Re: FB designs & fighters (& strawmen)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Noam Izenberg" <noam.izenberg@jhuapl.edu>
To: <gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu>
Sent: Monday, May 06, 2002 12:39 PM
Subject: Re: FB designs & fighters (& strawmen)

Okay.  I had a nice long rambling post that cut into all of these points
in
detail, but I think that what I wrote at the end states what I'm trying
to
get at most succinctly, so I snipped the rest.

> From Eric Foley:

> > 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. :-\

What I _really_ think is that the FB1 ships have three simple, glaring
weaknesses.

(1)  They have no coherent plan for dealing with a concentrated fighter
assault.  That touches on other potential disasters if any of them take
a
serious missile or plasma hit as well, but the general idea is still
simple:
their point defense is toothless.

(2)  They devote too much of their total mass to things other than
weapons.
That is the failing that is most emphasized with the FSE BDN:  75% of
its
mass is taken up in drives, hull, and screens.	But it's only the worst
of
the lot -- the NAC SDN devotes 68% of its mass to it, the NSL SDN
devotes
67%, the FSE SDN devotes 65%, and the ESU SDN devotes 70%.  What I
really
think is that all of those percentages are too damned high -- I'm
proposing
that there's a point of diminishing returns from those systems where
you're
cutting too deep into your weapons load for what you get from the extra
resilience or speed, and that every capital ship in FB1 far exceeds that
threshold.

(3)  The capital ships try to do too many things without bringing enough
of
any sort of weapon to do it well, and everything that _does_ have an
intelligent weapons fit is too small to be able to do much with it very
long.

(1) and (2) are the most important errors, but (3) just compounds the
problem.

The design I gave earlier does not make these mistakes, which is why one
has
to search, and hard, to find a FB1 grouping that would stand much of a
prayer against it (if not, in fact, resorting to legal fictions that
propose
to excuse bringing over half again as much NPV of hardware ;).	The
exact
design I gave may or may not be the best weapons fit that I could've
chosen -- as I said, I was basically dreaming it up on the fly.  But
ultimately, "Ship X" is a formidable enemy because it weighs in at 250
TMV
and has over 100 TMV of that put into weaponry.  Mix and match whatever
weapons fit you like to optimize it further; the SMs probably aren't the
best choice.  (As I said, I sort of threw that together on the fly.) 
But
it, or something _like_ it, is going to be _far_ superior to the FB
designs,
and the reasons above are why.	The exact weapons fit doesn't even
really
matter.

So which is it?  Is every weapon in the game that serves those three
principles really broken, or do the FB1 ships suck?

E