Re: Retrograde skirmishers

> In reply to stiltman@teleport.com:
 
> A few days ago, you claimed that your (or your opponent's) fleets
> regularly brought 100+ PDSs to the battles so your massed fighter
> swarms weren't abusive in spite of the lack of fighter morale etc.,
> since 100+ PDSs was enough to deal with it. (BTW, if you don't keep
> track of individual squadrons, how do you keep track of fighter
> endurance - which is the second major limiting factor for fighters?)

The average is probably about 60-80.  I think I've been pretty clear
about
that.  Heck, I've twice given you an exact count of ships and numbers of
scatterguns for a battleship-oriented force (90 scatterguns on five
ships
in my K'V based custom force, 60 PDS on three screen-2 cloak-capable
battleships with ADFC in one of my more common groups).  I think the
record
for PDS numbers in our games was when I flew two dreadstars, one of
which
had 84 PDS and the other had 30-something, neither of which was equipped
with ADFC because each ship was designed to fend for itself.

Keeping track of fighter endurance isn't terribly hard for me because
there
are few situations where I will have any number of fighters less than
the
sum total that I'm flying actually fire at once.  If there's a situation
where fewer have to fire because some are out of position (some of them
screening flankers or ships under missile attack, for instance) I
usually
will not have the extras fire the extra shot that they spared at all
because
I don't want to expose them to PDS fire in any smaller numbers than I
have to.

> Some days before that, you claimed that they didn't bring enough PDS
to
> have a chance against your massed fighters.

No... they bring enough to have a chance.  It's a matter of whether I
can
cripple their area defense networks by other means before I commit the
fighters to a serious attack, whether or not I take the expense to bring
heavy fighters, whether I risk it on torpedoes or attack fighters (which
I haven't done since about one or two battles after FB1 came out), and a
few other things like just plain old-fashioned luck.

> Now you write:
 
> >And no, overstocking your PDS is a _suicidal_ countermeasure.
 
> so you're back to your initial position.
 
> You can't have it both ways. Make up your mind.

Take a hard look at what I'm talking about as compared to what Noam was
talking about that drew that comment from me.

I'm talking about ships that might dedicate about 10-20% of their total
weapons mass to point defense being played in my games.  Maybe as high
as
25% if they're really stocking up.  Noam, on the other hand, has
suggested
everything from his BDN that had a single class 6 beam and 42 PDS/2 ADFC
(read:	48 mass on an offensive weapon and 46 mass on point defence) to
a destroyer with a single needle beam as its only offensive weapon and
5 PDS/ADFC (2 mass on offense, 7 on point defense).

I don't need to make up my mind, you need to pay attention to what I'm
calling "overstocking" as opposed to "reasonable".  60-80 PDS is
"reasonable"
and, if you don't get your ADFC's needled can give you a serious shot at
winning a game with a real carrier force.  240-340 is WAY into the realm
of
"overstocking".
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 The Stilt Man		      stiltman@teleport.com
   http://www.teleport.com/~stiltman/stiltman.html
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