Is there any game on the harder end of science fiction where the players can control various aspects of a space warship in combat that isn't miserable?
It's a niche interest that only really interests turboautists, so your best bet would be combat mods for KSP.
>>97411770Traveller"Erm but the ftl-" then take out the ftl, they even have campaign settings for this I think.
>>97411770I think that's a cursed problem, since hard scifi space combat is pretty miserable experience. You need to relax the hardness of the scifi a bit if you don't want the players to have a miserable experience.
>sci-fi>space warship
>>97411770>scifi space ship combat>looks closer>17th century naval warfare
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiIh4Xw2bnQ
>>97411770>hard sci fi space combat"If you are observed you are instantly killed by uncounterable laser batteries, or more slowly but no less inevitably killed by equally uncounterable grapeshot that shreds your ship into swiss cheese"Wowee, fun. Tabletop has enough trouble simulating gonzo sci fi space combat without trying to go granular.
>>97411770>harder end of science fiction>not miserable???>>97412144And the artificial gravity.And the distances.And most of the weapons.And ...
>>97413754>>97412146It is a common misconception that a laser beam is a perfectly straight "pencil" of light. Even in the absolute vacuum of space, a laser beam will eventually spread out and lose its intensity.This happens not because of the medium it travels through, but because of the fundamental physics of light itself.The primary reason a laser diverges is diffraction. Light behaves like a wave. When a wave passes through an opening (like the output aperture of a laser), it naturally bends and spreads outward. Even if you could create a "perfect" laser with all photons moving in the same direction, the moment they exit the device, they "feel" the edge of the exit hole. This causes the wave-fronts to begin curving, turning a parallel beam into a cone.At a quantum level, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle forbids a perfectly parallel beam. To make a beam stay perfectly narrow, you would need to know the exact position (x) of the photons (the width of the beam) and their exact transverse momentum (p) (the direction they are moving)Physics states that the more you "squeeze" a beam to make it narrow, the less certain you are of the photons' side-to-side momentum. This uncertainty manifests as a "kick" that makes the photons fly off at slight angles, causing the beam to spread.So lasers would have an effective limited effective range.
Atomic Rockets is your friend.
https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/95239513/already been discussed but it's worth reviving the topic.
https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/95262569/to cut a book down to a novel, anons have explored the idea and there's not one solid system that could encapsulate the type of realistic hard sci-fi actual astral warfare would look like in space, like the Lunar War or Children of a Dead Earth. More then likely a custom ruleset and mechanics would have to be homebrew.
>>97411770You can have:>hard science fiction with miserable space combat>soft science fiction with fun space combatYou cannot have both due to the hard limitations that... well, hard science fiction brings to the table. You have to obey physics and realistic (hypothetical) space warfare and so on and so forth.
>>97414079Skill issue. It's a matter of narrative framing. Take this example from Babylon 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXDwMRb8DOAIf you notice it, they don't even see each other with the naked eye. It's through camera trickery that makes you excited when in reality they are thousands of kilometres apart.
>>97414079would it really be miserable? Seems to me it'd be no different then peer-to-peer combat with a modern littorial ship.
>>97414111>>97411770https://youtu.be/n67rhlSnKIQ
The issue that arose wasn't more or less the combat, as there's at least something to work with there that a system or game could be used to make an equivalent for, it wad the fact the setting would need to be explained why there's space war.
