(TFT) Beware the ides of March...

["Jay Carlisle" <selfinflicted_wounds@boardermail.com>]

Well March is half spent and I've gotten very little done to schedule.

< Sigh >

If it makes a diffrence, I expected to have MUCH more free time this winter.
"Ax Men" said they were going to show some of the storm that came through at the end of last year, that should give ya an idea.

This one is a babble about how I use the combat map in TFT.

First, dimensions.

I'm useing a map that is 8 hexes by 10 hexes.
It seems that this is a standard printing size for hexes that measure 1 inch side to side (sts).

The hexes are arranged as follows.

All hexes run North to South from sts.
There is a row of half hexes, cut from sts, boardering the left and right (long) sides of the map and, of the 7 remaining rows of hexes, every other row starting with the rows next to the half-hex rows, themselves end with half-hexes, cut from east vertices to west vertices.

What you end up with is a geomorphic mapboard basicly like Squad Leader.
I call it a Battle Map (BM).
It takes 2 Battle Maps to encompass the origional Melee combat map. 
The advantage is in the geomorphic bit.
There is the obvious, of course, but I use these as a measure of movement as well.

Let's see...
At about 40,000,000 meters in circumfrence for the Earth, I get 30,769,230 hexes or 3,846,153.7 BMs.
That's 510+ billion meters area, a third of which is just under 150 billion meters.
1.7m^2 for a hex, @ 80 hexes, suggests just over a billion BM area for the total land surface of the planet.

Okay, here's the big weirdness.

I call the top and bottom sides of a Battle Map (not counting the half-hexes on either side, so 7 hexes) analogous to the sts of a hex.
I then divide the 10 hexes on either side in half and call these ne, nw, se and sw.

At 3 x 3 in the fassion of a mega-hex, a mega-Battle Map would be 32m x 40m (Squad Leader 40m sts hexes).

A mmBM would be 72h by 90h, or 96m x 120m.

I use this for detailed, high speed movement.
Things like chases on horseback that can cover lots of ground quickly.

So, I get to horsepower and the excelent point made by Mark T.
First, I agree compleatly about the units.
That said, I realise that the operative term in the defenition is lift.
Still, it is a common unit that allows performance comparisons.
What I want with horsepower is a measure of ST to work that is concerned with travel movement.
This lets us define engines via the same ST and lets us magnify or alter that work useing simple machines.
In other words, just like the materials build varying weapon combinations on the small scale, this also holds true of seige engines and similar large scale constructs.
I use David Macaulay's fantastic "The Way Things Work" as a referance here.

So about the "lift" thing.
When it comes to height, should a hex be considered a "collum" that goes straight up 80,000m or so?
Should there be layers of altitude?
1.3m per layer?
Also there's the question of the surface area of the top of the collum.
If the thing isn't basicly conical, we run into the same problem of the concentric circles.
A line drawn from the mutial center of the 2 circles, passes through the same number of infinate points on the circumfrance of circle 1 as 
of circle 2, although circle 2 has twice the circumfrence.
This will never do for planet building.
However, there is some oddness going on whereby if we call it the same number of hexes at 80,000 meters as at the surface (300+ billion) then the extra speed required to traverse the larger hexes at higher altitudes can be related to orbits, with a 1 to 1 corospondance with the ground.

Any thoughts?


Jay

-- 
_______________________________________________
Get your free email from http://www.boardermail.com
=====
Post to the entire list by writing to tft@brainiac.com.
Unsubscribe by mailing to majordomo@brainiac.com with the message body
"unsubscribe tft"