Re: [GZG] [LONG] Philosophy of shipbuilding

["Eric Foley" <stiltman@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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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