Re: MT missiles and point costs

Roger Books wrote:

>><g> This time you got it right. But what caused your initial comment
>>about my having to "assume a distribution of ships with varying
levels
>>of shields"? ;-)
> 
>Not liking to make assumptions. The assumption that you have an
>average shielding level doesn't make sense to me.

You confuse me here. I haven't made any such assumption that I'm aware
of...

In order to try to explain what I was asking Adrian about, I gave him
an example explicitly based on one specific ship design from FB1,
stating that it was undamaged when the missile struck. I deliberately
did not tell *which* one FB1 design it was, but that doesn't change the
fact that it was one *specific* design.

In the example, I calculated the average effects of an EMP hit and a
nuclear hit *on*this*particular*design*. Both of these are
straight-forward; you just did the EMP calculation for that ship -
well, for any ship with level-1 screens - yourself. The nuke effect
calculation is more of the same, but nothing difficult.

I then asked Adrian (and the rest of you) roughly how big he (and you)
thought *that*particular*design* was. 

What I very carefully did *not* say was whether or not this ship was
"average" in any way. The SD-sized missile barge I posted today
certainly isn't "average", but it wasn't the ship used in the
example... it was just designed to suffer the same system loss %s as
the FB1 ship I used in the example.

Where in all this did I give an impression of assuming "an average
level of screens"? Why would I want to calculate the "average" of one
single sample anyway...?

>You might get me to agree with an average shield level versus NAC I
>could probably get along with.  

I can give you a pretty good estimate of the average screen level of a
Tuffleyverse NSL fleet as well <shrug>

>Sometimes when you abstract statistics out to far they cease to have
>any real meaning.

This is exactly why I compiled, and add keep adding to, my FB design
database - currently 617 FB1 and 35 FB2 designs (no SV at the moment),
by some 40-50 different players - ie, all the legal FBx designs I've
come across during the past year and a half.

Calculating the average effect of whatever weapon I'm studying on each
of these designs (isn't Excel wonderful at times?) gives a reasonably
good indication of how powerful that weapon is against a multitude of
different design styles such as "heavy screens, strong hulls", "weak
hulls with lots of armour" etc, and against the entire spectrum of ship
sizes from TMF 3 to TMF ~300 (and then there's one ship with TMF 800
and one with TMF 1300 as well <g>). It doesn't become very abstract
unless I clump all of these together in one average...

FWIW, the "screen level vs TMF" plot hasn't changed noticeably over the
past 300 or so new entries - there are more dots now, but they all go
into the same places so the overall distribution stays the same <shrug>

>>>(I like my opponents to be thrust 3 or less. :)
>> 
>>As long as they use human-style drives and you play Cinematic I
>>agree :-/
> 
>Thrust 3 in vector versus SMs isn't much of a win either.

It isn't nearly as bad as thrust 3 vs SMs in Cinematic... in Vector,
you can at least spin to bring your weapons to bear; in Cinematic the
SM-using fleet will undoubtedly sit in the (A) arc of as many of your
ships as possible unless you happened to move very slowly when you were
hit so you're able to slow down to a standstill :-/

Fortunately, my own ships tend to have thrust-4 even when they've taken
some engine damage... and if you somehow manage to hit them with enough
Needles to ensure that you take their engines out completely, they
usually explode anyway :-)

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