Re: FB designs & fighters (& strawmen)

 From Eric Foley:

> ...Let me throw this at you for size... this is just a quick
> screw-around thought pulled straight out of my rectal orifice, so it
may
> have a mild flaw. ...

  Call it 'X'

> Mass 250
> Average hull, thrust 2, FTL
> 4 Firecons
> 4 SMLs, 3 salvoes each
> 4 SMRs
> 3 Class-3 beams, 3 arcs (spread to front/right/left)
> 10 Class-2 beams, 6 arcs
> 21 PDS

> Assume cinematic rules, fixed table.

> This ship says that every design in FB1 is space dust.

Ehhhhhh, no. Truly balanced duels, as opposed to the cakewalks you 
describe, would be more interesting to see.

If you scale points to remove the Large vs. Small ship imbalance, X is 
on the order of 1254 NPV. I'm pretty sure you disagree with this scaling

from the start, but it's another recognized inherent flaw in the FB1 
system, and the TMF adjustment is one way of adjusting things so equal 
points of small ships have a more even chance vs. large ships. See 
http://homepage.mac.com/nizenberg/Homebrew.htm for some results of this 
particular discussion and a table of adjusted-cost FB1 ships.

I disagree with the artificial restriction of a fixed table, without 
specific rationale - which presupposes the 'hard edge(s)' is(are) 
factored into the balance equation, which is not the case in a straight 
ship duel in space.

Valley Forge is 642 NPV (812 with TMF adjustment and standard fighters).

Balance with X by adding a Victoria (430 adjusted) or 2x Furious (392) 
to the NAC side. Looks much more balanced to me, and I'd consider the 
battle even with the fixed table. I wouldn't turn down this game on a 
floating table.

Von Tegetthoff is 867 NPV (adjusted, + std fighters). Even things out 
with a Richtofen (355), or a pair of Kronprinz's. This would be trickier

with the slow SDN, but I'd consider it if I could put an ADFC on the 
Richtofen and the SDN.

Foch: Adjusted NPV 1204 with three standard fighter groups. It would be 
interesting with ER Salvo missiles and Heavy fighters, but X still has 
the edge - specialist vs. generalist.

Komarov:  Adjusted NPV 1010 with 1 standard group. Add a Bejing/B (177) 
and a handful of Ibizas for flanking or late game, or a Voroshilev 
(245)  for balance. This _is_ cute. The Komarov plinks from 48" until X 
comes away from the edge, then the Beijing or Voroshilev parks in the 
rear arc at 30-36" and plinks again.   Long game.

For other combinations:
- Groups with thrust 4 ships: I'd not come near your engagement envelope

until you moved away from the fixed table edge.  Unless you want to sit 
and stare at me for a few hours, remove the artificial restriction. Then

its only a matter of time before the thrust 4 ship(s) get in X's rear 
arc and carve by pieces.
- A group with primarily Class 2 beams and banzai jammers (which on this

scale could be a handful of scouts to a couple ADFC frigates) might be 
able to charge even against X's Missile alpha strike to reach a range 
where direct fire weapons are reasonably balanced. Hm. 7 Radestky's 
would be pretty cute (21 PDS, 28 Class 2's). 9 Kronprinz's too (27 PDS, 
27 Class 2).
-6xFurious or similar  would be interesting as well - at 30", 3 class 3 
beams and 8 missile salvoes vs. 18 PDS, 6 class 3's and 6 Ptorps.

> Now, maybe some of the ships with more focused ship-to-ship armaments 
> could
> give this thing a bit more trouble, but not likely.  Everything that
> qualifies is considerably smaller than the SDNs, and just goes pop
that 
> much
> easier to the beam armaments, to say nothing of what happens if this 
> thing
> connects with a missile shot somewhere against a FB1 BB.

This is just a further illustration of the Mass/Cost imbalance. There's 
no movement I know of to replace FB1 costs with the scaled costs, partly

because FB1 vs. FB1 (and FB2) battles with a mix of ship classes (or 
even custom ships with a like mix of classes) tend to even out 
baloance-wise (though the tactics become more predictable). However, if 
you want to do one-off battles, especially with a few big ships against 
a bunch of small ones, the scaling becomes pretty critical to a balanced

game.

> As a few alternate ideas, if you don't like or know how to handle SMs 
> very
> well you could yank them off, and put 6 more PDS together with, say...
a
> pair of 2-arc class-4s and 5 pulse torpedoes.

A group of ships with Class 3's on the side arcs (e.g. 4 arc-modified 
Markgrafs ) could even make an attempt vs. this version ofship X sitting

and spinning in place. It would be a long, tough dance, but Ship X is 
slow and weak in the rear.

> In fact, this variant might well be better than the original for some 
> players
> because you wouldn't need to be able to predict where the thrust-4 
> enemies
> are going to go, and it would probably also pick off the thrust-6 and 
> higher
> escorts and cruisers far more efficiently.

Only if you can con them into taking you on from the front. Any group 
that can outmaneuver you but chooses to go down your throat deserves 
what it gets. The only real excuse for sitting near a non-floating edge 
is guarding of a fixed point, which means you're no longer in a strict 
ship-vs-ship scenario, and balance must be altered accordingly.

> So in the end... no, sorry, I don't accept that argument that I can't 
> design
> a ship that will chew everything in FB1 up, and badly, without needing

> to
> mess with fighters.

GIve me enough mass and I can do the same thing. Even without Mass/Cost 
scaling do you think it is balanced to compare ships 1:1 that differ by 
as much as 60 Mass?  (your 6xValley Forge vs 5x Ship X example even 
without scaling still leaves the NAC force short by one Majestic. With 
scaling, its short by 1 Valley Forge + 1 Excalibur and change). Compare 
apples with apples.

> "Our" standard of comparison?  I'm sorry, I stopped using the FB1
ships 
> as
> any sort of standard other than how _not_ to design warships quite
some 
> time
> ago.

Translation: The FT ship design system taken to the min-max is broken 
(exemplified by Mass/Cost imbalance, fighter swarms, missile swarms (to 
a much lesser extent, missile swarms), and possibly some mixes of FB2 
and FB tech) and taking advantage of the broken parts can cream designs 
with genre restrictions (FB1 'genre' can be described as a mix of 
classes from 6-280 Mass, Human Tech, with a roughly pyramidal 
distribution of ships by mass (heaviest=fewest in number) without 
hyperspeciallization in any one class or weapon system, justified by the

Tuffleyverse's PSB and PFHB (Pseudo-Future-Historical-B...) ). You have 
decided to forego the FB Genre and prefer custom designs that exploit 
the broken parts of the rules.

>  Yes, fighters kill them.  So does the thing I describe above.  So do
a
> _lot_ of other things I can dream up that don't involve fighters.

But I'll wager dollars to doughnuts all _do_ involve  the most broken 
parts of the design system. (Or things outside the FB1 design system 
altogether, such as cloaks)

> That's because the FB1 ships SUCK.

It seems that "Does not exploit broken rules" = "Sucks" in your lexicon.
Tell us what you _really_ think. :-\

While this is rather overstated all it's really just a twisted 
restatement of the translation above.  A truly balanced overall design 
system would be harder to break in the ways you have shown. That's not 
to say impossible. It is clear to me that any system that can be broken 
so badly either has to be revised, or have the weaknesses exposed and 
genres clearly defined. I prefer the former for FT, since it will give 
more people higher overall variety and playability. I'll shed no tears 
over the emasculation of fleets that exploit the flaws in the system.