Why do most sci-fi settings sideline space combat but instead mostly focus on ground warfare?
>>96502373If 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).
>>96502373I couldn't tell you, because I've only ever seen fantasy settings.
>>96502373Because 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 positions2. 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 bandsThis 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? >>96502481A true man of culture
>>96502373>Sci-fi space combat>looks inside>18th century naval warfare
>>96503045There are three flavors of sci-fi spaceship warfare.>16th to 19th century fleet engagements, everyone lines up and comes in close for broadsidesLoGH, 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 combatStar 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 warfareNot 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.
>>96502373because shooting at shit on the ground is infinitely more entertaining than space battles.
>>96503118A 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>>96503153Just 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?
>>96502373Ground 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 minuteswho wants to read this more than once or maybe twice?
>>96502505You say this as if ground combat in many sci fi settings isn’t ridiculous as wellChainswords anyone?
>>96502373>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.
>>96502373PC 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.
>>96505578bruh, the trek rpg made single ship teamwork a thing almost 40 years ago
>>96502481>>96502505>>96503031>>96503118Any 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.
>>96502481God 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 agoBruh, both the STCS and the RPG came out more than 40 years ago.>single ship teamworkThe 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.
>>96505680Start with the greatest website in the world:Project Rho/Atomic Rocketshttps://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
>>96502373Traditional games?
>>96502373I wouldn't mind ships maneuvering and shooting at each other with Asteroids physics, but it might get tedious for some
>>96505830How 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.
>>96505680Play Children of a Dead Earth vidya.
>>96502373space combat ceases to be a party of five and instead becomes a crew of thousands
>>96505680I 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.
>>96502373Because 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.
>>96503118third 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 flybyand 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.
>>96506826In 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).
