In High Guard, if I recall, agility (or maybe emergency agility, but then again if I'm in trouble, isn't all agility emergency agility?) was calculated from excess power and in MT perhaps as well. In some versions of the game, you got to sometimes substitute your pilot level (but others did not seem to do that).

It always felt odd to me to see the 60K dTon cruisers having high agility and your small traders and whatnot having less (unless you could count pilot skill and ignore your hardware because even a crappy trader could have a pilot-4 or 5 if they were very fortunate).

With the geometric laws that govern hull size and mass, I would have thought that it would be easier to have an agile small ship than large, especially because most of them only have Jump 1 or Jump 2 but many of the larger cruisers and the like are Jump 3 at least.

For it to be otherwise, the increase in plant efficiency by volume, would have to be very large to outstrip the the weight of larger drives and the larger hull (moreso as configurations that were not spheres were used as they just have more hull for the same interior space).

I suspect the reason some versions didn't seem to use pilot level is that they felt the actual physics ought not to be trumped by a skill (realistic maybe). But how reasonable or realistic (not to mention fun) is it to have highly agile large ships and usually less agile small ships?

I sort of expect big battlewagons to be ponderous, have massive inertia for any sort of course change, and have so much more mass due to larger engines and hull (plus all the fixings inside), that a smaller ship with less hull, a lot less inertia, and a lot less interior space ought to be more agile.

Does it make sense to have agility (or some other characteristic used in defense) reckoned from spare power? Or, in smaller ships, should pilot skill matter?

On the one hand, we have computers and probably firing patterns that require 1/1000th of a second accuracy and very amazing accuracy at tuning (I recall someone in some product from TNE (maybe Brilliant Lances) pointed out how unlikely lasers beyond 40K km was and even then only viable with gravitic lensing)... so the gunner probably invokes a particular fire pattern (perhaps adaptive) and his roll reflects his created pattern rather than him actually manually laying the weapon and depressing the firing stud.

That said, evasive piloting would also tend to be statistical (to be unpredictable) and that's probably a computer feature more than the pilot skill though the pilot might develop his evasive patterns with hints based on expected types of attacks - so invoke the right pattern for the right foe). Seems here also piloting's contribution isn't so much 'in the moment', but in the preparation for the moment.

BUT, for a fun game, albeit less realistic, one kind of wants to imagine the at-the-time contribution of the human matters. Just like the Imperial fleet not being able to hit squat with ships full of planet sized computers and enough batteries to light up a planet while small manually laid guns (like those on the Millennium Falcon, crewed by good gunners) can take out targets with regularity.

Where do you fall on the role and the nature of character skill contributions to ship defence and offence and where to you imagine any defensive dodging effect comes from - skill or lots of spare joules of power?

Tom B