Re: FB2... hmmmm...

G'day,

 >Yes.	Salvo missiles, when piled up, can also be horrifically 
ugly.  However...

You've pretty much pointed out all the downsides to SMs here, but it 
probably took you a while to figure them all out right? I'd guess
there's 
going to be the same kind of learning curve with plasma bolts.

 >[near-digression warning]....

At this point Beth start's to think maybe she's out of her experience
pool 
ship-wise... how big are these ships...mmmm?

 > Yes, but the nightmare lies in something like this:
 >
 >I'm envisioning a giant "Death Star" like varmint...1200 mass

Yep can safely say I've never flown and never played something that
large!
Its probably a credit to the FB design system and FT as a whole that you

can stretch it that far and it don't break! ;)
I'm not saying there's not a way to counter your argument Oerjan and
Alan 
have probably spotted it right away, unfortunately I'm not that fast and

I've actually got to get my head around flying/opposing such a giant in
the 
first place! As a first go.....

 >1. If you try to take it head-on with an area defense phalanx, it
won't be
 >terribly tricky to space out fighters and plasma to be able to attack
you
 >with both at the same time. Put the fighters a short distance behind
you,
 >the plasma a short distance ahead of you, make sure their radii
overlap 
enough
 >that I can hit all at once, and you have to take a choice between
letting 
the
 >fighters have a free shot every other turn or letting the plasma
annihilate
 >large portions of your force all at once.

OK I am particularly muddle headed this morning explain this one to
me.... 
are you saying that you hit the ships not covered by plasma bolts with 
fighters?? What if you just peppered your entire force with extra PDS so

there were no/few dedicated PDS ships, but as a whole they have a
whopping 
amount (maybe not 192 though)...this is assuming they don't also pick a 
supership (maybe 1200 mass and all PDS and class 1s) and do it back to
you ;)

 >With 15 needle beams, that can disable even a conventional
 >capital ship in a turn or two of fire.

You obviously don't roll as many 1s as I do ;)

 >With that much plasma, how hard is it to cover
 >pretty much the entire fighting field in overlapping saturation and
make it
 >prohibitively unlikely that anything's going to avoid getting hit?

If I was facing it I'd accept I was going to be hit and try and minimise

the impact, so PDS (to reduce number of hits) and then level 2 screens
or 
even shrouds would be something you saw on my ships - dropping off those
5s 
and 6s can make the damage a lot less painful. I know your opponent is 
going to know for sure you're bringing the killer to the table today,
but 
they may as well try and guess ;)

 >Back in FT2, it was a pretty easy cut-off:  if it was a "supership"

Must admit I've never played FT2, Derek has but he didn't convince me to

join in until FB came out (I'm more of a hysterical's player by nature).

 >In the fleet books, we haven't really arrived at a real cut-off yet
and, 
other
 >than the dreadstars mentioned above we haven't actually played with 
superships
 >much yet.  I would say for the sake of discussion that anything much
larger
 >than 300 mass would probably give a warning, anything below that,
probably
 >not.

So I haven't even played a supership yet, maybe I'll have to go and work

out a scenario with one just to see how it goes. We have played a couple
of 
games with starbases in, but they've been more along the lines of
defending 
the line than being vs a supership.

 >Heh.	We've actually had various running jokes that the most cruel
punishment
 >for any sort of misdeed committed with a task force is to be assigned
as an
 >interceptor pilot.  Some of our various "custom races" in our games
are known
 >to lobotomize some of their crewmen and wire them into the
interceptors so
 >that they'll have no more sentience than is needed to pilot their
craft (i.e.
 >they won't care about the futility of self-preservation), and others
just
 >plain consider it an ethical breach to use living pilots in their 
interceptors
 >in the first place, since the survival rate on the things is usually 
downwards
 >of 15% in our games.	:)

Sounds like a pretty good background idea actually.

 >The mess I see is that, the more spare hull you reserve for fighters,
the
 >slower your ships are going to be and the more expensive everything
else
 >will get to move the things.	So in the end, it might cost you more
for
 >the Sa'Vasku than it would for the others.

Can't seeing it cost that much, if any, more than human groups where
you've 
got to have the extra hull to put the fighter bays in in the first
place... 
that optical illusion again ;)

 >I'll keep ya posted. ;)

Cool.

Beth

------------------------------------------------------------------------
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----
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