Fighters in SFB and elsewhere

On Wed, 6 Jun 2001 02:47:22 -0400 Thomas Barclay <kaladorn@fox.nstn.ca> 
wrote:

> I hear a few people piping up about how few fighters were out there 
[in SFB] or how they were only nuisance value. Holy smokes, but I must 
disagree. Federation F-14s from the CVA or a full carrier strike wing 
could majorly wreck things, especially if the flight included A-10 or 
A-20 attack shuttles and had good drone loadouts. Not at all to be 
trifled with. I saw them wreck large fleets of capships. 
 
> Of course, we often played in 20 cap ship survivor style melees or in 
fleet battles with 2000-4000 points per side, sometimes with 3, 4, 5 or 
even 6 sides. One turn has been known to take three hours :) <
 
Yeah, that's one reason why I (mostly) gave up SFB -- that, Cole's 
Klingon favouritism and the creeping homogenisation process. The 
clutter that drones and all those fighters brought to the game really 
slowed things down. The fighters also came to dominate the game (and 
then came PFs, which were as bad, if not worse). And that's not Star 
Trek, either Kirk- or Picard/Sisko/Janeway-era. And _don't_ get me 
started on the srizonified General War... urrgh!

TNG-era "fighters" are, with almost no exceptions that I can remember, 
more like SFB PFs than X-wings or Vipers -- i.e., small starships with 
crews numbered in tens rather than hundreds.

And a note on John's "genre" fighter definitions: Vipers and Raiders 
have FTL drives, or else they couldn't perform the scouting missions 
that they do -- IMO, of course. 

Phil
------------------------------------------------------------
"I think... I think I am!     |        I think _I_ am:
 Therefore I am... I think?"  | 	Phil Atcliffe  
   -- The Moody Blues	      | (Phillip.Atcliffe@uwe.ac.uk)