I had just thought of this when I tried playtesting Knight Hawks to use that as a possible starship combat system for my game, which may derail my use of Knight Hawks entirely.
Knight Hawks uses an ADF/MR system, and ADF (acceleration/deceleration factor) specifically is a lot like a scientific "thrust acceleration" system. A ship with an ADF of 6 can raise or lower its current speed by up to six hexes. So, a ship at a current speed of 14-hexes per turn with ADF 6 would drop its speed to 8 hexes or raise it to 20 hexes per turn.
MR (maneuver rating) is how many hexes a ship can turn per movement phase. A ship with an MR of 3 can turn three times, requiring one hex of movement minimum per turn.
There is no maximum speed. This is physics, so if you want to accelerate to a speed of 100, 300, or 1,000, you can. This is how it works in real life, too, until you hit the speed of light and the theory of special relativity kicks in.
Good stuff for a game made for kids forced us to take our math and science classes seriously.
So what is the problem?
Most gamers these days have maps with one-inch hex grids. The movement scale for a one-inch grid throws you right off the map in just a few turns. Back in the day, all space combat wargames shipped with a vast 24x36 sheet of half-inch hex paper the size of a poster. You can have a massive battle on there, start over 50 hexes away from an enemy ship, and have movement speeds in the tens of hexes per turn while still being out of range of most other ships.
Almost every tabletop mat with hexes I can find on Amazon is a one-inch hex grid. You don't find that many half-inch hex grid maps these days made for half-inch counters that are table-sized. Even if I were to find and use a grid like that, I would be hesitant to design and ship a game that used that scale since many players would be excluded and have to buy special battle mats (which I have not found yet) - and the ones they have would not work that well.
FrontierSpace's ship combat system uses a flat movement rate that acts as a top speed, so a frigate will move at 3 hexes per turn while a starfighter zips along at 10. There is a "hard burn" rule that triples or doubles a ship's movement rate, which would be hard to keep starfighters on the map but great for escaping. Still, for the most part, those fixed movement rates will work on my one-inch hex grid.
I could adjust the scale and round and say each of my one-inch hexes is a two-hex space and just halve all movement and ranges in Knight Hawks, so it fits. This is a messy solution since many Knight Hawks weapons are ranged very precisely, and there is a fundamental difference between a 3 and 5-hex weapon.
I could also halve the ADF of ships, which would work and cap all ADFs to 3 (6G acceleration). This is the most workable answer since you keep ships on the map, but the relative speed differences are roughly preserved. Remember, Knight Hawks has no artificial gravity, so human limits start to come into play with acceleration.
FrontierSpace's ship combat system works better for what players have today. Knight Hawks was made at a different time when games shipped with these unique papers, and you could play at a scale that large.
And another part of me wants to design my ship combat system for hard sci-fi, centered around the one-inch hex battle mat, and for the Frontier Space rules. Knight Hawks has a bunch of strange assumptions and less thought-through parts, and I would want some of the classic "World War II in space" weapons and tropes coming into play here, like fighters with some sort of repeating laser weapon (instead of three one-shot rockets).
That sounds like another article for another day.
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