Re: Retrograde skirmishers

> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> >>Curiously enough, it is pretty close to the percentages of their
weapon
> >>mass most FB1 ships use for PDS - the ships you said are very
> >>under-equipped in the point defence department. This is part of the
> >>reason why I find your earlier statements about your PDS levels
> >>contradictory.

> >10% was a guesstimate I made when I didn't have my notebook of
> >designs in front of me.  Pulling it open, I'm seeing from 20-25% in
> most >of the ship designs that are built with the assumption that they
> won't >have carrier support, as opposed to around 5-9% on the FB1
> ships.
 
> The average amount of PDSs+ADFCs (you counted the ADFCs into the "mass
> used for point defences" on Noam's design, so I do the same here) on
> the FB1 ships is 16.3% of the weapon mass if "weapon mass" means
> PDS+ADFC+FC+weapons, or 13.9% if it means "everything which isn't hull
> or engines".

You're probably looking at smaller ships than I am, then.  The two ships
I
took a quick look to arrive at that figure at were the NAC CVL and SDN
designs.  The CVL has a total of 47 mass of fire control, fighter bays,
and
other weapons; it has 4 PDS.  The SDN has somewhere close to 60 mass of
such systems and the same number of PDS.

Ships of that size in my games, as I said in my previous post, would
likely
have somewhere between 10 and 15 PDS and probably an ADFC if they didn't
expect to have pretty serious carrier support.	The capital ships of
just
about all of the FB1 powers have somewhere between the 4 PDS of these
guys
and 6 PDS on the larger-sized ones; none of them have ADFC.

Would you like to delete all the specific comparisons again in order to
claim
some more that I'm being hopelessly vague, or are you having fun
responding
to posts where I say one thing by characterizing me as saying another? 
This
is three times in as many days here...

> Right in the middle of your (now withdrawn) claim of
> 10-20% of the weapon mass used for point defences. The average Mass of
> PDSs+ADFCs in a random 5000-point FB1 fleet is 57.

This much is potentially true.	But let's cut a bit deeper... a
completely
random force might have 57 PDS, but they're likely to have about 20-30
ships
carrying that many, each of which is likely to have 1-3 PDS, most of
them are
likely to take a threshold roll (or two or three) from any two to four
fighter
groups attacking them at once, and overall they're likely to get utterly
shredded in very short order by concerted fighter attack.

If they're large enough to survive a small-scale fighter assault, the
ratio of
PDS goes down dramatically.... if you composed a force entirely of NAC
SDN's
for that cost you'd have a total of (roughly) seven ships, with fourteen
fighter groups and 28 total PDS.  In a typical game under our rules,
that
group would still last longer against a carrier force playing for keeps
than
a completely random one anyway, because they'd put up more of a barrier
between their ships and my fighters with their own fighters than the
random
fleet likely would with combined fighters and PDS.  The fighters, in
their
own way, can be considered an area defense network to slow mine down...
which
would buy the SDN's a turn or two while I'm annihilating their fighters
before
I'd have to divvy them up into large groups to take out about an SDN or
two
a turn.  Most likely (because of screens and how many fighters they'd
bring
down with their own) they'd probably even keep a ship or two long enough
to
engage my carrier force ship-to-ship, where they'd do relatively small
amounts
of damage (my carriers usually have enough guns on them to outmuscle
such
stragglers) before my fighters reloaded to finish the job.  The random
force
probably wouldn't get too many ships past the fighters at all, and what
ships
_did_ get through would probably be hopelessly outgunned by the carriers
themselves.

> If you play 5000-point battles (which you have said several times),
> 20-25% of your weapon mass (which you state above) should be some
> 120-140 Mass used for PDSs and ADFCs and not 60-80 as you previously
> claimed. It seems that you actually were about as unclear as I
> percieved you to be on this point.

Oerjan... what you're doing here is ignoring specific numbers that I've
repeatedly given for actual PDS counts, in order to pick on the
percentages
that I've repeatedly stated were mere estimates so that you can claim
that
I'm being unclear or vague.  What part of the specific numbers and
examples
that I'm giving here are you failing (willfully or otherwise) to
understand?

Read what I'm writing.	Make sure you understand it _before_ you answer.
 It
gets very frustrating when I'm repeatedly trying to clarify with
specific
numbers and examples and you keep either deleting them or picking on the
estimates while ignoring the specifics.
-- 
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 The Stilt Man		      stiltman@teleport.com
   http://www.teleport.com/~stiltman/stiltman.html
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