RE: Fighters

There's a historical precident for Brian Bell's reasoning on the
viability
of Fighters in any real future space combat, vis a vis engine power and
efficiency.  If we look back beyond actual shipboard aircraft to earlier
small combatants: turn of the century torpedo boats.  Around the 1880's
or
so steam powered torpedo boats were all the rage in some navies, 
meeting
most of Brian's requirements: they were fast (25 knots or so at a time
when
battleship speeds were around 18), they had effective weapons (at least
in
theory, although early torpedoes weren't all they were cracked up to be)
the range thing was a bit of a problem since most were short ranged and
risked swamping in heavy seas (although TB's were looked at as a great
equalizer in coast defence - the French built hundreds - and a few
navies
experimented with tenders or motherships, sort of prototype carriers.
	But the advent of the destroyer changed all the equations.
Originally intended to fight torpedo boats, it was discovered that
destroyers made better torpedo boats than the torpedo boats themselves:
hydrodynamics meant that the larger destoyer hulls (starting at around
300-400 tons and growing to over 1000 by WWI) made for higher speeds in
real sea conditions while steam engines, both reciprocating and turbine
gained greater scale efficiency as well.  By WWI 800-1000 ton destoyers
were hitting well over 30 knots while the 100-200 ton torpedo boats, no
matter how hard you tried, couldn't break 30 with steam power.	Of
course
during WWI gasoline and diesel engines came into their own for small
craft
and internal combustion powered and the steam powered torpedo boat gave
way
to the ancestors of the PT boats, MBTs and E & S boats of WWII.
	The Fleetbook design rules represent the Destroyer/TB dilemma
fairly well -- if designing some sort of small missle boat and you want
high speed plus an effective weapon (ie: a SMR) there's a definate limit
to
how small you can go (not to mention the number crunching and rounding
of
decimals suddenly becomes REAL important).
	As for fighters, maybe Brian's on to something when he says
perhaps
fighters use a different style of engine (like the internal combustion
engines that suddenly made torpedo boats viable again).  I've always
wondered about the FT fighter rules anyway -- FT fighters behave a great
deal like their wet navy counterparts.	Which is odd since unlike
aircraft
they don't move in a whole different medium (ie air rather than water)
their manueverability advantages shouldn't be so obvious, nor the need
to
have dedicated weapons to attack them since, in theory at least, they're
just much smaller cousins of the ships they attack (ie: why are fighters
so
much more effective than small mass 6-10 ships).  The system gives a
very
WWII feel with airstikes and flak barrages, but then again, I ignore the
anachronisms and play it anyway cause it's a hell of a lot of fun.

			-M