Knight Hawks the strategy game

jedion357's picture
jedion357
August 6, 2011 - 6:32am
To be fair KHs had a strategy level of play, the cartoonish cover to the WoWL module with the sathar start circles and transit boxes. The problem with that is that it precluded having a strategy level of play for anything over then SW2. So this bread is to discuss ways of having strategy level of play in KHs.
I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers!
Comments:

aemonaylward's picture
aemonaylward
August 7, 2016 - 12:18pm

I've been looking at GDW's old 'Triplanetary' boardgame for inspiration on this topic. (There are rules and decent images of the maps and counters available free from BoardgameGeek: .https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3637/triplanetary) The scale of the map hexes in that game doesn't appear to be given in the rules, but just counting actual distances on the map, it looks like it's about 15 million km per hex – kind of interesting that people in this thread hit upon that value independently.

To me this suggests a couple of things about map scale:

  • You would probably want a different scale map that would fit the whole ~50 AU of a stellar system onto the game map.

  • You could use the 15 million km per hex scale for the inner-system map (say, Sol-to-Jupiter)

  • At 15 million km per hex, Terra and Luna are well within the same single hex, as are Jupiter and all 4 of its Galilean moons. But they'd be close to opposite edges, or even all the way off, of a single (10,000 km per hex) Knight Hawks tactical map. So you might want to invoke yet a third map scale for orbital maneuvering around planets (if necessary) before you get to the KH tactical map scale.

There are also fuel limits in Triplanetary, similar to what Terl Obar has proposed above – which I like.