Re: Fw: Weapons for Newtonian based FTIII

On Mon, 5 May 1997, Cleyne, Daniel wrote:

> And of course, opportunity fire wouldn't be allowed.

There IS no opportunity fire in FT. The game would be fundamentally 
different if there was.

> But what sort of intrinsic value would a station have. Surely it would
> (or should) be a much greater victory to capture a station rather than
> destroy it. I think I would perhaps regard the destruction of a base I
> was attacking as somewhat pyrrhic.

Compared to the cost of capturing it? That's the jist. Any such target
can be taken out with the rock'em approach. The larger and better 
defended it is, the more sense this approach makes. Or the *threat of
it* 
can be used to force a surrender.

>  Why would these weapon systems have been invented then. Surely if the
> most effective way of clobbering an opponent is to lob a chunk of rock
> at him, then the department of technical boffins would have
concentrated
> on improving Large Rock Delivery Systems(tm) rather than wasting time
> and money on weapons that aren't effective in combat. 

Not so. LRDS(tm) is useless against mobile targets, such as enemy ships.
The problem is solely with immobile targets.

The obvious answer is not to have immobile targets, but that removes the

fun of stations.

> It sounds like the
> existing weapon systems, especially the ranges, don't quite fit into
the
> paradigm that we want them to.

IMHO, it sounds like no one really, really thought what it's like to be
a 
sitting duck, Screen-3 and 100 DP or not.

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