Re: {Q} Efficient Designs

Laserlight said:
> Stilt said
> > This is simply too low.  What you're saying here is that if your
opponent
> > has 30 fighter groups, all you need is 60-72 PDS in order to defend
against
> > them.  This is simply too little; you'll do quite a bit of damage to
their
> > fighters but they'll do far more damage to your ships.

> Using Stilt's assumptions (all fighters are lumped together, no
> fighter morale) and assuming your opponent forgot to add heavy
> fighters to the mix, for 30 fighter groups (180 fighters) you'd need
> 225 PDS available to defend whatever ship(s) the fighters decide to
> swarm.  Hm.  Assume that your opponents fly from Arks Royal, that's
> five of them for 3450 points + 30 standard fighter groups at 18 points
> is 540, so that's 3990 points.

225 PDS would be a bit excessive.  If you had 180 fighters against
120-150
PDS, the rate of attrition for the fighters would be prohibitive to
their
effectiveness.

> Divided by 30 = 133 ash Shaulahs - 10% for non-FTL  = 120 SMR ...
> Just enter the map at high enough speed, recognize that some of your
> crews will be enjoying the houris later that afternoon, and launch.
> Perhaps you lose 30 boats on the way in to one round of fighters, then
> you launch 90 missile salvos of which let's allow the fighters to kill
> 30.  So your problem is, can you arrange to lay out 60 SMR so that
> each of the 5 Arks Royal eats 5 salvos?

Assuming that none of the carriers bring decoys, anti-missile plasma, or
cloaking devices.

> Or you could put some juicy target (say, an arsenal ship) in front and
> a destroyer 30mu behind.  When the fighters swarm the bait, the
> destroyer fires a Wave Gun.  Your ship takes 7 damage (assuming you
> haven't lost it to fighter strikes already) but the wave gun wipes up
> all the fighters in the area.

The fighters will probably watch their scanners a little closer to this
and
take the destroyer down first, or at the very least make sure they use
secondary movement to stay out of wave gun arc.

> Assuming you allow mixed species tech, you could also just drop 1
> point Plasma Bursts where you plan to end your movement.

Will only work if none of the fighters decide to shoot down the plasma
while
they're also shooting you.  Works better on missiles than it does on
fighters.

> So there's more than one way to skin a cat--but all of them are messy.

Agreed.  Fighters aren't the end-all of the game.  I'm rather (in)famous
for
my fighter swarms, but it's been quite some time since I last really
depended
on fighters for my main weapon.
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