Re: B5-3 Aft

On Thu, 04 Sep 2003 20:38:04 -0500, Jared Hilal writes:
>Kevin Walker wrote:
>
>> Understood.	It does make for a great assualt ship, taking out forces

>> guarding planets or installations.  They either run from it or it 
>> chips away at them over a long battle and then take out or captures 
>> the target (or opens the way for other ships of it's side to do so if

>> they later warp in).
>
>How?  You come to raid my infrastructure and win once.  Once this 
>victory is spread through the fleet, the next time you come to one of
my 
>systems, I don't go out to meet you, but rather stay at the objective 
>and wait for you to come to me.  Because you have to enter a certain 
>range of the target (for your weapon) and I can detect your STL
approach 
>into the system, I can position myself to force you to engage me before

>reaching the target, at which point my K-guns smash your fragile hull 
>and your stern-chaser armament does squat for you.

Because I stop when my weapons are in range of your ships (and yours
aren't in range of me) and start destroying your ships.  You have the
option of either running, trying to attack me, or sitting there
getting killed.  If I out range you and I'm faster than you, there's
little you can do to catch me.	I'll control the range of the
engagement, and keep it open enough you can't respond.

>> The main issue though was cost balancing between the different weapon

>> systems as well as an earlier discusion about drive types and 
>> cinematic vs. vector movement, which unfortunately has little to do 
>> with campaign or strategic issues.
>
>No, it does.  The previous discussion has revealed that the cost 
>balancing is only correct as written for Cinematic play on larger 
>tables.  On average size tables, the costing over-rates the larger 
>batteries, and vector appears to need some more tweaking to balance
right.
>
>Holding up examples that work in very specific situations (like this 
>ship) but not in general, common situations, and then extrapolating 
>general conclusions from the results is not correct.  In critical 
>analysis, this is called a "straw man argument".

Ships like this work fairly well in a wide range of engagements.
They're just boring as hell to play. :) In real life air battles, the
planes with longer range missiles probably get to do a bunch more
damage than the ones with shorter range missiles.  if they had an
unlimited number of longer range missiles, why would they ever suffer
any loses?

The same is probably true for a modern navy.  With nice long range
missiles, its hard to imagine modern US warships taking loses from WWII
era ships, unless they scenario somehow traps the modern ships.  The
modern ships have better range, better speed (well, mostly), etc.  If
the WWII ships can surprise the moderns in a constricted environment (a
river, a small bay, etc) then they can do a fair amount of damage.
But without that forcing function, the moderns are just plain going to
win.  

If the shorter ranged full thrust ships can arrange an ambush (hide on
the moon, or in a freakishly dense asteroid belt), then they can
possibly do enough damage before the faster and longer range ships
pull away to even the fight.

>> On Thursday, September 4, 2003, at 05:43 PM, Eric Foley wrote:
>>
>>> In the end, fast sniper vessels such as this only really work in a 
>>> lark where you're assuming a great many things that don't make a lot

>>> of sense, or in special situations such as commerce raiding where 
>>> you're not going to devote any large amount of resources to it, and 
>>> where you're prepared to refit the vessels with more sound armaments

>>> once your enemy stops being stupid and develops a countermeasure. It

>>> wins one-off games where you don't think a little outside the box
and 
>>> project a few military objectives that would otherwise rein in the 
>>> impulse to devote precious resources to building such vessels.
>>
>Exactly.

Its a tactic with few shortcomings.  Fighters definitely, or other
faster ships.  If you don't have the space to give up while you
retreat and snipe, that would be an issue.  But space is big.  really
really big.  If the jump horizon is a reasonable distance away from
the planet, you should have quiet a bit of time/distance to give up as
a buffer.

But all this doesn't really effect how much fun YOU have from the
game, does it?	If you don't fight these style of battles, who cares?
If you think B3's and B4's are overpriced, give them a house rule
price break.  FT tries to be as generic as it can be, but there are
always going to be breaks in the system.  If you play at slow speeds
(< 6mu a turn) life is very different than if you're off playing
rocket rangers ( > 24 mu a turn).  Ships movement in vector will tend
to be more predictable than ship movement in cinematic, etc.

-=- Matthew L. Seidl		email: seidl@wraith.com 		
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