Re: [GZG] [LONG] Philosophy of shipbuilding

Heh.  Honor Harrington.  It's true, Weber seems to take great enjoyment
in 
slinging thousands of nuclear bomb-pumped laser devices around space,
and I 
think it's only been just in the last book or two where even the
slightest 
hint of worry about preserving limited resources in ships actually has 
gotten mentioned even once.

In my own gaming when I used to play this on a regular basis, we had a 
fairly free-form design system where you were allowed to bring basically

anything you want within a certain point limit.  Yes, this had a
tendency to 
evolve into a state where somebody would have an enormous temptation to 
build a dreadstar with most or all of their point totals.  There were, 
however, a few fairly serious missions where smaller craft not only were

useful but were very powerful in the battles.

The first mission is the wonderful "banzai boat".  Everybody knows what
this 
guy's out there for.  It's an itty bitty, completely expendible ship,
often 
small enough that if you wanted you could probably stuff it in a spare 
hangar bay for giggles and not even bother carrying FTL on the thing,
that 
was deployed in smallish swarms around larger capital ships in order to
eat 
up salvo missiles.  Because, yeah, if you threw enough salvo missiles at
a 
large ship, it was usually going to die unless it was so stupidly 
maneuverable that you couldn't hit the thing, and in our games, if
people 
bothered bringing large ships the min-maxing was usually in favor of
heavier 
armaments capable of punching holes in a small moon rather than
humongous 
amounts of drive space to keep it zipping between asteroids at will. 
Since 
banzai boats are cheaper than drive systems capable of moving a brown
dwarf 
around dime sized corners, that's usually the solution I tended to use.

The second mission was as a needle beam striker.  There is nothing a 
dreadstar fears more than to have a bunch of needle beams outflanking
him 
(or worse, cloaking and sneaking up behind him) into a position where
they 
can take down drives and screens and leave them looking like heavily
armed 
metal asteroids floating through space.  Hands down, the shortest Full 
Thrust games I've ever been a part of haven't involved my infamous
fighter 
strikes, they've involved situations where my opponent threw a heavily
armed 
dreadstar battleship at me with no fighters and no smaller escorts and
the 
things had drives and/or screens functional for about four turns.  The
only 
thing that seperates a dreadstar from a more reasonably sized warship in

this case is that it makes a much more expensive sitting duck when it's 
forced to surrender to the enemy.

There's other potential missions where I could visualize small craft
being 
useful.  Islamic Fed style suicide bombers with SMRs is one, although
those 
don't pack as much sheer dread for a larger ship as needle strikers do. 
If 
a starfleet has the resources to waste on ships that have absolutely no
real 
capability to defend dirtside targets from attack (a need which is
simulated 
very nicely by forcing people to play on fixed tables) you've got the 
"Mongol horse archer" sort of ship with flimsy hulls, high class (i.e.
long 
ranged) beams and ridiculously high thrust.  If needle strikers got 
dangerous enough you could even justify bringing FT equivalents of 
destroyers for much the same reason as destroyers were invented in real 
life.  I tend to use fighter strikes to serve this mission myself
though, 
and it's one of the few reasons I would ever fathom for giving a
dreadnought 
a small fighter complement if it's not going to bring an additional
carrier 
escort as well to help those fighters actually be useful against another

capital ship.

But yeah... if you don't have some strategic or tactical reason for
using 
smaller ships, I don't happen to find it terribly "munchkin" to use 
primarily larger ones at all.  And if the rules haven't given smaller
ships 
a reason for existing, that's the fault of the rules set, not the
players. 
As it is, Full Thrust _does_ give a few reasons why small ships would
want 
to go near a dreadnought fleet, just that there aren't very many of
them, so 
unless you've got a scenario (campaign or otherwise) where picket forces
of 
smaller ships are a real asset, there's not really a whole lot of reason
to 
bring them if you haven't armed them with something that makes them a
real 
threat to larger ships.  Even at that, it's perhaps an interesting
scenario 
how a needle striker mission would balance together with a picket
mission 
against other escort ships the same size, or whether the needle strikers

would have to basically be left as flighty patrollers that run to report
at 
the first sign of trouble if they ever went out on their own.  Alas,
it's a 
large set of theorizing that would require me to actually get new people
to 
play with now that I've divorced my old FT buddy's sister.  :P

E 

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