Re: RE-[FT] Starfire bug designs

BIF Smith wrote:

>...if you are using WARPHAWK pods, you need to give these 
>enough range to clear a area to allow you room to deploy.

Called "SBMHAWKs" or just "pods" in the novel.

>The warphawk pods should be small, independently guided ships >armed
with SML`s*. I say this because it allows them to be 
>targeted by ship to ship weapons (which is given in the novels), 

Kinda-sorta. 

Just about all Starfire ship-to-ship weapons have *some* ability to hit
pods, but for most of them the range is very short (equivalent to 6mu
in FT) and the hit probability is very low. The only real exceptions
are missile launchers able to fire AFHAWKs or AFMc (that's the capital
version of the AFHAWK, with about three times the range of the standard
version...).

The pods are tricky in Full Thrust, though - particularly their
targetting: each pod is programmed to attack enemy ships of a specific
"ship type" (CL, BB, SD etc). Starfire ship types don't overlap in size
the way FT ships do, so the FT equivalent would be to specify a Mass
range instead. 

When the pods fire, they spread their salvoes as evenly as possible
over *all* ships of the specified size that are within range. In
Starfire this gives rise to a whole bunch of tricks you can use to
counter the pods, but all of these depend on the missiles being aimed
*directly* at their intended target. FT missiles OTOH are aimed at
*where you think the target is going to be* - and if your intended
target didn't go there but something else did, then the "something
else" eats the missiles instead.

The Bugs didn't use SBMHAWKs in IDG. Instead they used gunboats
(half-way in size between the smallest real starships and the tiny
fighters). One of the strange things with these was that they (unlike
fighters or pods) could be targetted as if they were "real" (but
hard-to-hit) starships (at the full weapon ranges, etc), but *also* as
(easy-to-hit) fighters.

Regards,

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."