Re: [GZG] John's Shipbuilding

[Oerjan Ariander <oerjan.ariander@xxxxxxxxx>]

John Atkinson wrote:

> >>That would cut 12 points off the cost of that ship, and for the cost of a
> >>dreadnought (now 1204 points) I could buy 100 of the little buggers.
> >
> >No, you couldn't: the missile boat in question originally cost 48 pts, so
> >if you reduce that cost by 12 pts it still costs 36 pts. That gives you a
> >mere 33 missile boats against the 1204-pt SDN, not the 100 John expected -
> >and 33 missile boats are by no means impossible odds for a well-handled SDN.
>
> A slip of the fingers--typing faster than I was thinking.
>
> A mere 33. . .given that it takes 10 on-target salvos doing average
> damage to completely destroy the dreadnought in question, I would
> suggest that the odds are well more than 50/50 in favor of the missle
> boats. At 17 to 1, the odds are much closer to even.

That's why I specified "a *well-handled* SDN", John ;-) You're either 
assuming that most of the missile boats will retain both sensors and 
missile racks long enough to launch successfully or that most of the 
salvoes launched will actually be on target. In my experience, the SDN 
player can do quite a lot to invalidate either or both of those assumptions.

Basically, this match-up hinges on how many missile boats the SDN can 
cripple before the boats get into missile launch range. By shaping its 
vector away from the missile boats the SDN can force the boats to come 
quite deep into the SDN's direct-fire weapons envelope before their 
missiles range on it, and if the velocities are high enough it can force 
them to spend several turns under fire before they can launch. Given the 
fragility of a missile boat - eg., on the design you posted even the first 
damage point inflicted has a 30% chance of neutering the boat by damaging 
either or both of the FCS and the SMR - and the amount of firepower that 
SDN can put out even at ranges >24mu, that is seriously bad news for the 
missile boats.

Of course, as Laserlight wrote the outcome of this battle depends heavily 
on the set-up. If the starting range and/or the initial velocities are too 
low, the SDN won't be able to shape its vector appropriately before the 
missile boats range on it - but if the SDN's captain has allowed 30+ 
unidentified ships to get that close without even beginning to do something 
about it, I'd say he deserves to lose his ship!

> Which reinforces my original point---that there are no small boats
> armed with heavy ship-killers in the Full Thrust rules as written.
> The closest equivalent is SMRs and most people seem to be skeptical of
> their effectiveness.  Hence serious fights will be primarily focused
> on capitals rather than on small ships.

Basic premises are reasonably OK - though note that neither torpedoes nor 
SSMs/ASMs are necessarily single-hit-kill systems against today's warships! 
- but the conclusion you draw from them is not. In historical wet-navy 
conflicts the weapons carried by small ships were usually unable to even 
damage large battleships until the torpedoes and missiles came around; but 
in Full Thrust even a tiny B1 battery can damage a superdreadnought - and a 
lot of B1s can destroy an SDN with a hundred tiny cuts. This fact alone 
severely upsets comparisons between Full Thrust and historical wet-navy fleets.

> What I'm driving at is this:  For any given points cost system, there
> is one most efficient use of the points.  Either it will favor small
> ships, or large ships, or there will be an artificial 'break point'
> (like the old FT points just below the divides between escort/cruiser
> and cruiser/capital) where the most effective point cost is.

Don't bet too much money on that. Yes, there'll always be *some* bias - but 
if the bias is small enough that player skill or even luck with the dice 
overshadows it, its effect on the game is minimal.

In addition the biases don't have favour either end of the scale; they can 
also favour the *middle* of the scale - eg., in the CPV case the "favoured" 
TMF range is roughly 80-150 (due to the interaction between the progressive 
hull costs and all the game mechanics that actively favour larger ships), 
and the bias against other sizes isn't very strong until you get up to TMF 
350+.

In short, there's still plenty of use for your TMF 250-ish SDNs - it's just 
that you've built your mental image of the GZGverse campaign setting at 
least partially on the NPV points values which are heavily biased in favour 
of the largest possible ships, so it might take you a little while to 
adjust to paying costs closer to what your capitals are actually worth on 
the gaming table :-/

Regards,

Oerjan
oerjan.ariander@xxxxxxxxx

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

_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-l