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Re: [FT] seeking Salvo Missile advice

From: Oerjan Ohlson <oerjan.ohlson@t...>
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 18:38:38 +0100
Subject: Re: [FT] seeking Salvo Missile advice

Edward Lipsett wrote:

>Well, they might be a bit miffed when you blew them all away the first
>night, but I imagine the second night you would be facing the results
of an
>intensive 1-day arms race...

Not if you play a campaign (narrative or otherwise), because then what
you 
blew away on the first night wasn't their *ships* - it was their 
*shipyards*, so they have no way to build new any ships for the next
battle.

This is the real problem with "vector-moving" missiles. They're not that

much of a problem in deep-space battles, because it usually takes so
long 
to build up the attack vector that a mobile would-be target has time to 
move away from the danger area (especially in Cinematic); in one-off 
deep-space battles this translates into a rather extreme sensitivity to
the 
exact set-up conditions used.

Most military SF backgrounds I've seen either ignore the hypervelocity 
missile strike tactic completely or ban it by referring to politics -
eg., 
in the Honor Harrington books you normally don't do hypervelocity
strikes 
against orbital installations because the Solarian League will
annihilate 
you in case you hit the planet by accident... even so it pops up in at 
least two of the HH books (Flag in Exile and... Ashes of Victory IIRC).

Regards,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
-Hen3ry

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