Friday, November 4, 2016

A Galaxy Far Far Away

My colleague Geoff Taylor has very kindly lent me his Star Wars X-Wing collection to supplement my recently purchased starter pack.  I've been trying out the rules solo.  I have found them good.


Good, that is, as  representation of spaceship combat as depicted in the Star Wars films.  You need a very healthy dose of suspension of disbelief to counteract the fact that the physics of the Star Wars universe is complete bollocks.

This, for example is the large Lambda Class shuttle, a nice model with foldy-up wings.  It's a bit slow and unmanoeuvrable, presumably because of the drag of the big wings against the ether, but it's also the only ship that can stop dead in space.  This, for some reason, is a stressful manoeuvre so it can't do it for more than one turn at a time!    


Still, it's fun though I make an inept Luke Skywalker; in my try-out he was consistently out-fought by his wing-man Biggs Darklighter.



2 comments:

Broeders said...

I would imagine that all ships in space travel at exactly the same speed. With a lack of atmosphere and gravity (and hence resistance) any ship in space would essentially travel at the same speed irrespective of size.

Counterpane said...

I did some thinking about this back in the day when I used to play Traveller (and then a homebrew system based on the James Bond 007 RPG). The important thing in space is not so much speed as acceleration*. Acceleration allows you to change direction in response to attacks or opportunities.

Acceleration will be determined by the relationship between the power of your engines and your mass. So a big ship will be slower after a given period of acceleration if it has the same engines as a smaller ship.

* At least until you get up to relativistic velocities.