Small ships and Wall of Battle

Jutland had destroyer and light cruiser squadrons engaging
each other, if I recall--the big boys were preoccupied with
each other, and probably would have had trouble hitting the
small fry anyway.

** Hit difficulty based on size profile is an absent concept in FT...
except that you cannot engage fighters till they hit a certain range.
Ships marginally bigger (less than 10 mass) are easy to hit at all
ranges. Has anyone experimented with a mass based modifier to
effective range? If so, I'd be interested in seeing what they
implemented.

There was an action in WW2 in which the Americans had an
ambush.  Japanese fleet came steaming through a channel, USN
DD's on either side engaged with torpedoes while the
American heavy ships crossed the Japanese T and obliterated
them.

** I wonder if the big ships could go into as shallow an area as the
DDs... another thing FT doesn't have. Shallow space...? I think not.
Though this is the kind of battle I was thinking of - where small
ships had a point in being there.

I can't think of an occasion (which may mean nothing as I'm
not a naval historian) when DD's were worth bringing to the
party--except for the threat of torpedoes.  The equivalent,
I'd say, is a rack of SM's, capable of doing heavy damage in
one punch--but torps don't take up as much space on a real
DD as a SMR would on a FTFB ship.  But if you allocated each
DD a MT missile, or figured out some way to split a SMR rack
among a DD squadron, you could make it work.

** PTs! or SML/SMRs. Or mounting a small (one or two) class III beams.
Or up armouring the popcorn to make it harder to snuff.

** If you had target profile or mass affecting your shooting (assume
big ships are easier to hit given the lack of shape/profile granuarity
in our design system - in a system that allowed it, ships with smaller
front-on cross sections would be able to mount fewer front facing
weapons - but the broadside would be nasty), that would make small
ships more viable. At range, the only worthwhile targets would be the
big ones.

** Just off the top of my head, no particular thought put into it:

Effective Range = Actual Range + Mass-Range Modifier (MRM)

How to calculate some sort of an MRM?

It shouldn't be a set quantity, otherwise you get silly things like a
small ship 1" away being treated as 6 or more inches away. It should
be something expressed in the form of "for every full x inches range,
add another inch to range".

sqrt(mass)
Mass 1-3: 1" per extra inch
Mass 4-8: 2" per extra inch
Mass 9-15: 3" per extra inch
Mass 16-24: 4" per extra inch
Mass 25-35: 5" per extra inch
Mass 36-48: 6" per extra inch
Mass 49-63: 7" per extra inch
Mass 64-80: 8" per extra inch
Mass 81-99: 9" per extra inch
Mass 100-120: 10" per extra inch
Mass 121-143: 11" per extra inch
Mass 144-168: 12" per extra inch
Mass 169-195: 13" per extra inch
Mass 196-224: 14" per extra inch
etc.

(Notice this progresses on the square of mass as presumably cross
section increases roughly on this progression)

If you had something like this, and you had two enemy fleets at 30",
composed of mass 100 BCs and mass 15 FFs, you'd have the BCs firing at
each other at an effective range of 33", and the FFs would be
targetted as if they were 40" away, making them a poor choice.

I think I'll try a scenario with something like this and see what this
does for the small fries.

And I'm still interested if anyone has any other historical battles
they'd care to comment on where smaller vessels participated with the
big boys.

Thomas Barclay
Software UberMensch
xwave solutions
(613) 831-2018 x 3008