 October 13, 2011 - 1:14am | Hi, I'm new here. Like I assume many of you, I have played, or at least looked into, a multitude of game systems. I picked up a new game that was good in concept, but had some problems that I emailed the designer about. I'm not sure how this site feels about plugging other work, so I will just sum up the concept with; "Humanity has no idea who is trying to exterminate them." I wound like to see what you all think about one Idea that might be applicable to Star Frontiers. Another problem is with military action. Military operations are depicted as “Reconnaissance in Force.” Send as much force as you can, and hope it’s enough. No one does a proper recon. The manuscript does state that ships were sent to systems, and never returned, but even they did it wrong. The proper way to recon a potentially hostile system is to position a vessel with a powerful telescope, (manned, or otherwise,) anywhere from one light year, to twenty light “months” off either the north, or south pole of the system, and have it sit there for a few months. Unless the enemy has forces in that area that could react, it would take them about a year for them to notice the recon ship. By then the vessel would be long gone. If it is believed that the enemy is expecting this, the position should be changed to anywhere from thirty, to sixty degrease off the pole, at any point around the system. What could be seen at this range? Plenty. The pole regions would have the clearest view, that’s where the ort cloud is the thinnest, but the other areas would also get good shots. Yes, the information would be a year old, but the orbits of planetary bodies would not change. Permanent bases would not sprout up over night. To describe the clarity of the view, I can only use a photo of Betelgeuse I saw several decades ago as an example. This photo showed variations in the surface temperature of the star. It was taken by an earth bound observatory, long before Hubble was even funded, (please, no cracks about how hard Stonehenge was to use.) If such a photo taken back then could have that much information, then sensors far more advanced, at a much shorter distance could show much more. On The Wings Of Life, By The Hands Of Hope. |
 October 13, 2011 - 4:41am | Welcome to the site. You can think of the Star Frontiers issue around here as a "theme" that we all gather around. Many different rule sets are played with by many different peeps. Alpha Dawn, Zebs Guide, Savage Worlds, D20, House Rules, etc. There's no official rule set. If you have another rule set that you like to use, use it. Alternate setting? There is a fair ammount of that around here too. For me Jump vs Hyper space is really tomatos and tomatos; I pay it no mind. Almost any game has to have a FTL technology to function as a game. Now It seems to me that you packed a bunch of questions under recon. 1. Humanity has no idea who is trying to kill it. That might make a good story and good news RPGs are about telling stories. However, how that will play out in a game is uncertain to me. That game could be like LOST the TV show with all sorts of mysteries and the players will spend most of their time figuring out puzzles and talking to NPCs. That game would suffer the probleme because the average player is looking to do "Recon by Force": kick in a door, see whats there, and kill it. So if humanity has no idea who's trying to kill it, who do the PCs fight? Other humans? Animals? Monsters? As a GM you need to know where the conflict will come from in the game you're going to run. Also I'd warn you that the average player tends to only pick up on clues that have the sublty of a hammer over the head. So a mystery sort of game with no clear antognist is an uphill battle. Another issue is How is some mysterious entity killing humanity? is the killing on or off screen for the players? Is it that NPCs are getting killed mysteriously? Players will either realize that you wont kill them in that fashion and not really respect the game or you will kill them in that fashion and they will resent having their character killed in a manner they can't do anything about. 2. Yes I quite agree, RPGs, Hollywood, Writers, and TV shows are very poor at running a military operation. Their goal is not to run a military operation but to tell an exciting story. Some guys sitting in a ship 1 LY from a system looking through a telescope for 3 months is not very exciting and is only playable if it takes up 5 minutes of game time. Remember players like to roll dice and nothing says dice rolling like combat. Best piece of advice I ever read (from a GASLIGHT rule book IIRC): "When in doubt have two mooks walk through the door with guns." On the issue of military operations: might be time for a discussion thread or document about how military operations are run. I think that might be a benefit to the community. Dovetailed on how they ought to run in a perfect world would be a discussion on how we might run them in game, keeping the game exciting and moving and fun. By the way the upside to Recon in Force is that if you do find something you damn well get to kill it, hence the name recon IN FORCE. Since Recon in Force has a name I have to think that there were times when it was considered a great or even the best way to do recon. Nothing says that a political animal with a rank wont make the same mistake in the future. History is full of such mistakes because the guy at the top had a hair across is arse or ego or a case of HUB (head up butt) or missed his calling in "rear eschelon". 3. No need to specify what can or cant be seen or sensed by telescopes and ship sensors, the game will specify what sensor can pick up in game terms or it wont, Its really up to the GM to feed the players the info that drives the game. Players get intel because the GM says they do; OR they looked for info and the GM decided to give them some. Now go roll some dice. Hope that helps. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
October 13, 2011 - 8:17am | 1. This point is an explanation as to were my thoughts came from. Would I kill off player characters in the first action? Of course not! Would I bloody them up a bit, and make them think that they are rolling desperate saves? That's how players understand what's going on, and that is what the described game was not doing. The players were hearing about the events a week or two after they were happening. 2. Not only do I have twelve years of military service, but I have gamed with military personnel. Everyone from infantry soldiers to B-52 pilots. We put our experiences into the game. To this day, movies that incorrectly depicts military operations are ruined for me, (examples of this are the Rambo movies.) The bottom line is, make it realistic, (with in the context of the game,) and then add an interesting story line. 3. This point is a given. "Hope That Helps" I have been gaming for the last 35 years, I was not looking for "Help," I was looking to start a conversation. On The Wings Of Life, By The Hands Of Hope. |
 October 13, 2011 - 10:01am | The impression I get from SF is it is based more off of our historical explorations than military actions. Many ships that 'don't return' are lost due to a myriad of causes, not just "hostile natives". Jumping from one star to another in SF is risky. If your astrogator is having a bad day, you could end up just about anywhere and in just about any condition. What attracted me to the game was its sense of exploration. Space age Lewis and Clarks. |
 October 13, 2011 - 11:05am | I agree, it makes more sense to stand off and do some recon. However, you'd have to get closer than a light year to be able to image earth type planets. Planets are really, really faint. The absolute magnitude of the sun is 4.8, the earth is around 43 and every 5 magnitudes is a factor of 100 in brightness so the earth is more than 100 trillion times fainter than the sun. Ignoring the issues of resolving the two objects (earth and sun) from one light year as this is easy enough and blocking out the glare from the sun (which could also be done with a properly designed choronograph), at a distance of one light year, the appearant magnitude of the earth would still be about 35.4. The faintest objects visible by the Hubble space telescope is 31.5 or about 40 times brighter than that. I'm not sure where that limit for HST comes from but I wouldn't be surprised if it was from the ultradeep field, an image that took 12 days to acquire. In which case the planet would have moved and be even harder to detect as it's light would be smeared out. I was just playing with the HST exposure time caluclator and even the above seems optimisitic. It said the total exposure time needed to get a signal to noise of 10 on an object with a solar spectrum at a magnitude of 31.5 was 189 days! And it is not likely that a scout ship is going to have an HST class telescope on board so exposure times would probably need to be even longer. Just for comparison, HST is 4.2 meters in diameter (with a 2.4m mirror) and 13.2m long. That's nearly 6 times larger than an average HS 1 ship from KH (and nearly 3 times larger than a "jumbo" HS 1 ship that is 25% larger in diameter and length that an average HS 1 ship). It's about 1/3 the size of a HS 2 ship. So it is big, you're not going to just haul that along with you  .And even if you could detect the planet, you're not going to get any details. The theoretical angular resolution of a 2.5m mirror is 0.05 arc seconds. At a distance of one light year, that translates into a linear distance of about 2.3 million kilometers. That's 180x the diameter of the earth and 16x the diameter of Jupiter. Planets would simply be points of light. You have to remember that Betelguse is 1180x the size of the Sun. That's why we can image it's surface from 300 light years away. We're talking about seeing planets that are ten to a hundred thousand times smaller than that. You've got to get up close to get any detail. I agree completely that there should be recon done, in fact, I even set up an adventure where a small HS 2 ship set up camp in the asteroid belt of a star system to watch the goings on of sathar in the inner system, intercept radio traffic, etc. when they stumbled onto a sathar base while exploring. I just think you're going to have to get in fairly close to get any usable information. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
 October 13, 2011 - 11:52am | Wouldn't probes be the initial investigators followed by living recon (if needed)? If they are good enough for Vader there good enough for me! Don't be a Vader hater!  |
October 13, 2011 - 11:54am | I'd be very much interested in your experience crafty military operations in a Rpg. BTW what game are you revering to? I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
October 14, 2011 - 1:39am | I think the main point we are in disagreement about is how sensitive will spencers become in the "Star Frontiers" era. In the end, it,s a game masters decision. w00t has given me an idea for an adventure. Decades ago, a ship dropped off an unmanned probe that has been wandering through an enemy star system. The players are sent in to pick up the probe, but can we really let something like that go easily? On The Wings Of Life, By The Hands Of Hope. |
October 14, 2011 - 5:27am | The beauty of that adventure idea is the its really simple and the "devil is in the details". Lots of possibilities.
EDIT: It suddenly occurs to me that depending on what your FTL technology is, it would be possible to jump into a system, not as far out as 1LY, fire off several drone on a couple different tragectories and jump out. The drones would have a base velocity equal to the speed the ship carried out of FTL. In the case of SF that would be 1%C. Now set this up in reverse with a human civilian ship taking a glancing blow by one of these drones from an unknown alien aggresser- it a pure accident that the ship was in the wrong place at the right time but also a lucky accident for humanity. The civilian calls mayday, the drone is damaged and its stealth tech is nolonger working to spec and the PC's ship is the first to respond. Stage 1A of the adventure is rescue of the civilians (written so as to not require lifting them off their ship and returning them to the planet). PCs are required to board and rescue people and perform some medical service. Radio com comes back, with questions about what hit that ship? Suppose the ship was the President's yatch or it was carrying an ambassador and escorted by fighters (which cant actually board and perform rescue operations). One of the fighters pursues and keeps the damaged drone on its scan. Once the PCs have stablized the situation on the yatch they're ordered to recover the "whatever" that struck the ship. STage 1B is recovery of the drone Stage 2 I like to call "Back at the hall of justice"- the PC's superior's are greatly concerned because the drone represents advanced alien tech and no one has any idea where it came from. Now the military is on a higher DEFCON and lucky thing too since these aliens will send a raid that they expect to wipe out humanity's space infrastructure. The higher DEFCON allows the humans to get some lucky shots in and this shocks the aliens causing them to pull back wonder how these apparently backward humans knew they were coming. In that lull more adventure can go on and humanity has a chance to reverse engineer from captured wreckage giving them a chance to close the technology gap and figure out who's trying to kill them. This is a nice set up for a KHs style module with AD and KHs levels of game play. The alien raid on the human system should be of a level that scars the piss out of everyone. while a wrecked alien ship is recovered with some intact computer files- the language is undecipherable until some bright person realizes that the math system the computers are using is something other than base 10. After that they are able to recover a portion of the alien's astro records. Those records are incomplete but it gives humanity a place to start and the PCs will be one of the scout teams sent to Recon those systems. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
October 14, 2011 - 7:22am | While mining the outer asteroid belt a miner uncovers a large metal object, could be a probe or a torp, or garbage left in space. He reports the find his company which in turns sends the characters on a retrieval mission. Curious characters examining the object discover it is a probe. Although the hardware systems look like any type of frontier technology the language is unlike they have seen before. As they dig deeper into the guts of the probe they'll realize it requires power (the power cell was knocked out when it hit an asteroid). As soon as the probe receives power a holo display is initiated, the party sees images of the star system (planets, moons, etc.), as the camera pans towards the home star it appears as if a light-filter is blocking some of the light, but then you realize it's a ship. A big ship.
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 October 21, 2011 - 6:25pm | Well there are a lot of different kinds of recon. a small detatchment on the groung scouting the planet, a satalite type probe making an orbital pass, a high speed fly-by, drones, and of course the distant starship scanning the system. Recon certainly is important and can go hand in hand with exploration too. I use an example of this in my recent comic book project where the exploration crew is sent to look at one anomally and ends up finding something completely different and un-expected than what they were sent to look at. |
