Re: B vs K was Re: Classed Weapons

Oerjan Ohlson wrote:

>  Let's look at it in a bit more detail:
>
> If the *firepower* is doubled (eg. you go from 1 die to 2 dice), then 
> the combat value increases by the square root of 2. That's straight 
> out of Lanchester. 

Yep.

> However, the area covered only affects the probability that there will

> be *at least one* target for the weapon to shoot at. If there isn't 
> anything to shoot at, the target can't shoot and its effective 
> firepower is zero (at least for the moment).
>
> So, when you say that "doubling the area increases the combat value by

> sqrt(2)", you're  effectively saying that doubling the area doubles 
> the chance that there will be at least one target in its range and 
> arc. However, this is only true if the targets are randomly 
> distributed throughout the combat area and the ship doesn't 
> deliberately manoeuvre to get them into its sight.
>
> Since the targets usually aren't scattered at random (in FT they tend 
> to be flying in formations, for example) and the ship itself usually 
> doesn't manoeuvre at random either, doubling the area usually 
> increases the probability of having a target by more than a factor 2.

I had not considered that, thank you for pointing it out.

> There's another factor to keep in mind as well: the longer-ranged 
> weapon can usually fire one or more shots before the shorter-ranged 
> weapon gets into range - which means that by the time the 
> shorter-ranged weapon *does* get into range, it has already taken 
> damage. In Full Thrust, this means that a short-ranged fleet attacking

> a long-ranged one will usually have taken some thresholds and thus 
> lost some weapons (or even lost some ships entirely) before they get 
> to return fire. Of course this increases the combat value of the 
> longer-ranged weapons further still :-/

However, this is where the size of the game area comes into play.

J