Skirmish at Osiris

[cosmicangler]

The Osiris System - asteroid belt - Mining station ROS-O21

The last transmission received gave word of a small pirate fleet warping into the system around them, communications ended likely when a blast damaged or destroyed the comms. With no chance of any reinforcements making it in any reasonable time, the system governer, Jaelyn Rasteri ordered the local 2nd Squadron to be dispatched immediately to destroy the pirates and rescue as much of the minerals as possible.

If the squadron were to fail, the mining station, which supplies most of the system's resources for construction could be destroyed, costing the Republic of Casmir countless fortunes in lost resources as well as vast deaths as without the influx of resources the local megastructure in construction around the system's star could risk becoming unstable and collapsing.

On a galactic scale this small skirmish is of little consequence, yet to the people of this system, the battle is could mean the life or death of most civillians.

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Here's something that I've been wanting to try out for a while, so the way this is going to work is that each of you that join will be assigned a ship to command each with its own armour rating and weapon emplacements. THis will initially be a one off premise, however if people like the way this goes I could extend it to a further longer game.

During the RP you'll have to communicate with the other players to attempt to tactically work together and bring your fleet to victory. It is entirely possible that during the game if you fail to do so, your ships will sustain critical damage and be destroyed, meaning you'll have to carefully manage how much damage is being taken while fighting.

With that said, I'll quickly explain the mechanichs. In this you'll have 3 types of weapons: Flak, missiles and kinetic. Flak has the shortest range and does the lowest damage of 5 armour points per battery per turn, however while firing they block 75% of all incoming missiles. Kinetic has the middle range and does a 10 armour points per battery per turn and cannot be deflected, while missiles with the longest range and 50 points per shot have a high chance of being stopped by opposition flak fire.

You need to utilise each weapon type and each ships different systems to bring about victory, the four different ships which make up the 2nd Squadron are listed down below, each with their own weapon systems and armour rating.

Battleship Valiant - Crew of 1,500 - 2 left flak batteries, 2 right flak batteries, 4 missile pods, 8 top kinetic batteries, 8 bottom kinetic batteries, 20 fighters - Armour 2000

Frigate Perseus - Crew of 400 - 2 left flak batteries, 2 right flak batteries, 1 top flak battery, 1 bottom flak battery, 4 top kinetic batteries - Armour 1,300

Destroyer Surefire - Crew of 150 - 4 kinetic batteries, 6 missile pods - Armour 750

Destroyer Slasher - Crew of 150 - 4 kinetic batteries, 6 missile pods - Amour 750

IF you're interested please comment which ship you'd like command of.

[Rigmarole]

I think you have a problem with the mechanics, namely that you want range. It's a weird concept for space battle for anything other than, say, lasers. As you know, deep space is very empty, so for all practical purposes there's nothing that stops something moving indefinitely. There's tiny, tiny amounts of hydrogen, but any drag that might produce is negligible for any non-universe spanning distances. Battles near astronomical objects like planets, stars, or black holes would influence range due to the effects of gravity or have terrain features that might prematurely stop projectiles, but other than that you should expect something you shoot to keep going until it hits something.

If you want to keep range, you should come up with a plausible reason for it. For example, you could say there's something like a space Geneva Convention that bans weapons that do not have internal explosives that automatically detonate, vaporizing the weapon, after a certain prescribed distance. You should then keep in mind the implications of your solution. One implication of my example would be that any explosive that could vaporize the weapon that contains it would also be powerful enough to be used offensively, which makes every weapon a bomb, really. Of course the implications of a solution don't have to be bad; again, regarding my examples it might be tactically interesting to consider every weapon a bomb, or it might be interesting to think about a military force that intentionally violates the convention.

Or you might do away with the concept of range altogether and replace it with something like propellant, or delta-V. Weapons would be differentiated by how much and perhaps even the capabilities of the propellant they carry. You might replace flak with something like swarms of small tactical nukes that carry a small amount of a powerful propellant, allowing it to make very quick course changes at short ranges to maximize its effectiveness as an anti-missile point defense weapon. Kinetic weapons would carry no propellant, and accordingly have no delta-V, and that's exactly why you like it; any space that would have been used to carry propellant is now filled with a dense mass of fuckyouranium, making a powerful unguided weapon. Missiles carry a lot of propellant, and can therefore make a lot of course corrections, meaning it can follow a maneuvering enemy.

This comes with its own implications, of course. It does somewhat preserve the idea of short, middle, and long-ranged weapons; nuke swarms are unguided after they spend their propellant, while kinetic weapons are unlikely to hit at distances far enough away for enemy ships to maneuver. That said, they would still effectively have unlimited range, which opens up tactical possibilities. A standard tactic might be to fire weapons in order to create area denial zones while also forcing your opponent to maneuver, to then fire the weapons you actually intend to hit your opponent with towards the areas your opponent is forced to maneuver into. Having delta-V be a central mechanic also makes it more important to determine the speed weapons are traveling at, because that is part of determining what kind of tactical maneuvers are possible in a given situation.

I would also switch the damage values of kinetic weapons and missiles. Without knowing the underlying economy of warfare here, it seems that in your current schema that missiles are king. If you shoot enough missiles you can overcome any point defense weapons, while if you stay far away enough you can maneuver away from kinetic weapons. Battle would basically be determined by who can shoot more missiles first. Switching up the damage values for missiles and kinetic weapons would change the game; there's more incentive to move in closer to actually use kinetic weapons effectively, while the damage they can do makes it more urgent to maneuver away from incoming kinetic weapons. This would, I think, make for a more tactically interesting scenario that values deft maneuvering and weapon use. There are other solutions, too; you could make it so that you have a very limited number of missiles, for example, such that you will be forced to use kinetic weapons, but that means most of the battle will be fought with only two weapon types instead of three.

It sounds like you're on a good track. If you think your mechanics through a little more, you could have something very cool.