Re: {Q} Efficient Designs

> PDA's are single purpose anti-fighter weapons, while the 1-bat can be
used 
> in two roles (anti-ship, anti-fighter).  How many fighters can a PDA
defend 
> against before being overwhelmed?  I think the answer is 2.5 or 3.  So
you 
> need at least 2 PDA's per-expected flight of fighters.

This is simply too low.  What you're saying here is that if your
opponent
has 30 fighter groups, all you need is 60-72 PDS in order to defend
against
them.  This is simply too little; you'll do quite a bit of damage to
their
fighters but they'll do far more damage to your ships.

I think the actual number is somewhere around 1.5, tops.  If your
opponent
is toting about 35-45 fighter groups, you're going to want somewhere in
the
range of 120-150 PDS to defend against it unless you've got very strong
maneuverability to evade them, and even then I wouldn't depend on it a
whole
lot.

A dreadnought or carrier sized capital ship in my games will often have
somewhere between 15 and 30 PDS equipped.  Yes, that means it's
dedicating
a lot of munitions to fighter defense; the slim margin of gunnery you
give
up to more dedicated battleships is nothing compared to the risk that
you'll
get annihilated by carriers if you don't.

Yes, this does depend on fighter morale to some extent; I don't use it
myself
and tend to just glom all fighter losses together across fighter group
boundaries, i.e. if you have 30 groups of fighters and 100 PDS, just
roll
100 dice and count off how many you kill and take off a marker for every
six.
This is just my playing style, to a fair degree, though... I hate having
to
keep track of how many fighters are left in gazillions of different
groups,
and in my games, yes, there _will_ frequently be gazillions of fighters
flying around.

> Of course this can 
> be acheived more cheaply by having escorts with lots of PDA's and
area-fire 
> control, however that gets into fleet design and I am thinking of ship

> design right now (for those times when you don't have an entire fleet
behind 
> you...)

Yeah... I'm not enamored of PDS escort philosophy, myself, because then
all
your PDS power is bottled up in smaller ships that are more easily
picked
off, leaving the larger ones more vulnerable without their PDS backup. 
Better
to bring escort carriers and trade your fighters (or interceptors) for
theirs.
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