SFB Unofficial Answers to Questions Why

Unofficial Answers ``Why?''
There are a few concepts in SFB which constantly generate confusion. Sure, it is possible to play the game by just literally following the rules without thinking. However, SFB does describe itself as a ``simulation game about an imaginary subject''. The game can be more fun and more interesting if you can picture the reality behind the rules.
What follows is my own way of making sense of the rules for SFB. If you read in the Captain's Log periodicals, you will see that there are official answers to some of these questions: but often they resort to ``Because that would change the game too much'' or ``Because that would ruin game balance.''
The answers below are purely for the purposes of helping players form a picture in their mind of what the battles are ``really'' like.

Warp Speed and Distance Scale, or
``Just how big is a hex?''

Warp Targetting and Sublight Disengagement, or
``He's still there -- why can't I shoot him?''

Drone Control and Wild Weasels, or
``Why's my drone going left when I can see the target is straight ahead?''

Weapon Mounts and Ship Design, or
``Why can't I put more gatlings on my Ranger?''

Power Absorber Panels, or
``Doesn't that violate Conservation of Energy?''

Warp Speed and Distance Scale
Rule section (A3.4) of SFB states that a hex is 10,000 kilometers across, and movement of one hex per turn equals movement at the speed of light.
However, I think this is a lousy way to make sense of the game, and would like to suggest an alternative. The official rule states that relativistic time dilation makes 1/30th of a second on a planet equivalent 1 minute on a ship. Within the confines of the game, this is more or less ignorable. However, if you are trying to define a consistent background, this is makes no sense:

SFB makes no differentiation between action on ships and action on planets or bases -- which directly contradicts the time dilation explanation.

Even if you discount any scientific calculation, picture a marine on a planet trying to talk to a station in orbit with a radio. It takes a full turn for his signal to reach orbit, and another full turn for a radio reply to reach him. Just try to picture it.

Units under impulse or in standard orbit move at 1 hex per turn (i.e. the speed of light). This is insanely fast for such units. To accelerate to just 1% of the speed of light in 1 minute, a starship would have to accelerate at five thousand gee's, releasing kilotons of fuel.

The rules already define objects not in warp which move at over 1 hex per turn: asteroids thrown from supernovae moves at 20 hexes per turn, and sublight units can be drawn towards black holes or moved by nebulas.

I would suggest that it makes more sense if you think of lightspeed as being somewhat over 32 hexes per turn. This has at least two advantages.

The speed boundary of 32 hexes per turn now makes sense: going faster than that means jumping to warp one. This is the special effect in the movies and TV series of engaging the warp engines and jumping to warp speeds.
Lightspeed phenomena now move at a more reasonable speed. One can at least imagine a 1 or 2 impulse delay for someone on the ground in talking to orbit by radio (as opposed to a 1 turn delay).

Non-warp units use only Newtonian thrust to propel them, and are thus still limited to 1 hex per turn. Technically, this thrust should only be a fraction of a hex per turn -- but it is fudged to 1 hex per turn to reflect the additional maneuverability of impulse movement. Note that this still represents hundreds of gee's of acceleration and speeds of many thousands of kilometers per second.
Warp units can maneuver at speeds of 2-31 by powering their warp drives without fully ``engaging'' them. We refer to this as tactical warp movement, which is slower than light but doesn't follow regular Newtonian laws. This matches the movies and series, where starships don't follow Newtonian movement even when supposedly not moving at warp speeds... For example, they bank when they turn.
Technically this means a sublight unit in extreme circumstances might be accelerated to speeds of over 1 hex per turn. This unit would move at an assigned pseudo-speed in a fixed direction, possibly with a regular pattern of sideslips. Its maneuver rate is zero: it may use impulse TAC's. If the unit has impulse power allocated to movement, it can move in a direction it want to on impulse 32, rather than in the fixed direction.

Warp Targetting and Sublight Disengagement
The existance of sublight disengagement and to some degree hidden deployment suggests the surprising conclusion that starships simply can't see very well. They can be unable to find and target a thousand-ton hunk of metal even if they are in the hex where they know it disappeared (i.w. within 10,000km). For reference, with your naked eye you can see small satellites a few hundred kilometers away in orbit.
This might just seem like a goof -- but it suggests a principle which helps to justify many other aspects of the rules. First, it shows that starships target primarily on the warp signature of their enemies (also note the sublight benefit under D19.0 Passive Fire Control). Second, it suggests that simply having warp engines (even if they are shut down) is different than actually jettisoning your nacelles.
In short, ships are affected by the passive field of having operable warp nacelles -- which obviously helps them to operate in warp-speed tactical battles, but which also interferes with their ability to sense and affect sublight phenomena. Picture a permanent distortion of space around the ship -- which you can tune to jump about at lightspeed, reflect away incoming fire, and so forth. However, it is also tricky to see through this field.

Weapon Mounts and Ship Design
Often there are various complaints about poor ship design, suggesting that X ship should have more or better weapons. Often these arguments are very simplistic, reflecting several misconceptions:

Ships are not actually lego-toys made of modular boxes stuck together. An SSD looks like this to show the various ship functions, but most boxed function actually depend on a variety of systems throughout the ship. You can see this by how damage works.
Say a single phaser hits a Klingon D7, damaging two Forward Hull, a transporter (in the rear hull), and a disruptor (on the left nacelle). Presumably the transporter and disruptor have been rendered inactive because the systems they depend on: targetting computers, power lines, etc. They are certainly not physically vaporized, since they can be brought back on-line within a few minutes by damage control.

A box of the same label does not neccessarily represent exactly the same equipment -- it just means that there are systems of roughly the same capability as equivalent boxes. In particular, option mounts or modular spaces are not just big open spaces to put things -- otherwise all ships have option mounts. They mean that the ship has a host of adaptable, multi-purpose systems. As a parallel, imagine a computer that has adaptable enough hardware and operating system to run any program for Windows 95, Macintosh, or any variety UNIX (!).

Weaponry on ships requires a lot more space than equivalent weaponry on fighters. This is because a ship has many factors which complicate weapon operation. The ships's weapons need equipment to tune them to fire through shields, and to compensate for the distortion of the giant warp field, and other functions.
For example, a Ranger can launch nine Stinger-2's which can fire 18 fusion beams and 9 gatling phasers. However, it cannot just mount those fighters on the front of the ship so they can fire their weapons. The weapons would reflect off the ship's own shields, and couldn't hit anything without having their own dedicated targeting computer.
Presumably the engines and defensive screens of fighters are much simpler. Thus the weapons on a fighter can do without many of the systems which are neccessary on ships -- allowing them to fit into a much smaller space.

Drone Control and Wild Weasels
It helps to picture a drone as an extremely volatile warp-speed vehicle. It is not just a rocket with a payload, and it is fundamentally different from 20th century missiles in many respects:

The only thing a drone can see and react to is a dot -- this is the single-channel spotlight which the firing ship uses to designate the target.
We can conjecture that the micro-warp field which drives the drone must generate an extreme amount of noise which its minute sensors cannot penetrate. Ships can cut through this noise with bulky and advanced sensors, but a drone is nearly blind.

A drone can only be ballistically targetted to strike within 5000km or so of a point. That is, it cannot inertially guide itself like a normal rocket can. It's unstable micro-warp is not very accurate and requires corrections to its course.
At times, the engine will spike and throw it off course, which it has to correct for. From the drone's point of view, everything suddenly spins and appears in a different place. Thus the drone guidance cannot rule out the possibility of its target seeming to ``jump'' from one position to another. Thus the drone can be distracted by a wild SWAC or PF scout in a wildly different direction than its target.

A drone is not a self-contained system. For example, you can't just roll a drone out of the hatch and activate it. It requires a very precise and complex launching operation to be deployed. Launching from a starship requires a specialized rack which primes the drone and launches it safely through the shields and warp field.
This process is apparently easier to do from a shuttle than from a ship. Thus, fighters and scatter-packs can launch drones relatively easily. Ships have shields and warp engines which must interfere with priming the drone -- thus they require more bulky specialized launchers.

As its endurance is reached, the frame burns out completely, destroying the warhead as well. This is another indication that the engine itself is volatile -- moreso than a conventional rocket.

Similar logic applies to plasma torpedoes, which also must have limited ability to sense their target due to interference from the giant ball of energetic plasma surrounding the core.
Thus, a wild weasel works by making a distraction that looks like the real ship. A full ship or shuttle with sensors (at close than Tactical Intelligence level A) can distinguish between the real ship and the wild weasel. However, the drone's sensors are much less accurate.

Power Absorber Panels
An interesting property of PA panels is that they return to the Andromedan ship more power than was used to fire at them. For example, a ship fires a phaser-2 for one point of energy, causing five damage. The Andromedan can ``absorb'' four power from this (with one degradation point).
This can be understood if you view the panels not as literal absorbers, but rather reactive shielding which release a burst of energy upon being struck. Imagine the incoming fire as a spark which drops into kindling, creating a larger fire.
This energy is not ``free'' because the panels are degraded by the damage. i.e. Their fuel is being used up. i.e. In the example above, say a lone PA box is hit by a phaser-2 (for 1 energy) causing 5 damage. This results in 4 energy and 1 degradation -- i.e. the PA box has effectively generated 3 power. However, it can only do this ten more times before it is fully degraded. Repairing it presumably involves replacing some of the lost material or fuel.
Thus, each PA box has approximately 30 units of ``stored'' energy which is slowly released via the priming energy of enemy fire.

John H. Kim <jhkim@fnal.gov>
Last modified: Wed Sep 16 17:39:51 CDT 1998
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