Re: Anti-missile defenses in FT

> Actually, we've found the best missile delivery vehicle to be a mass
18
> thrust 8 escort with 3 missiles and nothing else. It's fast enough to
get
> away from anything it doesn't want to fight yet sturdy enough to take
a
> couple of hits and still deliver a full load of missiles.

That's only 6 mass.  What else did you add to that ship?  A Mass 16,
Thrust
8 ship can carry four missiles without other mass overhead for other
systems.

> > Does anyone else think that missiles are way too difficult to be
defended
> > against?
> 
> I once did the calculations, and quite simply the answer is that
against
> a proper overload attack, you just can't get a cost effective defense
> with *DAFs. To wit: You need 6 PDAF's to get a reliable kill against
ONE
> missile. For that mass and cost, the attacker gets THREE missiles.
It's
> a lost cause.

It would seem to me that 'in reality' naval research would focus on ways
to improve the interception odds of hitting the missiles.  For that
reason,
I like the idea of increasing the odds of a PDAF missile kill to 5-6.

The +1 bonus for ECM is a good idea too.  Our group has proposed a rule
to
allow ECM/AECM to 'attack' missiles as a PDAF system.

Another idea our group discussed was to apply FireCons to the point
defense
to increase the odds of killing missiles.  For each FireCon applied to
the
defense, all missile kill die rolls get a +1.  The disadvantage of this,
is
that the FireCon is unavailable to direct beam fire.  This will require
a
fleet to time a missile attack with a beam attack in order to overload
the 
targeting abilities of the defending ships.  This will give Capitals a 
distinct advantage in missile defense, which they should have.	We have
not
playtested the ideas.

Just some more thoughts and ideas for the fire...

Jon Davis
davis@albany.net