Someone has probably done this this before, but it was a good exercise for me....
I like Mayday because it uses hexes and can be played on a reasonably sized table. I like LBB2/TTB vector combat system (hereafter just referred to as the vector system) because of the greater detail. I wanted to merge the two, but otherwise preserve the integrity of TTB vector combat. What follows the the logic I took in doing this. I would appreciate a reality check on the math, as it is not my strength.
Any other suggestions are welcome!
Why did I want to do this? With the vector system, military/scout detection range is 6 meters on the table and not practical. Cutting this by half is still too big. Cutting it by 1/10 means it is down to a 60cm detection range (reasonable for the tabletop), but this creates another problem — each G of thrust becomes only 10mm (down from 100mm at the full scale. Measuring 10mm for each G becomes fiddly and inaccurate and it is pretty tough to determine the center point of a counter or miniature at that scale.
One answer to the difficulty in measuring small increments it to use hexes. Plus, I just prefer using a hex map over rulers, wire, or markers required by vector movement.
Simply converting Mayday movement works, but I wanted to make sure I was getting it accurate and figure out what the scale would work out to. Mayday is at a completely different time, distance, and event scale. Each turn in Mayday is 6,000 seconds, so 1G of thrust for that 6,000 seconds is 352,800km, which is converted to 1 hex in Mayday (and rounded to 300,000km per hex).
Mayday turns are long at 100 minutes. Too long for a roleplaying scene. Ships in Mayday are destroyed after 3 or 4 hits, and a single hit to any component disables it, so each firing phase represents lots more fire than in the TTB vector system, where it takes multiple hits to disable systems, and many hits to destroy a ship. Because of this different scale, I decided to convert vector to hex, but keep the vector time scale.
In the vector system, turns are 1,000 seconds or 16.66 minutes. This still feels sort of long to me to simulate the action of space combat, but it is way better than the 100 minutes per turn in Mayday. In the vector system, the math at 1,000 seconds means each G is 9,800 km of thrust. The vector system rounds that to 10,000km and it equals 100mm on the tabletop. If we want to keep the 1 hex to 1G correspondence that Mayday has (and I do), we end up with 10,000km hexes. That means we can do movement exactly as described in Mayday, with each ship able to move its future position counter 1 hex per G of thrust it has.
So after all that, I ended up with the simple conclusion that you can just use Mayday movement in place of vector. Nice! The only thing that you need to take into account is using the appropriate distances for range modifiers and detection ranges.
With 10,000km hexes, the default modifiers for laser fire are:
-2 if range is greater than 25 hexes
-5 if range is greater than 50 hexes
You could smooth this out by making it -1 per 10 hexes if you wanted to.
Note that these modifiers are completely different from in Mayday, even if you convert the scale. With Mayday, it is -1 for every 300,000km hex. So why not do -1 for every 30 hexes? Mayday and vector are at completely different time scales. With Mayday each laser fire phase accounts for 100 minutes of firing (and the result is they do more damage). With vector, it is only 16 minutes of firing. With Mayday, multiple lasers add a +1 DM each, with vector, we fire each laser individually. If you want to preserve the vector system, but just move it to a hex map, you need to preserve the vector DMs as I did above.
Here are the detection ranges:
Commercial detection is 15 hexes
Military/scout detection is 60 hexes
Tracking is 90 hexes
This also makes planetary templates reasonably sized. Terra is close enough to one hex, and Jupiter would be fourteen hexes in diameter (instead of a 1.4 meter diameter template!).
Nothing revolutionary here. All you really need to know if that to use TTB combat on a hex map, each hex is 10,000km, and use the modifiers accordingly. Please point out any mistakes I might have made and any comments are appreciated!
I like Mayday because it uses hexes and can be played on a reasonably sized table. I like LBB2/TTB vector combat system (hereafter just referred to as the vector system) because of the greater detail. I wanted to merge the two, but otherwise preserve the integrity of TTB vector combat. What follows the the logic I took in doing this. I would appreciate a reality check on the math, as it is not my strength.
Any other suggestions are welcome!Why did I want to do this? With the vector system, military/scout detection range is 6 meters on the table and not practical. Cutting this by half is still too big. Cutting it by 1/10 means it is down to a 60cm detection range (reasonable for the tabletop), but this creates another problem — each G of thrust becomes only 10mm (down from 100mm at the full scale. Measuring 10mm for each G becomes fiddly and inaccurate and it is pretty tough to determine the center point of a counter or miniature at that scale.
One answer to the difficulty in measuring small increments it to use hexes. Plus, I just prefer using a hex map over rulers, wire, or markers required by vector movement.
Simply converting Mayday movement works, but I wanted to make sure I was getting it accurate and figure out what the scale would work out to. Mayday is at a completely different time, distance, and event scale. Each turn in Mayday is 6,000 seconds, so 1G of thrust for that 6,000 seconds is 352,800km, which is converted to 1 hex in Mayday (and rounded to 300,000km per hex).
Mayday turns are long at 100 minutes. Too long for a roleplaying scene. Ships in Mayday are destroyed after 3 or 4 hits, and a single hit to any component disables it, so each firing phase represents lots more fire than in the TTB vector system, where it takes multiple hits to disable systems, and many hits to destroy a ship. Because of this different scale, I decided to convert vector to hex, but keep the vector time scale.
In the vector system, turns are 1,000 seconds or 16.66 minutes. This still feels sort of long to me to simulate the action of space combat, but it is way better than the 100 minutes per turn in Mayday.
In the vector system, the math at 1,000 seconds means each G is 9,800 km of thrust. The vector system rounds that to 10,000km and it equals 100mm on the tabletop. If we want to keep the 1 hex to 1G correspondence that Mayday has (and I do), we end up with 10,000km hexes. That means we can do movement exactly as described in Mayday, with each ship able to move its future position counter 1 hex per G of thrust it has.So after all that, I ended up with the simple conclusion that you can just use Mayday movement in place of vector. Nice! The only thing that you need to take into account is using the appropriate distances for range modifiers and detection ranges.
With 10,000km hexes, the default modifiers for laser fire are:
-2 if range is greater than 25 hexes
-5 if range is greater than 50 hexes
You could smooth this out by making it -1 per 10 hexes if you wanted to.
Note that these modifiers are completely different from in Mayday, even if you convert the scale. With Mayday, it is -1 for every 300,000km hex. So why not do -1 for every 30 hexes? Mayday and vector are at completely different time scales. With Mayday each laser fire phase accounts for 100 minutes of firing (and the result is they do more damage). With vector, it is only 16 minutes of firing. With Mayday, multiple lasers add a +1 DM each, with vector, we fire each laser individually. If you want to preserve the vector system, but just move it to a hex map, you need to preserve the vector DMs as I did above.
Here are the detection ranges:
Commercial detection is 15 hexes
Military/scout detection is 60 hexes
Tracking is 90 hexes
This also makes planetary templates reasonably sized. Terra is close enough to one hex, and Jupiter would be fourteen hexes in diameter (instead of a 1.4 meter diameter template!).
Nothing revolutionary here. All you really need to know if that to use TTB combat on a hex map, each hex is 10,000km, and use the modifiers accordingly. Please point out any mistakes I might have made and any comments are appreciated!
