Re: Roles of various ship classes

> Specificly, what kind of ship was appropriately
> armed with Pulse Torpedos.

Anything fast and maneuvrable enough to keep them pointed towards the
enemy.

[snip]
 
> If you aren't using a very survivable ship you may
> as well use Submunitions, which can deliver all
> their damage in one shot.  Pulse torpedos are better
> than submunitions only if they get off >3 or 4 shots.

But a pulse torp _can_ fire more than three or four shots. If a small
ship
fires a large salvo of SMPs, I can safely ignore it for the rest of the
battle - it'll speed off anyway (unless it wants to suicide by ramming
or
going into FTL), and I can concentrate on destroying the ships that are
able to hurt me. If, OTOH, it fires a PT, I want to make sure it doesn't
fire another one once it has turned around for the next attack.

> So the ideal Pulse Torpedo ship is a fast heavy
> cruiser. 

That's pretty expensive, that is. It is good - most of my Eldar fleet
consists of fast PT-armed cruisers - but only as long as it points
towards
something heavily screened.

> With a more reasonable cost of 4 Mass,
> a heavy cruiser with Level-2 shields, 2 Pulse
> Torpedos and 2 PDAF you've got a ship that can
> get that all important first threshold check on
> a Capital ship.

Hm... make that "the all important second treshold check" <g> I rarely
damage very much on the first one, especially not screens :-(

> It would be a very odd class of ship.  A middle sized
> ship which specializes in attacking Capital ships.

And also not very able to go anywhere. If you go with the FTL variety,
well... I'm no good at ship classes, but weren't there quite a few large
destroyer or light torpedo cruiser classes that would be quite similar
to
the FT torpedo cruisers?

> The closest analogue I was able to find were the
> heavily armored coastal monitors which carried huge
> guns and stayed so close to shore that battleships
> couldn't close with them.

Historical reflection: Considering the ranges of battleship guns, the
only
reason I can think of why the battleships would _want_ to close would be
to
find them when they were hiding...

> It doesn't make sense to have an armament mix on
> a pulse torpedo Cruiser or Escort because it can't
> spare the fire controls.  

Escorts no - you want some point defences on it, though - but I don't
agree
with cruisers. It is very nice to have one or two light batteries to
your
sides so you can at least shoot back a little at the lighter ships that
are
pursuing you... and so you have something to shoot with all those turns
when your PT don't have a target. My most unsuccessful designs have been
the pure PT ones.

> Pairing off torpedo cruisers
> with cruisers designed to swat escorts is a good idea,

Yes - except that the escort-swatter usually don't want to mix it with
true
capitals :-(

> but mixing pulse torpedos and beams on one cruiser
> isn't.  If it loses a fire control a mixed armament
> ship would have to decide whether to fire beams or
> pulse torpedos.

But prior to that it is very useful :-)

> On that line of thought, a ship shouldn't have more
> different arcs of fire than it has fire controls.

...turrets... I assume you mean "arcs of fire" as in "weapons with the
same
arcs of fire" rather than the FT definition, though.

> "Well, what if you face an opponent from a direction
> you don't mount weapons?"  Why assume that you
> won't be able to maneuver to get a good firing angle?

If you have only one fire arc, it isn't that likely that you'll have
targets to shoot at all the time unless it is rather big - at least not
the
targets you'd prefer to destroy (like the small SMP ships that just got
into your blind spot <g>). I tend to use turrets with overlapping fire
arcs
(eg, one left/forward and one forward/right); in this way I have one
optimal arc (forward, usually) but I'm not entirely naked when attacked
from other directions too. (No, I don't use the battery masses published
in
FT; I penalise extra arcs with extra mass.)

> If you build your ship so that you can't ever use
> all your fire power you are being silly.

Which is why multi-arc weapons are so popular, of course. When all your
weapons are three-arc, you won't have any problems finding targets.

> A Kra'Vak escort should have all its weapons in one
> arc, a cruiser, 2 arcs, only a Capital ship would have
> all three arcs covered.

Remember that the Scattergun is all-arc in MT. And, of course, that you
can
buy extra fire controls :-) A Kra'Vak doesn't have room for very many
weapons anyway :-/

Later,

Oerjan Ohlson

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