Re: [GZG] FT:XD changes, part 1

_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-l

________________________________

From: Eric Foley <stiltman@teleport.com>
No non-idiotic, non-suicidal species is going to intentionally use a
military doctrine that fundamentally involves wagering their entire
civilization or any significant subset of it on a completely blind
guess. 

So not human beings then.

Every Military development has come out of the experiences of the
previous wars and a lot of theoretical arm waving. Thats fine if the
next war is exactly the same as the last one and not if you are
completely different.

Look at tank design between ww1 and ww2. No one had any idea about how
to use them and what sort of requiremetns they needed to provide. So the
British ended up with the slow infantry tanks designed to shoot up
machinegun nests and the fast cruiser tanks that drew doctrinal
inspriation from naval destroyers and cavalry squadrons.

In a modern war it takes so long to make new weapon systems you will
have to fight with what you have it's very likely that you could get
some scissors paper stone going on.

If your army is designed to fight enemy armoured vehicles in a total war
scenario in in open rurla planes, what happens if the next war is a
limirted engagement taking place in island archapelegos, jungle, urban
areas or artic snowdrifts.

In my FT gaming group, this sort of theoretical design and doctrine
development went on all the time. People designed fleets to fight the
sort of games they imagined would take place and could give them an
advantage in those games. When the actual battles resembled neither
sides expectations people were suddenly left improvising tactics to use
in the games.

I think that one of the fundamental problems with the FT mechanisms is
that there are two different rule mechanisms one for firign at ships and
one for firing at ordnance and they don't interact well and produce some
odd anomalies as a result.

For example, firing at a missile can't be done with ship weapons but
firing at a mass 3 ship uses completely different mechanics and it is as
easy to hit a mass 3 ship as it is a mass 300 dreadnought. If targetting
systems are such that the size of the target doesn't matter then why
does it matter when shooting at a missile or fighter squadron?

If target size does matter then why isn't there a graduated series of
DRMs based on the size of the target, say -2 for <1 mass targets
(ordnance), -1 for 1-50 mass, +1 for 100-150 amd +2 150 and above? Then
all you need to do is change the PDS weapons to rapid fire say 6 beam
dice.