Re: FT: battles report

>G'day Glen,

and congratulations, stick with it.

>>Next combat I will use SMs.  Any suggestion for general
design?
>>Lots of small SM ships?  Several medium or 1 large ship?
>>Racks or magazines?  Each of his BBs have about 6 PDS and an
ADFC,
>>so if there are two BBs it will be a lot of PDS to penetrate.
And he has
>>about 4-6 C1s per BB.

Beth, who is noted for her use of salvo missiles, said:
>I prefer magazines in place of racks becuase it usually takes a
couple of
>waves (for me) to kill so use the space (thus racks = wasted
space). I
>usually hust go for having them on all my ships (and then
having
>small-large ships in the fleet) rather than on one mega-ship as
a lucky
>shot/concentrated fire can't remove them all in one go.
>
>The first few time you use them I'd also put your spread down
netlike (so
>if you guess wrong hopefully they won't all miss), once you've
got the hang
>of them you can put them in clumps for bigger effects.

I prefer SMRs because the beauty of SMs is firing them all off
at once.  To take an extreme example, if you fire off one salvo
at a time against his BB's, your chances of doing any damage are
essentially nil.  On the other hand, if you lob out 18 SMR's at
once, that's 56 missiles on average (assuming you place them all
correctly), his PDS will probably kill something like 10
missiles and his C1's will kill another missile or two.  Let's
be generous and say he knocks down 16 missiles, conveniently
letting me multiply  40 x 3.5 = 140 points of damage.  Big
difference, eh?

I picked 18SMR because my Islamic Federation missile cruisers
carry, in one version, 6 SMR's per 60 mass ship.  Not much in
the way of hull or armor, mind you, so you'll want to practice
maneuvering beforehand--you'll only get the one chance to shoot,
but if you work it right, that's all you'll need.  It is
particularly effective if he doesn't know you're packing
SMR's--and setting out a dozen or so unexpected missile markers
should cause him to pale.

If he's still using Thrust 1 or 2 ships, you should know where
he's going to end up next turn, close enough to let the
missiles' seeker heads take it from there.  Again, work out
beforehand what his possible ending points are at different
speeds--and work out a missile placement that will cover all of
them.