Re: Those darned B1's

Galen Thies wrote:
> 
> Hello folks,
> 
> This is my first post here and I hope that my relative novice status
doesn't
> offend in a asking a fairly straightforward question.  I've found the
posts
> here remarkably useful and germain--bravo!  I scanned the archive
looking
> for a answer to the following query and was unable to find one.

Welcome, Galen,

> I only recently picked up fleet book 1 and overall have found the
rules
> quite flexible and well written.  My one concern is with the design
rules
> with regard to B1's.	It seems to me that a ship designed with a
massive
> compliment of B1's could simply "put the pedal to the metal" and scoot
to
> range 12 by turn 3 of 4 and smoke the other fleet with a huge quantity
of
> beam fire.   They are very cheap and small-- a massive amount of fire
power
> could be brought to bear such a design philosophy.  Enough room left
over
> for rather big engines to get into business range.  Maybe I'm off-base
with
> this but I would appreciate any feedback on this.  I'm really hoping
that
> some goofball has actually tried this and been handed their head.

If you consider said 'goofball' to be John Leary, then yes.  ;-) 
(although
I didn't exactly 'hand him his head'). John and I ran against each other
in
a PBeM game to illustrate a portion of this argument, er, I mean,
discussion.
We each used a 220 Mass vessel. I used a modified 'Komarov' (replace
fighter
bay with another Class-4 battery - forward facing, of course :), and he
had
the mid-range porcupine: 220 Mass SDN bristling with Class-2s.

In the end I took him. This was partly because as soon as he started
taking
threshold checks (I was sniping at him from long range as he closed, so
got
in enough damage to push him over early) he started losing systems very
fast (when you have 20-odd weapons on board vs someone with far fewer, 
YOU are going to lose more weapons faster than your opponent in the same
time frame!). And as a result of this (call it a 'feature' ;-), he was
unable to REPAIR his damaged weapons before I was able to repair mine
(I lost a Class-4 or two during the exchange, but was able to get them
back up and firing long before he got an equivalent number of Class-2s
back in service).

Now, yes, overall the Class-2 batts are more cost effective and
efficient than most anything else, but they aren't the end-all
be-all ship weapon. Get in a few games and you'll realize this.  ;-)

Mk