On 6/07/2011 05:05, Onno Meyer wrote:
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.
If FTL sensors are limited to a few AU, interstellar FTL comms by
anything other than courier become exceedingly expensive - with a reach
of 20AU between each relay you'd need 13-14,000 to reach from here to
Alpha Centauri.
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.
Unless the polities involved are small I don't see how to avoid it
except by massively limiting how many people any polity can put into
space, or by playing action/thriller stype games where things pivot on
the actions of small groups and not fleets and armies by convention.
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