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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Joerg Baumgartner" data-source="post: 9736645" data-attributes="member: 6893976">In SF role-playing games, fleet encounters serve as a reminder of sovereign or projected power of some faction or authority, usually strong enough to quench murder-hobo behavior.Most routine player character interaction with space navies will be with border control (possibly sealing offensive weaponry as a prerequisite for entry), mandatory pilot transfer for system entry (possibly backed up by marines able to de-activate the bridge), and/or customs control checking for contraband and unpaid fines or arrest warrants. While the player vessel(s) might out-gun the inspection vessel(s), typically the inspection vessels will have some higher fire-power back-up, although possibly not within immediate reach. Still, the typical assumption is that whatever detachment of the space navy either in place or sent in retribution will be too tough for the player vessel to survive in direct confrontation. A hit-and-run operation or a false flag or stealth insertion might still be possible with some risk during retreat.Player-controlled (or -inhabited) vessels might take on military supply contracts or participate in personnel transport or evacuation.Another typical navy encounter would be a battlefield aftermath - salvage activities (possibly humanitarian), intel-gathering.Space navies (or the authorities behind them) might hire independent contractors or enlist them for special operations. Depending on the setting, the player characters may be veterans with reservist status or susceptible to general mobilization (or taxable for avoidance thereof).A party might undergo basic or advanced military training, possibly as draftees, possibly as infiltrators, possibly even as a mission reward to acquire new or improved abilities. Their vessel might be pressed into auxiliary forces, (temporarily) equipped with military upgrades. Or they might gain access to surplus military vessels capable of commercial activities as reserve units, possibly with the hard-ware requiring activation codes sent along with the orders, and/or overrides for critical situations resulting in subsequent martial court oversight. (And of course all manner of illegal overrides to bypass that kind of oversight...)A typical literary theme but a lot harder to put into role-playing is participation of the protagonists in cutting-edge military research and development. Field-testing prototypes is about the closest adventure that may result from such activity, the rest falls more into manor-development activities.Player characters in charge of at least a manor or a local settlement or base might be wielding a (typically small) navy themselves, possibly also in charge of supply, replacement, recruitment, training and expenses. Manorial administration is mostly a chore ideally happening in the background, but creating role-playing activities in the nature of missions - gathering intel, diplomacy and supply deals, development activities and trouble-shooting, rescue or ransom missions, policing (including putting out bounties or bounty hunting), and directing a navy can be similar - employing a command staff that deals with minutia while pestering you for more supplies or improvements, or more ships or stationary defenses, or even bases, yards etc.Both Babylon 5 and Deep Space 9 are such manorial settings.With all science-fiction, there are setting questions that need to be answered first before you can answer how (internally) realistic your navy (and setting in general) can be.Of course, you can skip these questions and go straight to option 5, all rule of cool. If you enjoy more consistent settings, some of this world building should be addressed.What does the presence of civilization in space look like?Does most of the population live on planets and larger moons, or is there a sprawling civilization of space habitats (artificial stations, O'Neill cylinders, hollowed out asteroids)?Do spaceships routinely land on planets, or do they dock at orbital transfer stations instead, transshipping to orbital shuttles or beanstalks? Do they carry their own drop shuttles?What is the nature of the civilization (or organization) that maintains the navy?Does the navy represent and get funded by a sovereign (or colonial) government? Does it hire out its services?Where and whom does the navy recruit? What are the required qualifications for personnel, how much training and schooling is done by the navy?Does it own or control its construction and maintenance yards, its supply lines? Does it provide civic amenities (housing, schooling, medical care, jobs) for its personnel and next of kin?The Human FactorWhat roles does human (or otherwise sophont) personnel and/or crew play in naval operations? To what degree is the navy automated?While clearly a parody, think of the robot fights in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5gHZWxxVhk" target="_blank">The Ice Pirates</a> from 1984 for a possible role of humans merely in repair and remote command functions.What is the naval doctrine on acceptable losses?Space weaponry and protective systemsSpace is big, and projecting destructive force across huge distances, possibly with sensor lags in the range of minutes or hours due to speed of light limitations, creates targeting challenges.Are there defensive measures other than massive and/or ablative armor? Having worked with lasers in lab scale, the formation of ablation plasma at the impact site counteracts the penetration of a laser pulse, distributing quite a bit of the incoming energy to the adjacent surface. The incoming photons may be chosen to optimal interaction with the target armor material, or they may be chosen for maximum penetration and weaker interaction with the target armor material while still meaningfully interacting with the targeted systems' material.Is there some kind of shield technology, perhaps plasma held in place by projectors? If there is, can it be maintained indeterminately while there is energy, and what are the energy demands?Is space combat attritional on the ships or are plasma clouds the typical result?How lethal is space combat? How typical are catastrophic failures (rupture of fusion bottles, warp core breaks) in space combat? How long can a battered vessel keep fighting, how long can crew trapped on a battered vessel survive and possibly repair enough to relocate to a yard?The original Battlestar Galactica showed the scene where the middle of three Cylon fighters in tight formation turns into a plasma cloud at least twice per episode (in addition to the repeating intro). Fighter pilots expect to be able to fly through the plasma cloud after their beam weapon hit, without any care for remaining debris. Important characters might manage to eject from their fighter before it turns into a plasma cloud.There might be a naval doctrine for such glass cannons. It certainly applies to unmanned missiles (although one might argue that an on-board AI may qualify as a kamikaze pilot, even if only a clone from a backed-up system).Another question of doctrine is the totality of war and cost-profit considerations for the necessary strength to avoid conquest/hostile occupation or annihilation. Do naval battles resemble World of Warcraft strike team functions - close order tanks too powerful to ignore but too hard to destroy immediately, and basically unarmored ranged damage dealers remaining away from enemy lines, or do they rather resemble Starcraft's zerg rushes with cheap, easily replaceable light units and a lot of unit attrition?Do the repair cost of damaged units surpass their replacement cost? Does the same go for crew or high-tech payload? What is the actual cost of saturation attacks?If the civilization values individuality, do they have a form of back-up of the individuality of their military personnel? Is the military (predominantly) crewed by androids or clones with copies of the individual consciousness (or, in Cherryh's Union fleet or the Star Wars Clone Wars, adult clone bodies with mass-produced specialized consciousness)?How much body enhancement do individuals in the military undergo? Are they even recognizable as members of their species, or are we talking about cyborgs or ships' avatars?Modes of FTL traffic and communicationProbably the core question for the setting design. What kind of craft can use what kind of FTL traffic?Babylon 5 half-heartedly uses gates into hyperspace used by civilian transports while giving military vessels with sufficient energy generation the ability to open hyperspace windows. Hyperspace itself is shown as a realm topologically connected to normal space, but with fog-like phenomena that limit detection range. There are civilizations that can rendezvous or hide in hyperspace, possibly even colonize it.C.J. Cherryh's Union/Alliance space has a hyperspace drive that requires a (known) target mass to align the transitioning vessel's vector to, resulting in re-appearance in an approach vector to that mass outside of a "hyper-limit" that prevents hyperspace transitions. The hyper-drives in Traveller appear to work on a similar assumption. Cherryh also allows aborted hyper-drive transition to consume kinetic energy on the approach vector, and as an advanced use of the hyper-drive short jumps only a few parsecs out of the system. No key-holes, but somewhat predictable vectors of approach and departure.Depending on whether there is a hyper-limit and the actual extent of it, in-system hyperspace traffic might be desirable. Gas giants possibly orbit outside of the solar limit and provide their own anchoring mass. Gas giant positions might alter the nature of the anchoring mass.If there is something like a hyper-limit, there might be technologies to interdict hyper transit and to interrupt hyperspace traffic into a defined region of space. Sufficiently advanced technology might allow the creation of pockets in Space-Time with limited access interfaces.Settings with keyhole technologies (or passive assist for hyperspace traffic) might use these to isolate a portion of their real-estate from the rest of the universe. Space traffic in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan universe uses a network of paired jump coordinates with specific gravitational characteristics, although its early expansion into space used slower-than-light generation ships e.g. to establish Beta Colony. Such jump junction coordinates keep getting mapped and explored, and may become in-operational or might be subject to cycles of activity (e.g. three-body conformations).There may be (often restricted) applications of keyhole jump technology that allows the exit coordinates of a jump to deviate from the official keyhole by some distance, or that allows artificial keyholes to be placed either independently from other keyholes or as a parasite for alternative exit points. The jump network in the games of the (early, at least) X-series works with paired gates and an (initially experimental) jump drive allowing departure to a gate (or buoy) coordinate from anywhere.How important is inertia?Does the setting have artificial gravity control? If so, how focussed, how small, how finely tune-able? At what kind of energy cost?Many computer space games impose speed limits on the vessels in the simulation relative to the local inertial system. They tend to ignore the rocket equation (although they tend to still provide some jet-engine aesthetic), suggesting some form of reaction-less drive, possibly interacting with local dark matter or some other unobtainium.Elite, the ancestor of these games, used a vector-based inertial simulation and highly efficient yet still fuel-thirsty reaction drives.What is the purpose of the navy?System protection against raiders and invaders?Power projection and patrols along the trade lanes?Travel interdiction - blockades, hunting smugglers, attacks on logistical routes?Escort duty?Picket duty (hold vs. light aggression while reporting, retreat from strong aggression and reporting)Clearing the system of uncontrolled rocks and wreckage?Exploration and observation of other navies?</blockquote>

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