Re: FB2... hmmmm...

G'day again,

 >No prob.  I might not have been around the on-line scene long enough
that 
I've
 >gotten my name in the special acknowledgments... *notes the honor 
afforded you
 >and gives a respectful bow*

I think Jon was telling me its about time I went and actually did all
that 
housework I'd been putting off ;)

 >...but I've been playing the game for quite a while.	:)

Don't doubt it!

 >The thing that worries me is if you've got a custom game, and you just
keep
 >a ship or two in reserve with plasma cannons to the tune of twenty or
thirty
 >dice, and then put enough fighters behind them that enemy fighters are
not
 >going to be a serious factor.

I know its not the same thing exactly, but I'm curious as to whether you

ever saw this happen with SMs?

 >And with the radius on the bolts you're not likely to miss a terrible
lot.
 >If you piled on enough plasma firepower overwhelming even a pretty
stiff
 >area defense phalanx wouldn't necessarily be that tough, and being an
 >escort in such a phalanx would become quite a liability.

True, though I have seen descent escort phalanxs blow away plasma bolt 
dumps completely, the area effect isn't an all one way bonus. Plasma
bolts 
can be a bit of a two edged sword, this is even more the case if you
miss 
judge your placement and end up in the middle of your own bolts. In the 
case you propose I'd probably actually run towards the enemy and put my 
self right in amongst them (and dogfight all fighters were possible),
they 
can bolt to their hearts content then.... OK may sound to kamikaze for 
most, but it puts the sweats on the plasma bolt player if he has to
choose 
between letting you mix it up with him beam-wise or risking his own 
ships/fighters in a plasma bolt drop. Others will probably think of
better 
options than this, I'm not know for my tactical subtlety ;)

 >This is, mind you, thought out from the standpoint of my 5000-point 
all-custom,
 >no-warning-on-enemy-composition-other-than-supership task force
battles.

When you say supership what are we actually talking, SDN (250 - 300
mass) 
or bigger?

 >If we opened the door to mixing alien tech in here, my worry is that
the 
plasma
 >bolts could pretty quickly make a mess of things.

It could, Oerjan and others put many hours in to costing the various 
weapons so as mixing shouldn't be a problem, but it wasn't actually ever

tested on the table, thus the cautionary note Jon included in FB2. At
face 
value I don't have a problem with trying mixed tech, if it really
doesn't 
work then you can hammer out some design caveats at that point. I'd suck
it 
and see first.

 >The main mess that I see is, if you can't establish fighter
superiority, it's
 >usually not worth it to bother with fighters at all....

True, in that sense you do treat Sa'Vasku like human fleets, you either 
bring 'carriers' or you don't to those kind of match ups.

 >Now, it _is_ true that Sa'Vasku could pile on the biomass and
conceivably
 >establish about as much fighter superiority as they want... except
that in
 >their case, it literally comes out of their hides, such that their
ships
 >become far more fragile when they do so....

Not necessarily anymore so than any human carrier, you've literally got
to 
build their fighters into their hides before hand. It may look 
disconcerting to see all those little boxes crossed off for fighters,
but 
just go and draw the equivalent number if extra hull boxes, to cover all

the fighters in the bays, on a human carrier and see what you lose
there... 
maybe it'll make you feel sorrier for all those fighter jocks you
dispatch ;)

 >but if the enemy just piles on the fighters enough and keeps enough
ship-to-
 >ship weapons in reserve, they essentially can damage their enemies
quite
 >well even if their fighters just do a kamikaze run in the inevitable
dogpile
 >if they're outnumbered and then pick off the crippled enemies once
they've
 >diluted their hulls so badly.

Isn't this true vs humans too (thinking of how weak my fighter platforms

can be)? I still think its partly a visual illusion, you're physically 
crossing off the boxes so the cost springs into your face, obviously its

only partly an illusion because if you then decide to send off more
groups 
then you pre-built in you are eating into your 'dedicated hull' (then it

really hurts). In the long run maybe the Sa'Vasku will turn out not to
be a 
fighter intensive race (we haven't had any large fighter brawls
involving 
them yet to be honest), they can ping from such long distance and are so

fast they can conceivably out run fighters for long enough to knock
their 
endurance way down (we use fighter morale rules) so maybe they don't
need 
to get lots of fighters out to counter Chinese walls and such (just a 
thought haven't really tried that one much yet).

 >Will have to see how it goes.  I haven't had a real chance to playtest
this
 >as much

Well I hope you have fun and I'm keen to hear how it goes.

Cheers

Beth

------------------------------------------------------------------------
---- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Elizabeth Fulton
c/o CSIRO Division of Marine Research
GPO Box 1538
HOBART
TASMANIA 7001
AUSTRALIA
Phone (03) 6232 5018 International +61 3 6232 5018
Fax 03 6232 5053 International +61 3 6232 5053

email: beth.fulton@marine.csiro.au