From: Noam Izenberg <noam.izenberg@j...>
Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 16:24:40 -0400
Subject:
Roger Books wrote:
Limit the number of fighters than can attack a ship in one turn.
Flak Magnet:
Which seems realistic (as opposed to arbitrary) when you consider that
the different flights of fighters have to worry about co-ordinating
their fire and vectors in order be able to do significant damage.
If you want _this_ bit of realism, fighters should have an
easier/tougher time attacking a ship based on the other fire it's
taking from (and dishing out to) missiles and other ships. If you don't
then you're being arbitrary about the level of 'realism' you wish to
employ and reject.
If
one flight screws up another's vector then you have both flights
breaking formation, not making attack runs and generally getting hosed
out of the sky by ship anti-fighter defenses.
On the '20 minute turn' granularity of FT, that still seems arbitrary.
Perhaps basing the max
numbers of fighter that can attack by the ships classification (and
thus
general size/mass).
That introduces more Mass breakpoints in ship design
But, my mother taught me not to take shots at other's ideas without
presenting an alternative:
I haven't seen this discussed (here or the test list) (which doens't
mean it hasn't been hased out when I wasn't looking): A modification of
the fighter morale rules which incorporates the same feel, but not the
arbitrary hard limits.
Each fighter group to attack rolls 'morale' even if it is a full
complement. Each roll gets +1 for each successive group that attacks, in
addition to reductions from lost fighters. This can be interpreted not
merely failed morale, but as a combination of that and fighters finding
valid attack vectors harder to come by as more and more groups engage
the target ships, until the space is all but saturated. A roll of 1
allows attack even if for groups beyond the 6th. Committing to the
morale roll means the group is making an attack run and burns an
endurance point regardless of the roll outcome. This makes Mobs of 4
fighter groups or more decrease pretty seriously in efficiency.
Assuming full groups (No PDS damage), The _average_ number of standard
fighter attack dice goes like this:
Groups Dice
1 6
2 11
3 15
4 18
5 20
6 21
+1 +1
This is not my favorite solution and still suffers from some of the same
criticisms I gave above, but I much prefer it to the hard limit.