Robert S. Dean · 21 August 1991
I wish I could repost the remarks I got on this subject on GEnie, but I was
surprised to discover that everyone who answered over there is in agreement:
We are calculating agility wrong...they really do mean the power left over
after all components, including the maneuver drive, are powered. So, if you
want to have a ship that uses 30MW life support, 250MW of weapons, 120MW
of maneuver and has a high agility...go ahead and put in a 7000MW power plant.
(Makes no sense to me. Sorry.)
Since this apparently has nothing to do with the maneuver drive (then why
does the maneuver drive limit 'emergency' agility?) there is no limit on
how much power can be used for agility.
On the same subject: Some months ago I posted a note to someone who asked
if we should speed space combat up. At the time I went into a long description
with a lot of math about how small a target was, and what the odds of hitting
it at 50,000km were, given the likely uncertainty in the _exact_ angle of
your fire. Last week I sat down to see how much of an effect ship movement
would actually have, and was surprised to run through the numbers and discover
this: If you have a 50m long ship (let's assume a sphere for convenience,
other shapes will produce other results, but the principle is the same), and
you shoot at it with _perfect_ aim, agility will help it if it can change its
predicted postion (movement vector) by more than one ship length in the time
it takes for the sensor position to travel back to you and the beam to go out.
At 50m and 6-G acceleration, this critical distance is about 200,000km. For a
50m, 1G ship it is about 480,000km. _At this range, you could track the ship
continuously and stay on target if you had perfect fire control_. What would
this mean in game terms? Well, it's really too late to do anything about it
now, BUT since the uncertainty in firing angle is much more important than
actual ship movement, the use of the attacking computer factor as an add-on
to the attack makes sense. The use of any sort of defender agility as a
minus to the attack does not, and the use of the defender computer factor to
give a minus on the attack only makes sense if you assume that it represents
some sort of electronic countermeasures aimed at throwing off the attacker's
targetting data. This isn't a bad assumption, but it seems to me like it might
only be possible with an active EMS jammer and/or EMM system.
For those wishing to figure other conditions the formula is:
Critical Distance=t*2*300,000km/sec
--------------
/ship length*2
t= \ / ---------------
\ / acceleration
Rob Dean
I've been overwhelmed by the Horde!