Rupert replied to me: > I don't see being the crew of one ship with a five man crew in a fleet > of hundreds or thousands as being more useful or interesting than being > in the same ship as support for a battleship. You're still just a > statistic, most likely.
Hello Rupert, there are ways to deal with that which work equally well for a small, elite squad within a large regiment of ground troops or the crew of one ship among many, be it a three man fighter or the command staff of a three thousand man battleship among a few other battleships. * The outcome is determined by the strategy rolls of NPCs. How the general battle turns out determines what situations and what odds the PCs will face. * By cinematic convention, how well the PCs deal with their small part of the battle determines the overall outcome. They face a representative slice of the enemy -- if the PCs are elite, so are the enemy NPCs, if they are average, so are their enemies. If the PCs crew just a minnow among the sharks, it is harder to suspend disbelief on the latter option. > That brings up another possibility - slow travel times, so that 'the > cavalry', be it fleets of small ships or single battleships, is simply > not there when it matters and the PCs can't just go and get help because > by the time they do it will be too late. Slow travel or slow communications. No FTL coms, then, even if that is hard to explain if there are FTL radars. > Just as the commander of a > gunboat in Africa or Asia two centuries ago had to come up with > solutions on the spot, despite being part of the Royal Navy with it's > multitudes of ships of the line (well, when they weren't all laid up in > Ordinary - bear with me), so would the PCs have to. As their opponents > would mostly be in the same situation, the battlefleets remain in the > background, sitting in their bases awaiting an actual war (because if > they aren't involved it's merely an 'incident'). Certainly an option, but that limits the PCs to the backwaters. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
