Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
Would you like me to send you some links or PDF files to look over?
Writing prose about ship combat
- Thread starter robject
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Would you like me to send you some links or PDF files to look over?
I recall having the pilot rolling to control the ship undertaking evasive action while still trying to ensure it was set up to enable optimal firing solutions. The Astrogator/CommsO was working the sensors as well as the EW attack and defences. The engineer was at least monitoring the drives and power plant to ensure everything was operating optimally and could be red-lined if need be. The gunner was of course eating chips and chatting with the VI computer about targeting options. Bloody gunners.
The interaction in the group came from different players picking up on some things I said that hadn't been picked up by one or more of the others. Regular blind or task-unknown rolls based on their skills also kept the tension up.
How that'd be written up? I wish I'd done it straight or shortly after the sessions so I'd something on it now.
Here is how I did it: LINK TO PbP Starship Combat
(forced the rolls into the background and focused on the player POV.)
(forced the rolls into the background and focused on the player POV.)
I'd love that.
Yesterday, I read an eyewitness account of the sinking of the Indianapolis, and found it compelling. I also talked over the concept with Marc.
The job of prose here is to tell us about people who live (and die) by Immediate Action (but without using terms like that): they know what to do, either by a moment of insight, or doing by reflex what they're trained to do. While Travellers may not be more trained than ordinary civilians, the skills they are trained in are rare and supportive of Science-Fiction Adventure in the Far Future. Prose can show how that plays out. In turn, that can inspire players and referees.
One way to write that up is from the pilot's POV. Because he's at the center of action, everything seems to be happening "to" him all at once -- including his frustration over the gunners' apparent lack of sympathy or elan or whatever. Their respective training is what makes them successful -- or, perhaps, what mitigates a disaster, if you use setbacks to gild whatever the final outcome is.
khadaji2002
SOC-12
David Drake's RCN (Royal Cinnabar Navy) series, which starts with "With The Lightnings" does a good job IMO of describing ship-to-ship combat well. He doesn't focus on the mechanics (the dice rolls) more than to explain how the weapon works and how it can miss/misfire/degrade, etc. His prose focuses on his main characters and how they deal with the situation they find themselves in.
For Traveller prose, I would suggest having one or two main characters to focus on in each combat. What's happening from their perspective? I agree with a previous poster who suggested prose on WWII battles. I would add reading prose on WWII sub warfare as well. In the end, I like the fiction I'm reading to tell me what the characters are going through. Keep the physics, technology, etc., consistent and tell me how the people using those devices experience the world around them. You'll have a committed reader if you do.
FWIW, I own all of David Drake's RCN books. I like how he describes his characters and their quirks, and that those characters are far more important than the tech they use. And now you have my 0.02Cr worth.
For Traveller prose, I would suggest having one or two main characters to focus on in each combat. What's happening from their perspective? I agree with a previous poster who suggested prose on WWII battles. I would add reading prose on WWII sub warfare as well. In the end, I like the fiction I'm reading to tell me what the characters are going through. Keep the physics, technology, etc., consistent and tell me how the people using those devices experience the world around them. You'll have a committed reader if you do.
FWIW, I own all of David Drake's RCN books. I like how he describes his characters and their quirks, and that those characters are far more important than the tech they use. And now you have my 0.02Cr worth.
Higgipedia
SOC-11
Just off the top of my head, I'd say maybe think of each ship as a living, breathing character. Think about how the ship is reacting to these things, with the crew as an integral part of the ship's cognitive and neural network.
The Intrepid knew she was outmatched by the younger, faster corvettes. As they buzzed around her, their stinging blasts against her skin were slowly bleeding her dry. She struck out with her mighty cannons, first with purpose, but as crew members were ripped out of her hull by the corvettes' torpedoes and lasers, the strikes grew wilder, more sluggish. She whirled around, hoping for an opening, but every action was countered by the agility of her foes. While she managed to land a few final blows, even forcing one of the corvettes to pull back from the fight, the remaining corvettes began to pummel the Intrepid with more and more impunity.
The Intrepid knew she was outmatched by the younger, faster corvettes. As they buzzed around her, their stinging blasts against her skin were slowly bleeding her dry. She struck out with her mighty cannons, first with purpose, but as crew members were ripped out of her hull by the corvettes' torpedoes and lasers, the strikes grew wilder, more sluggish. She whirled around, hoping for an opening, but every action was countered by the agility of her foes. While she managed to land a few final blows, even forcing one of the corvettes to pull back from the fight, the remaining corvettes began to pummel the Intrepid with more and more impunity.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
As I have posted before I tend to change the scale for ship combat depending on the phase of the engagement.
During the operational level phase the turns could be measured in hours and it involves lots of moving 'black globes' around the system map - think Star Cruiser, Battle Rider.
The tension builds as the sensor picture slowly resolves the threat level.
Once moving to engagement range the scale switches to the typical Traveller ship combat round.
This is where sensors are possibly gaining firing solutions, evasive action, launching missiles, fighters and drones.
For a military engagement this phase is likely to involve lots of action at the midpoint between the combatants as the fighters, drones and missiles try to counter each other and close with the opponents ships.
The ships themselves will be taking hits from beam weapons, any missiles, fighters and drones that have made it through the midfield furball, the tension is ramped much higher as all those decisions I mentioned in my previous post come to the fore.
Military ships will continue to close to effective weapon ranges but have to be careful, within a certain range hits become automatic and the damage potential of beam weapons increases. Damage control, point defence, screening by escorts becomes critical.
Do you risk the final push to bring your full weapon potential to bear or do you play safe and maintain distance? What happens if a lucky critical hit reduces your options?
Build the drama and the tension during each phase, use the character point of view, and you will have an epic story.
I've had some pretty epic role played ship engagements without once breaking out the hex map and minis. Some have been small ship vs small ship, others have been capital vs capital and fleet vs fleet.
Note that all of this can be adapted to merchants vs pirates etc.
If I was able to write decent prose I would post an example, but my writing talents are a bit pants.
During the operational level phase the turns could be measured in hours and it involves lots of moving 'black globes' around the system map - think Star Cruiser, Battle Rider.
The tension builds as the sensor picture slowly resolves the threat level.
Once moving to engagement range the scale switches to the typical Traveller ship combat round.
This is where sensors are possibly gaining firing solutions, evasive action, launching missiles, fighters and drones.
For a military engagement this phase is likely to involve lots of action at the midpoint between the combatants as the fighters, drones and missiles try to counter each other and close with the opponents ships.
The ships themselves will be taking hits from beam weapons, any missiles, fighters and drones that have made it through the midfield furball, the tension is ramped much higher as all those decisions I mentioned in my previous post come to the fore.
Military ships will continue to close to effective weapon ranges but have to be careful, within a certain range hits become automatic and the damage potential of beam weapons increases. Damage control, point defence, screening by escorts becomes critical.
Do you risk the final push to bring your full weapon potential to bear or do you play safe and maintain distance? What happens if a lucky critical hit reduces your options?
Build the drama and the tension during each phase, use the character point of view, and you will have an epic story.
I've had some pretty epic role played ship engagements without once breaking out the hex map and minis. Some have been small ship vs small ship, others have been capital vs capital and fleet vs fleet.
Note that all of this can be adapted to merchants vs pirates etc.
If I was able to write decent prose I would post an example, but my writing talents are a bit pants.
Do not overlook the Engineering crew: damage control and emergency repairs, in a clumsy-and-important-to-not-recklessly-tear vacc suit, under the stress and chaos of combat conditions, and whom do you think the bridge crew is constantly radioing urgent and possibly contradictory commands in the ears of the whole time?
The tension back and forth between the two sides of the main bulkhead could be an excellent source of dramatic conflict to slather on top of the perilous enemy action.
Also, I second mike wightman's recommendation to go back and watch how they edited the two big space combat sequences in first season of The Expanse to give you a feel for the peculiar quiet-then-suddenly-horribly-violent-then-quiet-again pacing and -- for ironic lack of a better word, atmosphere -- of tin can versus tin can combat.
epicenter00
SOC-13
You're exactly right.
As both a reader, writer, and gamer, it's hard to do ship combat in a way that is engaging. I think a lot of it is that space combat is boring and in the 40-odd years since Traveller has been made, nobody has ever tried to address it.
You can anthropomorphize the ships in question (and some authors have with varying degrees of success). However, I've always found it a bit dissatisfying: In games like Traveller, space combat occurs at ranges outside of visual range, so there's little to describe about the enemy ship's condition - it's where I find the parallels between, say, something about combat in the Age of Sail break down.
In addition, there's a distinct lack of that other crutch that writers use to make sea combat interesting: There's no "terrain" in space - it's like a duel in an empty parking lot with computer-aimed guns. You can't have one starship suddenly flying out from a bank of clouds in a "nebula" or a gas giant atmosphere or out from behind an asteroid (unless you're playing in that kind of sci-fi).
There's a story in a (really old) Dragon magazine that I read as a child (did I just date myself, I guess so): "Passing In The Night" by Rob Chilson in Dragon #102 (it's available for free online, but I am not 100% sure of the legality of the pdf, so I won't be posting the direct link).
This story has really stuck me as there's no sequences of dogfighting, you never see the enemy except as a sensor signature; nobody looks out the porthole and sees the enemy ship. The entire sequence is this deadly waiting game of sending missiles off and waiting for hours while the missiles reach the enemy (or don't), meanwhile they've shot their missiles too and you watch them close in and you see if your anti-missile defenses work (or don't).
While Traveller combat is different post Nuclear Damper, I think the emphasis in that short story is similar to that of Traveller space combat, especially if you want to write about it - lots of emphasis on the anxiety and waiting. I think due to Traveller's wargaming origins, there's a certain fatalism to the space combat system, especially if the two combatants are not warships and lack much in the way of the countermeasures/protection.
Instead, I think you could put emphasis on how different space combat is, while the world is basically going to be in the ship for the most part. I'll share my efforts to make a space combat system that is more interesting for all the players, not just the "pilot" and the GM while everyone else as might as well go get food ("We'll be back in 30, tell us if we live or die then.")
* Everyone puts on an environment suit when a questionable contact comes up on sensors.
* The may be ship depressurized during combat. Naval veterans on the crew likely have been trained in "suiting for dummies" so the crew buttons up, and then they go through the airlock in turns so they know everyone's suit has been put on properly and works before the fecal matter hits the fan; someone's suit might be revealed to be broken so he (or she) has the unenviable position of knowing if the ship is hit and depressurizes, they have twenty seconds to reach the head that doubles as a pressure closet - easy to do normally, less easy to do in the panic of combat when the ship is possibly doing a 2G burn.
* In most editions of Traveller, there's a seconds of delay between even a laser firing and when it hits the target, slower weapons take much longer to hit their target. In a civilian ship, this could literally lead to a situation where some bridge officer has a stopwatch, the pilot has to activate the maneuver system (powered on battery backup, so "burns" are limited while engineering tries to get the reactor working again). The ship would have to have to play a game of chicken, where they maintain a predictable course to try and get the other ship to shoot their beam laser at them, then make a hard burn between the time the laser is fired and when it hits them to get out of the way with the crew knowing (for instance) the enemy ship is 6 seconds away, they figure out the enemy ship can charge to fire their beam laser once every X minutes. So the countdown is for the X minutes, then it's up to the captain to decide when the enemy ship has likely fired to order a hard burn.
* If the ship is hit, it's likely that microdebris and possibly atmosphere will form a kind of 'cloud' around the ship. Near-misses on the ship may only be detectable because this debris ionizes and glows, showing how closely they were missed (on a civilian ship, with their poor or possibly damaged sensors, crewmembers may actually be assigned to look outside the portholes to look for this - in fact, if you really want to wow the reader, the crew might intentionally vent gases out of the ship if their sensors aren't well-tuned to detect this kind of thing so they can tell when the enemy ship fired "Laser glow, port lower!" "How intense? Jon, stopwatch!" "Six!" "Um...just a second..." "Five!" "Now, bosun!" "Four!" "Looks like 20 megajoule range!" "In Vilani please, bosun." "Three!" "Five sixes Dekk and four eights Tarr!" "Two!" "Jeanne, two gee hard burn evasive!").
* If the G-compensation suddenly goes on the fritz, it's likely to happen in the middle of combat. Writing about how suddenly "down" lurches sickeningly, cups of coffee, lose equipment, much of it stuff that nobody thought would go flying suddenly going sliding/tumbling across the bridge could be an actual hazard - in addition to those crewmembers who didn't properly buckle down (because you know, in the TU people are most likely used to comfortable rides even in 2G maneuvers because of G-compensation) - crewmembers can get injured, possibly even killed by such debris.
* Fusion reactors don't explode and starships don't sink under the sea. I think there'd be a lot of ambiguity about when a ship is actually "destroyed" without any convenient moments where a freighter explodes in a dramatic fireball. How do you know if your opponent is actually disabled and unable to fight or just playing possum? In fact they might be doing both - if it takes you hours or something to approach a disabled ship, perhaps their crew (in their spacesuits) have gotten their fusion reactor back on-line in the time it takes you to close. It is likely unrealistic for a starship to simply keep pounding a hulk until it falls to pieces, so what happens when one ship or the other stops firing and maneuvering and sensors say the power plant is off-line? Do you simply just leave it and fly off? Do you send in drones to check out the hulk or do you have to close yourself and inspect (and possibly get ambushed)? Do you hail the ship and demand its surrender (and is there some sort of "spacer law" that handles such surrenders, like nobody wants to be cast adrift in some uninhabited system so perhaps there's etiquette regarding surrenders where the defeated side are interred in Low Berths while the winning is honor-bound to take them to a spaceport?).
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
The trick is to make sure everyone has something meaningful to do. I remember first reading the ship combat in original FASA trek and thinking - this is how it should be done.
In Traveller I use something along the lines of:
Captain - makes decisions
Pilot - evasive action, maneuvers the ship
Navigator - sensors
Computer - manages programs
Gunners - shoot stuff
Engineer - makes double fire rolls, if applicable, or tries to coax a few extra EP
Engineers, Mechanics, Electronics, JoT - damage control
Medic - tending the injured.
Describe what is happening, get the players to make decisions and be involved and your ship combat sessions become an exciting part of the role playing rather than moving some counters on a hex map, rolling a few dice and then describing the outcome.
Those then become the basis of the prose you write.
Two of my favourite introductions to books are the ship combat scenes in Reality Dysfunction and Consider Phlebas. There was a space battle intro to Mote in God's Eye that was cut - you can find it on the interwebs and it is a really good read,
In Traveller I use something along the lines of:
Captain - makes decisions
Pilot - evasive action, maneuvers the ship
Navigator - sensors
Computer - manages programs
Gunners - shoot stuff
Engineer - makes double fire rolls, if applicable, or tries to coax a few extra EP
Engineers, Mechanics, Electronics, JoT - damage control
Medic - tending the injured.
Describe what is happening, get the players to make decisions and be involved and your ship combat sessions become an exciting part of the role playing rather than moving some counters on a hex map, rolling a few dice and then describing the outcome.
Those then become the basis of the prose you write.
Two of my favourite introductions to books are the ship combat scenes in Reality Dysfunction and Consider Phlebas. There was a space battle intro to Mote in God's Eye that was cut - you can find it on the interwebs and it is a really good read,
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The ship is just a ship, it has no fear, no emotion, no pain.
Perhaps it strains under the load, creaks and groans.
But it is not the ships fighting the fires within. They are but tools and targets.
I mention this because I was at a restaurant a couple of years ago, waiting for it to open.
Outside, there was an older gentleman, and we got to talking.
Turns out that he was on the Saratoga, off of Iwo Jima during the battle. I remember basically staring mouth agape. "You were on the Saratoga?? YOU WERE ON THE SARATOGA!??"
He was on the Saratoga. And he was just a crewman, as were most of the people. Not an officer, "nothing special". But he had was on the wrong side of the ship when the battle started, and got cut off, unable to get to his post, a damage control section. Fortunate for him, as his post was hit, and his crewmates killed.
From Wikipedia:
The ships provide a place, but it's the people who have a story to be told.
Perhaps it strains under the load, creaks and groans.
But it is not the ships fighting the fires within. They are but tools and targets.
I mention this because I was at a restaurant a couple of years ago, waiting for it to open.
Outside, there was an older gentleman, and we got to talking.
Turns out that he was on the Saratoga, off of Iwo Jima during the battle. I remember basically staring mouth agape. "You were on the Saratoga?? YOU WERE ON THE SARATOGA!??"
He was on the Saratoga. And he was just a crewman, as were most of the people. Not an officer, "nothing special". But he had was on the wrong side of the ship when the battle started, and got cut off, unable to get to his post, a damage control section. Fortunate for him, as his post was hit, and his crewmates killed.
From Wikipedia:
The ships provide a place, but it's the people who have a story to be told.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Please, please, please, ignore everything you have ever seen in Star Wars or other movies/TV series (with the exception of the Expanse).
Ship combat in Traveller has the drama of Das Boot, not the cinematic thrills and preposterousness of Star Wars.
Ship combat in Traveller has the drama of Das Boot, not the cinematic thrills and preposterousness of Star Wars.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Added audio is part of the sensor equipment's situational awareness, enabling the pilot through surround sound to localize enemy fighters, and whether they are approaching or moving away from their spacecraft.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
'Fighters' do not exist in space combat. Motor torpedo boats are a better analogy.
Forget Star Wars, brush up on Newton.
'Fighters' are no faster or agile than capital ships, and ships can mount weapons, sensors, computers, defences that 'fighters' can not due to their small size.
In Traveller a battle rider is a 'fighter', a smallcraft isn't.
Forget Star Wars, brush up on Newton.
'Fighters' are no faster or agile than capital ships, and ships can mount weapons, sensors, computers, defences that 'fighters' can not due to their small size.
In Traveller a battle rider is a 'fighter', a smallcraft isn't.
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For the most part, I agree with this. However, with High Tech, vocalizing computers there is a personality to the ship as well -- even without AI. Throw in AI and all bets are off.
Cheers,
Baron Ovka
A "fighter" is whatever you choose to slap the label onto. I agree the name tends to conjure up images of the fighters of WW-II and wars since then, but then again there were the fighters of WW-I: weak, fragile, useful primarily for observation and harassing. The planes participating in the raid on Cuxhaven in 1914 used 20-pound bombs. A WW-I admiral hearing the word "fighter" would not have thought of them as something that could seriously threaten his warships.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Things that are more effective, when they invade your personal space.
khadaji2002
SOC-12
This. Usually armed with something that will hurt an enemy ship but not very likely to score a kill. However, if you have to deal with a swarm of missiles, laser fire, spinal mount fire, and fighters....you're not likely to stop everything. That to me is the point of fighters. Helping throw everything including the kitchen sink at the enemy to overwhelm their defenses and destroy them.
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