On 6/17/07, Hugh Fisher <laranzu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In phase 8, any ship may target a fighter group subject to
FCS availability, range, and weapon arcs. The player
declares intent as usual, "3 beam-2 against the attack
fighter group and 4 beam-1 against the other."
BEFORE dice are rolled, the fighter group has the option
to evade. (The player must decide in a reasonable time
frame - no calculators allowed!)
If the group evades, it expends 1 CEF and breaks off any
attack run. The anti-ship weapon fire automatically misses.
PSB: fighters have warning receivers that indicate a ship
has locked on, and unlike bigger vessels they can actually
move fast enough to break the lock. OR, anti-ship weapons
have to be 'steered' onto the group, water-hose style, so
the fighters can predict and avoid the fire.
The decision to evade should be made before the player owning the fighters finds out what is being fired. Announcements should be made about which fighter groups are under the eye of an FCS and then one player secretly writes down whether the fighters are evading and the other player secretlywrites down what, if any, weapons are firing (irrespective of weapons committed, the FCS is 'used' for the purposes of fire. After orders are written, both sets are revealed and resolved.
PSB: The warning receivers will register the fire control signals, not the weapons fire. As the FCS can handle the tracking for anything, the pilot has no idea what is inbound. During the Cold War, illuminating an adversary with a tracking radar was a good way to 'rattle his cage', as there was no way to find out if a missile had not been fired. A fighter that evades has no way of knowing the difference between being missed and not being fired at. Fighters that do not evade will know, but the information will be received too late to act upon it.
Also, not every pilot will actually listen to his threat receiver and many will even switch it off to prevent sensory overload. In the Viet Nam War, sensory overload was such a problem that some F4 pilots went to the extreme of switching off the WSO's intercom.