From: Christopher Weuve Subject: SF BOARD Brilliant Lances Design Notes As I rpromised a day or so ago, here are the Brilliant Lances Design Notes from Challenge #71. Note that the follow-on products listed at the end never appeared (except what was listed as "Brilliant Lances Express" apparently became Battle Rider). --Chris W. Christopher Weuve [caw@intercon.com] My opinions, not InterCon's. England expects that every man will do his duty. Brilliant Lances Design Notes by David Nilsen (writing on behalf of himself and Frank Chadwick) Brilliant Lances is a highly detailed, highly tactical presentation of space combat in the Traveller universe. It is intended to be used along with the roleplaying rules to resolve the inevitable space combat that occurs in roleplaying situations. It is clearly a refinement of the space combat rules that appeared in the Traveller: The New Era rulebook, but adapted to two dimensions rather than one dimension. It fills a very profound gap that has existed in the Traveller line for a long time. Original Traveller had its vector movement combat system which was played miniatures style, on a table or floor, with rulers and protractors. While this system worked well, it was time-consuming and a fair amount of bother, and I suspect the vast majority of Traveller players didn't use it very often ("Guys, my ship has gone under the couch, do we want to move the couch or shift all of the ships a few feet?'), and instead resorted to a more abstract, storytelling version: "Okay, the enemy ship comes at you until you're within range, start firing." Mayday was easier to use than the miniatures system, and had the distinct advantage that it came with a map and counters so you didn't have to cajole players over the cutting-and-pasting hurdle of making their own ship markers, finding rulers, etc. But since not all Traveller players had Mayday, you couldn't really use it as the official Traveller space combat system. High Guard's combat system was more abstract, and an awful lot of fun for major fleet actions. Unfortunately, it was unsuitable for roleplaying, as the system was scaled for large numbers of large ships and consequently killed PC ships quickly and without remorse (unless your player group owned a battle fleet of 1 00,000-ton battleships). MegaTraveller again provided its own space combat system (sort of High Guard bred through the old Traveller rules), but it too proved unsatisfactory, and incidentally provided the answer to the age-old question, "When is a vector movement game not a vector movement game?" So again, we had players discarding the rules in favor of an abstract storytelling style. This became a real problem, because we kept getting adventure submissions that contained scenes like this: "At this point, a small planetoid passes by at a range of less than 50,000 kilometers, and a ship that had been hiding behind the planetoid pops out and joins the fight.' All of which should prompt a roleplaying group to burst out with some combination of the following: "What planetoid? I didn't see any planetoid. Don't we have sensors for this sort of thing?' "How far away is 50,000 km? I mean, can we normally see that far? How long does it take to travel 50,000 km?" "So how come if we didn't see the planetoid, did that other ship see us? And if the planetoid was so far away that we didn't see it coming, how come that other ship can start firing right away?" The moral to this story is that when space combat rules are unsatisfactory, people don't use them, and consequently no one has any clear picture of the "geography" of space, such as how far apart ships and moons and planetoids are, and over what ranges their weapons and sensors can function. Our solution was to release the Traveller space combat board game as the first supporting product to encourage players to gain a sense of how things work in Traveller so that they can better visualize how to create adventures that have internal logic and consistency, while also encouraging players to gain proficiency in space operations and tactics. Basic Concepts The game scale was arrived at by noodling around with hex sizes and turn lengths that would yield whole numbers when computing acceleration measured in whole numbers of Gs. We really liked hexes of 1/10 light-second, so the 30 minute turn length was inescapable. The next stop was defining the performance of starship systems over distance, primarily the ability to see and fire at the enemy at distances of tens or hundreds of thousands of kilometers. Old 2300 fans will notice a similarity between Brilliant Lances and Star Cruiser in this regard, and some have asked if this is because we are trying to make it more like Star Cruiser so we can someday combine TNE with 2300. The answer to that is no (although we will eventually re-release 2300 as a campaign setting using the TNE rules), the reason is that the designers felt that sensors and fire control solutions were the critical sine qua non (oooh, Latin!) of space combat. Since this was also the underlying concept of Star Cruiser, the games will necessarily have similarities. The result is that the electronic battle becomes very important in Traveller, in ways that it was not before. We believe that this adds a great deal more excitement and strategy to the game. It also means that those Sensors skills really mean something now. Our model for sensors and weapons performance was drawn from the most accurate projection of future space combat that we could got our hands on, the report on the Strategic Defense Initiative to the House Armed Services and Senate Foreign Relations Committees which was prepared by the Congress' Off ice of Technology Assessment. (All of which, by the way, has nothing whatever to do with the recent charges of disinformation or cheating.) While some of the current limitations an sensor and weapon performance can be beaten in Traveller by advancing tech levels, some are limited by physics itself and will never get any better without breaking laws of physics. For example, the passive sensors in TNE and Brilliant Lances are actually synthetic aperture arrays, where a set of small sensors spread over a large area with diameter D mimic the resolution of a single large sensor with the same diameter. The ability to electronically scan the synthetic array becomes better with tech level, but the diameter of an array of given resolution is fixed by physics, and does not change with tech level. Breaking Laws of Physics: Our approach to game design at GDW is to break the fewest laws of physics that we possibly can when creating science fiction games. Of course everyone knows about jump drive, and has presumably forgiven us for breaking that law. We consciously broke one other law of physics in TNE and Brilliant Lances, and we call it laser focusing. In order to penetrate an opponent's hull, laser energy must be focused onto a small point on the target's surface, measured in watts or joules of energy per square centimeter. The equation goes like this: I=(P/[L/D]^2)/R^2,, where I is power density (intensity) at the target, P is the laser output power, L is the wavelength of light, D is the diameter of the focusing element, and R is the range. For purposes of delivering laser power to a target, you want that power to be focused into as small a point as possible, with one square centimeter being a good benchmark. So how big does our focal dish need to be? Let's go out on a limb and say 1 0 meters in diameter, much larger than anything ever visualized for Traveller. And let's set its wavelength in the ultraviolet (UV) range, better than we can handle today, but not as good as X rays (which we have left appearing at TL 13, as in previous Traveller products), and we'll set its output at 1 000 megajoules. The bad news is that its spot size at only 30,000 kilometers (one hex) is almost 70 meters in diameter, diluting the 1 000 megajoules down to only 0.3 megajoules per square centimeter. That's no good. We were hoping for a range of about 1 0 hexes with an intensity per square centimeter equal to the output. What do we need to get a 1 0-hex range? We need a divergence angle of around 0.3 picoradians (10-12 radians), which we can get by using shorter wavelength light or a larger focal dish. But since we've already decided that UV is as short as we can go before TL 13, we're left with a dish diameter of 6000 meters. To make a long story short, we had to come up with a system that would allow lasers to perform pretty much as we've been visualizing them in Traveller, which requires us to break the laws of optics. Our solution was to introduce gravitic focusing of the laser beam, which appears at the same time as contra- gravity technology. We create the effect of a larger diameter dish by creating an intense point source of gravity within the focusing area to band the light with gravity.We justthought you should know. Detonation Lasers: Here is another feature which is similar to Star Cruiser, but which has its own roots, separate from 2300. This result was driven by two considerations. First, the accuracy of lasers. Once we designed lasers to be accurate enough to hit targets that are several tenths of a light-second away, k didn't make a whole lot of sense to require missiles to come into virtual physical contact with their targets. The fire control-firing cycle lasts as long as R takes for sensor data to move from the target (at the speed of light) to the firing vessel, and for the laser beam to make h back to the target (also at the speed of light). A target can only move so far during that time, and the closer the target gets to the firing ship, the less time available to jink out of the way of that laser fire. For each target size, there are ranges at which they cannot get out of the way at all, given their G performance. And R's worse for targets like missiles which are coming straight at the firing vessel, because the fire control solution becomes a two-dimensional problem instead of a three-dimensional problem. Somewhere in the last 30,000 kilometers a missile will get killed. Add to this the fact that TNE puts reaction mass back into space movement (instead of the reactionless drives of MegaTraveller), and we find that missiles got bigger in order to carry sufficient reaction mass to reach their targets, and have precious little left over for violent evasive maneuvers. In any case, evasion would require a missile to present its long axis to its target in order to apply transverse thrust, making itself a larger target. Detonation laser missiles, allowing the missile to damage a target from a distance, were the only answer to this problem for purposes of space combat, but numerous other types of non-nuclear missiles are available for planetary bombardment, etc. Why No Neutrino Sensors: MegaTraveller players will notice the lack of neutrino sensors in space combat. This is because they are useless for finding starship fission and fusion drives. Nuclear reactions give off neutrinos as a by-product, but the energy of these neutrinos varies with the exact type of nuclear reaction. The standard fusion reaction, the proton-proton chain, produces neutrinos of rather low energy. The ability to detect these neutrinos varies with the material used to detect them, but for one real-life neutrino experiment, it was calculated that an Earthbound sensor would detect only about one neutrino per day from our sun. Given the much smaller size of a starship's fusion plant, a neutrino sensor would detect (on average) only 7 x 10^-21 neutrinos per second per ton of detector per watt of the fusion plant. This comes out to one neutrino every 50,000 years for a one-ton detector vs. a 100 MW power plant. Even with a very large neutrino sensor, say 1,000,000 tons, and a large power plant, say 100,000 MW, it would still take 26.3 minutes(approximately a turn) to detect one neutrino, scarcely enough to build up a sensor track. Higher energy fusion reactions, the sort that take place at the core of very hot stars, produce more energetic neutrinos that are easier to detect, but these reactions require far more temperature and pressure than those used in fusion drives. For this reason, neutrino sensors are only useful as survey sensors to obtain information about the reactions going on in the interior of stars. Our thanks to Kris Miller for some of these figures. Kris is perhaps the only Traveller player who works with a real neutrino sensor, so we're inclined to believe him. Jamming: Jamming in Brilliant Lances is of two types: deceptive jamming and barrage or noise jamming. The former is represented by the EMS jammers, and the latter by the area jammers. Deceptive jammers are subtle in their function. First, they detect enemy active sensor emissions, and then analyze their function and locate their emitter. The jammer then sends spurious "false target" returns back to the enemy sensor, by generating its emissions so that the enemy sensor accepts them as its own. Thus, it can confuse the enemy as to its location, speed, or direction of travel. Tech level of sensors and jammers plays a major role in the success of these comptetitions, because of the many subtle improvements which are incorporated into each now generation of electronics to defeat the countermeasures of earlier tech levels. Area jammers, on the other hand, simply emit large amounts of electromagnetic "noise" which complicates the task of hearing the real signals amid all of the more powerful emissions. The Big Change: Players who have already tried the starship combat system in TNE will notice that Brilliant Lances is very similar, but they will also notice one very big change. In TNE, starships fire 10 times per 30-minute turn, while in Brilliant Lances they fire only once. When we began transforming the mapless system in TNE into a boardgame, the first thing we noticed was that there was not enough movement. In a mapless, counterless system like in TNE this was not a problem, but this is a Big Problem in a boardgame. There is an important law which some people call Frank Chadwick's Law, but which Frank is always careful to correctly attribute as Glenn Kidd's Law: "You can never have too much movement.' Moving and then firing 1 0 times before moving again is not satisfactory, so we cut the firing by a factor of 1 0 to once per 30 minutes. Movement, hence tactics and maneuver, are now restored to their primary place. My, that was easy. What?!? We're that capricious and thoughtless? Well, not in this case anyway. When you fire at a distant starship, the motion of the target (note that a speed of only one hex per turn comes out to about 1700 centimeters each one- thousandth of a second)will "smear" that precious 1 cm^2 footprint and dilute the laser intensity to the point where h only scorches the paint, but does no damage. Thus, the firing laser must follow any target motion to hold that spot steady for the duration of the laser pulse. This is very hard to do over tens of thousands of kilometers, given vibration, etc. While each laser fires 10 times each 30 minutes, and may contact the target several times, many of those shots will only warm the enemy hull in this fashion. An actual hit is one which is held steady to inflict its full damage. To reflect the 10 shots per turn, we allow an Outstanding Success to score two hits. We encourage players using the TNE system to likewise cut their fire rates by a factor of 10. Guiding Principles As compared to earlier Traveller space combat systems, Brilliant Lances places tremendous importance on the role of individual crewmembers. Traveller has always had as its core assumption the idea that people make a difference, and this is a key facet of the TNE space combat system. While the High Guard, and by extension, MegaTraveller, space combat systems created combat results tables that were based on installed technology, the TNE system bases the success or failure of any task on the competence of the person operating that system. Unlike High Guard, which could actually be resolved on a purely statistical basis (see Trillion Credit Squadron), TNE space combat uses the installed technology to define the difficulty of task to be attempted by its crow. And because Brilliant Lances is intended to be used as part of a roleplaying adventure, this makes space combat more of a roleplaying experience than it has been before. Now players will understand why they have all of those Sensors, Communications, Gunnery, or Screens skills for, because they will be using them a lot. They will also learn how best to use their equipment and skills, and create their own tactics. Open-Ended System: Another aspect of the PC-centered concept is the fact that Brilliant Lances is intended as an open-ended system. It was designed from the bottom up to present a number of capabilities that the players learn to use to their best advantage, rather than from the top down, where decisions were made in advance about what tactics or equipment work best, with the rules written to reflect those preconceptions. There is no right way to fight a space battle. Instead, Brilliant Lances players will learn to use certain equipment or tactics to counter a certain enemy, and will learn to build and deploy their own ships accordingly. Unlike a top-down design which has a certain "right way" to win embedded in the rules, Brilliant Lances will be driven to a large extent by how the players interact with the system, and the solutions and standard procedures that they develop. The dominant tactics and weapons will not be dictated by the designers' opinions or assumptions. They will be discovered and developed by the players, in their own games and in tournament play. The Future of Brilliant Lances: Brilliant Lances is a detailed and complex game. Again, this is because it is to be used with roleplaying adventures. Damage is detailed because players want to know what has happened to their ship, their pride and joy, carefully modified and customized over the years of campaigning. What systems were hit? Which PCs were wounded? What do we have to repair? How bad is the damage? There are also a number of decisions to be made that enhance the roleplaying experience, and make the players feel like they are really sifting on the bridge, working out strategy with their fellow PC crewmembers. Do we go active? Should we launch a drone? Do we speed up or try to evade? Which of those bogeys should we head toward? As a highly detailed game, Brilliant Lances is clearly not directed toward large fleet actions. In 1994, we will release a Brilliant Lances add-on package designed for fleet actions with large numbers of large ships, called Brilliant Lances Express. h will be based on the same principles as Brilliant Lances, but with the level of detail scaled back a bit. This will ensure that the new system will be compatible with Brilliant Lances in that the results of both systems can be translated to the other scale. We will also be publishing Brilliant Lances control panel supplements. Space considerations made R impossible to include custom control panels for each of the 33 spacecraft included in Brilliant Lances, so we will be issuing supplements which present custom-made control panels for already existing starships, variants of existing starships, and all-now starships. These will speed up preparation for play, and will also allow useful tables and other data to be printed on the control panel. Finally, we will be supporting Brilliant Lances tournaments during the summer convention season, for which players can design their own ships and try out their own tactics. Scenarios: Brilliant Lances is intended, first and foremost, to be used in resolving situations that arise in the course of Traveller: The Now Era campaigns. The scenarios included with the game barely scratch the surface of the types of engagements that are possible, but are intended to give players ideas of the sorts of situations that can arise. These scenarios do not use all of the ships available in the counter mix or in the data profiles, nor do they provide for the use of advanced concepts, such as drones. Think of the scenarios as tools to discover how Traveller starship combat works, and then add new concepts to see how they after the outcome. If a scenario is unbalanced, see if the addition of a few drones or a missile-firing vessel helps out the weak player. Try allowing one or both players to start play with several drones already deployed, so that players will not know where their opponents have concentrated their forces. Try using more map space. Although the three large maps included with Brilliant Lances provide considerable space, actual space is infinitely larger, and the options presented by having to defend or attack across greater areas will help you visualize many of the important issues of space combat. Larger maps can be created by purchasing extra maps from GDW, or by picking up blank hex maps from your local game store. Some companies even self large area fabric hex sheets, or white hex grids that can be ironed onto black shoots for large play areas. Clarification: Although most players understand enough about physics to already know this, I omitted the explanation that all missiles, drones, and small craft launched from a spacecraft begin play with the same vector as the craft they were launched from. Since the Launch Phase precedes the Plotting Phase, this allows the launched craft to plot its now movement based on that original vector. I apologize for the oversight.