Re: Maritime Strike Bombers

Ryan Gill wrote:

> At 8:34 PM +1000 6/2/01, Derek Fulton wrote:
> >At 10:08  1/06/01 -0400, you wrote:
> >
> >If you want them to shoot at targets 'beyond their 6" range' at
> >targets without ant assistance it wouldn't hurt ;)
>
> Hmm, I'd always abstractified the Firecons based on it being a group
> of people that acted as fire controllers for multiple weapons. On a
> small ship (with fewer weapons) it'd be a console with a screen or 4,
> with a large ship, it'd likely be a small staff of people at consoles
> and an officer or MCPO. Must it be a Mass 1 object for a tiny craft
> to operate as a bomber?

You have described the combat information center.  The fire con is the
very precise tracking sensor that allows you to know where the target is
likely to be in the time it will take for your weapons to intercept it.
The problem with extremely precise sensors is that their field of view
is
non-existant (from a searching perspective), so you need one for each
target that you are tracking.

[Extrapolating PSB from how the game is played]
The reason that fighters operate as closely to their carriers as they do
is because the fighter is physically too small to mount the sensors
needed for a deep space intercept, and need target update information
from an external source that arrives soon enough to be useful, to engage
the enemy at all.