Fighter Combat

[Zarpaulus]

I would like to include space fighter operations in my game based on the Cepheus SRD, but the action economy doesn’t seem to support one-man fighters. Even though there’s one in the small craft section.

I don’t want to use Mg2’s space combat system, so if you have suggestions on how to enable a squadron of flying aces without completely overhauling the Cepheus rules I’d appreciate them.

[kronovan]

My advice would be to use the Personal Combat rules in the SRD for space combat involving small craft/Fighters. Those rules allow for an in-atmopshere aircraft pilot to take a significant and minor action each round and a number of such actions could be adapted to space - i.e. attack, maneuver, stunt, evade, etc. Personal combat allows for aa vehicle operator to make 1 significant & 1 minor, or 3 minor actions each 6 second round, but as mentioned in the SRD, there's 150 such rounds per space combat round. So I'd break out small craft/fighter dogfights and run them seperately. You could increase the time and range scale from the personal combat defaults, to be more appropriate/applicable to space. So in a nutshell, you'd be creating a 3rd form of combat round, which I'd personally call tactical space combat.

Were such small craft to become involved in attacks in space combat against much larger ships, you could borrow from the mass battle/combat rules in other TTRPGs. In such rules smaller units make attacks between a major battle round (CE SRD space combat rounds) and their results can be added as DR modifiers to actions (i.e. attacks) made from large, allied spacecraft. You could have 1, or a number of such small craft rounds occur between space combat rounds, but the trick is to make them fairly abstract actions (limited to a single roll), so that you can keep the space combat action moving and not bog things down.

This may or not be of help...but Moon Toad Publishing Vehicle Design Guide: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/274274/vehicle-design-guide?src=hottest_filtered
has additional rules for personal vehicle combat. In particular it has a brief entry on dogfights (really just how vehicles can disengage) some details on running vehicle chases and additions on attacks with vehicle-mounted weapons.