Re: [GZG] Subject: Re: Mixed Role Fighters (design system)

-----Original Message-----
>From: Roger Burton West <roger@firedrake.org>
>On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 04:01:32PM -0700, Eric Foley wrote:
>>   I actually had to kind of chuckle when I saw the
>>   IJN designs and saw the comment, "These ships are punching above
their
>>   NPV compared to fleet book designs in test battles due to the
fighters,
>>   we're looking into it..."	Well, duh... their carriers sport half
again as
>>   many fighters as the fleet book carriers do and they're getting
>>   attack-interceptors while the fleet book ships don't.

>Actually, the multirole attacker-interceptors seem to be costed about
>right - they can only choose role once per turn, after all. Do you
>really expect them to beat more than twice their number in standard
>fighters?

No.  But I expect them to be pretty evenly matched with half again their
number in standard fighters.  Two soap bubble carriers with the
superfighters costs 172 NPV.  Three soap bubble carriers with standard
fighters costs 189 NPV.  As the carriers get more "normal", the cost gap
increases.  Even if you increased the cost of the superfighters to about
48 per group (which would bring this number to 188 versus 189), there
will come a point where the mass of the carriers involved will make the
superfighters cheaper for the same amount of punch.

Even setting that aside, there's just a lot of squick factor in allowing
anybody to have superfighters like these.  There's a reason in real
world aeroscience that only the B-29s could carry the A-bombs and only
the P-51s could do well in dogfights with the other side's fighters with
the same technology levels.  Building one plane that could go toe-to-toe
with the P-51 in a dogfight and still drop an A-bomb in its spare time
was well beyond World War II technology.  That's essentially what the
superfighter is proposing to do:  take all the specialized weapons that
are more powerful against both fighters and ships, and put them on the
same frame without any tradeoffs, against enemies that can only do one
or the other and have to either severely weaken or outright remove
whichever capability they aren't specializing for.  There's no
reasonable interpretation for that other than that one side simply has
more advanced fighter technology than the other -- the standard fighter
alre
 ady is a "multirole" fighter that's simply less capable than the
superfighter.

>I agree that carrying a lot of fighters and missiles is overpowered
>under the current rules, but I don't think there's a lot of contention
>about that, and it seems only fair to warn people!

Well, at some point no matter how many fighters or missiles you cram in
there, an opposing force with enough scatterguns and banzai jammers can
pretty much completely dismiss them as a threat.  It doesn't even take
enough that you need to gut your ship-to-ship armament to do it; two
scatterguns destroys one fighter group on average, three destroys a
heavy.
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