So, for those who've played already, the Designer's Diary sounded pretty cool.

1. Did you use miniatures?

2. Do they have any counters or suggestions for keeping track of orders etc? (Seeing as most engagements would be fairly small, I wouldn't assume so).

3. Is it more...satisfying...than BFG?

4. How complete is it? Do you see a need/want for a forthcoming additional rules to expand this part of the game? (other than just new ship stats?)

Are game hasn't got around to space combat yet (only played one session so far). I can tell you that everyone gets to act on a tactical turn. One player can make a move action for the ship, one a gunnery action (one player can fire all weapons, or oversee the firing more like), and everyone else can take whats called extended actions. Extended actions are things like using ship sensors to help aim, medical attention stuff, damage control, and so forth. All actions to be taken must be decided at the beginning of the groups Tactical Turn and in what order. For example, the group could use a move action to get closer, the ship sensors to aim better, fire a volley of macrocannons (and make the ship fired upon expend it's void shield), fire their lance, send someone across in a boarding ship to do a hit and run attack, plus an additonal number of extended actions can be taken depending on how good your npc crew is (3 extended actions for a average crew). This all happens over a 30 min tactical round.

Maxim C. Gatling said:

1: Yes, it benefits from it far more than the ordinary combat. I wouldn't call it a necessity, but I find it very helpful.

2. You're supposed to resolve all actions a ship at a time.

3. For anything short of a large battlefleet engagement, yes, a thousand times yes. If you want more than a cruiser with a few escorts per side, you might find the complexity counteracting the awesome, but this is everything good about BFG turned up to 11.

4. No torpedoes or ships larger than a basic cruiser. Very few xeno-ships. So, it could definitely benefit from supplementary material. However, the system is at once incredibly intuitive and detailed, and you can run with it to whatever homebrew realm you want with ease. I wrote Torpedo rules, Eldar ship classes (complete with special Solar sail movement), several specialized Freeboota and Corsair officer NPCs, and other add-ons without scratching my head about what to do even once.

Thanks guys!

Say, what's the smallest ship represented in ship-to-ship RT combat? Do they go down to fighter level at all? If so, how is that handled?

The smallest ship is somewhere around 1.5km long, which I think is the raider. I'm sure future supplements will fill in the smaller ship gaps, but fighters are not covered, except there is an extended action called Hit and Run, that allows a explorer or one of the NPC crewmen to take a small ship over to the enemy vessel within 5 VU and attempt a boarding action to blow up something onboard the enemy vessel, causing damage that bypasses armor. But if the attempt is failed while attempting to board, the worse case is that all aboard the ship die.

The scale between big void ships and smaller ships are completely different. For example, the players guncutter itself could not hurt a void ship. It could shoot all day, and nothing happen. A saving grace of course is that Big ships find it almost impossible to target little craft with their big guns. Instead they have a bunch of short range weapons represented as a turret rating that hinders small craft and make hit and run attacks more difficult.

Not so much the fluff, but in the original source materials ('80's 40k and WD articles) as well as BFG, fighter/bombers COULD hurt a ship. Granted, one squadron, let along one bomber isn't going to destroy a ship, but it can contribute to the battle. Fighters had three basic functions, take out bombers, take out turrets and protect friendly bombers.

So theoretically if your Guncutter had the right armament it could hurt a big ship. It might take years to destroy it (assuming it held still and never fired back...). I don't think most Guncutters are outfitted for assaulting bigger ships, so it'd have to be a special order thing!

I do hope that in the future they make some provisions for the much smaller ships to participate in a meaningful but limited fashion.

Thanks for clearing up the turret rating question i had, i thought it had to do with what kind of weapons it could mount.

Supposedly, "turrets" are for point defense and consist of lascannons, plasma cannons, Multi-Meltas ...missile launchers even. But the type doesn't really matter because although devastating to a Dreadnought or Rhino, none of these weapons would scratch a Starship.

But used en-masse against fighters bombers and torpedos.... Hence they have a "turret rating" rather than specifying the exact type of weapon.

I do see scenarios involving small craft though. Example:

You're chasing down a ship with the intent to board her and capture her with minimal damage. The ship itself is the loot, after all. But alas, it is a bit faster than you. Not as fast as your Bombers though... Bombers can't destroy the ship (which in this case is good) so you send a squadron or three with a fighter escort on a run targeting the opposing ship's engines. This is a much better idea than firing your Prow Lance at it, because your Lance might accidently score a magnificent crit and blow the ship back to component atoms, which don't sell well and can't haul cargo...

The reverse:

You're making a run for it. Your ship is faster, but less manoeverable and you're having to dodge space junk/asteroids/viscious knids/whatever. you send your bombers on a run to target their Bridge. If you're lucky and they hit their mark, hopefully the enemy will be spending the next 30 min turn blind, re-routing power cables, switching to auxilliary auspex arrays, etc. and you can make your escape.

Of course, you'd have a better chance for success if one of your characters was an Ace Fighter/Bomber pilot leading the squadron...

What do you think?

Here's another thought, purely from a GM's point of view. If I don't throw Fighters/Bombers at my players occasionally, they'll wise up and start skimping on Turrets and Hangar Bays. I don't know if that's possible, but if it is you can bet min/maxing players are going to do it!

Maxim C. Gatling said:

I don't have the book. This is strictly what I've read in various posts and put together from that.

It would seem that the primary purpose of fighters so far is two fold, to get a boarding party aboard a ship and to help defend a ship from said boarding party, tough the primary defense against this is the turrets. That in and of it's self would be enough reason for your players to have good turrets, especially if they're up against Dark Eldar who's favorite thing is capturing new slaves, and to do that, they've gotta get aboard the other ship and begin a reign of hell upon it's crew.

It was mentioned in another thread tat one of the best tactics for taking a ship undamaged was through boarding actions. More specifically, boarding actions which, somehow, were terribly frightening and demoralizing forcing the enemy crew to surrender without a fight. In doing so, not only do you end up with a mostly undamaged sip, but a crew (not to be trusted tough) to sail the damned thing as well ;-) It revolved around a mechanic where by a boarding party could do something to inflict moral damage on the opposing sip and, once moral was reduced to a certain level, the crew surrenders. I don't know the specifics as I'm simply recalling second hand information, but in tat, there's already a vital role for small ships to play... getting your men aboard that ship.

Keep in mind a Fury (fighter) in Battle Fleet Gothic is 60-70 meters long, and the Starhawk (bombers) are even bigger. Torps are around 200 feet long. (There are smaller fighters, and bombers, but these are used to support ground troops.) Thus a guncutter would be more a fighter than a bomber. Personally my campaign won't be complete if the PCs don't stuff themselves in a boarding torp at least once.....

That's really interesting as GW throughout the years can't decide how big a torpedo actually is. Originally they're described as "the size of a skyscraper" but if you've been to London their "skyscrapers" aren't all that big. I imagine the size of an ICBM, which are several stories tall, not World Trade Center-sized.

Unfortunate, but in trying to create the sense of ginormous scale they exaggerated a lot in the beginning. It's another case of the original designers (Rick Priestley etc.) being young at the time and not realizing the game would still be around 20 years later. However, they had a lot of cool and interesting ideas that never made it past 1987.

As of right now, there are no actual rules in RT for fighters and bombers. I have set about trying to design some rules for smaller fighters and guncutters. I'm working with a damage conversion factor of 10 as a base for having ships both character scale combat sized and void ship combat scale sized. Seems like it might work. If a guncutter carrying a lascannon does 5d10 +5 damage, then even on max damage hits, thats only 55 points of damage for character scale combat, which would be only 5 points of void ship scale damage. 5 points wouldn't even scratch the armor on most void ships which have ratings around 10 to 14 armor points, and that is how it supposed to be.

That is good for when the characters really want to get in their guncutter and take the fight to the enemies own guncutter. I've also set about a secondary set of stats for using guncutters and smaller fighter/bombers in void ship scale combat in otherways than just the Hit and Run extended action. My group of players have a regiment of Imperial Guard on board as well as a couple of small wings of fighters, (though they are lightnings and ill suited for space combat). For the lightning secondary void scale stats, I stated that for each squadron in flight around there ship (they can only occupy the same space as their own ship because of their limited space flight), that the ship is provided 1 extra turret rating. Other types of fighters could provide different space combat abilities (like fighters being able to knock out an enemies own fighter support group providing the extra turret rating protection)