Cinematic Vs Rules/Realism in Space Combat

I don’t recall that one, but thank you for mentioning it. I will have to rewatch some DS9. Partly to see if it was a B’rel or Kvort Bird of Prey.

From what I can make out that could actually be quite difficult! The series was notably inconsistent on that front :smiley:

Inspired by FASA, I’ve incorporated simple firing arcs for my games. Cannons are forward only, banks are forward half, and arrays are full 360 arcs. Torps are forward + aft arc.

All Borg weapons get a full 360 for obvious reasons.

Player ships and major NPC vessels get forward, aft, starboard and port shields. Minor (basic damage rules for NPC ships) NPC ships and Notable NPC ships treat their basic shield rating as a single arc. (Notable NPC ships have multiple systems to damage, per full starship rules, but still the simpler shield rules, leaving them more resilient than cannon fodder minors, but not as tough as player ships or major NPC vessels.)

Thematically, this lets players meaningfully note that starboard shields are down 50%, or whatever, and make use of maneuvers to improve their resilience in combat.

Maneuver-wise, I’m stealing the maneuver dials and templates from Star Trek Attack Wing, calling green moves thrusters only, white impulse, and red adds one to the difficulty. Any of which can be combined with the cost/task for things like an attack pattern or evasive maneuvers. Warp just moves in a straight forward line however many zones, assuming it’s not a warp to disengage.

Judging from the size of the phaser bolts looks like B’rel
Phaser Strike
Aft Torpedo

That makes as much sense as anything canon :wink:

You could also go by the fact that they’re in front of the Galor in the first image and look quite small…

I’m a fan of the B’rel being the small one, but of course, the only time it was name-checked on-screen, it was 300+ m long… Let’s avoid that digression for now though :slight_smile:

It’s worth noting that the B’rel/K’vort distinction does not exist in the shows and those ships are never referred to by those class names either in the show or in supporting production materials.

Rather, the distinction is a secondary canon justification (from the Star Trek Encyclopedia, I think) made to explain how the Klingon Bird of Prey appears to vary wildly in size. Some fan-versions of this (such as the listings on ditl.org) assume even more “identical design, different size” classes than just those two, as the shows are spectacularly inconsistent in how big a BoP actually is (ranging from “looks like it might be a heavy fighter/escort” to
“about the same size as the Defiant”, to “comparable in size to a Galaxy-class starship” and everything in between). There’s a detailed examination of the issue here.

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With respect both terms came from episodes of TNG. “Yesterday’s Enterprise” Wesley Crusher identifies the approaching ships as, “Three K’vort class battlecruisers”. Later “Rascals” reuses footage from the previous episode, where Worf identifies “two ships decloaking fore and aft. Klingon birds of prey, B’rel class.”

Fluff is good for description and roleplaying. As long as it does not go against the game mechanics. So a GM saying a ship is swinging around attacking just means the ship is attacking … unless that GM ALSO wishes for said ship to change zones or get the buffs that come from Helm PC/NPC actions.

So first case is perfectly fine.

Second case is not. GM cannot both change zones AND attack without spending threat to retain initiative. And he most certainly cannot do that with BOTH ships at the same time.

Which is where the names came from… and Worf also identifies Lursa and B’etor’s vessel as a “D12”. But none of the names are ever used consistently within the shows, and that doesn’t resolve the fact that the same model is presented at as being at least five different sizes over the years.

It’s just one of those production-side annoyances we have to live with and work around.

Canon clearly shows that the TOS-Movies era is a dozen man ship, big enough to hold 2 16-20m whales side by side, and they have a flipper spread of about 12-15m, but we can probably narrow that by 5m for overlap… so, 24-30 m wide, and easily 4m tall…

The cargo bay on the “Bounty” is at least 17x24x4 m… not small - 1632 cu meters, over 500 Register Tons or 50 TEU. Well more than most modern 100 man warships can carry . And it’s run adequately by a crew of 4 (Kirk, Chekov, Spock, and Uhura).

I seem to recall, tho’ the rotarin only showed a dozen or so crew, but the list seems longer. WE know of at least 15 aboard in one episode.

I seem to recall a larger crew being mentioned for one elsewhere.

FASA had a Battlecruiser version, with 300 or so crew, in the late movies era… but their late movies era is decidedly Alternate Universe now…

The intent was for the Bounty to be roughly 110 meters or so long. With a few exceptions most of the shots in the movies are consistent give or take 10 meters. Using the ship in TNG without maintaining that scale necessitated a second larger version. This one changes virtually every time it shows up.

The scale intent (set in ST III) was blown when they shot the landing gear depression in ST IV, making it more in the 60m length. the gear length is roughly 1/6 the overall length, and appears to be a 5:1 or 6:1 ratio of it’s own with long. So, Jillian, on her knees, is about 1m, the gear is about 2m wide, and maybe 12m long, so about 72m for the ship.Off by 50% of apparent, or 30% of intended, length.

Likewise, the landed at vulcan shots put the look even smaller. Assuming a 30° away, it’s rougly 10x to 11x the tallest onscreen, so 12x to 13x (hypotenuse of a 30° right triangle), and a 1.9m peak person, putting it closer to 40m…

In short, ST IV is inconsistent enough to fail sanity on pure visual means. The one on Vulcan is smaller than the one in the park in SF, and the one in the bay is closer to the one on Vulcan, but then it’s hard to find enough room for the cargo bay…

I don’t recall any shots in TNG nor DS9 showing a landed BoP…

Have you contacting the folks who make the video and correcting them? I’m sure thy’d like to hear from you.

Section 31, I know it is “moot” at this point, but how does a ship “list” in space? That is a naval term for taking on water and leaning in the direction of the flood, or where the most compartments are full of water. Yes, I know that “in the show” they present a ship as “tilting off center to the camera’s viewpoint” to give the impression it is out of control, or badly damaged. I’m not trying to be difficult, but my point is that the show is an abstraction of reality, and the game presenter was doing what seemed right in the moment, for her/his group. Fun thread, though!

several different things happen… all of which could be interpreted as “listing”

  • 1 is the “bridge lean left/right” - in TOS, this is not uncommon. Camera tilts one way, everyone else leans over, implying the inertial compensation lags a bit. Implies a bit of impact force.
  • 2 is the stuck thruster or misaligned drive. The ship rotates along some axis due to drive damage
    *3 is the streaming atmosphere - realistically, there’s not enough to do much. But some episodes give an implication that something makes the entire ship’s inertial mass effectively far less… Hit the water tanks, tho’, and you have a potential for a few degrees of tilt… per minute.

Essentially, directors simply seem to copy submarine film standards, which aren’t exactly all that realistic for subs, either, according to what I’ve heard from submariners I’ve known.