Thread 96502373

Why do most sci-fi settings sideline space combat but instead mostly focus on ground warfare?

>>96502373 (OP)
If I had to guess it is probably because there isn’t much entertainment out there that focuses on spaceship combat and so most entertainment media makers don’t bother trying to innovate and play it safe.

Only media I can name that REALLY did space combat right is the original legend of the galactic heroes anime.
I don’t believe there is a tabletop game that captures its kind of space combat with ship formations.

Because it's hard to make space combat exciting without taking extreme liberties with the "science" part of your science fiction. At least with ground combat, you can pretend that individual effort can make a difference and have stories with characters and personal drama and challenges to overcome.

If you want to have space combat in your sci-fi stories, you've got two paths: focus on the commanders of the fleets (Ender's Game, Legend of Galactic Heroes), or focus on the ships (Battlefleet Gothic).

>>96502373 (OP)
I couldn't tell you, because I've only ever seen fantasy settings.

>>96502373 (OP)
Because the underlying physics are really hard for people to intuitively understand. With space combat, every unit and object is necessarily always moving, and braking is harder than acceleration. So if you are trying to model a ship vs. ship combat using a standard grid (with each ship or object represented by a miniature), you are left with the following unenviable options if there is any difference in speed between any of the units on the board:
1. Move each unit one by one at a given interval to "correct" for absolute positions
2. Correct positions by moving a smaller number of units relative to other units (which requires trigonometry and/or vector calculus)
3. Move the map itself under the miniatures (possible with vtts, good luck with physical)
4. Ignore representation of distance entirely and go for range bands

This doesn't even get into the problem of representing 3D and how accurate simulation of gravity would require you to use a 2D game board to model hyperbolic space. Pic related in how to map a complex hyperbolic tangent function over a standard 2D grid.

tl;dr I would absolutely love more space combat, but would anyone be willing to play it with me?

>>96502481
A true man of culture

>>96502373 (OP)
>Sci-fi space combat
>looks inside
>18th century naval warfare

>>96503045
There are three flavors of sci-fi spaceship warfare.
>16th to 19th century fleet engagements, everyone lines up and comes in close for broadsides
LoGH, 40k, Mass Effect, and plenty of other ones like this
>WW2/Cold War naval engagements, fighters rule the day so carriers are the end-all be-all of space combat
Star Wars is the most obvious example. Star Trek is actually in this category as well, but instead of being fighter-focused, it's WW2/Cold War submarine combat.
>Actual futuristic space warfare
Not very common because it's boring as hell for ships to fight each other from 200 billion lightyears away by firing a salvo of hundreds of planet-killing self-guided torpedoes that are traveling at FTL speeds so they can't be detected before they impact the target. They proceed to annihilate the entirety of a species and all its colonies before that species even realizes the war's begun. War is no longer a contest of skill, it's just whoever hits the big red button first.

>>96502373 (OP)
because shooting at shit on the ground is infinitely more entertaining than space battles.

>>96503118
A possible real-life explanation for Option #3 not becoming "realistic" is that most belligerents will want to capture each others' planets/stations/spacecraft instead of simply annihilating them. They want to live on the habitable planet or keep the jump gate operational, not merely reduce the number of habitable planets in the system or make space travel more difficult.

>>96503118
>>96503153
Just make option #3 rare, expensive, and mutually assured. Of course you wouldn’t have many direct wars, but there is plenty of room for the backwater thirdies of the universe to duke it out in their stead.

How could space combat where 300,000 km (one light second) is considered "short range" be made fun or romantic enough to strategize or tell stories about?

>>96502373 (OP)
Ground war is cool. Space combat can be cool if you do ww2 style dogfights. But having capital ships move slow as fuck isnt that interesting to write.

>sir, we will be in weapons range in 3 hours
>the enemy fired his torpedos, they will arrive in 45 minutes
who wants to read this more than once or maybe twice?

>>96502505
You say this as if ground combat in many sci fi settings isn’t ridiculous as well

Chainswords anyone?

>>96502373 (OP)
>most
Do you have any evidence for this at all? Because I'm pretty sure ground/space combat has about equal representation in sci-fi, if space combat isn't somehow more prevalent.

>>96502373 (OP)
PC are typically people not spaceships. Ship fighting ship is the province of war games not RPG.

Ship combat leads to either A) a minimum of 1 ship per PC which implies fleet vs fleet or B) somewhere you gave you have at least 1 ship with multiple PC on it.

They both lead to either i) PC being commander or ii) player assuming the NPC role of commander or iii) GM controlling the ship.

In iii the players might as well fuck off since the GM is reduced to playing both the friendly and opposing forces.

In ii the PC are all reduced to even worse dogsbodies than they usually are. The point of most RPG is that you have a PC, usually just the one, not that you play as a character who is not your PC.

In i you have a certain type of campaign where everyone has a spaceship and a fleet of spaceships might be a big hassle because the PC are all spread out across ships and the defies the notion of a party. You could also end up with players each having to control a group made of more support NPC than your typical old school party has henchmen because the commander needs his away team or you break verisimilitude even worse than Star Trek with a captains only part murderhoboing the galaxy.

B also comes with the potential problem that if everyone wants to be commander, someone has to suck it up and not be.

I've assumed larger ships, even capital ships, but you could play with everyone as a fighter pilot or whatever. Maybe your fighters have FTL so no carrier needed and every PC can fighter pilot as well as they can their other role.

The FASA Star Trep RPG integrated a starship combat board game well enough but even then starship combat took up the session, and that combat wasn't role playing it was board gaming. Trying to abstract ship combat away from board game defies all sense as current ideas of starship combat are all about manoeuvre, unless you opt for "over the horizon" combat where the ship is a missile/drone launcher and the PC might as well not be there.

Vehicular warfare in general will typically be sidelined because its hard to express it as a measure of individual skill unless it's like a single person vehicle of some kind.

>>96505578
bruh, the trek rpg made single ship teamwork a thing almost 40 years ago

>>96502481
>>96502505
>>96503031
>>96503118
Any reading recommendations for autistically realistic space warfare? I'm not the biggest scifi reader, but I do recall reading "The Forever War" which seemed pretty decent in terms of modeling the physics of combat.

>>96502481
God LoGH was such a great anime. I remember watching the big twist for the first time and literally spat out my drink.

>>96505627
>almost 40 years ago
Bruh, both the STCS and the RPG came out more than 40 years ago.
>single ship teamwork
The issue isn't teamwork, it's why starship combat is less prevalent. I already covered what happens with starship combat in the FASA system because I have likeyouknowbruh, actually played it. More than once even.

>>96505680
Start with the greatest website in the world:

Project Rho/Atomic Rockets
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/

>>96502373 (OP)
Traditional games?

>>96502373 (OP)
I wouldn't mind ships maneuvering and shooting at each other with Asteroids physics, but it might get tedious for some

>>96505830
How small is your proposed setting or how fast is your superluminal travel that wrap around edges on the universe come into play?
The space ship slows down in Asteroids. Deal breaker.

>>96505680
Play Children of a Dead Earth vidya.

>>96502373 (OP)
space combat ceases to be a party of five and instead becomes a crew of thousands

>>96505680
I was gonna recommend Forever War since it depicts a plausibly realistic form of space combat where firing first, luckshitting, and being from the right side of time dilation rules the day and humans are basically extraneous.

>>96502373 (OP)
Because you have to fork it into one of two paradigms. Either all the players work together to command the ship, reducing agency and often requiring tortured logic to include everyone. Or it's all personal craft, requiring everyone be part pilot. As a result, ship combat subsystems are usually second string in developer brain space because players will mostly be doing other things.

It becomes a problem for groups that WANT glto focus on those things, or who want to run a game in a setting where the duality is key, like Outlaw Star. That killed /tg/'s attempts to get a system going for it. Well, that and becoming obsessed with ctarl-ctarl estrus cycles and cross species reproductive behavior when in heat.

Don't realistic future ships have any kind of PD? How would firing ze missiles from quintilion range units away even accomplish anything when they will be spotted immediately and neutralized when they enter the range of PD nets.

>>96503118
third option is greatly exaggerated, the expanse is a closer example
>people start firing torpedoes from hours to minutes away
>in the off chance it gets close range (almost always exclusively through ambush) it is basically mutually assured destruction as the ships rake each other with cannons and railguns on the flyby

and even then, the ambush requires ass pulling or the same tactic (one side is wholly hidden behind a mass and the enemy has no eyes from the other side) as good luck hiding anything in space that is warmer than the background.

>>96506826
In a "realistic" space combat scenario, it's probably going to be battles where each side tries to fire its missiles such that PD is overwhelmed either by volume/angle of attack (less likely) or crippled by waste heat from frying missiles and evasive maneuvers and thus unable to defend itself enough (more likely).

>>96506794
>Well, that and becoming obsessed with ctarl-ctarl estrus cycles and cross species reproductive behavior when in heat.
Truly we are the best board

>>96503031

Despite having some of the most realistic yet moderately simple rules for space combat I’ve seen in a ttrpg
One concession I will make when I am going to run a mothership game in a few months
Is that proper full scale space warfare has not occurred for a good few hundred years because of the sheer cost and expenditure involved and the destructive potential of that kind of warfare

Even the second concession still PC ships are cargo containers with an engine strapped on and a bunch of systems retrofitted onto them that can be used defensively or offensively in point defence networks
And are no match for full scale technologies used in station defence or properly constructed war vessels for space warfare which will be able to overcome their shoddy PD network with presecion saturated fire or even energy weapons that would render their sensors inoperable

Still they can use a lot of dirty tricks to hide flee and disappear into the noise

>>96502373 (OP)
Because designing space combat is hard and most writers don't bother.

It's hard
I think the author of the original LoGH books realized that and decided to based them on naval combat instead. Star Wars based its combat on WWII dogfights

>>96502505
>extreme liberties with the "science" part of your science fiction
That has never mattered to any "sci-fi" creator before. It's always been about one of two things:
>making a work of fantasy that stands out in a saturated market so they want to call it something different and make more money off it
>making something in an attempt to affect greater knowledge, a greater sense of culture, or greater importance to try and get one over those "immature/uncultured fantasy readers", without the awareness (or with hopes nobody will notice) that what they're writing or reading or whatever is just another form of fantasy
You're kidding yourself if representing any part of the word "science" makes one whit of difference in how these people make or engage with their works.

>Ender's Game
>Legend of Galactic Heroes
>Battlefleet Gothic
These are all fantasy.

One thing that people tend to get hung up on, whether out of ignorance, of some dependency on what other people have done, or of intentional obfuscation, is that fantasy is a form of fiction that treads into the impossible or improbable. So in order to have a form of fiction that's DIFFERENT from fantasy, something called a name OTHER THAN fantasy, it would then need to BE DIFFERENT from fantasy.
Otherwise, there's no point in calling it something different, and I'd like to emphasize that because there's no point in calling it something different, there's also no point in pretending your favored media is any better, just because it has spaceships and lasers instead of dragons and fireballs.

>>96502373 (OP)
Isn't Halo's space combat pretty thought out? Though I don't think any official board games use it, but I might be wrong.

The Homeworld 2 and Sins of a Solar Empire mods are kino.

>>96508284
what about universes like the Expanse? Which ground themselves on actual hard science and theoretical technologies as much as possible (save for later in the books/series when things go full retard)

>>96503118
>Star Trek is actually in this category as well, but instead of being fighter-focused, it's WW2/Cold War submarine combat.
TOS at least is yeah, by Dominion War they just had masses of ship flying at each other.

Space battles that draw inspiration from clusterfuck night battles during WW2 might be a fun gimmick.

>>96502373 (OP)
What game?

>>96508284
Anon I will give you one chance to see if you can understand what genres are.
What is the difference between shadowrun and star wars.
Both have literal magic so by your measure you'd say both were fantasy. Which is wrong.

>>96502373 (OP)
Space is hard, counterintuitive and vast.
It's boring for long stretches, then you suddenly die.

>>96503118
>planet-killing self-guided torpedoes that are traveling at FTL speeds so they can't be detected before they impact the target
If you've invented FLT you can also invent something to detect things traveling at FTL speeds in time to intercept them.

>>96503448
Just make each combat round an hour, or six.
In the shitbrew I'm working on, space combat works at different time scales depending on the physical scale. Orbital combat defaults to 90 minute Orbits (9 D&D turns, 16 Orbits/day). Deep space combat works on a 24 hour Day. This is derived from Gygax's Warriors of Mars.
If anyone like >>96503031 is willing to work on a paper-based vector calculator for 3d space combat, I'd be interested in it.

Space combat is too cool for normies

>>96502373 (OP)
I think you could make a pretty good fighter pilot sci-fi game if you leaned into it. Most space ship combat is very naval and does not benefit from having a ton of interesting terrian. Boots on the ground with lots of terrain is an easy way to make an entertaining scenario.

>>96509218
By definition, no you can't. But also anon is a retard and meant relativistic speeds, not FTL speeds, which are impossible to achieve.

>>96509359
>fighting with ship's air at pressure
Definitely NGMI.

>>96502373 (OP)
Personal combat is more fun and more of a power fantasy for a lot of people.

>>96503118
Combine the first two for peak space combat,

>>96509067
First off, Star Wars does not have magic.
The Force is very much a part of the galaxy's natural order, and is even mildly deterministic of its course.
Second, any setting with any sort of supernatural or unnatural power is going to be fantasy, given that such things can't exist in our world, therefore couldn't exist in plausible fiction.
Star Wars has plenty of impossible and improbable aspects that aren't its power system, so that automatically makes it fantasy.
Shadowrun could have been plausible fiction, if not for the existence of magic in its mechanics.

Neither Star Wars nor Shadowrun represent science to any degree, they care more about their respective messages than making something with reasonable plausibility.
These forms of fiction have many impossible and improbable aspects, so there is no differentiation between these and fantasy, because fantasy is the faculty or activity of imagining impossible or improbable things.
There's no point in calling these things anything other than fantasy. You can add qualifiers like dystopian, urban, space, whatever, but it is still firmly implausible and unrealistic fantasy.

You're delusional if you can't see this.

>>96510628
>First off, Star Wars does not have magic.
>The Force
Kek

>>96509885
Anon is also a child that thinks war is just “kill all the other guy’s dudes and you win,” so, I don’t think he mistook. I think he’s just that stupid.

>>96511112
No he's just American.

>>96505826
>>96508667
We're all talking about why the game that we want to play doesn't exist yet, and the technical challenges in creating it, you jannie gooners. Tons of good discussions in this thread. Stop trying to police everyone.

>>96510658
The Force is a natural part of their galaxy.
Learn how to read.

>>96511522
>magic is natural part of the galaxy

>>96511602
>something that's explicitly natural according to the source material must be supernatural because I say so
lol

>>96511522
Magic is a natural part of a lot of fantasy settings but that doesn’t make it not magic.

>>96511711
>because I say so
I mean, you said so too
>>96510628
>Neither Star Wars nor Shadowrun represent science to any degree, they care more about their respective messages than making something with reasonable plausibility.
>These forms of fiction have many impossible and improbable aspects, so there is no differentiation between these and fantasy, because fantasy is the faculty or activity of imagining impossible or improbable things.
>There's no point in calling these things anything other than fantasy.

>>96509340
Thanks anon. I am actually working on something like this for a tabletop rpg that I'm hoping to release soon. The primary scenarios that I'm trying to emulate (as far as space is concerned) are either where is player pilots their own craft, or where each member of the party takes a crew position on one ship during combat. My hack for vector movement is to split the battlefield into three maps to represent z-position and have movement happen with Pythagorean triples.
>There are three maps, each using the familiar square grid: "galactic plane," "low" and "high." The distance between each map is 3.
>Default ship movement speeds are 3,4,5 for cruising or 6, 8, 12 for burns. Ships have to always move their full movement, unless they spend movement to brake (2-3 move per point of braking depending on ship and current speed).
>So, if a unit wants to move a plane up and four forward, that's 5 spaces.
>Facing is, by default, the direction of movement, but pilots can spend their AP to change it.
>Weapons ranges are both integers and z-bound. Short range = same plane, Medium = +/1 1 plane, Long = any as long as distance is ok
>As players approach the edge of their sensor ranges, the GM adds on the next tiny map grid. If players are moving faster than their sensors, or their sensors are disabled, they might hit an obstacle; the pilot might have the chance to make an evasive manuever and the engineer might have the chance to throw up shields.
>Asteroids, satellites and point defense drones, etc. can provide cover, just like ground-level tactical rpg stuff.
>Players can also unlock special abilities during progression, and ships can be customized with hardware that improves stats or grants abilities.
Feedback appreciated. Much more to it than this, but this should get you started :D

The game is about Arthurian Space Knights; I already have the domain, have started working on the art and have mostly finished the text, but now I need to do layout. God help me lol

It couldn't be that hard to make a tabletop adaptation of FTL, could it? Please tell me that exists.

>>96508284
Your post contains one of the most egregious false dichotomies that I've seen on 4chan all week. Moreover, the second of your "two" points reads like a slightly expanded version of your first point. Come back when you actually understand what science fiction is because at the moment you don't. The initial letters of "space fantasy" and "science fiction" are both SF but that doesn't mean they're the same thing.

>>96502373 (OP)
It's hard to write compelling space combat, especially for sci-fi writers since most of them are hacks.

>>96509885
>By definition, no you can't.
That's not a very intelligent thing to say. The definition of ftl is
>speed greater than 2.998 * 10^8 m.s^-1
or equivalently
>possesses a spacelike vector in Minkowski space
There's nothing in the definition about "and in a science fiction setting which allows mass to travel at superluminal velocity there can't also exist a means to detect that superluminal mass and transmit information about that detection in a timely manner".
Even Star Trek had sensors that acted superluminally, which other than some sort of our hero is unbeatable meme makes you wonder how the Picard Manoeuvre was supposed to work since that explicitly relies on luminal sensors.

>>96513042
>and in a science fiction setting
Option #3 said actual space combat, anon.

>>96513057
>>96513078
Samefag.

>>96513057
Option #3 actually said
>Actual futuristic space warfare
anon, cherry picking that quote to leave out the word that means "make believe" is very deceitful.

>>96505680
The Expanse by James SA Corey and Through Struggle, the Stars by John Lumpkin.

Both authors got super autistic about the space combat in the novels. The book cover for "Through Struggle, the Stars" advertises "the most realistic space combat depicted in fiction". The Expanse books are fantastic, Through Struggle, the Stars was decent, the main appeal being the way space combat and realistic space navies are depicted.

>>96513121
>anon, cherry picking that quote
no cherry picking there, I don't see "actual sci fi space warfare" just "actual future".

>>96513138
Is your trouble in not seeing it a literal vision defect or are you operating at a very low reading level? The differences are blindingly obvious
>actual space combat
>Actual futuristic space warfare
The first of those two is what you or whoever said option 3 was. The second is what option 3 actually is. Swapping combat vs warfare is not really a problem here but there's a whole word missing. Removing that word changes the sense and it was done to make an argument but its false evidence: therefore cherry picking and deceitful.

>>96513237
"Actual futuristic" still means "Actual futuristic" not "sci fi".

>>96502373 (OP)
combat tends to be more interesting with terrain and cover, neither of which are really present in space aside from the occasional asteroid/debris field

>>96502481
Was gonna point out LotGH but you already know your shit

>>96513254
>"futuristic" means "not any stuff made up in an imaginary future where science and technology exceed our own"
Science fiction often involves made up future tech so apart from that being a stupid and wrong position for you to take, your understanding of grammar could use even more work than mine.

>>96513707
Yet "Actual future" still doesn't mean sci fi.

>>96513735
How fortunate then that it doesn't say "actual future" it says
>Actual futuristic space warfare
In addition to cherry picking you're now lying about what the post says and trying to move the goal post.

Go look at what's written after the use of that phrase.
>>Actual futuristic space warfare
>Not very common because it's boring as hell for ships to fight each other from 200 billion lightyears away by firing a salvo of hundreds of planet-killing self-guided torpedoes that are traveling at FTL speeds so they can't be detected before they impact the target.
The phrase under discussion was already defined as scfi by the anon who used it before you started your illiterate rant. Choose a better hill to die on because you're way beyond sad already.

They always screw up the numbers. An actually developed space empire with dyson spheres would have trillions of ships.

>>96505815
And that, anon, is exactly what Ken Burnside did - and he's produced games with actual physics! >https://www.adastragames.com/news/comparison

Of course, scale in space combat will always be an issue - games like FASA Trek or Star Fleet Battles acknowledge that their counters or minis are disproportionately large compared to hexes, which is a trade-off between making realistic distances manageable on a tabletop scale, and making it possible to manoeuvre and identify the ships. Someone did make a scale Nebulon-B frigate for X-Wing, but that kind of effort is rare.

>>96514962
>How fortunate then that it doesn't say "actual future" it says
>Actual futuristic
Still no "sci fi" there. Try again.

>>96511522
Magic is a natural part of the Shadowrun universe. Ergo, Shadowrun is straight dystopian cyberpunk, but with dragons.
lrn2read

>>96506760
Yeah. I think one of the star trek games had an interesting workaround where players were encouraged to make multiple characters, so you could have the officers commanding the ship and then regular crew who could go down for away missions and "regular rpg stuff"

>>96515134
I'm a huge fan of Ken Burnside's work; everyone reading this thread who wants harder physics should really check them out. AV:T is more interesting but almost impossible to teach normies; SS is a more playable "game" but I felt like it lost something comparatively. Unfortunately though games are made to be played, not read, and that's why I chose abstraction and "numbers that simplify trigonometry" for space combat in the game that I'm working on above.

Also I know this is /tg/ but AV:T would make a truly amazing video game.

>>96509885
> But also anon is a retard and meant relativistic speeds, not FTL speeds, which are impossible to achieve.
Interstellar space travel is also impossible to achieve in any massive scale, you stupid little pedantic shit for brains. Furthermore, relativistic speed attacks are fully detectable at interstellar distances. You would have years of warning before the attack arrives, you stupid little fucktard. Shut the hell up about things you don't know a goddamn thing about. This is a sci-fi thread, not "MUH REALISM" thread. If you want "MUH REALISM" there will never be space wars ever in real life, congratulations you stupid shit-spewing mouth hole.

>>96502373 (OP)
Halo sidelines space combat because most of the battles are overwhelmingly lost by humans even with extreme numerical advantage which is the most credible outcome.
It featurea ground combat only while the alien side is looking for religious artifacts, as soon as they are done they glass the planet with the alreadyentioned spaceships.
You basically get to play super soldiers that are the exception, during exceptional instances of the war.

>>96511112
You're a fucking retarded nigger who doesn't understand mutually assured destruction scales up with technological progress.

>>96513057
>actual futuristic space warfare
is not the same as
>realistic space warfare
The words "space warfare" are themselves unrealistic because realistically speaking, we will never even colonize the moon let alone Mars, let alone engage in actual combat in space except at the humanoid level at best.

>space combat
You spot the exhaust trail of a starship 3000 miles away. Given the scale of it, it's probably already spotted you as well. This doesn't match any known scheduled routes for your allies, so your ship's AI launches a constant stream of debris at near light speed in the predicted direction of the suspected enemy and start up the point-defense laser weapons. The enemy's debris stream arrives at about the same time. At some point, one of your point defense systems suffers a brief dip in power, allowing a fragment of dust to slip past and puncture a hole in the hull of your ship. The hole rips open wide as an explosive decompression takes place. This sets off a chain reaction as power is diverted to try to seal off the damaged area, causing more power dips and more of the same to happen. You are dead before you know what's happening.

>>96505680
With realistic rockets space is neither 2d nor 3d. It's 1d. Orbits are like train tracks

>>96513128
Through Struggle, the Stars by John Lumpkin is excellent. It pairs well with the Autumn Rain trilogy by David J. Williams, which is a similar setting and feel, less realistic, but based around a single planet instead of wormhole-enabled colonies.

>>96502373 (OP)
Because most people like it when our toy soldiers start punching the shit out of eachother. It’s not that hard.

On the other hand, there’s games that do focus on naval combat but the group that’s souly focused on that is a very small percentage of gamers.

>>96503317
Wicked art

>>96513128
>>96518294
Nice, thank you

>>96516389
Magic is inherently supernatural, therefore beyond nature.

>>96511715
>Magic is a natural part of a lot of fantasy settings
No, it isn't.
In order to be magic, it has to be supernatural or unnatural to its world.

>>96511825
Tell us how they represent the science of our world to a plausible degree, then.
Tell us how they don't actually have any impossible or improbable aspects to them.

>>96519507
>Unnatural

This is such a strange idea. It being "unnatural" in regards to ones understanding of how things work is one thing but the idea of it being something completely seperate will never make sense beyond people getting way too deep into the idea.

Just like the idea of "alien" aliens being beyond the ability to recognize, understand, or comprehend.

It takes a lot of care and effort to make spaceship combat interesting on screen (thus why only top tier shows like BSG and Expanse do it often)

Easier to slap some dudes running around with laser guns into a scene. Probably on the wallet too.

>>96519507
Literally is, according to the settings and authors themselves.
Sorry autismo, you’re not winning this one. Decades of fiction contradicts your weird autistic screeching.

>>96517986
I hear you, anon. I really wanted to pick up AV:T but my gaming club weren't interested. Wouldn't even compromise on SS - they're more interested in Star Wars dogfights, and still regularly play X-Wing. Which is okay if you like that kind of thing, but I'm an unashamed hard sf enjoyer.

And you're right - it might actually be more accessible to normies as viyda, too. Good luck developing your own game, hope we see it here as a homebrew at some point (or that you can make money off it, if that's what you're inclined to)

>>96505680
There's this amateur CGI animated series https://www.youtube.com/@realfrost401
and, yeah
>>96505815
+1 for Atomic Rockets. It's a fantastic read

>>96503604
>citing 40K when you want to cry about the unrealism of scifi
Really? You could've gone with literally any scifi setting that DOESN'T run on spooky magic and gothic vibes. Literally any example would've been better, even Star Wars despite being similarly fantasy before scifi.

>>96513128
The Expanse can't be realistic because of the retarded torch drives but realistic enough

>>96502373 (OP)
Probably because space combat runs into one of three problems in almost every scifi TRPG.
>only one character matters when the space combat is involved and everyone else is stuck twiddling their thumbs
>everyone gets their own fighter and now everyone is essentially tracking two different characters
>the space combat is so abstracted as to be unengaging
The biggest problem is when most people are just wanting to go on planetside adventures, no matter what solution you come up with ends up just as an obstacle to get back to the "fun" part of the game. It's the same reason people rarely like boat combat in fantasy games.

And if you're referring to wargames, it's because it's easier to get people excited over cool looking scifi troops than cool looking scifi ships. Again, it's why there's far more fantasy ground battle wargames than fantasy naval battle wargames.

This is all pretty obvious, I don't understand why it's so hard for you to comprehend.

>>96512109
Are "low" and "high" orbital maps?
The idea of a map being laid out base on sensor ranges and being able to outrun your own sensors is interesting, especially for a space knights setting. It makes for some exciting battles in planetary rings, orbital debris fields and similar.
Crew/player actions should have those kinds of direct impacts, especially in dangerous situations.
>layout
Scribus is your friend, or LaTEX. Scribus is free, OSS, and easy enough to use. Otherwise, InDesign and pay a graphic designer to do it.
>shitbrew space combat
One of the things I'm trying to simulate is combining fantasy like jammers, mages and psionics with warp, high energy (Expanse-ish) and contemporary styles of space flight. All styled in a kind of Extreme Modernism. It makes sense in-world.
I'm still working out the rough edges of space combat but I know it's going to use a quad-view map for orbital combat:
>orbital track (pic rel)
>a wide maneuver hex map, 1-5000 miles for fleets, capital ships
>altitude and velocity tracker
>ship's exclusion zone (50 miles) map because fighters and ship's launches, drones, barriers and boardings are common. Altitude measures with both orbit shifting based on velocity and a major danger in deorbiting.
Orbital battles can take place broadly (mines, missiles, beam weapons) and at ridiculous crossing velocities on the maneuver map, or relatively close, trading fire. This can also be used to account for both ground fire and from higher altitudes like geostationary.
Capital ships on similar orbital tracks can trade fire or close to maneuvering range.
>>96510434
>Combine the first two for peak space combat
Sailing fleets, daring aces and silent killers lurking in the Dark. It really is peak.

>>96519499
>plutonium is inherently supernatural, therefore beyond nature

>>96502373 (OP)
Homeworld directly shows why. To have a good story on Space Combat, you need to use the ships as characters with the voiced characters being the representatives of different factions.

However, this is an uncommon style of storytelling and people easily latch onto individuals that can result in a narrative takeover, as seen with that series drifting away from that style. Additionally, if you are making there be any form of interaction like a game, the only style that really consistently fits are strategy games or occassional flight sims. By contrast, you can do those and far more genres as well with ground warfare.

Question:
In a realistic space combat scenario, if one of the ships keeps accelerating, do relativistic effects kick in? If so, how do you depict this - does the faster-moving ship get fewer turns per round, to reflect that time on board that ship is moving more slowly than for an observer which is static relative to the nearest stellar mass?

an intersection of both space and ground combat is in-colony combat
I do have issues with how it's handled (not at all) in media. Don't get me wrong, I fucking love Gundam, but bullets ought to be going picrel trajectories withing spinning oneill cylinders, but in-colony fight scenes never account for the Coriolis effect.
Bullets just seem to act independently of the inertial frame of reference in shows.
Maybe its just that the spin of a space colony is slow enough, and projectiles fast enough, and the radius of the colony big enough that it would be negligible or something, but idk.
An O'Neill habitat with a diameter of 6.4 km, generating 1g of centripetal force by rotation, so it would have a tangential speed of 400 miles/hr right?

>>96524322
Juggling, magic acts and ball sports are going to be so much fun, bros.
>>96524193
That's some crazy hard accelleration, depending on the duration of a round/turn in the game.

Friendly reminder that at distances around a light second or longer ship mounted lasers and UREBS and super powerful kinetics (lol) fail to be accurate due to just jitter. Yeah making a deadly laser and powering it for that kind of range is already hard, but keeping it on target becomes a source of handwavium as well. Volley fire with LoGH at ranges past this is weirdly accurate for this.

>>96506794
Option C. Everyone is a pilot

Just do orbital warfare instead of retardmaxxing powerlevels supertech space warfare. You sort of get a dynamic like surface to ground warfare (meaning, fighter jets), and cam even try and scramble your own rockets to engage in orbit as well. Very sensible. Scope is comprehensible.
>>96524193
Only memedrives would be speeding up that fast so it doesn't matter. Even at constant 1g it takes 85 hours to hit 0.01c. If you go all in on memedrives and gravity control and shit, relativistic effects kick in around 0.1c though. Try reading The Lost Fleet for space combat specifically about relativistic memedrive ships fighting each other.

>>96502373 (OP)
>CE did an awesome reveal where Chief is a several million year old space alien who was with Spark when the Rings blew everyone up
>all later games had everyone forget this massive interesting plot point about Mark IV cyborgs being possible aliens made into human slaves
Why Bungie? Why do you exist to disappoint me?

>>96520551
Thanks for the support :D Hopefully you'll see it soon here.I try to sneak in a truly preposterous amount of hard sf in a space fantasy package.

>>96523664
High and low are relative to the galactic plane, but around a planet, low is orbital. For those maps, the optimal sine wave paths are represented by combining squares in a grid together (and adding a little bit of curvature), so that it just seems obvious to the player rather than requiring proper computation. For situations that properly require additional altitudes, it would make sense to go from 3 maps to 5. I'm interested in seeing your system come to life also. Make it happen :D

>>96528152
>For situations that properly require additional altitudes, it would make sense to go from 3 maps to 5. I'm interested in seeing your system come to life also.
>Make it happen :D
Working on it. Stay tuned for playtesting opportunities.
I love the idea of TTRPG/wargame with a curved ship's view map.

>>96526452
How the heel did you come up with that over "humans are fore dweller descendants" ?

Not that they ended up using that, either.

>>96522067
the Epstein drive is the one thing in the Expanse (aside from the alien stuff) that stretches into unrealistic sci-fi magic technology, but it's the one thing that makes the entire setting and story even possible. So it's reasonably realistic beyond the aliens and the epstein drive.
>>96518294
Is "Desert of Stars" also worth the read? I enjoyed Through Struggle but haven't gotten around to the second one yet.

>>96505578
>I've assumed larger ships, even capital ships, but you could play with everyone as a fighter pilot or whatever.

Which is kind of what space based Mecha games assume. 1 PC (or an NPC) controls the carrier while the rest of the PCs get their own personal vehicle/mech.

>>96522071
>only one character matters when the space combat is involved and everyone else is stuck twiddling their thumbs

This is usual an issue of class or character design rules badly siloing space combat capabilities. Usually the space combat character ends up being practically useless outside space combat so ends up twiddling their thumbs when ever anything else is happening.

>everyone gets their own fighter and now everyone is essentially tracking two different characters

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The key point to having players fully committed to the buy in of both sides.

>>96531750
>This is usual an issue of class or character design rules badly siloing space combat capabilities.
It happens because players usually have one big ship because flying around in 4-6 fighters doesn't really make any goddamn sense. Try playing these games sometime retard.

>>96531802
Not just that. Take for example games like Star Wars Saga edition. Many games pretty much lock space combat viability to those with pilot (prestige) classes. In Saga edition if you are not a Spacer Scoundrel or are going for the Ace Pilot prestige class you should stay out of space combat. It is likely not even worth it to man an empty gun turret because you will spend most of the time missing rather than helping out at all.

No, it's literally just that, what you're describing is irrelevant dumbass

>>96502373 (OP)
There are a few settings with loads of space combat, but they're mostly pulpy military scifi.
Most notably (probably) Honor Harrington and Blackjack Geary
And none of them are terribly hard scifi because if you do not include some sort of (semi)inertialess drive it will just be horribly boring.
If you want a game that actually simulates this, there is Attack Vector: Tactical and its HH variant Saganami Island Tactical Simulator.

There are many 'naval battle but in spaaaace' options, I trust you guys can find thosee. If not, call me a faggot and tell me which ones are actually good.

Both are complex, and I really think they need a vidya adaptation to shine.
And as far as vidya goes, there is Children of a Dead Earth, but that almost requires autism to really dig into.

>>96525056
Absolutely true. In any real system, there will be vibrations. Either from nearby machinery, people walking around, being buffeted by wind, distant traffic, or any number of other sources. Even just the ambient temperature of the environment can lead to unavoidable thermal motion. These vibrations will be transmitted to your beam pointer, and cause the beam to jitter slightly. This will make it harder to keep your beam at one spot on your target. In extreme cases (like long range shooting in space) it might make it uncertain that you can hit your target at all.

As your focusing ability becomes better and better, probably by going far into the ultraviolet or x-ray parts of the spectrum to limit diffraction or using low emittance particle beams, it becomes harder and harder to correct for the jitter relative to the ideal focused spot size. A long range beam may just have to deal with its focused spot of destruction wandering randomly around on its target - or, for very long ranges, wandering randomly around in the space near its target, hoping to trace across it at some point. Oh course when you get hit by enemy weapons, or even warmed up lightly by them you get thermal expansion and even more jitter.

The Hubble Space Telescope experiences vibrations in its solar panels when it rotates, leading to about 50 microradians of jitter which requires about 100 seconds before normal operations can resume. And properly functioning Hubble has precision of 24cm at 1,000km (telescopes are inverse lasers) with a 2.4m sized mirror. Test case laser of the same size, 600 MW at 1080nm, gonna be similarly (not exactly) limited.

Ultra long range lasers need to be big SUPER stationary fully automatic platforms to work at all, and even then are a massive headache at just at 1 light second, so much so that you'd only maybe bother using them as "coastal guns" for defense as missiles or enemies were incoming.

>>96533700
Excellent post. Two possible solutions to that.
>Arced Directed Ionizing Radiation
For lasers, a space-friendly version of the gyroscopic INS systems currently used in aircraft and ballistic missiles. I have a feeling that the best way to improve performance would be to have the beam trace/sweep a small arc instead of attempting to hold it at a specific point (which is, for all the reasons listed in the previous post, unfeasible). This necessarily would inform the characteristics of the laser itself, pushing us away from time-on-target dependent directed energy systems like microwave and IR and probably into directed ionizing radiation. There's an interesting synergy there with antimatter drives, which notoriously produce a ludicrous amount of high-energy gamma radiation; it would seem at least theoretically possible to focus and weaponize the waste gamma radiation instead of simply sinking it into space.

>Kinetic
Of course, there's no reason why we can't simply launch kinetics from the spacecraft in the general direction of the target and allow onboard projectile attitude control to take care of dialing into the target. What's fun about this option from a /tg/ perspective is that our ship's gunner is still "aiming" in the general direction of the target, but the to-hit roll would not represents him performing sniper shots at astronomical distances; it would represent him getting the timing and angle of the shot close enough for the onboard missiles to reach their target. I imagine it being not too different from Legend of Dragoon's combat system, if anyone remembers timing the rotating squares to complete attack chains.

>>96534124
Missiles and drone rockets are arguably king for any long distance engagement but your turns need to be measured in shifts/watches at that point.

>>96534188
Missiles suffer a long range problem too. The further away they're launched from, the more time a defending laser has to zap their numbers down in the outr ring of defense. Going 20km/s at 1000km gives a laser 45 seconds of shooting before they hit the 100km mark, and a Hubble class accuracy pumping out 50MW means effectively tank cannon levels of firepower that never miss.

Then you can carry a pod of mini missiles to hedge against leakers and salvo attacks in the inner ring of defense.

IMO missiles seem to be the cheap, dirty, surprise-dependent close range weapon and lasers are the expensive upfront cost but more generally useful weapon.

>>96531735
>the Epstein drive is the one thing in the Expanse (aside from the alien stuff) that stretches into unrealistic sci-fi magic technology, but it's the one thing that makes the entire setting and story even possible. So it's reasonably realistic beyond the aliens and the epstein drive.
You're already making up enough excuses for the Expanse that it borders on parody. It's only realistic if you have shit for brains. Truly realistic sci-fi is that humanity never leaves Earth, never develops technology significantly better than what we currently have because we're already reaching the limits of human cognitation and memory in almost all scientific fields.

>>96534294
You use multiple missiles? The damage from the laser takes time, if you have 45 seconds of practical interception time you beat it by having more missiles and complicate the issue of being on target with the defenses. Simple math, if the enemy's lasers are effective for 45 seconds (our test case) and the missiles each take 5 seconds to target, then mission kill, you only need 10 missiles to get mission kill on the target. This is a VERY simplified example, and we are setting aside the economics of missiles vs lasers just to make the point that "big laser does not equal I win".

Laser CIWS is worse than firing interceptors which can engage from much further away. Defense is not a situation where you can just say "we built the silver bullet gun, so now defense is easy". You would engage with multiple layers of defense. But our test case hubble size laser can still engage only reliably at "only" 1000km or so, and we want to be able to engage longer than that, so missiles it is. And having drones with smaller lasers launched 1000km ahead of you extends your intercept as well, an extra 300km is several more seconds!

I don't think this is controversial. Obviously you get a complex mix with multiple layers of offense and defense.

>>96534330
>You use multiple missiles
Yes, that's the problem I'm highlighting. It's harder to add more missiles to the total system than add more laser range and power. Lasers scale up much faster than rocket engines pushing mass. So the missile meta is using peacetime to smuggle missiles inside the laser range.

Your intuitions are also quite off. 5 seconds per modestly carbon-armored missile is wild. Think more in the range of 0.1 seconds per missile.

>>96534358
Anon they aren't gonna just NOT also fire missiles. Do you really want laserstars inching towards each other until the guy who could afford the biggest laser gets the other guy in range first and kills him? Missiles, missiles bearing kinetic scattering payloads, casaba howitzers, heat management on lasers meaning that the more you shoot the less accurate you become, the potential for macron cannons to be shooting you invisibly, do we not want to make this space combat more interesting and not less?

Relatively close ranges (couple thousand km) and jousts of multiple clashing layers of offense and defense is obviously better for a game and isn't even impracticable for a physics, engineering, and military doctrine perspective. Your other option is going all in on UREBs and magnetic deflection with huge swarms of ships acting like line infantry, massive missile boats acting like artillery, and drones being "cavalry" for a recreation of Napoleonics I suppose. But lasers and missiles is fun!

Isn't that what this is about? Finding a reasonable "tough" mix of technology that allows a fun game?

>>96502373 (OP)
Most scifi doesn't center on full scale military action. Any conflict is more about the small scale skirmish or even one-on-one fighting that would arise out of more personal conflicts rather than aggression of state. I'll focus the rest of my answer to actual military conflict scifi.
In most video type media, actors in suits are much cheaper than building big ship models and even cheaper than replacing models after destroying them for action scenes.
A lot of novels feature naval warfare in space. I would say that you could spend a decade trying to read all of those. However, it's hard to personalize the conflict of two ship captains (let alone fleets) than it is two combatant on foot.
In gaming, capital ship warfare games just don't do as well. Here's the titles I know: Starfleet Battles, Renegade Legion Leviathan, Star Wars Armada, WH 40K Battlefleet Gothic, Battlefront Valkyrie, 5150, Starmada, and Colonial Battlefleet. How many times have you seen these being played? Pivoting to TTRPGs, ship to ship combat always sucks. The best RPG space combat system was in the FASA Star Trek and even that was weak.
In the end, naval combat in space is a really cool concept but difficult to focus on. I still want it there but it will largely be a set piece rather than a focus of game play most of the time.

>>96503118
The webcomic Runaway to the Stars falls under the third.

>>96534400
>want
My guy I'm describing physics not playstyles. If you want a soft slop game I'm not a cop, but if you claim realism don't get angry when basic realism is brought up.

>>96534792
This is aggressively gay and liberal. Like, complete "heteronormative erasure".

>>96534830
So what, your be-all-end-all is lasers at the absolute physical limit of what can be done to accommodate for jitter and other physical limits inching into range and... killing each other on a coinflip? And no other technology is allowed? What is the point of this? This isn't physics, this is just you not following through.

>>96534886
Ironically it's likeable because the non-heteronormative aliens are truly alien - and monsters:
>infanticidal anti-vegans
>promiscuous imperialists
>literally the-needs-of-the-many-outweigh-the-needs-of-the-few who procreate like viruses
The biotech sea lice haven't made an appearance yet.

>>96534950
The humans include a disabled obese mute lesbian catgirl, a lesbian space moslem, and some kind of bearded non-gender conforming boss manlady thing.

>>96534964
Like seriously. This is just as much on their sleeve as a guy salivating over aryan space hitler ethnically cleansing the unclean untermensch from pure Gaia before waging war among the stars.

>>96534964
It's funny because the reason why the catgirl is disabled and the space monkey is autistic is they're designer babies.
>>96534986
I like it because it's obvious.

>>96505680
CJ Cherryh is the author you're looking for. Her Alliance/Union series depicts exactly why space warfare is pants-shitting-fear and boredom.

>>96512736
>Perry Rhodan
Thanks for reminding me to finally read volume 6. I still have more than a hundred to go.

I wish our real Moon landing had been as unhinged as Perry "Mind Control is not yet a war crime" Rhodan's.
We need more advanced sci-fi civilizations with analog computers and ticker tape.

Also, realistic space combat sucks and more space games should have terrain in space. Dogfights in empty space suck ass.

>>96535019
>I wish our real Moon landing had been as unhinged as Perry "Mind Control is not yet a war crime" Rhodan's.
How was it?

>>96534903
That's the bottom end of lasers, dummy. Imagine laserstars with 10m mirrors and gigawatt outputs as the middle. Then towards the higher end, mirror networks throughout the solar system for transport whose military purposes are more of a side effect of cheap travel; like navies and commercial shipping fleets. Instead of isolated frontier colonies on Neptune colonists will be able to order Amazon Prime Space Edition and get parcels delivered in a blaze of plasma as lasers turn ice to reaction mass.

Sure you can have other weapons. Militaries do that today. They have microwave guns, jammers, batons, nukes...but face it, 99% of the fighting gets done with a single weapon class of explosives, gunpowder, and hydrocarbons.

>>96535041
Main character does the first Moon landing during the cold war, finds an alien space ship there, takes all of the mind control rays and then fucks off to Nevada and builds a city within a shield sphere to end the Cold War through superior firepower. He gets supplies and funds by mind controlling innocents and causing implied tragedies that no one cares about.
The space ship was manned, by the way, but the aliens put up no resistance to his plans because their species spent too much time playing videogames and has become uninterested in existing. Please note that this was written in 1961, before videogames were even a thing.

Later on he recruits the entirety of all espers across the planet, defeats some kind of shadowy esper mastermind and flies off into space to meet the creators of the space ship and steal their tech.
He also encounters a bored ascended entity, which grants him immortality as long as he continues being interesting.

This is four or so books in. There's more than 150 currently. She story is still ongoing.
Apparently later on the main characters ascend into a hivemind or something.

>>96503317
"Lost Fleet" is kinda that. Combat is absolutely brutal, with ships going at a good chunk of the speed of light and wrecking each other with kinetic and energy weapons.
>>96509359
Personally I was always more of a fan of how Crest of the Stars presents space combat. Author is also more of an autist than LoGH one - he actually made a whole artificial language for his books and carefully crafted all the tech. The only really impossible thing is FTL drive if I remember right. Every other weapon and technology is at least theoretically possible.

>>96535214
Lafier's books also have gravity control technology and use positron beams as standard weaponry on ships. Also Crest's realspace combat is relatively sparse, it's mostly all 2D with a fuckload of complications because they do it in the subspace.

>>96535236
>Lafier's books also have gravity control technology and use positron beams as standard weaponry on ships.
Ohh, so they do get gravity control? I don't think it was a thing in the first books.

As for positron beams there is nothing really impossible about them. Very much impractical, but not impossible as far as our current science goes.

>>96535266
True, they are just kinda pointless compared to UREBs which are simpler and pack just a much a punch. Kinda like how they are super big on antimatter fuel which is fucking terrifying as a prospect for logistics, you can literally never make that shit safe.

As for the gravity control, they stand on ships perpendicular to the direction of thrust and the first trilogy has hovercraft, so I don't think they ever out and directly say it's antigravity it's hard to come up with another explanation. Also for some reason they greatly oversell the thrust the ships can do with AM-catalyzed fusion, so presumably the gravity control is... helping? get the speeds reported. It's definitely one of my favourite series of all time though, the Abh are the kindest and most fair tyrants in history. 10/10 would join the Abh Empire.

>>96535289
>Kinda like how they are super big on antimatter fuel which is fucking terrifying as a prospect for logistics, you can literally never make that shit safe.
Hey, at least it's not Eclipse Phase where authors insist that a ship that is 70+% container for anti-matter by volume is somehow practical as a combat platform. In the same setting that has miniature fusion reactors.

>>96535349
>a ship that is 70+% container for anti-matter by volume
Jesus Christ.

>>96535349
I mean... What if the vessel is used by a race of antimatter beings to wage war against us baryonics?

>>96535289
>>96535349
Antimatter is such dogshit, who do I blame for this? Star Trek?
Even TEMU-ass positive coefficient fission reactors are safer than sitting on fucking FUEL TANKS of antihydrogen snowballs. What, too hipster to use water for your reaction mass? It's too fucking "safe" or whatever for you? Not to mention direct AM annihilation drives have insane radiation problems that make fusion and fission look like a Sunday stroll.

This kind of AM-drive is fine though I guess. Sidesteps most of the spookiness in exchange for handwavium and "idk maybe"-tier science.

>>96535485
Star Trek uses dilithium, aka handwavium, to regulate and stabilize its matter-antimatter reactions. Pretty much all sci-fi reactors like this will require an element like that to make it make sense. It's a pipe dream that we'll ever use antimatter for power in reality, since
>producing antimatter is incredibly inefficient and we have no way of storing it long-term. These are not problems that there are any reasonable solutions to.
>it takes 10,000 times more energy to create a few atoms of antihydrogen than using them as fuel would release. So we can't create it efficiently, we can't store it for any length of time to be useful, and we have to invest so much power to create a few specks of it that it's nothing but a tremendous waste of our reserves

>>96502505
>Because it's hard to make space combat exciting without taking extreme liberties with the "science" part of your science fiction. At least with ground combat, you can pretend that individual effort can make a difference and have stories with characters and personal drama and challenges to overcome.
Dumb take because most people don't care about realism and will accept air and naval combat in space

>>96535514
The difficulty of producing antimatter are totally irrelevant compared to containment lmao. I simply don't want to sit on a bomb that could go off if someone sneezes the wrong way around it. Pretty sure nobody ever wants to. Containment is a real problem, unless you enjoy being scattered across the solar system. Even if you COULD produce bountiful harvests of antimatter, it's still spooky as shit to be within a million miles of.

>>96535124
>Please note that this was written in 1961, before videogames were even a thing.
Neat.

>>96535538
>I simply don't want to sit on a bomb that could go off if someone sneezes the wrong way around it. Pretty sure nobody ever wants to.
Anon does not understand the dangers of automotives.

>>96535571
Gasoline is nowhere even in the same magnitude as antimatter. It is extremely fucking stable and safe. I can hand a jerry can full of it to a child and tell them to fill up a lawnmower with it and not be worried.
Lithium batteries aren't much worse despite their bad rap for exploding when punctured.

You do not have a shred of a chance with antimatter containment failure. Fractions of an instant of failure is instant, certain death. There is no way to make the "fuck everything" atoms safer. There is an acceptable level of spiciness. Even fission reactors are several orders of magnitude safer than antimatter. And most people are (needlessly) spooked about that. I can shoot gasoline with a gun a thousand times and it will never go up in flames.
Gasoline is arguably safer to handle than a literal horse.

>>96535594
>It is extremely fucking stable and safe
Gasoline has a flash point of -45f. You are retarded.

>>96535538
>The difficulty of producing antimatter are totally irrelevant compared to containment lmao.
Solar power is easy to produce, storing that power is another problem entirely. The inability to contain antimatter is simultaneously an inability to store it. There's no point in producing a fuel source you can't actually move around or keep. There's the secondary issue that antimatter containment involving electromagnetic fields would mean spending even more energy to contain them. The risk of containment breaching and causing a disaster is a tertiary concern.

>>96535538
>I simply don't want to sit on a bomb that could go off if someone sneezes the wrong way around it.

>>96535571
>Anon does not understand the dangers of automotives.

Anon also does not understand 20th century rocket launches. For what were those early ventures into orbit, if not one to three men strapping themselves to an enormous firework and trusting that it wouldn't experience "rapid unscheduled disassembly" (thanks for that wonderful phrase, Elon) due to a runaway exothermic reaction or a containment failure.

>>96535633
You are trolling. I know this, because you are acting as if a class 2 flammable liquid is remotely comparable to antimatter. That it is even notably risky to handle. A liquid that can be stored in any solid vessel of any material, be spilled on your skin, have its fumes inhales, get into an open wound, be shot, stabbed, dropped, and not kill you as being comparable to that at all. That this is comparable at all to antimatter. That this is even dangerous compared to other common chemicals like bleach, lye, ammonia, or muriatic acid. You would not insist this, especially as an argument for "actually the risk profile of antimatter propulsion is fine, we already use ICE engines and gasoline so this the same thing".
>>96535946
You on the other hand are a certified moron. Kill yourself.

>>96535985
>You are trolling.
t. Subhuman retard who thinks gasoline is "extremely safe"

>>96536004
t. subhuman retard who is unable to conceptualize risk

t. Subhuman retard who lost the argument

t. phoneposter

nope, you lose

if saying something made it so you'd actually be a woman. not the case unfortunately.

seething transnigger lol

seething pagpag eater lol

>>96535538
>antimatter sucks because it's expensive! no, because it's dangerous!
Observe this real life picture how to reliably (yes it's still fail-deadly) store and use antimatter, designed by physics PhDs and professional engineers for the American military. Positrons are stored in an electric ring 18" wide and shot into a tungsten target to power a ramjet.

Antimatter is energy dense. You can fly a global air combat drone around the globe perpetually at supersonic speeds without refueling, and it'll be compact enough to fit in the back of a pickup the rest of the time. Reduce the fuel load to a week or so and it's not even worse than a passenger airliner flying into a building!

You store it the same way nuclear submarines get stored: eternal patrol. The antimatter doubles as a weapon. Squirt some into a missile and launch that or use it as the self-collimating lasing medium for a gamma ray laser.

>>96536640
neat, too bad it doesn't work

>>96536692
You can stop manually breathing.

Physics works. There was no economic point building it in 1990s America when manufacturing antimatter would have been expensive, but we now know antimatter factories (as opposed to antimatter spinoffs from science projects) are cheaper than people used to think. In a scifi setting where they could be mass produced antimatter power makes some sense. Beam core antimatter engines are one of the only realistic approaches for interstellar travel.

>>96536746
Yeah buddy sure, the antimatter drones are being used right now we just can't see them lol

>>96536755
I see, you're pathologically incapable of having a nice conversation. Go away or stop shitting up the board.

>>96536784
I see you're a schizo

>>96536784
>entertain my delusions or else!!!!
Lmao nigga you thought they actually made the shit in your dumb images

>>96502373 (OP)
Because of the fact that getting shot down in space means instant death for a character in most cases, and that's not fun unless you're either an extreme sadist (GM) or extreme masochist (Player). It's hard to make space combat satisfying as a result, whereas in ground combat there's usually some chance to save an injured or dying character which means your players aren't rolling up a new character every 5 minutes because oops they rolled like shit and their ship exploded and their PC died (anyone who says they enjoy meat grinders is, again, a Sadist GM, Masochist Player, or lying because at that point you aren't playing the game, you're just going through chargen and if that's your favorite part of TTRPGs then this hobby isn't for you).

Space combat is much better suited to wargames, where there is little to no actual emergent narrative, where it's just faceless units rolling buckets of dice against each other until one player wins.

>>96503031
With you? Fuck no. I don't tolerate engineers or any other sort of person with a math-focused mindset or career at my tables specifically because your flavor of autism inevitably turns every game into "This is how it would work IRL with IRL physics ergo I should be able to do it in the game even though this game is not the real world with the real world's laws and physics" and that is not an argument I want to have every 5 minutes when your autistic ass comes up with some new way to create a rube goldberg machine to kill the boss.

>>96536640
yes I am sure you are firuing superpositoric ranjeets to tumgen

>>96537537
...so just don't let the blown up characters die die? Digitized mind backups get booted up or whatever. Technobabble resurrection spell. Nanomachines, son.

>>96537968
BUT THEN IT ISNT SCIENCE ITS LE FANTASY the autists will cry.

>>96537551
I've only ever encountered this mindset as parody, and never actually in the wild from an actual person. You heard him, boys. Time to pack it up. Nerds are no longer welcome in gaming. Out of curiosity, what are some personas that are welcome at your table?

>>96513128
>Through Struggle, the Stars
That was such a fun series, a shame the author stopped writing to focus on video game development instead.

>>96502481
What space combat game captured the feel of LOGH the most?

>>96537991
Digitized minds are more realistic than FTL.

>>96541115
Not really. Digitized mind is a completely asinine and retarded concept that requires you to be a complete wanker with no regard for the realities of digital technology to work.
They are always treated like beings stuck in a machine, never as the flimsy and likely imperfect simulations that they are. And don't get me started on the concept of jumping substrates or the general treatment of locationality of a digitized mind.

In fact, any kind of sci-fi setting that involes hacking or mind uploads is almost guaranteed to effectively have magic as a cornerstone of the setting.

>>96541532
Uploaded minds are improbable, but they aren't proven physically impossible. FTL is.

That's where the anti-transhumanist cope comes from. Games like Traveler have retarded anti-physics gimmicks but to the average normie, that's a good thing! Some people want to play recognizable humans more than a setting with recognizable physical reality, and since their instincts revolve around social patterns more than physical laws, it feels more natural to ignore physics than social assumptions. So we get games that are basically the 1950s coastal merchant-freighter in space; with "spaceships" that work like small diesel cargo ships and "FTL comms" which are radio or telegrams.

It's ironic; because centuries before humanity will ever be able to 'upload' into simulated realities people are doing the equivalent in our simulated realities! People would rather hide from physics than accept it.

>>96526452
>>96531451
CE was conceived of as a Marathon Spinoff with Chief being another instance of (you) in a new cycle like the Security Officer was previously, but broke away from that over development and became its own thing.
Anyways there was never any intention of Chief being an alien just like how the Security Officer wasn't.

>>96519507
That means ‘magic’ can never actually exist in any setting, because anything that actually exists is by definition natural. ‘Supernatural’ things, as in ‘things disallowed by the physical laws of that setting’ would never come about in any way.

>>96543547
The easy divider generalized is to consider magic as things beyond the common conception of material realty as we currently understand it in our world.
So the grass growing because of soil nutrients and photosynthesis is natural because it is a shared trait with our understanding of reality but the grass growing because there is a world soul that actively powers its growth becomes magic.
Its completely non-diegetic within any setting itself, but its a assumption of fiction born out of millennia of cultural shorthand to which trying to push against is a waste of time.

>>96502921
Most sci-fi is just fantasy with spaceships and guns.

>>96538408
>Nerds are no longer welcome in gaming
honestly I wish this were the case. Nerds are faggots completely at odds with the core concept of the hobby (Socializing), and with so little real life experience they can't do anything but imitate slop fiction or go "But this isn't like what I read on reddit!"

>>96541727
>but they aren't proven physically impossible. FTL is.
It's theoretical physics not proven physics LMAO

>>96503118
Gundam (especially Universal Century) is also not only a solid example of the WW2/Cold War flavor of space combat but also gives a really good explanation as to why they don’t dive straight to Modern style (or rather how they regressed back to the former), as advancements in active and passive jamming of missile tracking systems makes translating modern naval combat to space impossible

>>96547590
Nah, Gundam is fucking retarded in almost all iterations. It's a fractal of retardation.
I still love it, but the entire franchise is complete wankery. The "real robot" name is a complete farce and only works as a contrast to, say, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.

UC Gundam is basically Samurai dogfighting in the heavens. The mobile suits are treated like fighter planes with infinite missiles and bombs and the space ships like carriers without point defense. No, the no-hit special point defenses of your average UC Gundam cruiser do not count as point defense.
Seed Gundam is about Jesus interfering with somewhat more realistic naval-like battles by shooting everyone everywhere simultaneously nonlethally. Props for having anti-laser missiles.
00 Gundam is super prototypes built by the Illuminati gone wild. The one ship doesn't matter except as a resupply vehicle and the large opposing fleets with mobile suits and war ships especially don't matter. Having billions of bits was objectively the right design decision.
Wing is not a show. It's a stage play, following stage play logic. I don't remember it even having space battles.
IBO space combat is basically Mad Max with space ships. Ram your opponents, then jump on and board their ship.
At least they all got various flavors, I guess.

>>96546606
That is because sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and truly hard scifi can be pretty boring.

>>96502481
Does Battlefleet Gothic come close?
How about dropfleet commander?
>LOGH mentioned
Glad to know this place is still worth visiting.

>>96536784
NTA and not offence meant but you just told him >>96536746 to stop breathing so your not exactly capable of a nice conversation either

>>96502373 (OP)
Three reasons.

It's easier for people to understand what's going on. To be fair, space combat would be less like WW2 combat and more of shooting missles and drones at each other to take each other out. Maybe a Railgun or high power laser.

However if you trying to take a planet/moon/spacestation. You would want prefer to overwhelm and take over without glassing everything to the ground and having to rebuild.

>>96559652
The second reason would be for the story. It's more personal if they fighting more actively then just look at a screen and pushing buttons. Flying the fighter, shooting a gun, even shouting orders is better then just pushing a button and staring a screen to see if it worked.

>>96509359
webm unrelated?

>>96536640
dude... you're gonna burn more energy keeping this electromagnetic storage device running than you'll get out of the antimatter stored in it.

>>96559663
And the last one is good luck trying to think of new ways that would make people want to read or watch your story/setting that would be more realistic to the idea of future combat. Remember most people in a good army don't fight they are a support role. From repairing and mantaining weapons, ships, places, etc. To just delievering new supplies to the bases and troops on the front lines. Not every person in the military is in a combat role. Unless your in a 3rd world army or something. Most are just supporting the combat troops.

>>96547564
The core concept of the hobby is a bunch of nerds being awkward together for a couple hours, and not whatever the fuck you think the hobby is.

>>96548557
There's space battles in Wing, it's just a bunch of mobile dolls versus whoever was stuck in the Zero that week.

>>96547564
Is that all nerds or do you just hate Redditors? Which is fair enough.

>>96505680
>autism

You want the Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell.

We're talking no tactical FTL, communications or sensors - real time 4D fleet strategy manoeuvre fiction.

Interstellar FTL only works by flying out to the very edge of the star system. So you arrive at a star, see what the enemy was doing around the planet that matters three hours ago because that's the light that's reaching you, not what they're doing now.

Want to go fight them? Neat, enjoy the next few days or weeks of increasing your speed to reach the enemy. Also they've just seen you and now they're also increasing speed. When you meet you're going comparative fractions of C, the shots traded are all done by computer, the battle is over in less than a second and you shoot off away into the distance until you can both slow down, turn all your ships around and do it again. Also speeds that fast cause relativity problems so the higher the speed you were going the more likely your sensors and automated systems fucked up and didn't hit the enemy ships. Because you might have two hundred ships but they're still in space distances apart and if you stood on the hull and looked for anyone else you'd not be able to see them even if you were surrounded.

Characters in general can be a bit cringe, but the plot and world is not bad. Humanity has colonized worlds and split into the normal space USA and a sort of so-capitalist-we-went-Soviet Syndics.

The story is the Space-USA's fleet is going to finally end a 100 year war with a clever sneak attack! And fate is clearly shining on them, sneaking through enemy space they discover the lost escape pod of the famous Captain Jack Geary - HERO OF THE FEDERATION - himself! The legend who chewed iron and shat bullets, genius strategist who's skill was unmatched, who fought off the first attack a 100 years ago with one wave of his massive schlong and saved his crew before - everyone believed - dying heroically. Truly we are blessed!

CONT

>>96560779
Except something fucks up and it was actually a trap, the space USA fleet is fucked. But at least they have Captain Geary himself to save them! Except... he is just a normal guy, a lieutenant on a small and pretty inconsequential ship that just happened to be one of the first attacked and who was posthumously promoted and every aspect exaggerated and basically turned into a ridiculous legend for morale.

But the war has been going on so long and has been so horrifically wasteful that society itself has regressed. The ships are held together by duct-tape and no one expects them to last more than months. Theyre staffed by the barely trained and use no strategy more complicated than flying into the enemy and firing: anything more is regarded with suspicion of cowardice since the propaganda says bravery is all you need! Just because actually 4D space combat is actually hard, and all the people who were good enough to train anyone died ages ago.

Meanwhile the good-guys are now only good in comparison - mass murder of civilians and war crimes are all over the place. And Captain Geary is almost a religious figure, people literally swear by him and even those that don't expect he'll probably carry out a coup of the Space-USA government when he gets back to space and doubt anyone would bother to stop him. A hundred years of war has has turned the place into a near police state.

This all turns into a large fish in a tiny pond situation. By his own standards Geary is just a perhaps mildly above average career military man - competent and professional but little more. By the current time's standards he actually is a military genius just by merit of having actually having received *training*. He spends most of his time trying to convince his fleet captains not to just ram the enemy and that he's not a witch for knowing how to time actions over days or hours while fending off political power grabs because everyone wants to be the next junta.

>>96560783
He's not a genius: people in his own fleet are smarter than him. But they do not know what they are doing so the insane brave lunatics were in charge and anyone who wanted to use 'tactics' got humiliated into suicide like it's WW2 Japan and someone suggested not kamikaze-ing the enemy and using their guns instead.

And his ideas of things like 'lets not orbital strike any civilian population centres' or 'prisoners of war should not be summarily executed' come across as the behaviour of a saint instead of bottom of the barrel standards. Which reinforces his HERO OF THE FEDERATION reputation.

Geary is also an admiral and as such never leaves his ship or goes near a gun at any point like some kind of silly space hero. Though he does have marines and gets to watch the cameras they have strapped to their heads while trying to stop himself from micromanaging people in combat he isn't trained to know anything about.

All in all, 7/10 for normal scifi, 10/10 if you need complex fleet action literature because i've not read anything that does it better.

>>96502373 (OP)
Probably similar for same reasons we don't get any naval battles. Expensive, harder to do logistically the grande the scale, and accuracy bores a lot of some people for some reason.

>>96560798
I mean, you can get Star Fleet Battles and (almost) play Harpoon in space if you really want to.
Or AV:T, which tries to simulate 3D on the tabletop.

And for larger-scale naval battles, you can use Armada, Dropfleet Commander plus probably a bunch of others I forget right now.

>>96560779
>>96560783
>>96560790
> 10/10 if you need complex fleet action literature
It tickled my autism in just the right way. Good reads, and available as audiobooks for commutes etc.

>>96555412
Dropfleet commander is about as good as you're gonna get while ignoring the 40k ip if one wants to avoid it.

>Minimum spot diameter = 1.27 * distance * wavelength / lens diameter
>100nm wavelength, large as fuck 10cm spot size
>to be this focused at 1 light second requires a 380m lens
>roughly 10,000km only needs to be a "modest" 20m diameter (twice as large as Starship lol)
>2-3m you get 0.01 light seconds or so of distance for this spot size, which is probably the largest reasonable size for anything mounted on a vessel

Wow, I'm super scared of lasers bros, it's not like someone needs to spend years building an absolutely massive fuck off mirror at massive expense to have a setting ruining doomsday weapon they can't even move and needs massive support infrastructure to keep it safe from micrometeoroids it can hit just by staying on the same orbit forever.

>>96507491
I don't know what you call this art style but I fucking hate it.

>>96502481
>Only media I can name that REALLY did space combat right is the original legend of the galactic heroes anime.
You fucking drunk, it's 2D ancient warfare in SPACE.

>>96569527
I mean, near future/The Lunar War/hard as titanium type space battles are 1D so is that your complaint or do you operate under the delusion that space battles are 3D?

>>96569623
They're not really 1D, but I can see your point.

>>96519512
>Tell us how they represent the science of our world to a plausible degree, then.
SR pulling it's ideas of the Matrix from Neuromancer, which has increasingly become a predictive rather than imaginary, is more than enough.

>>96502481
>LOGH mentioned
They did so much right. The space combat right with the fleet formations and then their power armored units dealt with their problems with a big heavy axe. I love it.

>>96508284
>t.

>>96569756
Thank you for being agreeable about this, I appreciate that.
For those who may be curious, the point is that with milligee or centigee thrust all engagements occur along a dominant axis of motion. Thus, 1D (two points on a line drawing closer or further from each other).

>>96569527
I think that's mostly a simplification due to it being easier to animate, and LotGH was never terribly high budget, as well as being easier to convey to the audience. There's a few shots in the show that show the formations are actually 3-dimensional.

>>96560779
>sneaking through enemy space they discover the lost escape pod of the famous Captain Jack Geary
>Except... he is just a normal guy
>By the current time's standards he actually is a military genius just by merit of having actually having received *training*
I dunno if you want to hear this but this is written like an isekai.

>>96548557
Gundam is not only better than many space combat scifi, almost all of them would be improved with both minovsky particles and mecha.

>>96535214
Banner of the stars/crest of the stars is so good.

>>96575171
>minovsky particles
Minovsky particles are a good idea horribly executed. It's basically a handwave in the background of the setting that's only ever directly relevant when someone is scanning for the particles.
Most Gundam shows are also really fucking shit at portraying space combat. The worst is probably Zeta, where the fights look like 5v5 but the debris shows littered battlefields. They have a mobile suit type on board that I legit thought was unmanned for most of the show because you only ever see glimpses of them and their many wreckages. The crew is in the hundreds but feels like ten people.

Ahab waves and GN particles are a much better implementation of the same basic idea.

>>96575616
>someone is scanning for the particles.
Minovsky particles are the result of the engines that allow mechs to exist, and they block radio signals making misssile warfare impossible in space. It's an okay way to justify multiple logistical issues with a single scifi element.

>>96575645
I know the lore and I agree that the concept is decent.
It's just that UC Gundam stories always fuck it up. You never see the supposed distortion effect that it has on visual light, for example. Almost every time it's just "we detected particles, someone must be there" or "don't spread the particles, we are hiding" with a very few cases of "let's jam radar with our particles".

When will Kerr singularities be more popular than beam core AM? Isn't it cooler to do one of these with an engineered magnetosphere to take the flux and produce collimated EM jets for haha weee big thrust? There are other potential benefits, but really when both are on the same tech level of bullshittium you'd think this would be more popular since it's just a cooler concept. And naturally results in very big (massive) ships like everyone likes.

>>96575159
I be that anon. I've read those books twice through and I've never once even considered that, but you're totally 100% right. It's a normal guy, very arguably a self-insert, transported into a new world (the distant future where nothing is the same) and in a situation where he is abnormally influential for what are to him relatively mundane accomplishments. There is even an extremely minor love triangle where first/best girl wins.
Ain't nothing wrong with that of course. Nothing new under the sun and all that. But fucking weird.

...What's weirding me out further is that while wondering if that made Rip Van Winkle the first isekai, I realized the first Lost Fleet was published in 2006. Not only the same year as Familiar of Zero (not literally the first isekai anime but arguably the one that popularized it as a concept) did, but the same freaking week. Not sure what that means, but I am concerned.

>>96574120
That's really only an issue for one side, especially if they're in orbit. The other is free to engage how they wish, even if it's like shooting a bullet out of the air.

No my issue with LOGH (besides being overrated) is that tactics have effectively stalled and battles and strategy are more akin to land warfare of the classical era. I will say this though, Rosen Ritters for life.

>>96576345
>No my issue with LOGH (besides being overrated)
Whew lad. That's gonna rustle a lot of jimmies.
But you aren't wrong. LoGH is a great anime, but it is overrated.
I think part of LoGH's problem is that we don't know what space combat will be like. It could be organized with fleet formations like in LoGH or it could just be brutal dogfights in the black void. We'll never know until we get there and I think that's LoGH's biggest problem.
>Rosen Ritters for life
Damn right. I don't know why, but in a universe with deadly gunships in space somehow the axe (I think the RosenRitter referred to them as tomahawks once) is the most badass weapon.

>>96576469
I mean, UREBs are kinda like space muskets though. The ranges and rates of fire involved means volley fire is effective for the same reason it was then. If UREBs are your dominate weapon, then the tactics make total sense as a response to that technology.

>>96576469
It can rustle all the jimmies in the world for all I care. It's a political diatribe disguised as a story, and it's not especially great about it. I liked it, I'm glad I watched it, but I expected more out of it.

In any case, if the ships primarily fire forward, then it why didn't either side invest in heavily in shielded drones to fly forward and disrupt the enemy formation? Shit like that. We're just told static skirmishes of attrition are the standard and only true geniuses have figured out that they can flank the enemy.

>>96576281
the first isekai is probably some ancient religious text about traveling to the underworld that doesn't even have a modern translation

>>96555412
Arguably the best system for mass space combat would probably be Mutants & Masterminds. Where you treat fleet combat groups similar to squads, platoons and armies as described in GMs guide.
The way M&M system works it is incredibly easy to derive everything you need from a few known quantities or convert things from other systems or real world numbers to the game. Hell, kinetic damage is simply Mass+Speed ratings of the projectile. For example 50 kg slug going ~250 thousand km/s would be 1(mass)+25(speed) for a total damage rating of 26.

>>96580164
How would you do it for an electron (mass = 9.109×10^(−31)) kilograms moving >= 209,854.7206 km/s?

>>96576281
Yeah not even a critique, just got me thinking as I read.
>>96576889
You could probably find some story of being enslaved into a strange land and then rising into nobility from your quick thinking that's going to use a lot of similar themes.

>>96580852
Mass -100, speed same 25 (since everything from 128 to 256 thousand km/s is that). So total damage rank for a single electron is -75. Though considering how energy weapons work it's mostly useless for them since there are too many other moving parts that determine how much damage they do.
In Mutants and Masterminds each rank is double(+1) or half(-1) the previous one. Rank 1 is 50kg.

>>96581126
So you'd need to use common sense basically and treat it as an energy weapon like a laser (since neutron guns and electron guns are the main guns of LoGH).

>>96581166
You can use reactor/capacitor power and gun efficiency to determine damage. If I remember right 1 megaton nuke would be around rank 24 damage. So if your gun capacitors do 500kt and your gun has ~50% efficiency (you need a lot of radiators, man) you have a rank 22 damage weapon.

>>96581382
You'd have to use this source if you were going to keep it accurate. Best of luck, it's untranslated.

>>96581405
Well, we can derive some things even without that.
Starship armor is on average 0.5 to 1 meter thick, with critical locations having up to 5 meters of armor.
Considering the types of stuff they use for armor 1 inch thick plate should be decently stronger than steel (which is in 8-10 rank range depending on type) so 12-13 toughness per inch of armor. Meaning that average armor of the starship is around rank 16-18 with possibly up to 18-20 on critical locations.

Considering that beam weapons regularly do a lot of damage a good way to model them would be Rank 20-22 damage (~60 to 250kt) with Improved Critical 4, to show their ability do devastating damage semi-regularly. Multiple weapons dedicated to slapping one ship simply work as Multi-Attack.