RE: Soap bubbles?

Chuck-

If it's a group new to FT, you'll see the soap bubble philosophy pop in
at 
some point.  Some joker always pushes it.  There are a couple of well
known 
tricks to handling it, from least effective to most effective 
(Effectiveness order is my personal take, not to be taken as gospel):
1.  ADFC (There's a design philosophy debate on whether it's better to 
mount ADFC on all ships and a hand-full of PDS, or a mission specific
ship 
designed with ADFC and mainly/mostly PDS to provide cover for
ship-killer 
ships.)
2.  Fast ships/High initial V.	Zoom in ~ 48+ speeds, hit the carriers,
and 
zoom out leaving fighters either dead in bays or unable to reach you and

carriers unable to escape.
3.  Krack scatter guns.  These are considered fairly effective vs. 
fighters, but if you're not playing Krack, you're mixing technology
which 
has it's own serious flaws.
4.  Fight fire with fire (or in this case, fighters with fighters).  Use

soap bubbles yourself.
5.  Ban, or significantly reduce custom designs.  "Book fleets only"
fights.

To comment on a previous question of yours:
The majority of the list think fighters are under-priced as it is. 
There's 
a minority (I am included) who disagree and actually think they're 
over-priced.  It's almost unanimous, though, that fighters are 
overly-powerful given their current incarnation.  The specific problem 
involves many vs. few, where 1 (or a few) fighter groups are usually 
ineffective at best, but 10+ are overly-effective (at worst).  The
standard 
arguement for this is usually stated along the lines of: 1 group of 
fighters points times 10 does not equal 10 groups of fighters.	Or 18*10
!= 
180.

There is a bit of circular dominance involved, with fighters beating 
ship-killers who in turn beat PDS boats who dominate fighters.	(IMNSHO
PDS 
is more effective than it should.  However, long and heated debate has
been 
held over that land-mine already)

Hopefully that should sum up several years of debate for you.
Some Free advice:  The best solution I've found for people who want to
play 
fighters, but don't want to see them dominate, is to have a friendly
house 
rule that disallows extremism ship creation and/or limits numbers of 
fighters either on the board or allowed to target a ship at a time.

A question for the rest of the group:
I haven't had a chance to playtest it, but perhaps a solid rule limiting

the number of fighters allowed to target a ship at any time?  Perhaps 1 
fighter (not squad) per 10 mass, with one group always being allowed?

Rand.

At 01:27 PM 2/17/03 -0500, you wrote:
>Oops... missed that little bit. That's what I get for try to discuss
rules
>at work without the material handy :) BTW, my only experience with
fighters
>is watching my ships go poof when they come near. Always the escort
>commander, never the carrier admiral :/ But my group has never employed
soap
>bubbles either. The carriers have always had bark and bite too, so I've
>never experienced the fighter swarms others have seen.
>
>Thanks for the catch Laser, back to the design tool....
>
>Chuck
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-gzg-l@lists.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU
> > [mailto:owner-gzg-l@lists.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU]On Behalf Of
> > laserlight@quixnet.net
> > Sent: Monday, February 17, 2003 11:57 AM
> > To: gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu
> > Subject: RE: Soap bubbles?
> >
> >
> > Chuck said:
> > >So far from my overly simple analysis, it seems fighters themselves
are
> > underpriced for what they can do. Perhaps with other designs I would
see
> > different. But if a 6 pt fighter group has resonable odds of taking
down a
> > 50 pt vessel even with dedicated anti fighter weapons, it seems to
me that
> > something's amiss there.
> > >Glady awaiting someone to point out my erroneous thinking.
> >
> > Well, fighters don't cost 6 points.  Roger posted this soapbubble:
> >
> > >			      Item  Mass  NPV
> > >	       Spaceframe: mass 12    12   12
> > >		Fragile hull 1 box     1    2
> > >			 FTL Drive     1    2
> > >		      Main Drive 2     1    2
> > >		       Fighter Bay     9   27
> > >			     Total    12   45
> >
> > So that's 45 points to bring a fighter bay to the table--and
> > you'll need to
> > actually buy the fighters too.  So you're at total 63 points or
more,
> > depending on what fighters you buy--does that look better when
compared to
> > your 50 point escort?
> >
> >
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> >