Re: FB designs & fighters

Of course this entire debate had to crop up the day after I went
off-line 
for a week... Oh well.

The Stilt man wrote:

> > 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

Legal design; NPV 879

>Assume cinematic rules, fixed table.
>
>This ship says that every design in FB1 is space dust.  To compare to
each
>of the SDNs:

A couple of points here:

1) You're only comparing this ship against the FB1 SDNs. Roger's
challenge 
didn't say that you had to match the FB1 ships one-on-one; he talked
about 
fleet-on-fleet.

2) In three of the four comparisons below, your ship is larger and more 
expensive than its opponent... which means that it bloody well *should* 
have an advantage over the smaller, cheaper ships.

>Valley Forge:

TMF 190, NPV 702 including 2 Heavy fighter squadrons. Your ship is 
one-third bigger than the Valley Forge, and 25% more expensive even than

the most costly fighter option. You're really surprised that you win?

>   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.

6 Valley Forges against 5 of yours means 4212 pts of NAC against 4395
pts 
for you... and that's with the most expensive VF option possible. Not
too 
big a difference, but you're still stacking the odds in your favour :-/
4 
Richmonds (ie., replacing both fighter bays on the Valley Forge with SML

launchers) and 3 Harrison scoutships against 3 of your ships could be 
interesting though <g> (2631 pts of NAC vs 2637 pts of yours - pretty
close 
points-wise).

>Von Tegethoff:

TMF 200, NPV 700 with 1 Hvy fighter squadron. Same odds points-wise as
the 
most expensive Valley Forge variant, but apart from that I agree with
your 
assessment - an unsupported Tegetthoff can't cope with massed missiles.

>Foch:

The only one of the FB1 SDNs which is both larger and more expensive
than 
your ship. No surprise that it'll be the trickiest one for you to deal 
with... 'course, an FSE fleet consisting of smaller ships - eg. a
triplet 
of Jerez-class cruisers, or why not a somewhat extreme swarm of 18 
Athena/Ms - may cause your PDSs somewhat greater problems than a single 
Foch <g>

>Komarov:

TMF 220, NPV 781 pts (as usual including Hvy fighters). Not as badly 
out-costed as the NAC and NSL SDNs, but even so rather cheaper than your

ship. I'd much prefer an ESU cruiser force in this case though.

>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 haven't tried your ship against everything in FB1, though... only 
against a few carefully selected opponents :-/

Regards,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."