Re: balancing Fighters

Noam wrote:

> I'm in agreement with Kieth and others that fighters are too cheap
for 
> their power in FT. 

This depends entirely on how the carrier is designed, though. The
"proper" FB cost of a standard fighter squadron is, IIRC; 85-90 points
- ie, if you buy an anti-fighter escort for 85-90 pts (the Tacoma/A,
for example) you'll usually beat the fighter squadron quite easily,
whereas a 90-point ship with very weak anti-fighter weaponry is likely
to get plastered. A 90-pt ship somewhere between these two extremes is
usually a pretty even fight for a single fighter squadron.

The problem is that in FB (and FT too, for that matter), these 85-90
points include the cost of the figher bay and the hull and engines
which support it. You'll get this cost if the carrier devotes 50-60% of
its total Mass on drives and hull - 55% Mass for hull, FTL and engines
gives a total cost of 87 pts per Standard squadron - which is where
most of the FB figher-carrying ships are. (The FSE Bonaparte and the
ESU Rostov and Komarov classes use 70% of their hull for fighter
squadrons instead.)

If you use paper-hulled thrust-2 carriers, you'd need to pay some 40
pts for a standard fighter squadron instead to achieve good balance
against other ships (this leaves the MT point modifications for the
various other types of fighters unchanged, but the FB costs all increse
by ~22 points).

Best wishes,

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
- Hen3ry