Re: [GZG] Integral Armour

-----Original Message-----
>From: Hugh Fisher <laranzu@ozemail.com.au>
>J L Hilal wrote:
>>As far as small K-guns being ineffective against heavily armored 
>>ships, I don't mind that at all.  Historically, a lot of battleships 
>>were immune to the fire of 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-inch guns (and in some 
>>cases even 8-inchers).

>Yes, although that immunity turned out to be theoretical in
>some cases. (Graf Spee against British light cruisers and Hiei
>against American cruisers both suffered enough damage to put
>them out of action, although neither was sunk or in danger of
>doing so. Scharnhorst was critically handicapped by having
>her radar knocked out by a cruiser shell before Duke of York
>got near her.)

The other thing that potentially gets messy for advanced screens is the
question of needle beams.  That's one very expensive system to get
needled out...

But part of the issue (IMO) wasn't really just that the cruisers
couldn't hurt the battleships at all, they just couldn't hurt them
significantly before the battleship itself annihilated the cruisers with
their much heavier weaponry.  Cruisers in those days weren't
particularly well armored, and their weapons were considerably shorter
ranged than the battleships'.  Earlier this week I played a scenario
that, among other things, had a mass 80 or so blockade runner going on a
commerce raid, and it ran into a Q-ship twice its size that had had its
merchant hull paved over with heavy armor, and had thrown in thrust 4,
level 2 energy screens, and then loaded the rest of it to the bulkheads
with ship-to-ship weaponry, so effectively the blockade runner had run
head on into a heavier-armor-than-hull battledreadnought.  Due to the
intercept speeds, the runner fell straight into the Q-ship's 12-18 MU
range band and was destroyed in a single turn's fire in exchange for
what amounted to
  a few scratches on the paint.  That's probably somewhere on par with
what would've happened to a WW2 Japanese light cruiser if it'd blundered
into a South Dakota before it realized where it was going.

>Plus while battleships were in not much danger from the
>lighter guns of destroyers and cruisers, those smaller ships
>did have torpedoes. There's no real equivalent to the effect
>these had on WWI/WWII battleship tactics in Full Thrust,
>although if you wanted to create a Hornblower/Nelson in space
>type game where capital ships RULE and those pesky escorts
>and cruisers know their place, that could be an advantage.

And this isn't what we've already got?	If that'd been a mid-200s mass
monsternought instead of a Q-ship, they probably could've vaporized two
of those blockade runners in one turn instead of just one.

Conversely, something like Graf Spee could be modelled as a better
armored low-end battlecruiser with somewhat bigger guns, that ran into a
slightly smaller heavy cruiser and a couple of light cruisers and got
worn down by the lot of them.  That's not so hard to envision.

E/Stilt Man
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