Re: Carrier and fighter questions

> I understand that some people play without the restriction
> of fighters to Capital ships.  Having done some of the numbers
> I'd like to weigh in against doing away with the restriction.
> Especially doing away with the restriction for Heavy Fighters!
> As a historical note, in WWII the smaller carriers were often
> armed with less powerful planes because the best fighters
> required longer runways.  I don't know what sorts of extra
> logistical requirements the more expensive fighters need,
> but limiting them to Capital ships is important.
In WWII yes, because few carriers had catapults to get the aircraft 
up to flight speeds. Don't forget that many battleships and merchant 
vessels carried aircraft on catapults (in the case of BBs these were 
perched on top of the after turrets) so deck length wasn't an issue. 
Look at modern US Navy carriers - the catapults only run roughly half 
the length of the deck, the rest of the space is used as a 
marshalling area. With the advent of VTOL / STOVL aircraft this 
argument is even less valid.

> As I understand how fighters work, they get half their
> movement the turn they are launched, but they can attack
> that very turn.
Maybe the answer is to restrict the speed on launch of the fighters. 
They get half their move only if launched from capital sized vessels 
which have sufficient catapults / linear accelerators (insert your 
own technology here). Otherwise they're assumed to be launched in a 
similar fashion to a VTOL aircraft or helicopter leaving a modern 
frigate or destroyer, and in the first turn they can only be (say) 1" 
in front of the parent vessel. Certainly you should restrict these 
small carriers to launching one group per turn.

> I suppose that with enough extra cargo space the Swarm II
> could rearm torpedo fighters, interceptors, attack-fighters,
> basically whichever fighter squadron happened to be near
> it.  You could have 3 Swarms launching 3 different types
> of fighters, but any squadron could rearm at any Swarm.
> Considering that the torpedo fighters would need to rearm
> more quickly this versatility could be important!  And on
> the not too infrequent occurences that a launch bay or a
> Swarm cruiser was destroyed, the extra cargo area would
> mean that they could still recover the fighters without
> blocking the launch bay.
Much of the logistics space on a carrier would be taken up with 
model-specific spare parts (engines, wings, electronic modules etc) 
which we could assume aren't interchangeable. Realistically, 
especially over a campaign of any length, a carrier could on service 
/ re-arm a model of fighter that it was equipped with and therefore 
equipped to handle. Any fighter could expect to be recovered by any 
carrier, but IMO having any carrier being able to recover, re-arm, 
refuel, repair and relaunch any fighter would be stretching things a 
little too far, especially if you're talking about escort sized 
vessels.

I'm all for sub-capital sized carriers. In smallish campaign games 
where engagements are down to half-a-dozen ships per side they are 
the only way you can afford to put fighters in every tak force.

Tony Francis