SV: What makes a Capital ship Capital?

> I am concerned with a number of changes that will
> weaken the effectiveness of Capital ships. 

Which changes?

>  Right
> now Capital ships have two major advantages on a
> cost basis:
> 
> 1)  It is cheaper to buy defenses for a 100 mass
> Dreadnought than it is for 10 10 mass ships.

Yes. However, it is also much cheaper to buy defences for a 300 Mass
Supermonitor than for a 100 Mass Dreadnought... which is not a good
thing
IMO. Battles between huge Superships aren't very fun, and those huge
superships can kill just about anything except a large missile salvo
launched from afar - including smaller capitals.

> 2)  Capital ships have access to certain weapons
> smaller classes don't.  AA guns, Nova Guns, Fighter
> Groups...
> 
> I have a problem with changing the costs of shields
> to a percentage of mass basis.  If you make all
> weapons and defenses available to all classes FT
> will simply become a contest between huge numbers
> of Escorts.

First of all, the rumours you've heard about changing the screen masses
are
not entirely correct, so this argument falls. (No, I'm not allowed to
tell
you how they should read.)

Second, with the current design rules far too many FT battles -
especially
one-off ones, and of course IMO - are slugfests between the
battle-lines.
No or little maneuvering, few or no small ships (except missile boats),
just dreadnoughts and bigger beating the sh-t out of one another. This
tends to happen when the players are design-maximisers, who immediately
realise your point 1 above.

Third, I strongly doubt that the Escort Swarm will be a serious danger
in
FTIII

> Capital ships should dominate whatever battle they
> are in, but a good fleet with have heavy cruisers
> for pursuit, and escorts for scouting and destractions.

But unless you play on a _really_ big area (so big that 54 measuring
units
(scanner range) is relatively small) or in a campaign, you won't have
any
need for scouting and little need for distraction; and when the enemy
fleet
also consists of dreadnoughts your "pursuit cruisers" are likely to be
too
small and fragile to do much good - I'd expect them to be taken out
first,
since shooting at them is a faster way to reduce the number of enemy
weapons.

[snip]

> I don't like wonder weenie fleets of scores of low
> mass Escorts, and I'd prefer to limit them by
> emphasizing Ships of the Wall.

A "wonder weenie" fleet tends to be pretty vulnerable to a cruiser fleet
-
and, unless it is equipped with a lot of missiles, to a fleet consisting
of
capitals too...

[snip]

> There is so much for smaller ships to do

Sure. But not on the gaming table.

>, why not let
> the heavy ships dominate the head-to-head clash of
> fleet?  

Because it results in horribly boring battles?

Regards,

Oerjan Ohlson

"Life is like a sewer.
What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
- Hen3ry