Re: [GZG] Monster ships

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Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lI keep hearing
MT missles are simply bigger and more fragile versions of a salvo
missle. My answer is who has served in the modern military and why are
smart weapons so denied. These are people that think a defensive weapon
is so great while in reality defence lags behind offence in weapon
technology.

--- On Tue, 1/12/10, Indy <indy.kochte@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Indy <indy.kochte@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [GZG] Monster ships
To: gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
Date: Tuesday, January 12, 2010, 12:13 PM

I was never, ever a fan of the "salvos are dumb and attack closest"
camp. But my voice was small on the playtest list on that issue. <shrug>

Mk

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 12:03 PM, Charles Lee <xarcht@yahoo.com> wrote:

Ahhh yes Missle sponges, let the admiral relying on Missle Sponges
against someone with More Thrust missles and watch him move his command
to a cutter as the big boys and cruisers go mision killed. At 54 plus 6
movement units away the launch cruisers are ready to take out the small
boys. Missle sponges are old and obsolite today with smart cruise
missle. Compare Cruise missles with MT Missles while Salvo missles are
likened to short range dumb missles carried by lesser navies.

--- On Tue, 1/12/10, Indy <indy.kochte@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Indy <indy.kochte@gmail.com>

Subject: Re: [GZG] Monster ships

To: gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
Date: Tuesday, January 12, 2010, 11:34 AM

On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 10:00 PM, John Tailby <john_tailby@xtra.co.nz>
wrote:

Not really sure what you mean by banzi jammers and it depends on your
rules about mixed and on table hyperspace assaults. We don't allow mixed
on table and hyper assault games because it makes it too easy to just
jump accross the table and do you might as well equip all ships with
close range weapons if you can tactical jump. 

Banzai Jammer was a termed coined years ago for small, usually
nigh-worthlesss ships (scouts, corvettes, etc) to surround larger
targetable ships to self-intercept salvo missiles. Given the current
rules for salvos (attacking closest target, irregardless of targets in
the attack envelope), sacrificing a 6- or 10-mass ship to several swarms
of salvo missiles is highly cost-effective in saving the larger ship,
which could, in turn, blast the snot out of the salvo missile firing
ship.

If I understand Eric's paragraph correctly, I believe he was suggesting
that while banzai jammers are easy to kill with anti-ship (i.e., beam)
fire, having a bunch of them means not all may be killed off in one turn
by direct-fire ships. So the easiest way to eliminate the horde of
banzai jammers would be to send a similar horde of dinky ships into
point-blank range and having them fire up their FTL drives, blowing all
the tiny ships (including the banzai jammers) to smithereens.

Mk

PS: amusing to see the number of replies in this thread and the subject
line of the thread; I think this has become one of the larger/largest
on-going threads we have had here in a long, long time

 

 

 

From: Eric Foley <stiltman@teleport.com>

To: gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
Sent: Tue, 12 January, 2010 2:58:27 PM 

Subject: Re: [GZG] Monster ships

Yeah, I've been somewhat pondering what to do with this.  On the one
hand, I think it's not a bad idea to treat MT missiles sort of like
plasma bolts for point defense fire, because if you treat them the same
as individual salvo missiles then they get a little _too_ easy to shoot
down and they'll have no effectiveness at all.  At the same time, I
think it's a good idea to let fighters shoot at them as well, which
wasn't possible in More Thrust.  We wound requiring each MT missile to
use an individual fire control partly because of this.  Area defense
got a lot better in the fleet books, though, although we wound up mostly
using salvoes in the old group.
 
Resupply for missile ships and carriers is a potential issue, but a lot
of this depends on how easy you make it to resupply them.  The decoy
drones aren't going to work very long if the other side's even the
slightest bit balanced or inventive, though.  Even if there's way too
many of them to ever reasonably shoot them all with conventional beam
support, it's still so easy to just send a similar swarm of drones into
the midst of the banzai jammers and FTL bomb the lot of them, even if
you don't feel like actually arming them.  Different variants of this
can pretty much trash anything that tries to exploit the design rules
with 1 hull point, really.  Take a few scatterguns and ruin soap
bubble carriers too, for instance.
 
There's really a lot of different things that can work in battles if
you've got the logistics to support it, though, but you usually have to
have at least a semi-credible Plan B for it to work.  Good carriers and
missile ships still usually need to keep it semi-honest with beams or
K-guns at some point, because sometimes it takes a lot of work to get
through point defense.
 
E
-----Original Message----- 
From: John Tailby 
Sent: Jan 11, 2010 11:37 AM 
To: gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu 
Subject: Re: [GZG] Monster ships 

Charles 
 
Our gaming group dropped the penalty to PDS hitting the MT missiles a
long time ago. A couple of players made fleets whose doctrine was
Missiles, Beam 2 and PDS, very like a modern naval fleet... With the
increased protection agaisnt PDS fire they were a very superior weapon
system especially when compared to Salvo missile weapons.
 
Unfortunately massed missiles and fighter squadrons make for a rather
boring game. The ships sit at opposite ends of the table and moves waves
of counters at each other.
 
I agree that missile armed destroyers especially if equipped with
stealth technology to protect against long range sniping are pretty
effective strike ships
 
 
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