Re: Fighters and Hangers

--- Oerjan Ohlson <oerjan.ohlson@telia.com> wrote:
> 
> The answer to which is unfortunately "yes". Not as long as all the
> bays involved are 9 Mass, certainly - but not all small craft bays
> are 9 Mass, and you *don't* want your local powergamers to start 
> thinking of those differently-sized bays in relation to fighter 
> group sizes

You mean someone might, *gasp*, deploy groups of 4 or 8 fighters? 
Those barbarians!  How dare they!  :)

> since changing the number of fighters in a full-strength 
> group affects just about every aspect of the fighter game balance 
> (such as it is :-/ ).

So isn't a fighter group that has lost 2 fighters to combat just as
"unbalanced" as one that started with 4 fighters?  If the problem is
that having 12 fighters in three groups of 4 gives an advantage over 12
fighters in 2 groups of 6, a few simple rules tweaks can go a long way
to remedy much of the problem.

If you wanted to prevent this, then the size of the bay should have
been given in FB1 & 2 as a fixed size, rather than as 1.5 MASS per
fighter, and the cost of fighters should have been in terms of points
per group, rather than points per fighter.

Additionally, you are saying that setting specific variants, such as
Minbari (who love 3's) deploying groups of 3 or 9 would really screw up
the game that much?  (although I will admit that 24 Minbari fighters
organized as 8x 3 is a lot scarier than the same 24 as 4x 6, In this
case it is *supposed* to be ;) )

> 
> The end result is that you either come up with PSB explaining why
> fighters can't use small craft bays, or you try to invent PSB 
> explaining why full-strength fighter groups have to consist of 
> exactly 6 fighters (6 "effective" fighters that is, if you scale 
> them down as suggested in previous posts)... and I strongly suspect 
> that you'll find the former alternative to be *much* easier than the 
> latter.
>

Or you make the fighter rules as flexible as a set of generic rules
should be.

> 
> > >If you want large ships vs small fighters, the two easiest options
> > >are to play with actual large ship designs and to say that each
> > >fighter group actually represents more than 6 fighters even though
> > >the group as a whole has 6 "hit points".
> >
> >That only works up to a certain point, and that point is very low on
> >the scale.
> 
> Seems to have worked pretty well for Dean Gundberg's "CrossOver"
> scenarios 
> <shrug>

As Dean is the only person on this list whom I have actually met, and
he seemed like a nice guy, I don't want to bash what he has done.  The
crossover designs that I have seen on his website over the years look
like the they would make for entertaining games, and I like what he has
done in adapting the SW Ion Cannons, but . . .

Any crossover gets in to the areas of "Enterprise can beat up ISD" or
visa-versa, which becomes a matter of personal opinion / perspective /
taste.

And

The designs that he has are (IMO) to give flavor to a game, rather than
to try to give a relative representation of the various designs, which
you would want to do if playing within a specific setting.  Even taking
just the designs of a single setting, they are not scaled to each other
within that setting.  E.g. the SD's and MCC's are undersized and the
corellian freighter is oversized when compared to the Nebulon (taking
an arbitrary reference from the available choices).

> 
> While your listing of mass and volume data for various Star Wars
> ships is impressive, it completely ignores what we see on the movie 
> screen - namely that even though Star Wars capital ships are 
> extremely huge compared to Star Wars fighters, and even though there
> aren't very many fighters around (*) individual fighters can inflict
> griveous damage on capital ships.  And no, I'm not just thinking of
> a certain psychic hot-shot :-/
>

I can think of only two on-screen instances of fighters damaging SW
capitals, both appear to be special cases:
1) needle-type attack destroys ISD shield generator, leaving ship open
to attack and
2) Kamikazi A-wing crashes into bridge of SSD Executor,causing it to
loose helm control and be drawn into Death Star gravity well

 
> (*) A Victory-class Star Destroyer is over half a mile in length yet
> only carries two 12-fighter TIE squadrons, and even the huge Executor
> (claimed to be some eight miles long by the sources I was able to
find > on a quick web search) carries a mere 12 squadrons. The Rebel
Mon 
> Calamari cruisers carry 5-6 12-fighter squadrons each.
> 

1) I specifically excluded the SSD in my original post as I feel it is
beyond the scale of the game.  Anything much larger than a 1600m ISD or
1800m battlestar is beyond playability.  You don't run games with
HIMPotL Dahak, do you?

2) LucasArts' games "X-Wing" and "TIE Fighter" say 8000m, not 8 miles,
same info from West End Games Imperial Sourcebook (SW:ISB).  Makes it
the same size as B5 ("Five miles long..."), as well as the EF Explorer
class.
2a) 12 squadrons is 144 TIES.
2b)SW:ISB also attributes to the SSD an additional 60+ shuttles,
assault transports and blastboats, as well as a ground corps of 72,000
troops, 6,600 heavy vehicles, 25 AT-ATs, 50 AT-STs, and 3
pre-fabricated ground bases.  At 4 CS per trooper and 50 CS per MASS,
that is 5760 MASS just for the troops, plus 2000 MASS for vehicles
exclusive of walkers, plus interface craft, etc., etc..

3) SW:ISB attributes to the ISD not just 72 TIEs, but an undisclosed
number of other small craft (shuttles, assault transports, etc), a
ground division of 16,000 troops and 1,500 vehicles, 20 AT-ATs, 30
AT-STs, and pre-fab bases.  It is unclear whether the ground division
includes a 40-strong ground support TIE wing or not.

3) WEG's SW:Rebel Alliance SB attributes 36 fighters (3x SW squadrons)
to the Mon Cal cruisers, 12 A-Wing, 12-B-Wing, and 12 X-Wing.  This is
the same as Dean has in the designs on his website. 

> In B5 fighters seem to pack less punch relative to the capitals than
> they do in Star Wars - in spite of the fact that the size ratio 
> between capital ships and fighters is generally smaller in B5. B5 
> fighters are usually only an annoyance in the larger battles, able
> to pick off surface systems but rarely doing more than that; and 
> most of the large ships destroyed in B5 battles seem to be destroyed 
> by other large ships (unlike Star Wars were the capitals seem to be 
> able to pound each others for ages without anything much happening 
> - unless of course the "capital" firing happens to be a Death Star!).
> 
> Honor Harrington battles are far worse for the smallest units, of
> course. A pinnace or assault shuttle is able to damage a defenceless 
> freighter, but its only chance to hurt a warship is to bring its 
> wedge up inside a boat bay or possibly to physically attach limpet 
> mines to the hull of the ship... and the pinnace is rather slower 
> than the warship too, so would need a fair amount of luck to catch
> the warship outside planetary orbit. As for modelling Shrikes as 
> escort-sized FT ships, well...  

I have said before that HH has two scales, one where BCs are the
largest playable ship, with ships of the wall off the top of the scale;
and a second for ships of the wall where escorts are insignificant. 
Remember the HMS Bellerophon (medium sized DN) annihilating four BC's,
in passing, in a single volley, without pausing? ("A Short Victorious
War")

There is a big jump in size between DWs BC's (<1,000,000 dwt) and Ships
of the Wall (6,000,000 - 8,500,000 dwt).  There is also a big jump
between BC's and CH's (300,000 - 600,000 dwt)

> the Minotaur carried 96 Shrikes, and the later LAC carrier classes - 
> particularly the Havenite ones - had larger strike groups. An 
> average heavy task force in the latest HH book includes 2-3 of these 
> carriers, occasionally more, so can be expected to have some 2-300 
> LACs. Are you really serious about modelling each of those LACs as 
> an individual TMF 20 ship, or even a TMF 4 one? Sure, modelling the 
> LACs as "fighters" would mean that DDs become very small too - but 
> since they're pretty much ignored in any HHverse battles 
> involving capital ships, that seems quite appropriate to me.
> 

The range and power ofthe Shrike's shipkiller missiles puts them out of
the range of FT fighters, IMO.	OTOH, the ship-launched impeller
missiles are also beyond the scope of FT SMLs.

> All in all, I'd say that if you model the game on what you actually
> see on the screen rather than on theoretical mass considerations, the
> "certain point" beyond which using large capital ships and 12- or 
> 18-fighter groups no longer works is *far* higher up on the scale 
> than you believe :-/

Since what one sees in SW shows that only special cases are effective
against capitals, then infinity:1 is indeed far higher up on the scale.


However, if you want the fighters to have *some* effect without totally
skewing the game, there needs to be a system for settings where
fighters are small and ships are big, or really big, other than "Play
with big ship designs or scale 48 fighters into a FT fighter group".

J