Re: Small ships and Wall of Battle

We wanted to preserve our smaller ships in battle but still keep the
game
mechanics simple.  We decided that for our games, any ship with a thrust
6 was agile enough to earn a -1 to hit penalty.  A ship with thrust 8 is
-2
to hit.
Note: a roll of a 6 ALWAYS hit, regardless of penalty.

Works for us...

Pete

-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas Barclay <Thomas.Barclay@sofkin.ca>
To: GZG List (E-mail) <gzg-l@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Monday, September 13, 1999 1:00 PM
Subject: 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
>
>
>