its facing or course, what cannot do if it has Agility 0 is to do it violently...
Don't worry, I wont.
That's the part of the SOM I talked about without describing when I talked about the lateral thrust capacity, so I already knew it.
Not in my view, dedicated accel pushing the full 1000 seconds has to keep pointed in its direction to get the full G effect for the power invested.
Now if you had say 100 second phases, I could see 9 of those being accel, one phase being agility-1 enough to swing around, fire, and resume accel as before. That would be a loss of 1000+ km accel but perhaps worth it to take the shot.
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
So it says the ship can change attitude with gas jets, hence without main thrusters or massive amounts of power.
Hence, pointing the spinal without an acceleration or agility rating is possible, as the MT task suggests.
Hence, does not say anything about LBB5 agility...
Hence the premise of the question is wrong; you don't need to power the M-drive to a full Agility-1 to turn the ship around it's axis. Not in MT, and presumably not in CT either.
It's not an argument either for or against agility as acceleration, as far as I can see.
Ooh, I'm conflicted. On the one hand, it may not take much time to align the ship with the firing solution the computer comes up with. On the other, the way energy is managed implies the spinal is taking several shots over the turn, with the roll representing the best of them, which would mean operating the spinal interferes with agility.
If it helps and it probably doesn’t, I see it as one big shot.
More drama, plus a subgame where the ranges drop to 10000 km increments instead of 100000 km and firing happens every 100s, or you fire that close every 1000s and do a lot more damage.
I've always assumed that the ship was "grossly" aimed, and that the spinal had some leeway as for final aim. Far easier to make the very fine tuning required for very long distances through electromagnetic means (say, magnetic fields or whatever) than adding another puff on a thruster.
There's no big crosshair on the viewscreen of the battle ship that they're lining up on the tareget with a joystick on the navigators console.
