Star Wars in CB?

[theoz]

I've been playing around with translating SW ships into CB, and while there isn't any direct equivalence (names of certain CB weapons notwithstanding), I have a few assumptions (and confessions) I'd like others to evaluate and some (very) preliminary SSDs to show.

Assumption #1: Disregard the CB weapon names; pick weapons for their effect on target, not because the name matches up with a SW name.

Assumption #2: For all the dogfighting, X- and Y-wing fighters are more like CB strike fighters than CB interceptors. TIEs, TIE Interceptors, and A-wings are the CB interceptors.

Assumption #3: A CB fighter squadron represents one full squadron of 12 Imperial fighters, but only half a squadron (6) of rebel fighters. Otherwise the Rebels will be swarmed under by their opponents.

Assumption #4: Forget all the little stuff, at least for now. Little weapons, little ships, little heroes. Remember the KISS principle.

Confession #1: I don't have any idea how to represent SW tractor beams.

Confession #2: I don't know how to show the capabilities of different kinds of SW fighters.

Suggested House Rule: Unleash the fighters. At the minimum, double the fighter ranges. To be more true to the movies, have no range limits at all on fighters.

Here are the two preliminary SSDs, an Imperial-1 SD and an MC-80 cruiser.

The SD is not the largest possible BB hull to leave room to build bigger. She is Battleline role since that seems to be her lot in life. All of her firepower bears forwards.


The MC80 is not as large or powerful as the Imperial. She has better shields and more FC, and all her weapons bear to port and starboard. I made her a Defender role since Mon Cal ships are supposed to have faster-repairing shields.

[TheDreadnought]

I'll be interested to see what you come up with. I've been playing around with stats for star destroyers and such also. Here's an Imperator class I came up with a couple weeks ago. I do have the luxury of messing with the rules since I'm playing with future options to enable different types of combat and technology in future releases.

However, your approach of substituting weapons is the intended route for re-creating a specific sci-fi property from the core rules.

Yes - I'm trying to get my arms around exactly which fighter types correspond to what. However, for some of those rebel fighters. . . I'll give you a hint as to where I'm going:

"Multi-role fighters"

Note that my armor values are lower - since SW was not a primarily armor-as-defense driven universe. It's all about the shields for them. Still, I figure all those pretty, flat surfaces on the top and bottom of the SDs is because they are armored, while thin slice around the edge is not.

Hmmm. . . that's a good idea though. Wonder if Rebels rely more on armor b/c they're smooth all over.

Attachments:

[theoz]

I based my stats (such as they are) on the Star Wars RPG stats for those ships. It's hard to decide what to do when the ships in the RPG are porcupines bristling with weapons (an Imperial-One class SD has over 100 weapons in the RPG) and CB is limited to 30 weapons tops (60 if you like Gatling Lasers).

For the fighters, perhaps some mechanism for trading statistics? Let a fighter get a +1 on the dogfight roll (A-wing) but pay for it with a -1 somewhere else (anti-ship? Survival roll?). Even just allowing a single trade per fighter type would allow many different kinds to be evolved. Or fighters buy extra pluses at the expense of more tonnage?

Of course, this opens a can of worms that might be better left closed.

[TheDreadnought]

It's not really realistic to try and base starship game stats on a 1-1 weapon correspondence with published materials like that.

[soapbox]
It doesn't cost the author any more to say an ISD has 100 weapons than it does to say it has 1 weapon. Nor does he have to find places to mount them, or make the various systems work together. He REALLY doesn't have to spend any time worrying about power levels and game balance. It's just some numbers on a page he made up because they sounded cool.

I don't know if they happen to have rules of some kind for starship combat at the capital ship level in the RPG. I do know that if I want to do hard core starship gaming, I'm not going to go looking for an RPG writer to interpret it for me. (Nothing against them, I've helped write RPGs before myself actually. . . but its an entirely different skill set - and there are VERY few people out there who can write good miniature games, let alone good miniature games AND good RPGs).

Personally, in the movies, I never saw anything remotely close to 100 weapons firing from an ISD at the same time - more like 1/10th of that. So that tells you how much credibility I give numbers from some of these supposedly authoritative sources.
[/soapbox]

So, when I try to replicate these things, I go back to the source material and try to emulate the FEEL of playing whatever it is. An ISD is a big ass battleship that's extremely tough, not particularly maneuverable, and has a massive amount of forward-directed firepower reflecting the Empire's penchant for agressiveness. It also carries a serious amount of fighter support.

So. . . that's what I put together.

[theoz]

Jun 14, 2010 20:38:43 GMT -5 TheDreadnought said:

It's not really realistic to try and base starship game stats on a 1-1 weapon correspondence with published materials like that.

[snip]

So, when I try to replicate these things, I go back to the source material and try to emulate the FEEL of playing whatever it is. An ISD is a big ass battleship that's extremely tough, not particularly maneuverable, and has a massive amount of forward-directed firepower reflecting the Empire's penchant for agressiveness. It also carries a serious amount of fighter support.

So. . . that's what I put together.

I agree that it's impossible to match the RPG stats (and unnecessary to try) but I do like to have some explanation for the inevitable complaint that "your ship doesn't match the movie/RPG/video game!"

In this case I would say that the weapons we see ISDs using in the movies are actually the PD and/or flak batteries of CB. After all, when we see ISDs shooting in the movies they are shooting at much smaller ships (Corellian Corvette, Millenium Falcon) and they're shooting to disable and capture those ships. If they used the big guns they'd vaporize their intended prisoners.

Besides, there's so many different descriptions of SW ships that you can pick the set of stats that best matches CB.

[RiflemanIII]

Jun 15, 2010 6:41:14 GMT -5 theoz said:

In this case I would say that the weapons we see ISDs using in the movies are actually the PD and/or flak batteries of CB. After all, when we see ISDs shooting in the movies they are shooting at much smaller ships (Corellian Corvette, Millenium Falcon) and they're shooting to disable and capture those ships.

Except, of course, when they use those same guns to fire on a Nebulon-B frigate in Return of the Jedi. during a life-or-death battle.

[warchariot]

Theoz,

I noticed you have all the tech levels at 5. You might look at each area and lower some of these to fit what you have seen/read in SW and then build some ships. I did the same when I was trying out BSG ships and found the lower tech levels actual helped me make some decisions about weapons, fighters and such. I also lower the weight of all my ships as this helped with delta cost and gave me more options.

[theoz]

I played around with smaller ships, but the restrictions on the number of weapons per hardpoint meant that it was difficult to fit in the fighters I wanted in smaller hulls without reducing the weapons too much.

I didn't think about tech levels: I was building the ships of the Imperial Era, which seem to be the highest-tech ships in the SW universe. I suppose it's possible that the New Republic ships could be TL5, and the Imperial Era only TL4.

Hmmmmmm......

[TheDreadnought]

Well, you have to consider the tech available in the setting too. For instance, I would give SW a conventional weaponry tech rating of 0 or 1 since to my knowledge you almost never see any of that tech used in the movies.

Probably the same with Quantum Manipulation. They do mention 'cloaking devices' in the movies, but I've never seen one actually used, so they must not be very good.

[theoz]

I've given some thought to TLs for STAR WARS and here's my (fallible) opinion:

• AM: 5 (mostly to get the engine size reduction, most SW ship plans show tiny engine rooms).
  
• CW: 3 (just enough to get Bombardment Missiles since similar weapons are shown in some of the comic book storylines.
  
• FT: 3 (SW fighters aren't that good, no recon or armed recon fighters seem to exist).
  
• LW: 3 (enough to get Heavy Turbo-Lasers)
  
• OM: 5 (Death Stars, need I say more?)
  
• QM: 1 (just enough to get Ion Cannons)
  

If you count, you'll see that comes to 20 levels, which makes SW a viable faction in CB. I'm not sure what the faction bonus would be, and it might well be different for the different fleets (Imperial vs. Rebel, Republic vs. Sith, etc).

I am rebuilding some SW ships based on these TLs and taking into account some statistical analysis of SW ship stats. I should have them soon.

Comments?

[warchariot]

I think you'll find this helps define the ships more. I wasn't sure about it in BSG, but when Harry posted his starting levels and I built a few ships, it all fell into place. Good luck, can't wait to see what you come up with. Remember, small is the new large in space ships!