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

Imre Szabo wrote:

> >What the small ships need to be effective in equal-points battles is
a
> >points system which takes the big-ship advantages into account -
unlike the
> >current one :-/
>
>I know.  Has anyone done any work to developing such a formula?

Certainly. The problem isn't so much to determine the ship's real combat

power with good accuracy as to create a formula which approximates this 
real combat power reasonably well while still being simple enough to use

without a computer program. The ideal is a formula which can be used
with 
only pen and paper, of course.

The formula Laserlight gave a link to gives reasonable results up to
around 
TMF 250-300; larger than that that the ships get more and more
overpriced. 
I'd prefer that to the current situation where ships get more and more 
*under*priced as the TMF increases, though :-/

>With an initial simplifying assumption that mass is proportional to
hull
>integrity (total number of boxes, not percentage), this implies that
the
>larger the ship, the more the error in the points. We could then divide
the
>mass by a constant to a get percentage of error.  Larger ships appear
to be
>much more effective then smaller ships implies the function we are
after
>could be exponential.	However, even the largest ship is probably not
worth
>twice its point value in frigates, so the constant should be greater
then
>280.

The largest FT design I've seen to date was somewhere around TMF 8000
(or 
was it 80000? Don't remember. BIF?). It was definitely worth far more
than 
twice its own points value in (TMF 16-24ish) frigates :-/

If you're talking about "largest" as in "largest of the designs
published 
in the Fleet Books", then I agree

>This all results in the following formula:
>
>corrected point value	= points * [1 + (mass/300)^(3/5)]

Should work reasonably well, though you need to make some special 
allowances for carriers (who don't get the large-ship advantages in as 
large degree as non-carrier warships)... and I'd prefer not to calculate

that "to the power of three-fifths" with pen and paper :-/

Later,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
-Hen3ry