Quote from: Heavy Josh;1055090I've been posting my After Action Reports of space battles using SWN:R on the Google+ community for Sine Nomine. It's been quite productive and interesting. Generally, the ship combat rules work, and they work really well. There are a couple of little tweaks and things to house-rule to make some fights much more involved. But my players are engaged, and the fights get pretty hairy.  I just ran a 6 ship (the PCs and their allies) vs. 7 ship + 4 fighters + 1 station battle, and it was quite satisfying.  I did have the players take control of their allied ships, so I wasn't totally overloaded.

Oh nice, I'll check that out on the Google+ group.
It'll be an interesting read, especially I'll be doing a session of SWN revised next week.

Quote from: danskmacabre;1055092Oh nice, I'll check that out on the Google+ group.
It'll be an interesting read, especially I'll be doing a session of SWN revised next week.

Let me know if you have any questions, please.

Quote from: flyingmice;1054998That's not a bad thing! It's just a different style. Joey's specific question assumed c-limited data gathering as the norm, so that's what we are discussing. Science fiction is fiction. How much science you want is up to you.

Yes, I do understand that. For some people this is a huge part of the fun of science fiction, and I wasn't implying it shouldn't be for them.

Quote from: Chris24601;1055054One of the more interesting technology aspects of The Last Jedi was not actually the hyperspace ram (which was probably "rule of cool", but could also just be a rarely used tactic because the Raddis is actually a damned big ship and most potential targets aren't as big as the Supremacy... which wasn't even completely destroyed by the attack), but that it cleared up why Star Wars capitol ships have always had to slug it out at close range and why they bother to use fighters at all; their ray shields can completely negate blaster/turbolaser fire past that relatively close range, but ray shields don't block small fighters which can fly through those shields and do damage; taking out surface emplacements and shield generators to make the capital ship vulnerable to attack.

I thought that long preceded Last Jedi, SW ships have always behaved that way, and in the original Star Wars the Rebel fighter commander explicitly states they'll experience turbulence passing through the Death Star's shielding.

While energy shields are pretty much magic, energy weapons IRL really are short range weapons due to dispersal, and if ships are hard to hurt it makes good sense that energy weapon combats occur at short range. Of course IRL space combat is 99.9% certain to be dominated by semi-autonomous drone missiles, and any 'starfighters' will also be unmanned drones, probably launching smaller drone missiles themselves.

Quote from: S'mon;1055704While energy shields are pretty much magic, energy weapons IRL really are short range weapons due to dispersal, and if ships are hard to hurt it makes good sense that energy weapon combats occur at short range. Of course IRL space combat is 99.9% certain to be dominated by semi-autonomous drone missiles, and any 'starfighters' will also be unmanned drones, probably launching smaller drone missiles themselves.

Dispersal is mostly due to atmosphere, so that's not an issue in space. Also, drone missiles will only dominate if there's no reliable way to shoot them down or otherwise disable them. An energy point defense system running off the fusion drive (or whatever you're using to push something the size of a typical sci-fi capitol ship through space) and good sensors could probably make a vessel nigh impervious to all but the most concentrated of barrages. Hell, one could argue the turbulence and EM distortion of the 'ray shields' might be enough to disable anything smaller than a fighter with particle screens.

Or maybe the missiles will be able to reach relativistic velocities, be coated in laser reflective materials and rely purely on kinetic impact so there's nothing to disable or make it alter course. Once we start getting into post-energy scarcity societies (which just about anything involving spaceships hundreds to thousands of meters long would have to be) its really hard to have any certainty about which direction technology will evolve.

As to Star Wars ships only being able to slug it out at close range, you'd be amazed the number of Star Wars fanboys who thought they were only being shown that close because of 'rule of cool' (basically the same reason Star Trek ships are show practically next to each other while dialogue indicates they're a thousand kilometers away) and if the ships were fighting at 'realistic' ranges they'd be firing from thousands of kilometers apart.

Indeed, this is how a number of EU novels handled ship-to-ship combat; stating that the ships were thousands of miles apart as they slugged it out with turbolasers to bring down the other ship's shields.

The video games (and the novels that aped their mechanics instead of using what the movies portrayed) also got the fanboys so used to the idea that all Star Wars shields are ablative instead being literal shields; they absorb as much of the impact energy of what are essentially big particle projectors as they can and let the rest through (in D&D terms they're DR not temp hit points). Shields in the films were on/off; they were either on and stopping what damage they could, or they were off (often because the shield generator hardware was physically damaged) and your hull was taking a direct pummeling.

The point being; the mechanics used in TLJ were 100% consistent with past films; but entirely inconsistent with how the fanboys thought the systems worked so it was actually news to them that SW ships do actually have to slug it out from a kilometer apart like the movies showed to do any damage to the other guy if their shields are both up and that continued bombardment doesn't actually deplete/ablate the shields to the point they would eventually fail any more than pounding a fist against a safe is eventually going to punch a hole in it through cumulative punch damage.

Quote from: Chris24601;1055712Dispersal is mostly due to atmosphere

No, at thousands of km range, and certainly tens of thousands of km, a laser beam will disperse significantly in vacuum. That's why Traveller came up with "gravitic focusing" for its 300,000 km range laser weapons.

(Edit: I'm not saying that laser-armed ships IRL would be fighting from 5 miles apart. But nor would they be fighting at ranges where the speed of light becomes much of a factor. A few hundred km to a few thousand km depending on hull armour vs beam strength seems likeliest IMO.)

Quote from: Chris24601;1055712The point being; the mechanics used in TLJ were 100% consistent with past films; but entirely inconsistent with how the fanboys thought the systems worked so it was actually news to them that SW ships do actually have to slug it out from a kilometer apart like the movies showed to do any damage to the other guy if their shields are both up and that continued bombardment doesn't actually deplete/ablate the shields to the point they would eventually fail any more than pounding a fist against a safe is eventually going to punch a hole in it through cumulative punch damage.

That's quite interesting, thanks.

I'm not really familiar with the EU (I did read the Thrawn Trilogy BiTD) - it seems to have been heavily Star Trek influenced by the sound of this. In the Han Solo trilogy (Star's End etc) the lasers work exactly as depicted in the films - as short range weapons. There is a scene where Han & co are flying old but rugged Headhunter fighters at enemy TIEs, and as they close in from long range the enemy lasers are just impacting pretty harmlessly on their shields; only at dogfight range are they actually lethal.

So you get some relatively realistic(!) reasons why the Star Wars space battles resemble Midway and other WW2 Pacific War air-sea engagements.

The EU space combat was less Star Trek influenced and more X-Wing/TIE Fighter video game influenced.

Ablative shields were an easier mechanic to use in a video game (and one that allowed the player to 'heal up' mid-mission by breaking off and throwing full power into shields to regenerate their hit point pool), one easier to depict on a player's HUD (either percentage or 'green/yellow/red/black' color coding) and one that gave the player a mechanic to juggle (dumping remaining points between fore and aft shields) to make their defense feel more active than just making sure your shields were up and flying like a madman.

The problem came when writers who weren't all that interested in the tech side of things presumed the video game mechanics created to make an interesting flight simulator game (basically using shields to model the plot armor Luke, Han and other main characters had in otherwise rather binary conditions; i.e. "I'm okay/I'm a fireball") were how it actually worked.

You can see it too when it came to hyperdrive notation. Those who did a deep dive on Lucasfilm lore knew that Point Five was used in Star Wars the same way Warp 5 was used in Star Trek (i.e. Point 5 is faster than Point 4) while those who didn't used the WEG values and classed hyperdrives in novels as class 2, class 1 or class .5 (referring to the hyperdrive multiple used in WEG Star Wars for travel times... never mind the ridiculousness of a scale supposedly thousands of years old where the default x1 value was only reached in the last decade or so and that marked improvement by making the number smaller to the point you eventually have to start using fractions).

It's really just a case of most writers willing to work at the payscale tie-in novels pay not caring enough to look past the surface level and later that the EU became enough of its own beast that in order to be consistent with previous material you basically had to use the faulty presumptions or it would feel incongruous with the rest of the novels.