RE: Re: Fighters

On Tue, 7 May 2002, Ryan M Gill wrote:

> At 2:48 PM -0400 5/7/02, laserlight@quixnet.net wrote:
> >
> >a) you can reduce the efficacy of PDS vs any single fighter (which 
> >will help make small quantities of fighters *more* useful, which 
> >they presently aren't)
> >b) Assuming you fiddle with ADFC some, *every* ship will need to 
> >have masses of PDS to be invulnerable.  If you put 20 mass of PDS on 
> >a DD or CL, you're not going to have room for much else.
> 
> When did this become a thing of making a ship invulnerable to a 
> weapon system? "Gosh, can I have level 10 screens so my ship ignores 
> beams all together?"

I'm not quite sure what Laserlight is getting at (I've lost track of the
threads here!) but I don't think invulnerablity is the design goal we're
gunning for.

If you want invulnerability vs fighters, just ban the silly things from
your tabletop!

> Its about balance. When the exception jumps on the end of the 
> spectrum and screws the balance, you're going to move the balance of 
> the rule and not the exception?

I don't think so - most of the fixes proposed & debated have been one or
two rules at most - either some part of fighters (cost or attack
strength)
or PDS variations. I favour revamping fighters, because PDS pretty much
works in other situations already. Fighters are always broken...

> What it really sounds like is that the Ship construction rules for 
> Carriers needs to be revised.
> 
> No instant launches of all fighters. Carriers must have at least 
> average hulls for the cats to function with a corresponding decrease 
> of strength given a higher Delta V from the engines. Break out 
> separate launching and recovery facilities for carriers from the 1.5 
> mass of the fighter bay and points cost.

But these also render obsolete the whole of FB1 (and chunks of FB2) and
all the fighter-using designs based on those rules.

Tweaking the fighter and/or PDS rules - without changing mass or
adding/subtracting systems - seems better. (Don't forget that the FB
carriers DON'T have fighter costs written in - so you could, say, double
fighter costs to balance them without wrecking the existing SSDs)

Brian - yh728@victoria.tc.ca -
- http://wind.prohosting.com/~warbard/games.html -