Starfights and fighters

Dogfighting and strafing runs

So. Maybe I watched some star wars recently. I was thinking about some dogfighting rules to allow you to have fun fights in space or the in the air. I should begin by saying I own warbirds ( http://www.warbirdsrpg.com/ ) and it is an excellent game and may have informed my thinking a little bit. Basically, I know I have some of their ideas in here and adapted them for fate and for what I think would work at my table.

Scale

This beauty is probably not going to do a barrel roll

The first thing in a dogfight is scale. Star destroyers are not a thing that an x wing dogfights, they are terrain or bombing targets. A tie fighter can dogfight meaningfully with the millennium falcon, but even then, they are making attack runs on the falcon, whose turrets are firing back. So key to the concept of dogfighting is scale. You dogfight your own scale, or one smaller or larger. If someone is two scale bigger or smaller than you then you are making attack runs. If there is a scale difference of three or more, then you are not interacting other than as scenery or plot based bombing runs.

Dogfighting

When you are dogfighting you have another track like the initiative track called the positioning . This represents how hard it is to attack someone and who is in the position to fire on each other. Simply put, the higher your positioning, the better you are placed to attack anyone else in the fight. You get your positioning by starting the fight making a piloting (or whatever skill your game uses) roll. Your result is your positioning.

Turns happen in positioning order (like initiative) but there are some changes you can make. First, making an attack option costs you one point of positioning. Obviously, dropping down the initiative order does not give extra actions. You can also roll against the lowest enemy piloting skill in the dogfight as a difficulty to gain position. If you succeed, for every shift you beat the difficulty by, increase your positioning by 1.

If your positioning is higher then the enemy you choose to attack, the difficulty to attack someone below you in positioning is always 2 or their piloting (whichever is lower) . They are in a position where you have them in your sights.

If your positioning is equal, then you fire against their piloting. You are in a head to head dogfight.

If your positioning is lower than theirs then it is very difficult to attack them. You can only make an attack against someone with a better positioning than you if you have an aspect of some sort which would give you permission, and then you attack against difficulty of their piloting or 3, whichever is higher.

Attack runs small ship to large

When you are attacking someone a bit bigger than you, you are making an attack run.

First of all, compare your positioning. If your positioning is higher than the person you are attacking, then congratulations, you can make an attack run. If it is not higher, then you need to create advantage of “attack positions” before you can make an attack. If you are the only person doing it, then the person you are setting up an attack run on might overcome your advantage.

Hitting the ship ain't hard, its not letting the ship hit you....

Once you have permission to attack, lose two points of positioning and roll to attack the ship you are attacking. Difficulty to attack is the highest shoot of the turrets defending the bigger ship, since what makes your attack difficult is the fire coming at you. Remember the scale differences will make the attack roll easier, but will remove shifts of effect. Many attack ships have a weapon which ignores one point of scale difference such as missiles of heavy cannon.

Shooting – large ship to small

If you are in the larger ship, then you can attack anyone. The advantages of turrets are that you do not lose positioning to make an attack, and you can attack people who have a higher positioning than yours. Every turret gunner gets one attack during the ship's turn. They attack against the difficulty of the enemy's piloting skill.

Pilots in large ships can create advantage or overcome with piloting, to either to counter an advantage allowing an attack run or to create an advantage to put themselves and their gunners in a better position to fire. If a larger ship wants to change it's positioning, it is more difficult. In order to make the roll to gain positioning, the ship needs to expend a free invoke of an aspect which gives them narrative permission to put themselves in an advantageous position in the fight.

Engineers can create advantage or overcome aspects related to their ships, aspects such as boosted shield, jury rigged power and careful tracking might represent the work of the engineer.