Re: Retrograde gimmickry

Stilt said:
>Yeah... that's basically it.  What wartime operation is a
skirmisher going to
>be able to fulfill?  If you need to provide cover while you're
conducting
>troop landings or evacuations, skirmishers are useless.  If you
need to defend
>a planet under concentrated attack, the only reason they'd be
any use at all
>is if they had the luxury of a week between FTL and planetfall,
and they lose
>even that if the enemy has fast drives, cloaking devices, or
reflex fields.
>If it needs to press in on a layered defense net of patrols at
an enemy planet,
>it's going to be pretty useless.  Neither can it present a
particularly
>daunting defense grid of its own; surgical FTL placement or
cloaking devices
>will both defeat their purposes as such just by being there.

Mmm...you're a little pessimistic here.  Raiders don't present a
static defense or a full-bore frontal assault, true.  But it
doesn't take a week of chipping away to do a lot of damage--call
it "mobile defense."  (I'm not particularly taking into account
reflex or cloaks because they're genre weapons, not standard).

AAnd what do you do about commerce?  Either you convoy
everything and keep your fleet spread out to cover all your
planets--in which case the enemy main fleet will defeat you in
detail--or you concentrate your fleet and lose freighters to the
raider squadrons.