Abstraction of enemy position in relation to fire Arcs

[Law]

I was curious how people handled shields and fire arcs without using miniatures? I had come up with a rule to figure out where an enemy was based on fire arc position of a target's shields without getting too in depth on combat and movement. We haven't play-tested it yet, but the opportunity should be presenting itself rather shortly.

I was thinking that on the attacker's turn both combatant's would roll piloting + maneuverability + their ship's space movement in pips and the higher roll would determine the attacking ships firing arc on the target after shield placement.

The cons would be that this will require an extra roll in combat and may slow play a bit but this shouldn't affect our play much as we don't really do much in the way of space battles. The characters have a custom tramp freighter and generally "gun then run" when it comes to imperial entanglements. I might even go far as to say half of them are cowards but they would say they excel at descretion in the area of valor. I don't recall Race Sandsworn, the smuggler, making a single attack roll as his pilot-operated weapons are all forward fire arc only, if you catch my drift.

[Bren]

We tend to do more hand-waving (literally) to describe how the starfighters maneuver rather than using detailed miniature movement. Sometimes what you have is a simple stern chase situation. That's easy since the fire arcs are simple: forward for chaser, stern for the chased. Other times we will draw little diagrams to illustrate starting positions, direction, and movement. Rarely we use the paper and cardboard cutouts or miniatures.

Often we just did the hand waving thing along with opposed manuevering rolls. We have used a simple manuever chart something like (but not exactly) this:

Beat opponent's maneuver by
0-4 ......... still maneuvering for a shot
5-8 ......... head to head shot
9-12 ....... flank shot
13+ ........ tail position

The tail position gave a bonus to gunnery. I think we considered it a good advantage so it was maybe +10.

[Law]

So with the maneuvering roll, do you use that more for head to head combat since you are predetermining your chase arcs?

And if you aren't figuring fire arcs for chases and just using forward and rear, which does make sense for simplification, do you still give the chaser the +10 bonus on attacks? Because it wouldn't seem to make sense to give the bonus for general combat but not chases.

For our chases, I've started some work on converting the Spycraft mechanism over to d6. It seems like it has a great cinematic feel to it, and (more in the case of ground chases) gives a great way to abstract terrain and floorplans so you don't have to know exactly what's in an area for the chase to occur.
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[Bren]

[Law]

[garhkal]

I usually just go with descriptions and the maneuvering rolls.. Better one has arc!
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