Island Hopping vs. Deep Strike

[Anarade Relle]

Once the War on Atmospheres get underway we'll be removing those!

[Aldaris]

The problem is that short hyperspace jumps need to have less cumulative chance of trouble.

I do have one point about deep strikes:
Delta-V.
Deep strikes are problematic for a very simple reason.  The ship has to have enough fuel to get up to speed, then decelerate at the end of the jump, fight, and come back.  If you try a deep strike, I would imagine that it would be wise to get there and back as quickly as possible to minimize maintainence and vulnerability.  That requires a lot of delta-V.  If you have a forward base in the area, it's not as much of an issue.  Shorter distance lets you get away with lower hyper speed, and you can transit to home about twice as fast.

Actually, a decent while back I raised an issue for why deep strikes might be overpowered.
The drive by nuclear holocaust.
Provided you go fast enough and have enough box launchers, you can zip past the hostile capital, leave it about as hospitable as Chernobyl, jump to a neutral star after you passed through the system, and manouvre for a return home. Obviously this last bit could end up being a bummer, but losing a single fleet will almost always be worth the destruction of a hostile homeworld. If you're the top dog you can afford to lose them because you have more fleets, if you're about to lose, well, you have nothing to lose and all to gain.

One suggested penalty for over-range jumping is a decrease in accuracy, perhaps even to the point where there is no official maximum range, just a point where the deviation becomes impractical.

[Yonder]

One suggested penalty for over-range jumping is a decrease in accuracy, perhaps even to the point where there is no official maximum range, just a point where the deviation becomes impractical.

I really like that idea.

[Steve Walmsley]

One suggested penalty for over-range jumping is a decrease in accuracy, perhaps even to the point where there is no official maximum range, just a point where the deviation becomes impractical.

I also really like this idea in principle. My only concern is whether jumping in a really long way out from the star could be used for tactical advantage. I guess it depends on the definition of "a really long way out"

Steve

[PTTG]

Hmm... are maintenance checks still done on ships in transit? Because that alone would discourage super jumps. Maybe if they can't repair the drive with maintenance parts onboard the ship, then the ship either drops out of jump right there in whatever system it's closest to, or else gets obliterated when it does an uncontrolled drop from jump.

One thing I like about the concept of deviation over long jumps is that it might allow you to make a very long jump to a distant star for non-tactical reasons, such as fleeing an enemy fleet. Perhaps when making very long jumps, it should be possible to arrive at a nearby star to the intended destination, or even scatter task groups about over several systems- presumably by making new subsidiary TGs for the lost ships.

Of course the odds are against actually "hitting" a system if you're going by a purely trajectory-based deviation. It could be justified by the the ship being pulled in by the gravity of the star.

[Yonder]

One thing to keep in mind with the inaccurate jumps is that in our 2D map (at least the current version of it we're seeing) ships that miss their target are not going to be "lost in space" they are going to hit another system, and probably fairly soon. It will always be an annoyance for this to happen, even in the best circumstances the fleet will lose some fuel correcting and probably a couple weeks in the new system traveling in real space until they can jump out again. In some circumstances (like entering a system that needs a 90 degree course change to attack the target, and then another 90 degree change to go back home) the mistake may cost the attackers so much fuel that they may have to abort the attack, but that will probably be much more rare than the mild inconvenience.

However this change may be enough to get us back to the territory control gameplay that we've been worried will disappear. Even if the systems right next to you aren't all that valuable for other reasons, they will still be the systems that enemy misjumps are most likely to appear in, so it will be important to have enough of a presence there to give you a good chance to at least detect these misjumps to give you warning, or even enough of a presence to destroy the attackers in the system.

And then that in turn gives the attacker a choice: they aren't in an empty system, but in an enemy system. Do they take the couple of weeks to reorient and continue to attack their original target, who may now know they are coming, or do they change their plans and attack the enemy holdings in the system that they have ended up in?

[wilddog5]

what about long jumps affect crew rating, the longer the greater the amout of crew experience is temporary lost, this could then recover over time the result of which means that after a jump the ship would accel slower (to simulate the pilot and engineers being less efficient) less accurate guns ect giving a soft cap depending on the loss the player finds acceptible, this could spell the difference between victory and defeat in battle and affect almost all flights to a greater or lesser degree.

[Yonder]

what about long jumps affect crew rating, the longer the greater the amout of crew experience is temporary lost, this could then recover over time the result of which means that after a jump the ship would accel slower (to simulate the pilot and engineers being less efficient) less accurate guns ect giving a soft cap depending on the loss the player finds acceptible, this could spell the difference between victory and defeat in battle and affect almost all flights to a greater or lesser degree.

Hmm, that could work. The problem with using the Jump Blindness approach in Newtonian is that you would need the affect to last a very long time to actually have a chance to matter, and being blind for a very long time is probably not workable. However introducing a more minor, but still substantive penalty that lasts for much, much longer...

[chrislocke2000]

I also really like this idea in principle. My only concern is whether jumping in a really long way out from the star could be used for tactical advantage. I guess it depends on the definition of "a really long way out"

Steve

What if you blended that inaccuracy with a potential for damage to ships that come out too close to the jump limit. IE Set the random jump in as going potentially too close as well as too far. Depended on how much deeper you land every ship coming out of jump would take random damage based on structural overload from the gravitational forces arising being too close (or what ever technobabble works!) to the sun. This means you could make those great big jumps but as the accuracy decreases you increase the chance that on exit your ships could be crippled or in extreme cases destroyed by the jump.

[Steve Walmsley]

What if you blended that inaccuracy with a potential for damage to ships that come out too close to the jump limit. IE Set the random jump in as going potentially too close as well as too far. Depended on how much deeper you land every ship coming out of jump would take random damage based on structural overload from the gravitational forces arising being too close (or what ever technobabble works!) to the sun. This means you could make those great big jumps but as the accuracy decreases you increase the chance that on exit your ships could be crippled or in extreme cases destroyed by the jump.

Good idea.

A lot of interesting ideas in the thread. At the moment, I think I am inclined toward a variety of different events, including the above, that can take place during a hyperspace jump. The chance of such events will depend on the length of the jump on a non-linear scale, although I haven't decided on a formula yet.

Steve

[Texashawk]

I like the idea of a deviation factor - I especially remember how in the Honorverse it was always tricky to translate out of the hyper bands with any reasonable accuracy (thank goodness Honor always seemed to have incredible helmsmen!) but I always got the feeling that it was easier for Manty nav systems to translate with more precision than Haven, to say nothing of the Solarian league ships. Perhaps this could be one of the components of the engine/hyper system that could be improved, or perhaps a character bonus for naval officers?

[PTTG]

I'd especially like the ability to, say, design ships to do far longer, more accurate jumps than normal at the expense of much greater FTL drive mass.

[Arwyn]

Lots of good points, thought I might throw my 2 cents in as well.

This argument if pretty similar to the one had back in the 80's with the old GDW game Renegade Legion. The naval portion of the game system was called "Leviathan" and their jump drives worked very similarly to whats being discussed here. Their solution to prevent long distance jumping was detection, and charge build up. Their movement system was "Newtonian lite" but with more advanced rules that added much more realistic thrust rules.

1st- Deep strikes.
Overjumping sounds like a great idea, and adding in a penalty to accuracy sounds even better. To add to that, as a limiter to prevent "drive by nuclear annihilation", add a tech line to jump accuracy as a radius. So, much like jump drives work in Aurora now, add a tech multiplier that would add to the accuracy of your jump. Sort of a jump radius limit. As you exceed your "safe" jump limit, your chances to introduce errors starts to increase significantly. You could even put it in bands, so if its inside the "safe" margin, its a milk run, or maybe its the ONLY jump transition that civilian ships can use.  Jumps further out, say in the 2x or 3x band, get increasingly dangerous, to the point of losing ships to systemic failure or running into objects in space.
In Leviathan, jumping ships build up a charge in T-Space "heat shimmer", that if it exceeded a months duration, caused systemic failures in the ship until something catastrophic happened. The only way to bleed off heat shimmer, was sitting around in real space letting it slowly dissipate.

Skipping the handwavium aspects of jumping, you could make the argument that jumping produces short lived high energy radioactivity on ships, that needs to disperse. So, you could say the limits would be either accuracy or the build of of radioactivity/high energy particles or both.

So there is one option.

2nd- Detection. In Leviathan, T-Doppler arrays sat in most major systems, and even in some ships. As a fleet transitioned into T-Space they had to build speed in precise alignment with their destination prior to jump transition. Once they transitioned into T-Space, they traveled in a straight line path to the destination. The longer the jump, the easier it was to detect the moving ships/fleet, and relay the detection and path of travel information off to naval forces in the targeted area (done via FTL communications using the same principal as the jump drive). The locals then got to arrange for a warm welcome. So, in the Renegade Legion universe, while you COULD deep strike, the chances were very slim to have it work in a well developed area with good detector arrays up.

So, the way to limit deep strikes and keep more of an island hopping/forward base type system in place would be to include something like those to mechanics (or both). You could also make these tech research items, so that it would be POSSIBLE to do a interstellar drive by at low rish, due to your opponent not having spend any points in that area....

[orfeusz]

Maybe add some very small chance (0.02% for LONG jumps) that in case of long jump a ship can expect critical_drive_failure/collision/mutiny/sabotage/be_eaten_by_Warp_Daemons/AI_rebellion (or something along those lines) and be lost forever. 

for the Fun 

[sloanjh (OP)]

Just a small comment on the direction this thread has gone....

The whole island hopping vs. deep strike issue is not quite the same as "how far can I jump in a single jump".  It's "as a defender, is there a reasonable way for me to set up a defence perimeter that will allow me to intercept an enemy fleet before it reaches a target deep in my sphere of influence?"  To me, this either means choke points or some sort of supply/maintenance-based "penetration depth".  On the choke point front, the more "chokiness" (i.e. the fewer number of approach options available to the invader) the better   My concern is that, with a simple single-jump range limitation, there won't be enough chokiness because there's a LOT of stars out there than can be used as waypoints.  On the penetration depth front, this essentially means that there has to be a mechanism to limit the distance a fleet can travel away from their base before they have to turn around and come back to refuel, resupply, or refit.

From what I've seen in this thread, I think there is a story here that fits together - I just don't remember seeing it explicitly stated.  I think the underlying assumption with people focusing on the shortening the jump range is: "Jumping to a star, then changing course to jump to the next star costs fuel".  Interestingly enough, the fuel cost should increase as the magnitude of the course change increases.  So an invading force hopping on a more or less direct path would have a much deeper penetration depth than one trying to evade enemy emplacements by jumping to stars well away from the direct path.  Also, penetration depth would be inversely proportional to speed in this case (and total strike time inversely proportional to speed squared) since deltaV (and hence fuel usage) is proportional to speed.

This still leaves another question:  "Is is possible for a defence force which is positioned in a waypoint system to interdict an attack force that's using that system as a waypoint?".  The thing I wonder about here is if it's possible for a defending fleet to hit an enemy thats tearing through the system.

John