Re: [FT] Battlecruisers vs. battleships

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin Paul" <Robin.Paul@tesco.net>
To: <gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2002 4:34 PM
Subject: Re: [FT] Battlecruisers vs. battleships

> The Hood really _wasn't_ like the Jutland BCs.  Remember that her
design
was
> recast into a fast battleship rather than a "dreadnought armoured
cruiser",
> which I'd say still describes Renown and Repulse in WW2.  Also,
remember
> that Hood had a couple of _decades_ as the world's biggest warship
before
> Bismarck arrived.

Well, the Hood was like the battlecruisers that went down at Jutland in
the
only way that really mattered, in the end:  her design traded armor for
speed, particularly on the decks, and just like the Jutland casualties,
this
resulted in a catastrophic magazine explosion when she was hit by a true
battleship-caliber shell in the wrong place.

>Cruiser-killing was of huge importance to a global
> empire. Even less obviously imperial powers wanted cruiser-killers
e.g.
the
> Japanese B64 project, the Dutch BC and the Dunkerques (as good a
pocket
> battleship-smacker as you'll see).

Whether or not it was that important to kill cruisers, the fact remains
that
the battlecruiser concept wasn't really that wildly popular in any navy
other than the British, and those few that ever built any of them
abandoned
the concept in time.  They did so for the same reasons I don't generally
go
for the idea myself in FT games:  it's kind of silly to build a ship of
the
wall sized vessel that doesn't dare fight something its own size.

The closest thing in my design notebook that I have to a battlecruiser
is a
weak-hulled vessel in the 200s mass range (I don't have an exact number
because I'm still prototyping it) that sports thrust-6-advanced, plasma
bolts, pulsers, and scatterguns.  Its main vision for being is to chase
down
things that might potentially carry enough fighter defense to be able to
deal with the fighter/plasma doctrine and enough speed and range to make
a
potential mess of themselves otherwise.  But ultimately they're capable
of
striking a blow against ships their own size just fine and are no less
able
to take a hit than the multi-role plasma-and-fighters vessels that make
up
the backbone of the fleet that deploys them.  (They all tend to use
weakish
hulls anyway... the fast guys need to in order to carry both speed and
weapons and the slow guys usually want to bring as heavy a dose of
plasma
and fighters to the board as they can.)

E