Carriers

 Well first foray into this message group.

Very interesting debate about carriers so he's my opinion.
(for what its worth)

To me what is needed to distinquish between a carrier and 
a battleship, destroyer etc is armour. With all the ideas 
about launch methods for fighters, unless the external 
option is developed any carrier will have several launch 
tubes, hanger bay doors etc. If we applied some penalty 
for basically filling a ship with holes for fighters to 
occupy then a carrier would be alot weaker. No player 
will want to weaken a frontline vessel just for fighters.

I know buy having hanger bays you limit a ships weaponry 
I was thinking of something a little more servere!
Carriers are fragile and should be protected by other 
ships.

Ok on th point of launching fighters. Most of the 
examples of external systems in my opinion also have 
pilots who are fanatics. Having a system where if you 
launch, fight, return with no garantee that you could 
dock again takes nerve. 

Also to gain better numbers of launches this should use 
examples already quoted.

Battlestar Gallactica has different landing bays to 
launch bays. This system would allow no penalty to 
launching and retriving fighters at the same time. 
However this system would not allow all fighters to be 
launched at the same time.

B5(the station) Has a very simple launch method and gives 
the impression that all fighters could be launched 
together. But I suspect that the down side is docking 
those fighters again. 

Maybe what we need is to actualy pay for launch bays and 
docking bays separately. Therefore a ship with 2 launch 
bays and 1 docking bay can launch both fighter groups 
together but only dock one at a time.

With this method its kept simple and you are still using 
the idea of flight controls by having to pay for the 
specific fighter bays.

Anyway good mailing group cheers
----------------------
Jeremey Claridge
jeremy.claridge@kcl.ac.uk