Re: [GZG] John's Shipbuilding

[John Atkinson <johnmatkinson@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 1/16/06, Oerjan Ariander <oerjan.ariander@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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.

???  4 beam dice, 3 pulse torps that have a 1 in 6 chance of hitting. 
That's not exactally overwhelming.

> 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!

True.  And a lot of that goes into campaign assumptions--specifically,
the range at which the SDN captain can spot 30+ bogies.

> Basic premises are reasonably OK - though note that neither torpedoes nor
> SSMs/ASMs are necessarily single-hit-kill systems against today's warships!

To be fair, SSMs or ASM may not sink a ship, but they will very likely
mission kill them.

> - 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.

You need a LOT of B1s, and I wouldn't want to try it with real human
beings under my command.  Of course, that's a factor that will always
be missing from a game--there are strategies that may be effective but
not cost-effective (in terms of lives), and there is no way to enforce
that consideration when dealing with notional people.

> 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+.

True that -- but there is always a favored part of the scale and
fleets designed for efficiency and effectiveness will gravitate
towards having a majority of their ships being at that part of the
scale.

John
--
"Thousands of Sarmatians, Thousands of Franks, we've slain them again
and again.  We're looking for thousands of Persians."
--Vita Aureliani

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