Re: FB designs & fighters (& strawmen)

 From Eric Foley:

 > Okay.  I had a nice long rambling post that cut into all of these 
points in
 > detail, but I think that what I wrote at the end states what I'm 
trying to
 > get at most succinctly, so I snipped the rest.

Then we could have dispensed with the Ship X strawman from the start.

 >> > That's because the FB1 ships SUCK.

 >> It seems that "Does not exploit broken rules" = "Sucks" in your 
lexicon.
 >> Tell us what you _really_ think. :-\

 >What I _really_ think is that the FB1 ships have three simple, glaring
 >weaknesses.

Certainly more addressable

 > (1)  They have no coherent plan for dealing with a concentrated
fighter
 > assault.  That touches on other potential disasters if any of them 
take a
 > serious missile or plasma hit as well, but the general idea is still 
simple:
 > their point defense is toothless.

You say this is a weakness of FB1 design. I, others, and the math 
maintain is is a flaw in the Fighter and/or PDS rules. Total fighter - 
and to a lesser extent missile - power scales nonlinearly with number of

groups, whereas almost all other weapon and defense systems (most 
importantly PDS) scale linearly. My favorite answer to this is adjusting

PDS to scale with fighters rather than changing fighter rules or costs.

 >(2)  They devote too much of their total mass to things other than 
weapons.
 >That is the failing that is most emphasized with the FSE BDN:  75% of

its
 >mass is taken up in drives, hull, and screens.  But it's only the
worst 
of
 >the lot -- the NAC SDN devotes 68% of its mass to it, the NSL SDN 
devotes
 >67%, the FSE SDN devotes 65%, and the ESU SDN devotes 70%. 

IMO you seriously undervalue speed and agility, which reduces real 
difference in offensive capability. Your favored duel setup with a fixed

edge exacerbates this mindset.

 > What I really
 >think is that all of those percentages are too damned high -- I'm 
proposing
 >that there's a point of diminishing returns from those systems where 
you're
 >cutting too deep into your weapons load for what you get from the
extra
 >resilience or speed, and that every capital ship in FB1 far exceeds
that
 >threshold.

While there is no doubt a point of diminishing returns for most systems,

precisely where the optimum balance of offense/defense/maneuver lies is 
a) a matter of opinion and experience, and b) dependent on the way you 
play. It is exactly the thing that can be (and is constantly being) 
determined on the gaming table. I think the experience of others does 
not often match yours, but then your specific house rules restrict valid

comparisons.

 > (3)  The capital ships try to do too many things without bringing 
enough of
 >any sort of weapon to do it well, and everything that _does_ have an
 >intelligent weapons fit is too small to be able to do much with it
very
 > long.

As has been said multiple times, the FB1 ships are neither optimized nor

min-maxed. The fact that the "good" ships are "too small" to last speaks

directly to the Mass/cost imbalance of large vs. small ships.

 > (1) and (2) are the most important errors, but (3) just compounds the
 > problem.

(1) and (3) speak to flaws in the design system, not FB1 ships. They are

errors, but not the errors you claim. (2) speaks only to your own 
prejudices and values in gameplay, setup and tactics.

 > The design I gave earlier does not make these mistakes, which is why 
one has
 > to search, and hard, to find a FB1 grouping that would stand much of
a
 > prayer against it

It took only a few minutes to come up with several.

 > (if not, in fact, resorting to legal fictions that propose
 > to excuse bringing over half again as much NPV of hardware ;). 

Extra points for parenthetical dismissiveness and incorrectness.
Calling the correction of a flaw in the costing system a legal fiction 
neither heals the flaw nor invalidates the correction. The numbers speak

pretty clearly on this. You want legal fiction, talk about a fixed table

in an open space starship duel.

 > The exact
 > design I gave may or may not be the best weapons fit that I could've
 > chosen -- as I said, I was basically dreaming it up on the fly.  But
 > ultimately, "Ship X" is a formidable enemy because it weighs in at
250 
TMV
 > and has over 100 TMV of that put into weaponry. 

There's no argument that Ship X has formidable offensive power and good 
defenses. It also has weaknesses exploitable by FT1 ships in several 
ways, some of them obvious.

 > So which is it?  Is every weapon in the game that serves those three
 > principles really broken, or do the FB1 ships suck?

(1) is solved simply by a PDS fix (that does not involve any changes to 
FB1 designs, which remain non-optimized, yet balanced vs. each other) or

by a more complex modification of the fighter rules or costs. I prefer 
the former. Its a 1 system fix either way.

(2) is solved by a player choosing not to follow the low-thrust script 
you've written. No fixes needed other than the ability and will to 
maneuver.

(3) is solved by recognizing and resolving the Mass/Cost imbalance, 
either through a point revision or a campaign game where economics and 
construction/repair costs and time affect distribution of fleets and 
restrict  ship availability for any given scenario. The latter is easy 
to implement for one-off games and involves no change to systems or 
weapons. The former has been a grand quest since FT came out.

So, To answer the last question succinctly, Only one weapon (actually 
one defense) is broken, and the point system is faulty (for one-offs) or

incomplete (lacking an economic/campaign context).  FB1 ships are not 
optimized or min-maxed, but that does not mean they suck.