Re: Fighters and Hangers

Ah, here it is at last! Only about 24 hours later than expected...

Jared Hilal 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!  :)

Bingo. And given the rather massive advantages they can gain from doing 
this while using the rest of the published Full Thrust fighter rules, I 
don't you'd find it particularly funny if you were on the recieving end
of it.

> >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?

No, it isn't. The main reasons for this have already been discussed in 
detail by others, so I won't go into it further.

>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.

Not without creating a bunch of "interesting" new problems, no. You need
a 
lot of far-ranging "tweaks" to get something which won't cause the 
munchkins out there to cry with delight.

>If you wanted to prevent this, then the size of the bay should have
>been given in FB1 & 2 as a fixed size,

The size of a fighter bay is given as 9 Mass in FB2, where it twice
says:

"...ships may carry hangar bays for fighter groups (or other embarked
small 
craft) in exactly the same way as human ships, using all the standard 
rules. Each Fighter Bay uses 9 MASS ..."

The text then goes on to quote an incorrect bay cost of 18 points
instead 
of the correct 27 pts (which has been corrected in the official FB2
errata) 
and to say that these bays can hold up to 6 MASS of fighters (which has 
been superceded by Jon's post of July 4th 2000, which I referred to
earlier 
in this thread), but the "in exactly the same way as human ships" and
"Each 
Fighter Bay uses 9 MASS" make it quite clear that human fighter bays are

also 9 MASS - and this has *not* been superceded anywhere.

The sizes of *small craft* bays OTOH are variable, and have been since
FB1 
was published. That is the game-mechanics reason (as opposed to the PSB 
reason) why fighters can't use small craft bays.

>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?

Yes. I'd say "screw the game up that much FURTHER" though, since the FT 
fighter rules are already badly screwed up.

> >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.

Bingo. Which exactly is why I want to replace the entire fucked-up FT 
fighter rules complex with something that works... but I can't get any
such 
new rules into [OFFICIAL] print until FT3 gets published.

> >>>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.

Of course they are. I strongly doubt that Dean used the same conversion 
scales for the various universes, for example.

>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).

Their *mass ratings* might be over- and undersized; I don't have good 
enough sources to check.

But are their relative *performances* over- or undervalued (relative to
the 
other ships from the same background, that is)? The only measuring stick
we 
have for that are the movies and the various computer games - and they
show 
pretty conclusively that the performance of the various ships does not 
scale linearly with their respective masses :-/

> >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:

Bingo. Both of which are easily represented in Full Thrust as failed 
threshold checks. Sure, we never see a fighter attack actually destroy
an 
SD - but we never actually see an SD destroy an MCC on-screen either, or

even a Nebulon-B. Should we take that to mean that SDs can only inflict 
insignificant damage on MCCs other than in special cases?

> >(*) 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.

And the *only* reason why you feel this is that you have decided on a
mass 
scale which is too low to fit it. Dean's Excecutor design is TMF ~1600,
ie. 
about the maximum you'd consider playable; to escort it he used TMF
300-ish 
ISDs and TMF 160-ish Victory-class SDs.

>Anything much larger than a 1600m ISD or 1800m battlestar is beyond 
>playability.  You don't run games with HIMPotL Dahak, do you?

No problem, though the Mass scale would be quite a bit higher than in
the 
Star Wars case; I'd represent the huge Achuultani battleships as TMF 4-6

strikeboats and Dahak's various sublight battleships as fighters.

>2) LucasArts' games "X-Wing" and "TIE Fighter" say 8000m, not 8 miles,

OK. As I said, I didn't have time for more than a quick web search
<shrug>

>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.

Both of which are HUGE compared to the normal warships in the show, 
including even the largest Minbari war cruisers.

>2a) 12 squadrons is 144 TIES.

Correct. That's what the web sources I found gave the Executor, and for 
some reason it also matches the number of fighter bays on Dean's
Executor 
design.

>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.

Since we never see the shuttles and transports actually shooting at 
anything in space on-screen and the ground troops for obvious reasons
are 
unable to do so, none of these are relevant for Full Thrust purposes.

>At 4 CS per trooper and 50 CS per MASS,

...you're applying an inappropriate Mass scale from a completely
different 
background universe for the specific purpose of making the example look 
ridiculous so you can ignore them.

If the mass scale changes, the number of CS per mass changes with it - 
unless of course you believe that each individual trooper becomes a
hundred 
times larger when you change the mass scale from 1 Mass = 100 tons to 1 
Mass = 10,000 tons :-/

>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.

Yes, my goof. Even the hazy web sources I found agree with your numbers
:-)

> >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.

Yep. And if there are more than one or two Shrikes involved their 
DN/SDN-sized carrier isn't far away either, which puts you firmly in the

ship-of-the-wall scale. If escorts are insignificant, then Shrikes
(which 
are even smaller than escorts) pretty much have to be treated as
fighters.

>The range and power ofthe Shrike's shipkiller missiles puts them out of
>the range of FT fighters, IMO.

The range, agreed - but see below. The power, no - FT's torpedo fighter 
rules seems to fit quite well both with the hitting power and the
limited 
ammo available, though of course the Shrikes should still have their
spinal 
graser.

>OTOH, the ship-launched impeller
>missiles are also beyond the scope of FT SMLs.

Yep. Outside the scope of any normal-sized gaming table too, unless you 
want energy weapons to have ranges of about 1mu :-/

>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 rea lly big, other than "Play with big 
>ship designs or scale 48 fighters into a FT fighter group".

Completely wrong. There is no need whatsoever for a special system for 
settings where fighters are small and ships are big separate from the 
"normal" system for settings where the mass ratio is smaller.

There is however a desperate need for a system where the fighter rules
are 
balanced - and such a system can handle any fighter:capital mass ratios
you 
can think of; all you need to do in such a system is to change the
number 
of fighters represented by each fighter group. Full Thrust's current 
fighter rules aren't balanced; they don't work well for *any* 
fighter:capital mass ratios.

Regards,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

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