Re: FB designs & fighters (& strawmen)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Noam Izenberg" <noam.izenberg@jhuapl.edu>
To: <gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, May 07, 2002 6:25 AM
Subject: Re: FB designs & fighters (& strawmen)

> From Eric Foley:
>  > (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.

No, it doesn't.  30 fighters is a catastrophic threat to a fleet with 20
PDS.  It's a footnote in operations to one with 100 scatterguns.

>  >(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.

It has nothing to do with speed or agility.  I use thrust-4 and thrust-6
ships as well, but when I do, I take off hull to make room for it rather
than weapons.  The example I used just _happened_ to have thrust-2.  It
could have just as easily had thrust-4 and a weak hull as thrust-2 and
an
average one.

>  > 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.

Yeah... several that brought half again as much hardware.  This is an
argument that MY design sucks?

>  > (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.

Uh huh.  And everyone knows those poor mass 12 soap bubble carriers have
it
SO hard because they're small.	I mean, when you might bring fleets of
mass
400 dreadnoughts, boy, my soap bubbles are going to be in trouble!  So I
should be permitted to bring them at a ratio of 42 to one instead of
just 22
to one.  (I _might_ be calculating the math wrong, but you get the
idea.)
After all, _just_ 22 fighters against a mass 400 dreadnought would
_never_
be enough... those extra 20 are absolutely _necessary_ to balance out
the
small size of my ship against such a brobdingnagian monster up against
me.
I _fully_ see that this is a _much_ better idea than my silly suggestion
that some people like to play on those heretical "fixed tables".

Choketastic.

E
(aka Stilt Man)