Re: SM battle report - "Death of the Decoys"

Roger Books wrote:

> > Fought this battle today. Cinematic movement on a floating table,
but
> > speeds were still fairly low - my NSL opponent didn't dare flying
> > faster than speed 20 with his thrust-2 ships, and I had to conform
to
> > his speeds to avoid overshooting him.
> > 
> > Alan and Roger, I hope this report answers some of your questions 
> > about dealing with BJs :-/
> 
> Answers a few of mine.  One question I do have, how quickly does the
> FSE munch on the NSL without use of cannon fodder?  

Which cannon fodder - the FSE small fry or the NSL CTs?

Without the FSE small fry, it is unlikely that the FSE would've munched
the NSL at all. While the light wing didn't kill that many CTs - the
FFs and SCs only killed 3 Stroschens and crippled 2, out of 16 - they
forced the NSL to choose between facing them (and allowing the FSE
heavies to make *their* attack run from the rear quarter of the NSL
force), or facing the FSE heavies (which would have allowed the FSE
small fry to kill far more of the BJs). 

The first attack wave needs to be armed with non-SM weapons only, have
a high number of FCs per weapon (due to the small size of their
intended targets) and be fast - thrust-6 or better - and the FF and
smaller are the only official FSE designs which fit all three of those
requirements. Had there been an FSE CL with beam/sub-pack armament I
would've been sorely tempted to use it instead - eg something like the
Huron, but with the broadside C2s replaced with 4 forward-firing
sub-packs.

Without the NSL corvettes, well... depends on what they'd used the
points for instead :-/ More CLEs or CEs would've been very nice of
course, but they tend to take take less damage than the same points
worth of CTs to mission kill (ie, reduce their PDS battery and/or
knocking the ADFC out, as compared to destroying it completely in the
BJ case), so they'd've been about as vulnerable to the FSE tactics as
the CTs turned out to be.

> Could the NSL
> made better use of their small ships by immediately closing range?

The FSE could've swung their own small fry - the fighters in particular
- across to attack the NSL CTs had these charged ahead, and the
Stroschens (those that lived long enough, that is) got to fire at the
FSE heavies before the first FSE missiles were launched (as well as at
the FSE small fry the turn before).

All in all the NSL CTs might've inflicted some more damage on the FSE
heavies by charging ahead of the battleline than they did in the
present battle, but I don't think it'd've been decisive. Far more of
the CTs would've survived the battle though, which could've been
important in a campaign.

> Note I'm not saying your use of the jammers was not valid, 

Our use of the jammers clearly *wasn't* valid - it didn't work! <g> Or
did you mean my way of dealing with them?

> I'm just curious because nobody here would play NSL ships because of
> the slow speeds.

Same here. Indeed, we rarely use Fleet Book designs at all; I used the
NSL and FSE mainly because Alan had used those two forces in his
examples <shrug>

Later,

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

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