Re: Fighters....Re: Full Thrust vs Starmada

Replying to multiple posts at once here:

Grant A. Ladue wrote:

 >>Show me the number crunching that suggest they ameliorate the problem
 >>"greatly", or even at all. The only number crunching of this concept
I've
 >>seen very strongly suggested that limiting the number of fighters
attacking
 >>a particular ship in a single turn has virtually *no* effect if the
target
 >>ship is a FB-style (ie., limited-PDS) BB or smaller...
 >
 >Really?

Really. And it's not just number crunching, either; the playtest
experience 
shows exactly the same thing. Sure, you can put the limit lower; all
that 
means is that you reduce the minimum size a ship needs to be to become 
virtually immune to fighters.

 >For instance, I would think that if you limited a cruiser sized hull
to
 >only 4 attacking fighter groups (say out of a 6 group swarm),

And there's the rub: you limit a CRUISER SIZED hull to only 4 attacking 
fighter groups. What limit do you set to a SUPERDREADNOUGHT SIZED hull, 
then? Same as for the cruiser, or different?

When you start looking it closer, it turns out that in order for the PSB
to 
be consistent with itself (which you want, because otherwise you won't
be 
able to convince all your opponents to use that rule) you have to use
*the 
same* max limit for the SDN as you use for the cruiser - which means
that 
you have to choose which of the two you want to balance against the 
fighters, and leave the other one either badly overpowered or badly 
underpowered against the fighters.

Let's take an extreme example to show why:
* Assume that fighter weapons has a maximum range of 10 km. (To put it
into 
perspective, that's more than the range Star Wars fighters typically
attack 
from but less than some of today's aircraft surface-attack weapons.)
* A cruiser is a cylinder 10 meters long and a diameter of 2 meters.
* A superdreadnought is a cylinder 1 km long and has a diameter of 200 
meters (so it is ten thousand times larger than the cruiser).

With a max range of 10km, the fighters can attack either of these ships 
from 10km away - or, in other words, the "engagement volume" (ie. the 
volume from which attacking fighters can attack either of these ships) 
extends 10 km out from their respective hull surfaces. If the PSB 
explanation for limiting the number of attacking fighters is that "they
get 
in each others' way/they interfere with one another", the maximum number
of 
attacking fighters must be proportional either to the outer surface of
this 
volume or to the volume itself.

The engagement volume for the cruiser is ~4.19*10^12 m3. For the SDN, it
is 
~4.51*10^12 m3... so the the SDN has an engagement volume less than
*10%* 
larger than that of the cruiser, in spite of the fact that the SDN is
*ten 
thousand times* (ie. 1000,000%) the size of the cruiser. If the maximum 
number of fighters attacking the ship is proportional to the engagement 
volume and the cruiser can be attacked by 4 fighter groups, then the SDN

can be attacked by at most 4.4 fighter groups.

If instead the number of fighters is limited by the *surface area* of
the 
engagement volume, the difference is only 4% (the surface of the
engagement 
volume is 1.97*10^9 m^2 for the cruiser, and 2.05*10^9 m^2 for the SDN).

IOW, if the cruiser can be attacked by at most 4 fighter groups at a
time, 
then the SDN can be attacked by at most 4.16 fighter groups at a time.

Note that these tiny differences in maximum fighter numbers is with a 
*really* extreme difference in size between the two targets, and a
fighter 
weapon's range which is less than that of today's air-launched anti-ship

missiles. If the size difference between the targets is less than one
order 
of magnitude (eg. a Fleet Book SDN compared to a Fleet Book cruiser), or

the fighter weapons have longer effective ranges than 10 km, the 
differences in maximum attacking fighter numbers disappear somewhere in
the 
far decimals.

So, I ask you again: if you set the maximum number of fighters that can 
attack a cruiser in a single turn to 4 groups, what is the maximum
number 
of fighters that can attack a superdreadnought?

***
In another post, Grant wrote:

 >>>Okay...now you take as many 1 hull, firecon, t-4,  Beam-4
 >>>ships as you can fit in those 6000 points.	Don't have the books
handy
 >>>but it's got to be over 100.
 >>
 >>I get 93 points/ea if you include FTL, so about 64 ships for
 >>6000pts. I've played games like that, and had it be rather more even 
than the
 >>massed-fighters deal.  OTOH, if you make it Beam 4 and Thrust 8, that
 >>gets ugly.
 >
 >How about making them 3 x beam 1, thrust 6 and 1 point of
 >armor?

Have you actually played such battles? I have, and so has Laserlight. 
Assuming that you use the CPV system rather than the NPV one, in my 
experience this usually gives a pretty even fight where tactics decide
the day.

While you get around 2 of these strikeboats for each enemy fighter
group, 
3-4 of them for each enemy DD and rather more for each larger enemy
ship, 
quite a few of these strikeboats will die before they get into range -
and 
thanks to the FT combat initiative system even more of them will die 
*after* they've gotten into range but before they get to fire their own 
weapons (since the enemy can fire one ship for each strikeboat which
fires, 
and most warships ships can kill at least one and often multiple 
strikeboats in a single salvo).

Victory in a battle like this goes to the side which manages to control
the 
range and/or gets into the enemy's blind arcs... and that side is by no 
means always the strikeboat side :-)

 >Complement them with some with 1 ER SMR and 1 beam 1
 >for 47 points each (remove 2 beam 1 and the armor).

...and hope that the enemy doesn't dodge your SMRs, or soak them up with

BJs of their own, or shoot them down with point defences, or uses any of

the other anti-SM tricks in the inventory.

 >Build your fleet up to speed 30 and overrun the other guy.

If you fly that fast and are armed with such short-range weapons, you
run a 
quite significant risk of overSHOOTING the other guy instead of
overRUNNING 
him.

 >The force has 353 beam 1's and 53 extended range salvo missiles.

And thanks to the very low hull integrity (306 damage boxes) and the
short 
weapons range of the B1s, many of those beams won't get to fire a single

shot before they're destroyed.

 >Against most fleets, you'll beat him just because he doesn't have
enough fire
 >controls to target your ships.

This only works *if* you manage to close the range without taking any 
long-range fire (and avoid overshooting him). Having fought quite a few 
actions like this on both sides (though none quite this large; IIRC the 
largest strikeboat swarm I've faced or fielded in Full Thrust was 4500 
pts), my experience is that this is *much* easier said than done for the

strikeboat commander :-/

 >Even heavy fighter users are going to fall to this one, because each
ship 
has
 >a anti-fighter weapon in the beam 1's. You'll attrit the fighters away

Not exactly, no :-/ B1s aren't that powerful anti-fighter weapons, so 
assuming that each fighter group attacks a separate strikeboat each turn

each Standard fighter group kills on average 2-3 strikeboats - which is 
about the same points value as the fighters themselves cost once the bay

and its supporting systems are included. ('Course, if several fighter 
groups gang up on a single strikeboat they can reduce their losses, but 
it'll take them longer to kill the boats.)

 >while the salvo missiles kill the carriers.

In a 6000-pt battle I doubt that a mere 53 SM salvoes will suffice to
*hit* 
every enemy ship, much less *kill* them all...

All in all, while the Full Thrust points system certainly has problems,
in 
my experience the swarm of small short-ranged strikeboats is not one of
them.

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