Saganami Island Tactical Simulator
Encyclopedia
Saganami Island Tactical Simulator (SITS) is a tabletop wargame
set in the Honorverse
, a series of military science fiction
novels written by David Weber
and others and published by Baen Books
. The first edition was based on the Attack Vector: Tactical
game engine, whereas the second edition featured a rewrite of those rules. Originally published in 2005 by Ad Astra Games
, the second edition was published in 2007, and is based on the as yet unreleased Squadron Strike movement engine, which uses whole turn pre-plotted movement, rather than segmented movement and time keeping.
The game was developed in concert with Honorverse
author David Weber
and is considered canonical
to the universe. The game is described, in an in-universe introduction in the rules pamphlet, as an aid issued to Royal Manticoran Navy cadets at the Saganami Island Naval Academy (from which the game gets its name) and is used by cadets at the Academy to prepare themselves for the much more complex computerized simulators. The game, the introduction continues, is also used by Manticoran line officers on active duty starships to wargame
, in the military sense, various combat scenarios before engaging in the time-consuming process of programming the ship's simulator.
-style simulated combat or in scenario
gaming, where one side attempts to prevent the other from achieving an objective, such as the protection (or destruction) of a convoy
.
The turn sequence has players plotting ship movement by use of grease pencils or eraseable markers on laminated cards; all movements are plotted simultaneously, as are all fire decisions, then are resolved in turn. Effects, if any, of battle damage or damage control
efforts are applied after weapons fire is resolved, and the next turn begins.
The primary shipboard armament in the game, as is in the books, is the impeller drive missile using bomb-pumped X-ray laser warheads
. Salvos of missiles are launched at enemy vessels, and are whittled down by the defenses of the target (abstracted as electronic countermeasures
, countermissiles, and point defense laser
clusters).
The mechanism for "culling the missiles" abstracts down to three die rolls (one for ECM, one for countermissiles, one for point defense lasers), each one knocking out missiles on their way in; ECM knocks out a percentage of missiles, counter missiles and point defense tell you how many inbounds you shot down.
Whatever makes it past the three layers of defense hits the ship, where a system takes warhead size, target size factor, Defense|sidewall strength and a die roll to determine how much damage the missile does to the target. Each missile that hits has its entry point rolled on a hit location matrix that has the port and starboard sides of the ship on the top and bottom and fore and aft on the left and right sides. Each damage point moves down the row or column of the matrix, identifying what gets hit; the system is marked on the system damage tracks and combat resumes.
The SITS 2nd Edition game scale has one map-printed hexagon at 240,000 km, and one turn as the equivalent of approximately 6 minutes in the universe of the game. An in-game thrust
factor of 1 is equivalent to an in-universe acceleration of 190 gravities
. The physics of ship movement are Newtonian
; that is to say, a ship with a given thrust vector will continue to move at that same vector until thrust is applied again.
There are sidebars throughout the rulebook explaining when the game breaks away from the numbers used in the novels, and why those decisions were made. The first edition game hewed much closer to the numbers given in the books, but did not capture the feel of combat in the books as well.
. First among these is the Attitude/Vector Information Display, or AVID. The AVID is designed to provide a visible reference for each ship's current attitude, planned attitude changes, as well as current velocity in three-dimensional space. In combination with the Range
/Angle
Lookup Table (RALT) (a chart that runs out the Pythagorean Theorem
, color coding angles of fire to match the color coded rings of the AVID), doing the spherical trigonometry
implicit in a three-dimensional combat environment is greatly simplified.
To simulate 3-dimensional space using a 2-dimensional map, box miniatures (card-stock paper cubes, shipped in sheets with pre-printed ship graphics) are placed on the map, using tilt blocks and stacking tiles to simulate angle and altitude, respectively. Tilt blocks are plastic cubes with wedges cut into them, at angles of 30 degrees
for one cut and 60 degrees for the other. This allows any combination of 30 or 60 degree increments in ship flight dynamics
—pitch, yaw, and roll—to be depicted using one or two tilt blocks. (Yaw is represented by turning the whole stack of box miniatures, tilt block(s), and any stacking tiles.) Stacking tiles are colored plastic tiles, designed to fit into the bottom of tilt blocks, with different colors representing different numerical values above or below the surface of the map sheet. Signifying altitude "below" a map sheet is done by adding a single black tile to the top of the stack.
to produce the Jayne's Intelligence Review series of books, which add further depth and detail to the Honorverse
. These books are also vetted by David Weber
, and are also considered Honorverse canon. The concept of the Jayne's series is loosely based on that of the books by Jane's Information Group
, a United Kingdom
-based company which provides unclassified reference works on military organizations, technology, and equipment. Each Jayne's guide covers one space navy
as seen in the Honorverse books, as well as its attendant marine
corps. Released so far have been books covering the Royal Manticoran Navy (including the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps) and the People's Navy (and the People's Marine Corps). Planned future books as of 24 February 2008 will also cover the Grayson Space Navy, the Imperial Andermani Navy, and the Silesian Confederacy Navy. The Jayne's guides and Saganami Island expansions are planned together, so that information in one will be consistent with information in the other.
Wargaming
A wargame is a strategy game that deals with military operations of various types, real or fictional. Wargaming is the hobby dedicated to the play of such games, which can also be called conflict simulations, or consims for short. When used professionally to study warfare, it is generally known as...
set in the Honorverse
Honorverse
The Honorverse refers to the military science fiction book series and sub-series created by David Weber and published by Baen Books. The series is set primarily after Honor Harrington's October 1, 3961, birth; although she is the protagonist in most of the stories, more recent entries make only...
, a series of military science fiction
Military science fiction
Military science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction in which the principal characters are members of a military service and an armed conflict is taking place, normally in space, or on a planet other than Earth...
novels written by David Weber
David Weber
David Mark Weber is an American science fiction and fantasy author. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio. Weber and his wife Sharon live in Greenville, South Carolina with their three children and "a passel of dogs"....
and others and published by Baen Books
Baen Books
Baen Books is an American publishing company established in 1983 by long time science fiction publisher and editor Jim Baen. It is a science fiction and fantasy publishing house that emphasizes space opera, hard science fiction, military science fiction, and fantasy...
. The first edition was based on the Attack Vector: Tactical
Attack Vector: Tactical
Attack Vector: Tactical is a space combat wargame published by Ad Astra Games. The game is consciously designed to model comparatively realistic space combat and eschew common conventions of space warfare...
game engine, whereas the second edition featured a rewrite of those rules. Originally published in 2005 by Ad Astra Games
Ad Astra Games
Ad Astra Games is a company that produces boardgames, miniatures wargames and role-playing games. It was founded in 2004 by Ken Burnside. The chief operating officer is former West End Games founder Daniel Scott Palter, and the office manager is Sam Pray, husband of horror and gothic romance...
, the second edition was published in 2007, and is based on the as yet unreleased Squadron Strike movement engine, which uses whole turn pre-plotted movement, rather than segmented movement and time keeping.
The game was developed in concert with Honorverse
Honorverse
The Honorverse refers to the military science fiction book series and sub-series created by David Weber and published by Baen Books. The series is set primarily after Honor Harrington's October 1, 3961, birth; although she is the protagonist in most of the stories, more recent entries make only...
author David Weber
David Weber
David Mark Weber is an American science fiction and fantasy author. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio. Weber and his wife Sharon live in Greenville, South Carolina with their three children and "a passel of dogs"....
and is considered canonical
Canon (fiction)
In the context of a work of fiction, the term canon denotes the material accepted as "official" in a fictional universe's fan base. It is often contrasted with, or used as the basis for, works of fan fiction, which are not considered canonical...
to the universe. The game is described, in an in-universe introduction in the rules pamphlet, as an aid issued to Royal Manticoran Navy cadets at the Saganami Island Naval Academy (from which the game gets its name) and is used by cadets at the Academy to prepare themselves for the much more complex computerized simulators. The game, the introduction continues, is also used by Manticoran line officers on active duty starships to wargame
Military simulation
Military simulations, also known informally as war games, are simulations in which theories of warfare can be tested and refined without the need for actual hostilities. Many professional contemporary analysts object to the term wargames as this is generally taken to be referring to the civilian...
, in the military sense, various combat scenarios before engaging in the time-consuming process of programming the ship's simulator.
General Overview
The game play focuses on single ship or small unit engagements, as shown in the earlier books in the Honorverse series. Players use ships pulled from the Honorverse books, or created by the game designers specifically for the game, in deathmatchDeathmatch (gaming)
Deathmatch or Player vs All is a widely-used gameplay mode integrated into many shooter and real-time strategy computer games...
-style simulated combat or in scenario
Scenario paintball
Scenario paintball is a type of paintball game in which players participate in a scenario, or story; and may include historical re-enactments, futuristic or video game simulations. Games tend to last in the range of hours or days, and may include a large group of players...
gaming, where one side attempts to prevent the other from achieving an objective, such as the protection (or destruction) of a convoy
Convoy
A convoy is a group of vehicles, typically motor vehicles or ships, traveling together for mutual support and protection. Often, a convoy is organized with armed defensive support, though it may also be used in a non-military sense, for example when driving through remote areas.-Age of Sail:Naval...
.
The turn sequence has players plotting ship movement by use of grease pencils or eraseable markers on laminated cards; all movements are plotted simultaneously, as are all fire decisions, then are resolved in turn. Effects, if any, of battle damage or damage control
Damage control
Damage control is a term used in the Merchant Marine, maritime industry and navies for the emergency control of situations that may hazard the sinking of a ship...
efforts are applied after weapons fire is resolved, and the next turn begins.
Gameplay
Gameplay itself resolves completely around ship-to-ship combat. The ships in the game are designed to give players playing the different factions (as of Second Edition players can "command" warships Manticoran, Havenite, Andermani, or Silesian) certain advantages, in line with the advantages each faction enjoys in the Honorverse books. However, each faction enjoys similarly derived disadvantages, as well. For example, a Manticoran battlecruiser is, individually, greatly superior to a Havenite battlecruiser. However, the Havenite vessel, as in the books, carries more powerful warheads on their missiles, and each Manticoran ship is worth significantly more victory points than the Havenite counterpart.The primary shipboard armament in the game, as is in the books, is the impeller drive missile using bomb-pumped X-ray laser warheads
Project Excalibur
Project Excalibur was a United States government nuclear weapons research program to develop a nuclear pumped x-ray laser for ballistic missile defence. It became part of the Strategic Defense Initiative . Conceived by nuclear scientist Edward Teller, the concept involved packing large numbers...
. Salvos of missiles are launched at enemy vessels, and are whittled down by the defenses of the target (abstracted as electronic countermeasures
Electronic countermeasures
An electronic countermeasure is an electrical or electronic device designed to trick or deceive radar, sonar or other detection systems, like infrared or lasers. It may be used both offensively and defensively to deny targeting information to an enemy...
, countermissiles, and point defense laser
Laser
A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of photons. The term "laser" originated as an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation...
clusters).
The mechanism for "culling the missiles" abstracts down to three die rolls (one for ECM, one for countermissiles, one for point defense lasers), each one knocking out missiles on their way in; ECM knocks out a percentage of missiles, counter missiles and point defense tell you how many inbounds you shot down.
Whatever makes it past the three layers of defense hits the ship, where a system takes warhead size, target size factor, Defense|sidewall strength and a die roll to determine how much damage the missile does to the target. Each missile that hits has its entry point rolled on a hit location matrix that has the port and starboard sides of the ship on the top and bottom and fore and aft on the left and right sides. Each damage point moves down the row or column of the matrix, identifying what gets hit; the system is marked on the system damage tracks and combat resumes.
The SITS 2nd Edition game scale has one map-printed hexagon at 240,000 km, and one turn as the equivalent of approximately 6 minutes in the universe of the game. An in-game thrust
Thrust
Thrust is a reaction force described quantitatively by Newton's second and third laws. When a system expels or accelerates mass in one direction the accelerated mass will cause a force of equal magnitude but opposite direction on that system....
factor of 1 is equivalent to an in-universe acceleration of 190 gravities
Standard gravity
Standard gravity, or standard acceleration due to free fall, usually denoted by g0 or gn, is the nominal acceleration of an object in a vacuum near the surface of the Earth. It is defined as precisely , or about...
. The physics of ship movement are Newtonian
Classical mechanics
In physics, classical mechanics is one of the two major sub-fields of mechanics, which is concerned with the set of physical laws describing the motion of bodies under the action of a system of forces...
; that is to say, a ship with a given thrust vector will continue to move at that same vector until thrust is applied again.
There are sidebars throughout the rulebook explaining when the game breaks away from the numbers used in the novels, and why those decisions were made. The first edition game hewed much closer to the numbers given in the books, but did not capture the feel of combat in the books as well.
Game aids
SITS features several game aids, some developed from Attack Vector: TacticalAttack Vector: Tactical
Attack Vector: Tactical is a space combat wargame published by Ad Astra Games. The game is consciously designed to model comparatively realistic space combat and eschew common conventions of space warfare...
. First among these is the Attitude/Vector Information Display, or AVID. The AVID is designed to provide a visible reference for each ship's current attitude, planned attitude changes, as well as current velocity in three-dimensional space. In combination with the Range
Range of a projectile
right|thumb|250 px|The path of this projectile launched from a height y0 has a range d.In physics, assuming a flat Earth with a uniform gravity field, a projectile launched with specific initial conditions will have a predictable range. As in Trajectory of a projectile, we will use:The following...
/Angle
Angle
In geometry, an angle is the figure formed by two rays sharing a common endpoint, called the vertex of the angle.Angles are usually presumed to be in a Euclidean plane with the circle taken for standard with regard to direction. In fact, an angle is frequently viewed as a measure of an circular arc...
Lookup Table (RALT) (a chart that runs out the Pythagorean Theorem
Pythagorean theorem
In mathematics, the Pythagorean theorem or Pythagoras' theorem is a relation in Euclidean geometry among the three sides of a right triangle...
, color coding angles of fire to match the color coded rings of the AVID), doing the spherical trigonometry
Spherical trigonometry
Spherical trigonometry is a branch of spherical geometry which deals with polygons on the sphere and the relationships between the sides and the angles...
implicit in a three-dimensional combat environment is greatly simplified.
To simulate 3-dimensional space using a 2-dimensional map, box miniatures (card-stock paper cubes, shipped in sheets with pre-printed ship graphics) are placed on the map, using tilt blocks and stacking tiles to simulate angle and altitude, respectively. Tilt blocks are plastic cubes with wedges cut into them, at angles of 30 degrees
Degree (angle)
A degree , usually denoted by ° , is a measurement of plane angle, representing 1⁄360 of a full rotation; one degree is equivalent to π/180 radians...
for one cut and 60 degrees for the other. This allows any combination of 30 or 60 degree increments in ship flight dynamics
Flight dynamics
Flight dynamics is the science of air vehicle orientation and control in three dimensions. The three critical flight dynamics parameters are the angles of rotation in three dimensions about the vehicle's center of mass, known as pitch, roll and yaw .Aerospace engineers develop control systems for...
—pitch, yaw, and roll—to be depicted using one or two tilt blocks. (Yaw is represented by turning the whole stack of box miniatures, tilt block(s), and any stacking tiles.) Stacking tiles are colored plastic tiles, designed to fit into the bottom of tilt blocks, with different colors representing different numerical values above or below the surface of the map sheet. Signifying altitude "below" a map sheet is done by adding a single black tile to the top of the stack.
Jayne's Intelligence Review
The license under which Saganami Island Tactical Simulator was created has also allowed Ad Astra GamesAd Astra Games
Ad Astra Games is a company that produces boardgames, miniatures wargames and role-playing games. It was founded in 2004 by Ken Burnside. The chief operating officer is former West End Games founder Daniel Scott Palter, and the office manager is Sam Pray, husband of horror and gothic romance...
to produce the Jayne's Intelligence Review series of books, which add further depth and detail to the Honorverse
Honorverse
The Honorverse refers to the military science fiction book series and sub-series created by David Weber and published by Baen Books. The series is set primarily after Honor Harrington's October 1, 3961, birth; although she is the protagonist in most of the stories, more recent entries make only...
. These books are also vetted by David Weber
David Weber
David Mark Weber is an American science fiction and fantasy author. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio. Weber and his wife Sharon live in Greenville, South Carolina with their three children and "a passel of dogs"....
, and are also considered Honorverse canon. The concept of the Jayne's series is loosely based on that of the books by Jane's Information Group
Jane's Information Group
Jane's Information Group is a publishing company specializing in transportation and military topics.-History:It was founded by Fred T...
, a United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
-based company which provides unclassified reference works on military organizations, technology, and equipment. Each Jayne's guide covers one space navy
Space navy
A space navy is a fictional military service arm tasked with waging battle in or exploring space.* Lensman - Galactic Patrol* Star Trek - Starfleet* Star Trek: The Next Generation - Imperial Klingon Navy...
as seen in the Honorverse books, as well as its attendant marine
Space marine
The space marine, an archetype of science fiction, is a soldier that operates in outer space or on alien worlds. Historical marines fulfill amphibious roles: ship defence, landing parties, and general high-mobility deployments...
corps. Released so far have been books covering the Royal Manticoran Navy (including the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps) and the People's Navy (and the People's Marine Corps). Planned future books as of 24 February 2008 will also cover the Grayson Space Navy, the Imperial Andermani Navy, and the Silesian Confederacy Navy. The Jayne's guides and Saganami Island expansions are planned together, so that information in one will be consistent with information in the other.
Ad Astra databooks
- Honor Harrington: Saganami Island Tactical Simulator (2005) ISBN 0974879746
- Honor Harrington: Saganami Island Tactical Simulator: Manticoran Fleet Box 1 (2006) ISBN 0974879754
- Honor Harrington: Saganami Island Tactical Simulator: Havenite Fleet Box 1 (2006) ISBN 0974879762
- Honor Harrington: Saganami Island Tactical Simulator: Andermani Fleet Box 1 (2006) ISBN 1934153028
- Honor Harrington: Saganami Island Tactical Simulator: Silesian Fleet Box 1 (2006) ISBN 1934153052
- Honor Harrington: Saganami Island Tactical Simulator: Havenite Fleet Box 2 (2010)
- Honor Harrington: Saganami Island Tactical Simulator: Shipbook 2: Silesian Confederacy (2006) ISBN 0974879770
- Honor Harrington: Saganami Island Tactical Simulator: Shipbook 3: The Short Victorious War (2010)
- Jayne's Intelligence Review: The Royal Manticoran Navy (2006) ISBN 1934153087
- Jayne's Intelligence Review: The People's Republican Navy (2007) ISBN 1934153095
- Honor Harrington: Ships of the Fleet: 2006 (2005) ISBN 097487972X
- Honor Harrington: Ships of the Fleet: 2007 (2006) ISBN 0974879797