Re: FB designs & fighters

----- Original Message -----
From: "Roger Books" <books@jumpspace.net>
To: <gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu>
Sent: Sunday, May 05, 2002 7:18 PM
Subject: Re: FB designs & fighters

> On  3-May-02 at 16:04, Brian Bilderback (bbilderback@hotmail.com)
wrote:
> > If the current designs are valid within the context of facing other
current
> >  designs, then no change seems necessary.  If the changes are
intended
to
> > make the current designs more useful against more advanced/optimized
> > designs, then the changes skew the rules.

> Actually, let me simplify to why your solution doesn't work.

> Ignore fighters and non-base (no plasmas or wave guns) for the moment.

> Design any ship you want using these systems.  Go ahead and min-max
> if you want, I don't care.  the decent FB1 ships (ignore that D#$N
> FSE BDN), if using similar masses, will give your ships a run for
> their money if played by someone of equal or better tactics than
> yours.  You may have a 10% or so advantage but that would only be
> because you are designing ships to fit your tactics.

All right.  Let me throw this at you for size... this is just a quick
screw-around thought pulled straight out of my rectal orifice, so it may
have a mild flaw.  But it's not terribly atypical of the designs that
one
sees regularly in my games for a ship designed to fight without
fighters.

Mass 250
Average hull, thrust 2, FTL
4 Firecons
4 SMLs, 3 salvoes each
4 SMRs
3 Class-3 beams, 3 arcs (spread to front/right/left)
10 Class-2 beams, 6 arcs
21 PDS

Assume cinematic rules, fixed table.

This ship says that every design in FB1 is space dust.	To compare to
each
of the SDNs:

Valley Forge:  I ignore his fighters, I have equal his class-3 armament
and
ten all-arc class-2s against his two all-arc class-2s and two class-1s. 
The
two pulse torpedoes and the screen he's got don't concern me... he
probably
won't live past my first missile salvo or two anyway, and I outgun him
pretty hopelessly.  Even if you evened out the point value and put 6
Valley
Forges against 5 of my design, the Valley Forges are toast.

Von Tegethoff:	One fighter, one SML.  Is 21 PDS worried about this? 
Um,
no.  Thrust 2 and four PDS says that I can fire my SMRs with the first
salvo
and triple-threshold him for free.  He doesn't even match the beam
armament
intact... the follow-up salvoes and beams I'm going to throw after the
first
barrage won't leave enough of him for the salvage crews to be able to
recognize what he used to be.

Foch:  This one involves the most potential trickery, because it's the
only
one that has a prayer of getting past my point defense or stop any
substantial amount of my missiles if they hit him.  But keeping his
fighters
back as a screen against my missiles also neuters his own, and he can't
afford that, because I can throw twice as much beam firepower as he can
into
a lot more arcs.  Which means his only real prayer is to try to get his
missiles and fighters to hit me together, in hopes of swamping my PDS. 
That
carries a risk -- he can only fire all three salvoes together through
his
front arc, which means he's in serious danger of taking an even heavier
missile hit from me if he tries to put himself in a position to throw it
all
together.  Even if he does find a way to do this, I'll probably devote
about
12 PDS to his missiles (so that they'll be seriously blunted) with 9 PDS
to
his fighters (which means he'll have one less group to try this with the
next time).  As his fighters become less numerous I can focus more and
more
on defending against the missiles until they're both ineffectual.  And
unless he miraculously manages to kill me before he runs out of missiles
(assuming he doesn't take a serious missile hit himself) he just doesn't
win
this fight.

Komarov:  Again... thrust 2, and only four point defenses.  You can try
to
get cute with this guy because he's got much better long range beams
than I
do... but his arcs are poor enough that if he tries to turn away to keep
the
range open he surrenders that advantage.  With level 2 screens his beams
are
actually heavier than mine when all is said and done, but he can't come
head
to head to use them all because my missiles stand a pretty solid chance
of
destroying the entire ship with the first barrage that includes the
racks.

Now, maybe some of the ships with more focused ship-to-ship armaments
could
give this thing a bit more trouble, but not likely.  Everything that
qualifies is considerably smaller than the SDNs, and just goes pop that
much
easier to the beam armaments, to say nothing of what happens if this
thing
connects with a missile shot somewhere against a FB1 BB.

As a few alternate ideas, if you don't like or know how to handle SMs
very
well you could yank them off, and put 6 more PDS together with, say... a
pair of 2-arc class-4s and 5 pulse torpedoes.  The Foch's mild hope of
trying to swamp the point defense would go bye-bye (with six more
around,
that means his missiles still won't hit much and he'll probably lose
most of
two fighter groups instead of one), and the Komarov's one decent
advantage -- keeping the range open -- would also go out the window.  In
fact, this variant might well be better than the original for some
players
because you wouldn't need to be able to predict where the thrust-4
enemies
are going to go, and it would probably also pick off the thrust-6 and
higher
escorts and cruisers far more efficiently.

So in the end... no, sorry, I don't accept that argument that I can't
design
a ship that will chew everything in FB1 up, and badly, without needing
to
mess with fighters.

> You can't say the same with massed fighters.	I could write a flow
> chart for the fighters that could beat an FB1 fleet.	Since our
> standard of comparison is ships from FB that tells me that for
> extreme masses of fighters the point system is broken.

"Our" standard of comparison?  I'm sorry, I stopped using the FB1 ships
as
any sort of standard other than how _not_ to design warships quite some
time
ago.  Yes, fighters kill them.	So does the thing I describe above.  So
do a
_lot_ of other things I can dream up that don't involve fighters. 
That's
because the FB1 ships SUCK.  They're not just a little rough around the
edges with a few glaring weaknesses... they SUCK.  If you want to use a
standard of comparison from ships that SUCK, then go right ahead, but
don't
expect me to give the argument you're making that's based on the
standard
much credence.

> Just for amusement, has anyone designed a soap bubble carrier
> for the Kr'vak?  They would have the additional problem of
> a broken morale system.

I personally wouldn't expect the Kra'Vak to have the soap bubble idea
occur
to them.  Why not?  Because their own scatterguns would kill the
fighters
for fun, so they'd wonder why anyone would _want_ to build a
one-dimensional
fleeet based on such an idea.

Hint:  Maybe in a world full of custom designs where soap bubble
carriers
actually exist, someone who's frustrated enough with them would think to
also use scatterguns to make a rather... pointed suggestion to the "soap
scum" that their philosophy isn't really such a hot idea idea after all.

E