Re: FB designs and SLMs

At 07:58 AM 9/9/98 -0500, Doug Evans wrote:
>Lastly, I had my first experience with the FB designs last week. My
friend
>...ran a small fleet of his FSE's, basically 2 HC's, 1 CL, 2DD's,
against
me >running an ESU SDN and EC w/ ADFC mods.

<snip battle report>

It's good to hear that the FSE _can_ win a battle...at our group, so far
they are 0 for 2 in recent games.

We played our first engagement two weeks ago.  FSE vs. ESU.  (~1000 pts)
An FSE BC, CA and 4x DD vs. an ESU BB, CA and escorts.

This was our first attempt at the new Fleet Book stuff, so we were
mostly
experimenting with the rules.  

The ESU came in on a high speed pass at 24 while the FSE loped along at
about 8 or so.	The first salvo of missiles for both sides was
indecisive
(maybe one or two of the escorts got capped, don't remember), while ESU
beam fire resulted in bridge hits on both of the FSE's big ships.

Rather than start a new game, we decided that the ESU ships would be
turning around for a second pass while the FSE bridges were being
repaired.
 After about 6 turns of damage control, we tried again.  The FSE ships
were
at significant disadvantage due to heavy damage from the first pass. 
They
came in very slow, while the ESU had to accelerate constantly to close
the
range.	In this second pass we used 3" range for SLMs rather than 6" as
we
had in the first round.  The FSE got off 3 salvoes, but due to the tight
formation flying of the ESU, both of the ones in range were sucked off
by
one of the ESU fleet's escorts.

ESU beam fire proceeded to maul the FSE and by some miracle, their BC's
FTL
drive survived all 3 threshold rolls and was put to good use the
following
turn.

Last weekend, we tried again with NSL vs. FSE at ~1500 pts.  The FSE was
under the command of the previous week's ESU admiral and the NSL under
the
previous week's FSE admiral.

IIRC, the FSE brought a Foch class DN, a Jerez CA, a Milan, and a couple
of
Ibizas to play while the NSL brought 2 Maria V.B. BB's, 2 CL's and 4
missile DD's.  

Partly as a joke, we put a single asteroid drifting at about a half inch
per turn diagonally across the center of the board.

The NSL ships charted a course for the center of the board at speed 12.
Other than rotation, they did almost no other maneuvering the whole
game.
They maintained a tight formation up until one of the DD's was disabled
and
drifted off.  It looked something like this:

		CL			CL
	DD		DD	DD		DD

		BB			BB

The escort ships were in base-to-base contact with about an inch between
the two destroyers in the middle.

The FSE, unfortunately decided to get cute.  The Milan and one of the
Ibizas tried a high-speed flanking maneuver around the NSL's port side,
while the remainder of their ships crossed the NSL "T" diagonally from
port
to starboard at about speed 8.

The flanking force was going way too fast due to a vice admiral
unfamiliar
with the new vector movement.  They never came within 36" of the NSL
ships
during the entire game and narrowly avoided zooming of the end of the
table
at speed 32.

To make a long, sad story short; the remaining FSE ships got mauled by a
combination of heavy beam fire and 7 on-target SLM salvoes, while
narrowly
avoiding collision with the "joke" asteroid.

To pharaphrase one description of the battle of Tsushima: An FSE fleet
which could do nothing right was destroyed by an NSL fleet which did
nothing serious wrong.

In the end, the Jerez struck her colors rather than face the
concentrated
fire of the largely unscathed NSL fleet.  The Foch was probably
abandoned
and scuttled by its acting commander.  The flanking force FTL'ed out
without firing a shot.

One of the Marias suffered a threshold check and a destroyer was lost
due
to core collapse.  One of the light cruisers suffered moderate damage.

Having both won and lost an SLM duel, I think that SLMs are pretty
decent
weapons after all.  At first, they seemed a bit too "twitchy" for use as
a
serious weapon.  We went back and forth over the 6" vs 3" attack radius
and
will probably use 3" after all.  

We did find the "attacks closest target" rule to be a bit limiting and
so
we've adopted a house rule that allows the firing player to nominate his
target if he dedicates one active firecon to guidance.	Otherwise, it
attacks the closest target as usual.  This will also give us the option
of
later adopting ECM rules with EFSB-Minbari-style jamming systems to
counter
the guiding firecon.

Jeff Lyon