Re: [FT] (LONG) The Balance of Power -- Fighters and a Defense

From: "Laserlight" <laserlight@quixnet.net>

>Let's make it more extreme.  If you have 6000 points and 1 fighter,
>then they're not much use.  If you have, say, 25-30 fighters and your
>opponent doesn't, then fighters dominate the battle.  I think both
>sides of the CanAm FT battle would agree.

Is this still true if the non-fighter group as a PDS/ADFC net with 20-30
PDS? In a 6000 pt force, that'd be pretty easy. 
If you mean 25-30 fighter _groups_, then 36x30 = about 1/6 of your fleet
is
fighters. They can be neuralized by making at most about 1/9-1/10 of the
opposing fleet points anitifighter weaponry (PDS/ADFC) +/- if you use
things
like scatterguns or Class-1'sas PDS. in order to be balanced, the
opposing
force would have to mount some fighter defence. This assumes that the
non-fighter player tactics  take advantage of the antifighter systems.

The hardest place to do this kind of comparison is in one-off scnearios,
where the rock-paper-scissors effect penalizes - sometimes severely -
the
side that guesses wrong about the opposing force. Perhaps if the
Canadians
and Americans in Can-Am had both known from the design phase that the
Americans used fighters, the Canadians would have fared better.

Noam