Re: (fwd) Re: [FT] F***ters [was: Operational game]

----- Original Message -----
From: "B Lin" <lin@rxkinetix.com>
To: <gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2003 2:51 PM
Subject: RE: (fwd) Re: [FT] F***ters [was: Operational game]

> The use of scatterguns implies that you have to be Kra'vak.  Fighters
are
employed by all races.
> The problem is that PDS and ADFC don't get good until you can
concentrate
a bunch (i.e. 12 or more) in one place.  Spending 12 mass per ship on
something that may or may not show up can cripple your fleet.  One
solution
are Aegis cruisers that mount 18 PDS and 2 ADFC, that can cover two
other
ships plus themselves.	The downside again is that you've devoted an
entire
cruiser to basically AF/AM defense.

I just don't get this one.  Soap bubble carriers are not a part of the
doctrine of any of the human star nations in the canon.  Clearly, if
somebody's breaking them out, then they're departing rather dramatically
from the fleet book canon into the realm of pure custom-build. 
Similarly, I
find it... ludicrous that a game would allow the construction rules to
be
lax enough that they'd allow soap bubbles and not scatterguns without
blinking an eye.

In my games, the gloves are off.  There's no such thing as "human",
"Kra'vak", or "Phalon"... we just take all of the custom design rules
and
glom them together.  Since Sa'Vasku doesn't fit the fold real well we
don't
use that, but everything else is fair game.  We haven't had games
dominated
by pure fighters with no other significant supporting doctrine in
literally
YEARS.

> As to your reference of a 10,000 point game, if building soap-bubble
carriers it would equate to 250+ squadrons of fighters.

By my calculations, unless there's some soap-bubble design I'm not aware
of
that can pack them more efficiently than the mass 23 "double-bubble",
you
can cram 165 normal fighters into a 10,000 point soapy fleet.  That
assumes
82 double-bubbles and one single to fill the last gap.	If you go for
singles-only you can only get 158.  Seems nightmarish, no?

For a 10,000 point battle fleet, the scatterguns to annihilate that
entire
swarm will constitute only about 10% of its total systems mass.  Leaving
the
other 90% perfectly open for the hulls and screens to withstand whatever
pipsqueaks manage to survive the scattergun blast from hell, the engines
to
run down the carriers that have neglected to build any of their own, and
the
weapons to reduce them to their component atoms once they're helpless
because they haven't brought any of their own besides fighters to answer
with.

Not nightmarish at all.  In fact, hideously unsound for naval doctrine.

E
(aka Stilt Man)