RE: Big Guns and Small Ships (was Re: house rules/offline)

An additional thought.	 Who says the recycle rate of combat lasers or
rail guns is negligible? Many SF universes like B5, Star Trek etc do NOT
fire big guns rapidly (although some do fire exended bursts with the
risk of doing damage to themselves) but they power them up and then let
loose.	It could take a lot to hurl that much energy at some one.

  Once you have a target in your sights a beam weapon will almost always
hit unless you are more than 186,000 miles away  at which point you have
1 second to evade.  Anything closer...	This can only mean that the
problem is targeting versus armour and it boils down to how long does it
take to target and how difficult is it for a smaller more manoeuvreable
ship to evade.	Personally I think targeting systems would always win
out over moving ships (inluding fighters) unless you take into account
very high target speed

David Best
>
>Unfortunately, in FT and most sci-fi universes, guns are lasers, or
>phasers, or rapid-fire rail cannon; things where reload rate is
>irrelevant, and the speed of the projectile is so high that even if
>you miss with the first shot, you can easily compensate and tag the
>bugger with the second.  End of Story.  (Examine Starfire, or 
>the Honour Harrington Books, or the B5 Universe.  You're small, you
>die easily in the line of battle.  HH is the strongest example of 
>this; I would not want to take a destroyer, or even a squadron of
>destroyers, against a Superdreadnought.)
>
>Thus, in these other universes, the construction of small ships must
>be justified by other factors; expense and numbers.  Unfortunately,
>these are only factors in campaign style games, where you need 
>destroyers and the like as convoy escorts, pickets, scouts, and
>"distractions."  (While somewhat callous, it is a role that small
>ships have fulfilled from time immemorial.  WWII is full of examples
>of destroyers and cruisers taking on opponents twice their 
>displacement, to let the convoy get away.)
>
>