GURPS 4E Space Combat - Hexes and Distance

Question

I have a problem right now. According to B387, it said one hex is one yard. However, I have spacecraft right now that's tabled. A TIE Fighter is 100 MGLT. Factoring the TIE's 100 MGLT speed into the Basic Move of 55 (according to the 4E Unofficial Star Wars Sourcebook) would end up with 55 hexes.

How does one solve this problem? Do I divide the speed by 3, round down to measure the hexes more appropriately? Is there any other to limit the number of hexes without having to wildly plop out more hexes to cover more ground?

My question has a lot to do with mapping out distances in hexes. I don't want to have to take up so many hexes to resolve space combat in a VTT like MapTool. Currently, the books I'm using in cooperation with GURPS 4E Space is SS (Spaceships), SS3 (Spaceships: Warships and Pirates), and SS4 (Spaceships: Fighters, Carriers, and Mechas). This is primarily a space combat question and has nothing to do with people.

What I wanted to do is figure out how to model the TIE Fighter's speed into a number of acceptable hexes that are not excessive. As an example, I would be OK with moving a VSD (Victory-class Star Destroyer) one hex per 3 turns while a TIE might go at max 9 hexes to simulate appropriate speed or movement. Currently, I'm statting out Imperial starfighters in SS Format. What I need to do is assign each starfighter an appropriate hex number in a format like this: low/medium/high in regards to thrust.

BM is an upper limit. That's exactly what I want. If the BM is 55 hexes for a TIE Fighter, that's too much for me. I want to lower that number of hexes, figure out how to model the low/medium/high thrust in terms of hexes for each starfighter.

Is there any way to figure out how to actually lower the hexes to an appropriate amount so that it doesn't take up too much space on MapTool?

Answer 1

First, B387 one-yard hexes are for people fighting each other (like a blaster shoot out or light sabre battle), and is not for combat between spaceships flying around, so ignore that.

The Unofficial Star Wars Sourcebook you mention has notes on page 107 for converting MGLT to acceleration and max speed, but it also mentions that such stats found in sources tend to be inconsistent with each other. It suggests some formulas for computing those numbers. But annoyingly, they then go into huge detail on various obscure ships and don't give stats for the most commonly-seen ones, such as X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Star Destroyer, etc. But ya, 55 is what they give the prequel Delta-7 (Jedi) fighters for acceleration. Note that that is acceleration per second, though, so after 2 seconds, it's can have accelerated from stopped to 110 yards/second, etc... of course they then give the max speed as 373, which may mean an atmospheric speed limit - in space, there wouldn't be a speed limit.

The thing is, that book also suggests you don't even use a map, and so provides no rules I see for actually using those speeds on a hex map.

So I would tend to refer to the relevant section of GURPS Warships and Space Pirates, which does have rules for hex-based tactical space combat. It sounds like you may not have found the pages that are relevant here, which start on page 24 of that book. There it talks about choosing a scale both for time per turn, and for distance per hex. Notice that the smallest hex scale they suggest is 10 miles per hex. I'd assume that's a good place to start.

The rules there talk about considerations for picking scales based on the speeds of the ships and the ranges of the weapons involved, to avoid the sorts of problems you are thinking about with running out of map space.

A 10-mile scale is going to make your map be good for large-scale ship battles and movement to contact, but not the right scale for dogfighting starfighters - that's probably best handled though by having fighters that enter the same hex use one of the abstract mapless dogfighting rules systems, since the range at which fighters shoot at each other in Star Wars is always well under 10 miles.