Re: [GZG] Microcarriers (was: NewCampaign)

[Eric Foley <stiltman@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
>From: john tailby <John_Tailby@xxxxxxxxxx>
>Sent: Oct 2, 2007 2:51 AM
>To: gzg-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: Re: [GZG] Microcarriers (was: NewCampaign)

>In our rules Heavy is a modification to a fighter type and just provides 
>extra defences for a specific type of fighter. Fast is also a modification 
>in this case it gives the attack fighters a primary move of 36 MU.
>
>So a heavy attack fighter is an attack fighter that has a -1 drm against it 
>when shot at by PDS weapons.

Okay, that's what I was thinking.  From your original description I was getting this idea that the attack fighters themselves had gone and directly destroyed the defensive fighters before attacking the ships.  Unless there just weren't very many defensive fighters at all, I just wasn't picturing it.

>Torpedo fighters are more effective (and out own created MKP fighters) are 
>nasty against enemy capital ships but not so against multiple smaller ships. 
>Attack fighters are better against 3 frigates and effective enough against a 
>light cruiser over multiple turns.

Depends.  A single strike from a torpedo bomber group does 15 points of damage. each, on average.  An attack fighter wing does only 7.  A battle carrier line can do enough damage with its ship-to-ship weapons to take down frigates that wiping out one frigate per torpedo bomber group outright doesn't scare me too much.  The only other question is whether the house rules would allow interceptors to rearm as standard fighters aboard the carriers or perhaps allow re-configurable interceptors for an extra cost; if they did, I'd cheerfully torch the fighter wing with them and then rearm the fighters for attack missions against the fleet.  Even if I couldn't, the plasma together with the torpedo bombers would be enough combined firepower that I wouldn't mind the risk much.  The only thing that comes out of a fighter bay that scares a carrier fleet with a front line heavy interceptors is other heavy interceptors.  They're enough better than both heavy fighters and regular interceptors that we actually wound up banning them in my group just because they monopolized the fighter superiority game too much.

>The mass 13 carriers carry 1 squadron each and about 75% of their cost is 
>their fighter squadron.
>
>We wanted to play games more than worry about repair / rearm logistics so 
>ships that suffer hull damage or need to replenish expendable munitions can 
>do so with a penalty to their strategic movement.

Yeah.  In a campaign game that forced them to replace those very expensive fighters, though, that would start to balance out pretty quickly.

>I had about 9 squadrons of normal fighters defending my ships ad was 
>attacked by 29 squadrons of attack fighters. Assuming my defending fighters 
>got average kills, so 21 fighters and some from scatter packs on my ships 
>that left about 140 fighters to attack me. Against my unshielded ships each 
>attack fighter does about 1 point of damage per fighter so thats about 140 
>points of damage to absorb at about 30% mass on hull and armour thats about 
>500 mass dead then and there.


>Next turn thats aboout 120 fighters and so on. It's pretty brutal really.

Yeah... 9 squadrons of normal fighters is pretty much asking to not get much out of them.  It's not enough to really do damage to anything other than stragglers at that point scale, and it's not going to do much to really slow down a concerted fighter attack in turn.  Scatterguns doing only half as much point defense damage hurts, too... I'd probably have to rethink a few of my own designs with that.

What's the rule you have on scatterguns against heavy fighters?  1d2 per scattergun?  The old rules were d6 against standard fighters and d3 against heavies.

>We do treat fighter pilots as expendable munitions, Carriers regularly dump 
>and run. I fact quite a popular tactic is to drop out of hyper space, launch 
>fighters and then warm up the FTL and then jump. It's pretty effective 
>against fortifications as is a similar attack by missile equipped fleets.

Yeah.  That's pretty clearly a case where your players are abusing the "free ordnance" rule, really.  If you were required to actually buy those fighters back (as you would in most campaign rules), that kind of practice would stop in a huge hurry out of a desire to save as many of those fighters as you could for further battles.  Granted, fighters are going to be gone through like popcorn, but if you just dump them and forget about them, even if you win the battle that's still a very expensive "win".

EF

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