Re: Those darned B1's

Galen Thies wrote:

>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.

<chuckle> This sounds almost exactly like Brendan Pratt describing why
he thinks the FB2 Phalons are too powerful :-7

What usually happens in this situation when I play, is that the enemy
fleet spends turns 2 and 3 (well, on my (large) table it is more like
turns 3 and 4) pouring long-range fire into the close-range sluggers.
Unless *both* fleets want to close to point-blank range (on turn 4-5)
and one side doesn't have a very large advantage in maneuverability
(able to use at least 2 more thrust points for turning), the fleets
usually don't get this close (ie., the fleet which wants to keep the
range open usually succeeds unless massively out-engined).

The enemy's early long-range salvoes aren't as powerful individually as
the sluggers' point-blank ones, but they have a good chance of knocking
some of the sluggers' weapons out (by threshold checks or outright ship
kills) before the sluggers can reply in kind - which means that the
sluggers usually don't outgun the enemy once they finally do get to
shoot back (or if they do have more dice left, their hulls are in much
worse conditions so they die faster than the enemy anyway).

>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.

IMO you're off-base with this <g> Several others have voiced the same
worries, but, well... I've been collecting FB ship designs ever since
FB1 was published (last count was 1063 legal non-SV ships from around
60 players, but I have a bunch of designs I haven't had time to check
if they're legal yet); only about 40 of those are armed with B1s only -
and the biggest of those ships is TMF22 (IIRC, could be 24 as well. I
don't have the archive handy right now :-( ), so they use B1s simply
because they can't easily fit any bigger weapons. Not even the worst
local min-maxers use B1s as their majority weapon :-/

Regards,

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