> As to the realism of extending the range, I think by limiting stutterwarp
> mobility, and and therefore the possible locations of an enemy ship we can
> justify extending the range of lasers.
It's been a long time since I've played Star Cruiser, but it seems to
me one way to justify limiting mobility and extending range would be
to make the hexes smaller and the turns shorter. I can't think offhand
of anything else this would seriously break.
> While we're discussing the limits of
> lasers, however, I have to point out that missles are under some pretty
> serious restrictions of the same kind. A missle has to detect a ship, send
> this data to the mother ship, wait for the remote pilot to respond, wait
> for the message to make it back to the missle, and _then_ fire! By whick
> time the enemy ship is nowhere near where it was when the missile first
> detected it.
"Remote Pilot" is a bit strained, really. It seems clear that your
missile pretty much has to do its own targetting, with some
supplemental data from the mothership. "Firing it" should really
amount to saying yes when the missile brain asks permission to
explode. Or arming it and saying, fire when ready. [The targetting
computer on the mothership would serve to continuously extrapolate
out-of-date information up to "now", for tac-board display.]
- --
colin | to create, you must destroy--smash a glass and cry, too much joy!
roald | (too much joy)