[GZG] Ship point values and effectiveness

["Thomas Barclay" <kaladorn@xxxxxxxx>]

Oerjan said, in reply to John A. : 
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.

TomB: 
The way Oerjan describes earlier small craft vs. larger ships reminds me of More Thrust
style Kravak armour... where things just seemed to bounce off. That style of armour offers
a different type of challenge in FT in terms of a tactical point evaluation (worth 
some value vs. big guns, but worth a lot more versus effectively ineffective smaller
weapons). But I do miss that sort of idea being present in the game, despite me knowing
some of the game balance reasons why this is so. 

But as OA says, in the FT universe, 
a swarm of well flown escorts can see the death of cruisers and capitals. Vector makes
the missile boat swarm an easier tactic, especially against ships like the NSL SDN, which
has a very limited manouver envelope (insufficient to escape salvos placed at the endpoint
of the drift). This means the only time you won't hit it is when you are a) blisteringly
inept or b) he shoots down your missiles or takes out the launching ships FCS or SMR. 
This is yet another example of where points costs for cinematic and vector diverge (or
at least should, if they map to relative efficacy... an MD2 SDN in cinematic is no 
agile cat, but at speed 20+, it can still present some tough choices to an attacking 
missileer. In vector, your speed doesn't matter... there's just no avoiding those SMs. 






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