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Re: FB designs & fighters (& strawmen)

From: "Eric Foley" <stiltman@t...>
Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 01:14:27 -0700
Subject: Re: FB designs & fighters (& strawmen)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Noam Izenberg" <noam.izenberg@jhuapl.edu>
To: <gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, May 08, 2002 2:40 PM
Subject: Re: FB designs & fighters (& strawmen)

> From me:

> >> 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.

>  From Eric Foley:
> > 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.

> Comparing 20 PDS to 100 scatterguns? You're kidding, right? Not to
> mention missing the point entirely. The fighter imbalance has been
> stated clearly enough, and enough times, its not worth reiterating it
if
> you're not interested in the facts.

What fact is in dispute here?  If you've got 30 fighter groups and I've
got
20 PDS, my verbal response to discovering this is going to be "Oh holy
@#$@#$!%!"... if you've got 30 fighter groups and I've got 100
scatterguns,
my response is going to be "Pull!"  Read:  the same number of fighters
is
either an unmitigated disaster for its enemy, or just so many clay
pigeons,
depending entirely on the amount of defenses involved.	There is nothing
magical that makes 30 fighters parabolically more powerful than 5 just
by
virtue of their being there -- it's the _gap_ that is necessary to
establish
their power.  If you don't have the gap, your fighters' worth is exactly
nil, whether it's 5 or 30.  If you _do_ have a gap, then it's much more
pronounced.

Is this difficult for you to parse, or do I have to explain it in
simpler
terms?

> >> 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.... The example I used
just
> > _happened_ to have thrust-2.

> Then it was a poor example. No one can do comparisons against ships
you
> _could_ have proposed.

In stating my general principle of what's wrong with FB1 ships, I made
no
allusions to exactly how you should disperse the mass you devote to
things
other than weapons -- I only stated that the total percentage shouldn't
be
as high as 67-75%, as is the case with every FB1 capital ship.	I think
going much farther than 50% starts to exceed that point of diminishing
returns -- _some_ space obviously has to be devoted to non-weapons, and
devoting more rather than less is usually a good idea... to a point. 
50% is
a good point.  70% isn't.  What, precisely, you choose to devote it to
is
beside the point -- I, personally, am just as happy with weak
hull/thrust-4
as I am with average/thrust-2 or average/thrust-3 (advanced).  You just
assumed that I was also stating that the thrust of FB1 ships was too
high
for their own good as well.... and I've never made such a statement.  I
merely gave the one example and you assumed from that, that I was also
stating that higher thrust than 2 is useless.

> >>> 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?

> No, it compensates for the known problem in costing large vs. small
> ships for one-off duels.

And also invalidates your argument entirely.  I'm sorry, but giving the
FB1
fleets a 60% hardware advantage is _not_ a convincing argument that they
don't suck -- if they _need_ one, then they do.  QED.

> >> 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.

> So you want to exploit both major  errors in the design system in one
> scenario by taking minimal carriers against an uber ship. In the five
> second analysis, all this does is indicate that the fighter imbalance
is
> greater in magnitude than the Mass/Cost imbalance, since your soap
> bubble swarm will crush a Mass 400 DN that's not loaded almost
entirely
> with PDS, and a 400 Mass Ubership will lay waste to an equivalent
> (unmodified) cost of any other Mass 12 ships hands down.

No, I was pointing out a rather grievous error with your "correction". 
If
this were adopted as canon, there'd be no sensible reason to use a
normal
sized carrier design again, because smaller platforms could carry them
much
more efficiently.  After all, a carrier platform isn't really intended
to
face a head-on fighter anyway, so if you wanted the best shot at fighter
superiority (regardless of the rest of your weapons mix), you'd have to
be a
colossal idiot _not_ to take the smallest carrier platforms possible. 
In
fact, just about any ship whose tactical role doesn't involve a very
high
need for survivability -- whether that's a carrier that's expected to
stay
well to the rear, or a nova cannon platform being used as "support
artillery", needle beam escorts, or a suicidal submunition bomb -- would
be
well served to put the bulk of their designs into small packages under
this
system, just to maximize the weapons they're bringing to the field. 
Which
ultimately allows one to cheat the system by bringing a lot more
hardware
than your enemy does, simply by putting it in smaller packages.

And I _really_ disagree with your assessment that there's no mass-12
ships
that could beat a mass 400 dreadnought when they outnumber it (sorry, my
initial math was off) 50 to 1.	Take the following:

Mass:  14
Hull:  1 (fragile)
Thrust:  6
5 MKP, 2 scatterguns

Cost (normal):	50
Cost ("corrected"):  38

Put this against the dreadnought in question.  At a rough estimate
(assuming
a 3.5 cost-to-mass ratio for the dreadnought before "correction", which
may
well be conservative), I'll get 68 of them for every dreadnought.  By my
calculations, I'll need nine of them to survive long enough to get
within
range, on average, to kill an average-hulled mass 400 dreadnought with
MKPs
alone.	Which means that the whole battle will depend on a very few
questions, assuming that the dreadnought doesn't _really_ carry enough
fire
control to take down 60 different ships in one or two shots:

1.  Is the battle on an open table?  If not, the dreadnought dies for
free
regardless.

2.  Does the dreadnought have better than thrust-6 itself?  If not, then
it
still dies for free.

It really is that simple.   Unless the battle's on an open table, AND
the
dreadnought has better than thrust-6, it dies.	Even a mass 400 soap
bubble
carrier's fighters are going to be laughed at by 136 scatterguns, and no
plasma or missile armament that puppy's going to be carrying is going to
get
through it, either.

> > 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".

> 1) You can choose to ignore both the fighter and Mass/Cost imbalances
if
> you wish. That doesn't make them any less real. If you want to play
with
> fleets that exploit those loopholes, you're welcome to (even if they
get
> closed in a rules revision). I am unlikely to be playing you, so
neither
> of us can do more than catcall each other.

I don't think it's an imbalance.  As illustrated above, there's far more
than one way to ram the extra hardware you would get by this little
cheat...
er... correction down someone's throat in a way that they can do very
little
about, which leaves the system even more broken than it was before.  I
think
that the point system works just fine... for every advantage a larger
ship
gives you, there's a corresponding disadvantage.  After all, in a real
war
effort, a mass 3000 ship means that you only need to get one needle beam
hit
to its FTL drives and you've just rendered a very major piece of
hardware
irrelevant to an interstellar war.  Go ahead and _let_ it fly as far
into
your space as it wants to go, needle its drives, then close off the
space
behind it and let the fools sulk.

> 2) Restricting combat area in an open space duel is not heretical - it
> is arbitrary and ridiculous for the genre, and plays into the hands of
> wall crawlers,and ships that protect their rear arcs by sitting on an
> edge or corner.

Says you.  Some people prefer to play on fixed tables as a matter of
simplicity.  Just because they do doesn't mean that they're always going
to
sit on the edge to protect their rear arcs.  In my five or so years of
playing this game, I can remember only a very few times when I've ever
parked armed ships anywhere near the edge of a board, and they all had
to do
with keeping the range open to a target in order to exploit long-ranged
weapons.  The most recent example, for instance, was when I had a ship
with
class-6 beams that was up against a starbase that had nothing with range
to
match.	The board just wasn't large enough that I could exploit that
_without_ parking it near the edge.  But if the longest range of my
weapons
was shorter than that, I've always flown out into the field rather than
waiting.  Doing other wise just... isn't done around here.  *shrugs*

E


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