[Lepanto]

As everyone knows, FS ships move really slowly in realspace (by any remotely realistic standards) and fight at visual range, even when real-life spaceships should move and engage at far greater speeds and distances. Of course, I'm well aware that FS is designed for gameplay first, and scientific accuracy a distant second. I just want to know how HLP users, especially those who want to add a bit of a realistic hard sci-fi edge to their campaigns, prefer to rationalize FS's soft sci-fi physics.

[Grizzly]

Table mods! Sushi's velocity mod rather recommended.

Aside from that... No, not really interested. FS2 always emphasized the "Fi" part of sci-fi anyway, and if we want an hard sci-fi edge, we've got von Nuemann probes .

[General Battuta]

There is no genuinely effective rationalization. One thing you can do, however, is accept that subspace drives are so much more powerful than reaction drives for traversing long distances that most engagements begin with everyone jumping into a common reference frame and then maneuvering at low relative velocities.

It's not much but it's there!

[MatthTheGeek]

It never made sense, never tried to, and never pretended to.

I believe the amount of campaigns produced in the FS universe is a testament that most people don't care. It's a game.

[Mobius]

Option 3. When I think of the universe FreeSpace is proposed to describe, I imagine different mechanics with stuff like higher speeds (as seen in the Intro cutscenes of both games), deadlier beams (Behemoth Vs. Vigilant anim, FS2's cover) and more effective blob turrets.

[General Battuta]

Option 3. When I think of the universe FreeSpace is proposed to describe, I imagine different mechanics with stuff like higher speeds (as seen in the Intro cutscenes of both games), deadlier beams (Behemoth Vs. Vigilant anim, FS2's cover) and more effective blob turrets.

This is fine as just a light remix but if you move towards genuine realism you accidentally render every weapon system and combat doctrine in the setting malformed and irrelevant.

You don't have to alter beams at all to make them as effective as the FS2 cover art, and if you do you accidentally create a really boring game.

[Luis Dias]

A space battle would actually look more like Ian M Bank's kind of war, which is extremely boring and just too abstract.

[General Battuta]

I love that bit in Surface Detail where the protagonist's on the ROU watching a battle and she's like 'wow it's all going so fast!' and the ROU says 'oh no, the battle was over in less than a minute. This is a replay.'

[Phantom Hoover]

GOU, not ROU

[General Battuta]

I'll ROU your GOU, foo

[The E]

ROU ROU FIGHT DA POWER

[Mongoose]

Option 1, dun care, just fly and shoot things.

[Phantom Hoover]

option 1 seems essentially the same as option 2

[mjn.mixael]

Option 1 indeed. In fact, I would find it rather annoying if a story went out of it's way to explain any sort of -non physics- or whatever sci-fi magic is going on. We got enough of that technobabble in Star Trek.

I prefer to just play it and enjoy it without it trying to prove to my mind that it actually could happen.

[General Battuta]

Option 3 is pretty much Objectively Wrong since everything about the setting falls apart if you try to pretend ranges and velocities are greater. You end up with a nightmare world of kamikaze drones, constant unblockable RKV bombardment, and no sexy little manned fighters to fly. Jump nodes also become impassable barriers since you either come out of them too slow (and die) or too fast (and you hit the kinetic mines and die).

[666maslo666]

In a world with subspace, what would you actually accomplish with a powerful engine capable of great speeds? No matter how fast you go, your velocity can be matched with a single subspace jump. Similarly, its useless for interception, when the opponent can just jump away when you get to him using your sublight engine. Its better to put that ship space a big engine would take up into more powerful capacitors enabling more frequent subspace jumps. Its pretty logical that Freespace ships are slow.

The small combat distance is unexplainable though.

[Dragon]

Note, the "realistic space battle" doesn't necessarily have to be the boring, simplistic image people often invoke. It all depends on tech level and conditions. Most analyses dealing with space battles simplify a lot and assume even more. For example, "unblockable RKV bombardment" won't happen if you don't have tech to propel stuff to such velocities. IRL, lasers lose coherence after a while, missiles can be shot down and mass drivers are limited by a number of structural and energetic constraints. Most "realistic" discussions of space warfare assume that those difficulties were overcome, but it's perfectly possible to write a story in which they weren't. It's even possible to make things such as fighters and "space stealth" perfectly viable, as long as you have a good idea of what kind of "tech level" it'd take.

That said, it'd take a mighty odd way of tech development to end up with anything remotely resembling FS2. Not to mention the fact flight physics are utterly wrong (not impossible to change) and orbital mechanics are not simulated (big problem, orbital motion is very different from what we're used to, and fighting for empty space sounds unlikely).

[General Battuta]

Unfortunately in FreeSpace you have the tech to propel things to arbitrary relative velocities built right in.

[JCDNWarrior]

If a more realistic way opens up more fun and unique gameplay and faster, riskier (collission) movement, then I am certainly for it, however for Freespace (and mods like BP) I prefer keeping it as it is with incremental improvements. What Dimensional Eclipse (and other mods) do is also really nice though, raising the speed of flight and general distance that ships engage eachother in. I believe both methods could work within one campaign, in particular if you can assign ships to fulfill certain roles between the two methods and ping-pong the player more towards vanguard, rearguard/artillery, and the main force.
Of course, then the main question of how subspace and subspace tactics/chess is involved would appear, I believe.

[General Battuta]

In general I'm a big fan of velocity mods but I do worry about the way that it actually slows down the gameplay. It's a more deliberate, less twitch-based game with higher velocities and that's not always what I'm looking for.