Re: B5-3 Aft

Kevin Walker wrote:

> Understood.  It does make for a great assualt ship, taking out forces 
> guarding planets or installations.  They either run from it or it 
> chips away at them over a long battle and then take out or captures 
> the target (or opens the way for other ships of it's side to do so if 
> they later warp in).

How?  You come to raid my infrastructure and win once.	Once this 
victory is spread through the fleet, the next time you come to one of my

systems, I don't go out to meet you, but rather stay at the objective 
and wait for you to come to me.  Because you have to enter a certain 
range of the target (for your weapon) and I can detect your STL approach

into the system, I can position myself to force you to engage me before 
reaching the target, at which point my K-guns smash your fragile hull 
and your stern-chaser armament does squat for you.

> The main issue though was cost balancing between the different weapon 
> systems as well as an earlier discusion about drive types and 
> cinematic vs. vector movement, which unfortunately has little to do 
> with campaign or strategic issues.

No, it does.  The previous discussion has revealed that the cost 
balancing is only correct as written for Cinematic play on larger 
tables.  On average size tables, the costing over-rates the larger 
batteries, and vector appears to need some more tweaking to balance
right.

Holding up examples that work in very specific situations (like this 
ship) but not in general, common situations, and then extrapolating 
general conclusions from the results is not correct.  In critical 
analysis, this is called a "straw man argument".

> On Thursday, September 4, 2003, at 05:43 PM, Eric Foley wrote:
>
>> In the end, fast sniper vessels such as this only really work in a 
>> lark where you're assuming a great many things that don't make a lot 
>> of sense, or in special situations such as commerce raiding where 
>> you're not going to devote any large amount of resources to it, and 
>> where you're prepared to refit the vessels with more sound armaments 
>> once your enemy stops being stupid and develops a countermeasure. It 
>> wins one-off games where you don't think a little outside the box and

>> project a few military objectives that would otherwise rein in the 
>> impulse to devote precious resources to building such vessels.
>
Exactly.

J