EW, Sensors, Stealth and Ships that go *BLIP* in the night

I agree with Mikko Kurki-Suonio and a few others that additional die
rolling
as in a EW duel will slow the game down. This is probably why Jon did
not
have a roll to detect and a roll to hit in the first place, it was
simplified into the roll to hit.
The question should not be what info can I get from or can I detect that
ship (if it's on the table it's detected) but how well can I hit the
target.
The easiest way I can see of doing this and using a system that is
already
on every ship,is the Fire Control. For every additional FC that you
commit
to a target, you roll an extra die per battery and choose the best dice
equal to the number of batterys/classes firing. For example if you have
3
Class-1 firing at 10mu and you commit 2 FC you then roll 6 dice and
choose
the best 3. If you added a Class-3 battery you would roll an extra 4
dice (3
dice as normal plus 1 for the battery) and you would use the best 6
dice.
You don't increase the number of hits just the possibility. You can
rationalise this by saying that by commiting extra FC you increase the
detection elements and processing power to give a better target
solution. It
should work for all weapons systems that use FC and for the xenos as
well
with a slight adjustment but I won't go into that until FB2 is more
common.
There is also the problem, that if you give a ship a EW suite dedicated
to
spoofing or decoying an enemy ship shooting at it, you invalidate and
render
obsolete all those FB1 and 2 designs that don't have it. Although there
would be nothing wrong with having a dedicated EW ship whose primary
function was the disruption of enemy targetting locks. You build a ship
as
normal but instead of beam batterys you have systems designed to
temporarily
blind/overload an enemy ships FC. These systems would have the same
mass,
cost, range and roll to hit as the batterys they replaced but they only
affect the targets FC, that is substitute the DPs for FCs blinded and no
re-rolls. If these ships appear to be overpriced for their capabilities
that
could be why none of the major powers built any.
Stealth Ships: Stealth systems for ships should be mass intensive and
expensive otherwise all ships could be retro-fitted with them. The
characteristic of stealth in the game would be to increase the apparent
range of the ship for each level of stealth. If you have 3 levels
'Basic',
'Enhanced' and 'Superior'. Basic would increase the range by 6mu,
Enhanced
by 12mu and Superior by 24mu.
I'll leave this for now but I have more ideas; ships running cold,
'weasel'
fighters, terrain effects etc.

Tony
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