Re: small ships

On Tue, 26 Feb 2002 19:16:13 EST GBailey@aol.com writes:
>>One question. Where's the hull? Each ship uses all the mass points
>>without having 1  hull box. 
>>
>>Jaime
>
>Aw, gee, you had to spoil their fun.  :)
>
>Also, an armor point would do wonders for the survivability of these
>so called escorts.  I don't think I'd feel all that safe as a 
>freighter 
>captain/
>owner when my escorts can be taken out by my piddly PDS that small 
>freighters seem to have for armament, let alone some beam weapon that 
>a larger freighter may have.  Cheap is cheap, but come on, don't be 
>less
>powerful than the ships you are supposed to escort.
>
>Glen
>

Valid point, so how small does a ship have to be to be useful?	

I think the armed trawlers and small corvettes (?) of WW2 worked only
because there was no other option and because there was no (surface) foe
they had to face that was a threat (I do not mean that there were
dangerous foes but that ideally they were not deployed facing foes
beyond
their capability to fend off.

That said, scenarios when raiders/pirates are hitting convoy forces
might
just have such ships as (necessity) escorts.  

Yes they have no place in a line of battle but I don't expect to see a
USCG Cutter or Canadian equivalent in a line of battle either.	In WW2
my
father served on Cutters escorting convoys (Atlantic and Caribbean.) 
And
saw action.  Submarines then but in theory they could have been deployed
in places where they might have faced surface foes (Did not the coastal
escorts in the UK early in WW2 face E-boats (essentially FT Corvettes)?

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