RE: Re: FB designs & fighters (& strawmen)

I condensed what Eric Foley wrote about FB1 ships:
>1)  their point defense is toothless.
>2)  They devote too much of their total mass to things other than
weapons.

Defenses (including point defenses, thrust, screens etc) are "things
other than weapons", you know.	And points put into other areas can be
useful--eg one of my Alacrity battlecruisers (thrust 8, a couple of B4)
would saunter into your rear arc and chip apart your SDN while not
taking a scratch in return.  It would take a long time and be a truly
boring game, but the SDN would be just as dead at the end. 
(Or I could bring a 250 mass soap bubble (25 hull, MD2, FTL, 20PDS, 1
ADFC, no FCS or weapons, 17 squadrons, about 1230 points.  That would be
over pretty quickly--ie on the first turn of combat).

I do agree that FB ships could have been designed better--eg a ptorp
wants to be in your face, while a B3 prefers to hang back at 30" and
snipe, so why put them both on the same ship?

But the point is that the value of direct fire weapons is linear--that
Ptorp is worth about the same whether it's the first or the tenth.  The
value of fighters (and missiles) is non-linear.

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