Re: Carriers

Jeremy Claridge wrote:

>  Well first foray into this message group.

Welcome! I haven't seen any reply to this (could've come while my ISP
was
down, though), and I don't agree much with you, so here goes :-)
 
> To me what is needed to distinquish between a carrier and 
> a battleship, destroyer etc is armour. With all the ideas 
> about launch methods for fighters, unless the external 
> option is developed any carrier will have several launch 
> tubes, hanger bay doors etc. If we applied some penalty 
> for basically filling a ship with holes for fighters to 
> occupy then a carrier would be alot weaker. No player 
> will want to weaken a frontline vessel just for fighters.

You can do this using the FTFB design system. However, what's the
difference between a fighter and a large missile (especially the MT Mass
2 type, which is at *least* as large as a fighter),
hole-in-the-ship-wise? Should a missile-heavy design also be fragile?

Your argument can be used in both ways. You think that carriers should
be
fragile; fine, use a Weak hull (or even a Fragile one) and no armour. I
don't think that a carrier - especially not one with B5- or
Starfire-style fighter bays, where each fighter has its own bay rather
than one with a single large fighter deck for all fighters (as in SAAB)
-
would be very fragile, or at least it wouldn't *have*. Lots of
compartmentalisation, and there's no reason why the bay doors shouldn't
be heavily armoured too :-/ Both design types can have high or low
launch
rates for various reasons (though I'd suspect that the 1 bay/fighter
type
would be more likely to launch fast than the single-deck one).

[snip]

> B5(the station) Has a very simple launch method and gives 
> the impression that all fighters could be launched 
> together. But I suspect that the down side is docking 
> those fighters again. 

They seem to dock fighters through the normal cargo bays...

Later, 

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@nacka.mail.telia.com

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