Re: FT: battles report

first up, Beth is far more of an SM expert than i, so don't take my
opinions too seriously, eh.

On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Beth Fulton wrote:

> >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.
> 
> 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).

this is true for the standard conditions of battle most people are used
to; however, Glen isn't fighting a standard battle, he's up against two
monster dreadnoughts and a bunch of DDGs. in this case, the primary
objective is to destroy the dreadnoughts, in which case a massive single
strike is probably the best option. thus, go for SMRs.

> 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. 

i'd agree with that; the ft2.5 design system doesn't penalise you for
having lots of mdeium ships rather than one big one, apart from the cost
due to ADFC, which is pretty minor. having scads of tiny ships is not
such
a good idea, though, as they die a bit quickly: you may have the same
overall loss rate with big ships, but you get the losses in jumps at
threshold points, meaning that you get full firepower for some time.
otoh,
if Steve is short on firecons, maybe a profusion of targets is what he
needs.

> 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.

now, here we can exploit the low thrust of the dreadnoughts; this works
perfectly in vector and well in cinematic (unless Steve has taken a leaf
from Oerjan's book and is zipping about the table and lunatic speeds :)
).
basically, there is a very small region of space where a thrust-1 ship
can
end up, centred on the ship's unmodified move endpoint (ie where it
would
go if it applied no thrust); in vector, it's a 1-mu radius circle, in
cinematic it's a wedge 2 mu long and with a width dependent on the speed
of the ship (but still small). basically, if you target all your SMs on
the unmodified endpoint of a thrust-1 target, they will hit.

so, build two types of cruisers: missiles cruisers, with a load of SMRs
and little else, and gun cruisers, with beams, torps, whatever, plus
good
PDS/ADFC to hold off his DDGs. make 2/3 of your force CGs and one-third
CAs, and go for it. your first step is to get your CGs in range and
whack
his DNs, then pull them out of the way and send in the CAs to finish the
job. if you use SM-ER, you can keep your CGs out of range of his DDGs,
which would be useful.

peace,
tom