We Have Carriers!

So What?

The aircraft carrier is special. A patrol boat can steal a scene; a submarine can underpin a movie; and a battleship can steal the hearts of generations of armchair admirals. There is even a whole Age of Sail defined by “wooden ships and iron men.”

But the aircraft carrier has been iconic through four eras of warfare: there is a popular image of their winning World War II, a similar mythology permeating the Cold War, and their modern use underpinning decades of foreign policy interactions. The fourth era is, of course, science fiction.

It is hard to imagine a science fiction setting where (non-newtonian-physics-based) space warfare does not involve at least one big ship deploying smaller ships to join the fight. Ours was almost an exception: early in development, we considered not having fighters (we call them “Small Craft” to encompass everything from bombers, to interceptors, to transports) as an option.

We had a few branches they could have taken. We considered not having them at all, with their future emergence penciled in as an evolution of warfighting technologies. Then we thought about just making them act like fancy missiles. But when we went through our early playtests, our players universally wanted Small Craft on the tabletop in some fashion.

That left us in a bit of an odd spot trying to figure out how to represent Small Craft well, both mechanically and thematically. One thing we agreed on fairly early on was that our setting wasn’t really a dogfighting setting.

When your battles take place at the scale of light seconds - the closest Fleet Command Hevelius ships get to each other is about the distance between the Earth and the Moon - having to get into guns range to do damage feels like a really easy way to get shot down in transit. So instead of World War II dogfights, we looked at more modern “Beyond Visual Range” platforms for inspiration.

That helped define our behavior a little bit. That led us to the idea of squadrons, over individual heroic aces, and a system that looked at a fleet’s capacity to launch sorties over the course of a given battle.

We’d like to think that in normal operations, even a normal skirmish, a ship carrying Small Craft would try to conserve its subordinate units. In the flashpoints that define the battles you play, however, all bets are off and your hangar bays are cycling through as many squadrons as they can muster to come out on top.

In mechanical terms, that meant designing Small Craft deployment around Wings. You can stack a Wing with Interceptor, Bomber, or Transport squadrons; send those Wings on a sortie against an opposing ship or opposing Wing; and then have those Wings bring back any survivors at the end of the turn.

(Thematically, that also means you get to decide whether your battle casualties are destroyed, merely damaged enough to need to disengage, or a mixture of both.)

The Problem

It wouldn’t be much of a “So What?” series if all we did was talk about what we felt like we were doing right. The problem with introducing a solid Small Craft system is that we were introducing a completely new battle phase into the equation. Our rules for starship combat aren’t incredibly complex (though certainly more involved than just rolling a d6 and hoping you get a 6 each time), but imagine how much drag it would add to a game to move -> shoot -> check casualties -> contest objectives; and then have to do each of those phases all over again to account for Small Craft.

We don’t have to imagine - our first version was exactly that! That meant streamlining Small Craft quite a bit. We made iterative changes to the model we have in 1.0, which is to populate a Wing and send it out to run its mission with an average life expectancy of 1 turn. Those Wings can either hit an opposing ship very hard, or mess with an opposing Wing trying to do the same thing to you.

I say this with all the confidence of someone who believes you won’t find this blog until after we’ve improved our 1.0 model: I think we over-simplified our Small Craft mechanics. I know we did it because we wanted to focus on the larger fleet model, the Small Craft mechanics were “good enough” on paper, and we were getting so close to releasing the core rulebook that restarting the full QA process to make Small Craft exceptional would have added another 6-12 months to our development cycle.

What we have today is a system where Small Craft are sentient missiles. It’s a step up from them being just another missile type (which we’ve considered moving back to), but a significant step down from an independent, strategic asset that can shape battlefields.

I think with two more years and infinite funding, we could have had something phenomenal. Instead we have something that works well enough within the framework of a whole combat system, and a lot of research questions to explore on what makes a carrier-type ship satisfying. I personally prefer it this way.

Our game world is a framework to tell stories, and the evolution of Small Craft doctrine would be a fun B plot to the politics of the Expansion Zone. What could be truer to life than watching rival powers deploy a weapon system, find out it works differently on the battlefield than on paper, and evolve their own equipment and doctrines to compensate for that?