Re: Strike Boats...

Imre A. Szabo wrote:

>>You mean "would not have been able to go...", no? OK, they soaked up
>>some fire which would otherwise have hit the strikeboats, but given
>>how frail the strikeboats were I don't think that effect was very
>>significant. OTOH going in together with the Victorias would've
>>given the ESU a larger number of reasonably hard-to-kill targets to
shoot
>>at, making each of your BBs/ tenders last that much longer.
> 
>No, the problem was the fleet I was in came in two waves.  If it was
only
>one wave, we would have done slightly less damage to the ESU, but 
>recieved much less damage back.

I doubt that you'd've inflicted less damage by going in a single wave,
at least up 'til the time your actual battle ended. Fewer of your ships
would've been damaged while they were closing, so more of them would've
had a chance to fire effectively.

>Combat turn 1	  Range apporoximately 30" to the strike boats and
tender,
>about 38" to NAC BB's
> 
>Combat turn 2	Range approximately 7" to the strike boats and tenders,
> about 32" to the NAC BB's

Sounds as if the ESU didn't move at all (enabling them to spin in
place), or at least moving extremely slowly?

Strike boat speed = 20-23 mu/turn (depending on the ESU speed and
whether or not they turned). IMO this is low speed for strikeboats,
particularly when facing C4 batteries.

>Combat turn 3	Strike boats and tender are approximately 12" behind
>the ESU, NAC BB's are 20" in front of the ESU.

Both they and the ESU accellerated as hard as they could straight
towards each other?

>Combat turn 4	Stirke boats and tenders are approximately 24" behind 
>the ESU, NAC BB are about 13" in front of the ESU.

Bad place to be when you're facing Komarovs, yes :-/

On tender design:

>Problem is, the rules state that the Tender must have the same mass as
>the ship or ships they are carrying. 

Not in FB1 - the tug design rules there supercede the FT2 tug design
rule you're referring to. Read the tug design example on FB1 p.8, where
a Mass 60 tug is designed to tow 100 Mass of ships. I admit that this
change could have been more explicit, though.

In spite of this change, tugs + sublight strikeboats isn't
cost-effective compared to FTL-equipped strikeboats. Sublight
strikeboats are OK for system defence where you don't need the FTL
capability (and more importantly don't have to pay for it), but that's
it.

>>Ie, at least two turns of needle fire wasted. Could you have hit the
>>SDN which lost 2 FCs with needles a second time (seeing that that way
>>you'd've had a decent chance of mission-killing it), or was it the
one
>>you hit last?
> 
>No, it was a high speed pass.	They were out of arc, two turn latter
it was
>over...

Ah, true. I had forgotten about the other needle strikeboat squadron.
OK, only one turn of needle fire wasted :-)

>>Given that the NAC only managed to cripple a DD (and possibly
>>insignificant damage to some other units), I suspect it wouldn't've
>>mattered much if it had concentrated its fire anyway :-/
> 
>They concentrated Trops on two SDN's and Beams on a couple of lighter
>units.  Level two shields make beams rather ineffective.

As I said, it wouldn't have mattered much if the NAC had concentrated
its fire :-) Needled level-2 screens don't make beams ineffective,
though <g>

Regards,

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