Re: Fighters

A late reply - I'm still catching up with the mail...

Allan Goodall wrote in reply to Laserlight:

 >>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)
 >
 >I'm not sure what you mean by this.

What he means is "If any specific fighter group took less damage from
PDS
than they do now, small numbers of fighters would be more useful than
they
are now even if *large* numbers of fighters become less useful than they

currently are."

 >>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.
 >
 >It takes 8 PDS, using the proposed system of every PDS firing at every
 >fighter squadron, to -- on average -- take out 20 squadrons of
fighters. 
8 PDS
 >rolling an average of .8 at 20 squadrons = 128 fighters destroyed.

Er, no. You're thinking of the "on average 0.8 kills per PDS" as a 
constant, but it isn't - it is a function of two variables: the number
of 
PDSs shooting at the fighter group, and the number of fighters in the
group.

In order for the PDSs to score on average 0.8 kills apiece, *each* PDS
must 
fire at an *undamaged* fighter group. (Actually each PDS must fire at a 
fighter group consisting of an *infinite* number of fighters in order to

average out at 0.8 kills apiece, but in this particular case 6 fighters
is 
close enough to infinity to make the difference negligible - the real 
average of fighters killed when one single PDS fires at an intact
fighter 
group is 0.7963. )

If more than one PDS shoots at a single fighter group, they start 
"stealing" each other's kills - so 8 PDSs shooting at a single fighter 
group "only" kill on average 5.0 fighters, ie. on average 0.625 kills
per 
PDS. In fact, no matter how many PDSs you throw at the single group, 
they'll *never* reach an average kill number of 6.0 since there's always
a 
chance, however tiny, that they'll all miss.

Still, 5.0 fighters gone from each squadron is pretty close to wiping
the 
fighters out <g> That's the reason behind the suggestion that an "engage

all incoming"-style PDS shot be reduced in effect...

Regards,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."