RE: Ramming.

In reply to Aden Steinke:

>If you have a culture conducive to such behaviour it gets down to
economics
>and logistics / repair costs + time, crew replacement availability +
time, if
>you have 'plenty more where that came from' or the repair takes so long
a ship
>is useless there is no reason not to have a doctrine based on the ram
for the
>few survivors of a heavily damaged ship if they are so culturally
conditioned
>as to believe it its the right thing.

I tend to agree that if there is some sort of tactical doctrine or alien
philopsophy behind it, fair enough. Of course the trouble with ramming
is
that you have another crew trying to avoid you, hence the mechanism
which
seems to work reasonably well. From that viewpoint I'd say the mechanics
are fine.

If you tend to look at the nations who have done these things in recent
times you tend to have lone individuals doing it eg. kamikazis and
Islamic
suicide bombers in trucks full of explosives. In a way this makes sense
-
after all why have thirty people in a truck when you can have thirty
trucks... Craig Mitchell's rules are interesting - it's probably
reasonable
that given ideal cirucmstances if an average ship was going to attempt a
suicide ram they'd evacuate most people and do so with a skeleton crew.
This is a bit of a problem because generally speaking the average crew
isn't prone to doing something like that, and a ship manned with a
special
purpose skeleton crew doesn't perform well in normal combat because
there
are not enough of them to man guns etc. Consequently, in my opinion, you
get to the stage where you have small, dedicated ships (eg. torpedo
fighters) or the very occasional ship in an extreme situation going down
in
a death or glory stunt. I personally think for the average navy it
shouldn't be the rule.

Regards,

Kevin.

Kevin Mc Lean.
STEPS Co-ordinator/CLC Tutor.
Central Queensland University.
Mackay Campus.
Ph  (079) 407416.
Fax (079) 407407.