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-lAlthough I'm no
expert in these matters, it occurs to me that perhaps one might consider
the logistics of fighters (particularly in the campaign setting) in
terms of the true limiting factor: the flight crew (pilot, for a
single-seater).

Fighter technology is well understood in the GZGverse and adoption
appears relatively trivial. In other words, building the fighters for a
fighter arm is no big deal. Anyone with an industrial base could
conceivably pile fighters high enough that lined up fin-tip to fin-tip,
one could walk from here to Ceres. Great. Somebody let the contract, and
the last thing those redacted Kra'vak will ever see is 400 million
fighters howling down on 'em.

Just one question, though. Who's gonna fly 'em?

Consider Earth's largest wet navy. How many total personnel are in the
US Navy, and what percentage of those could be classified by any stretch
of the imagination as high-performance fighter pilots? Bet it's pretty
small, and by invoking the Law of the Minimum by way of the fighter
pilot, a solution might perhaps be found.

One could ramp up production, telescope the syllabus, and send out
hordes of green pilots, but the result should be some species of the
Pleiades Turkey Shoot: at worst, the damage a gaggle of tyros could
inflict ought to be about what happened to the fleet off Okinawa over
the several weeks of the campaign. The impact wasn't trivial, but remind
me: Who won at Okinawa?

I would look at modeling logistical limits on fighters two ways:

1. Regardless of construction cost, fighters can be no more than some
quite small percentage of the total (tonnage, construction cost, what
have you) of a given fleet. This construct represents the idea that a
fighter pilot comes from a smallish pool at the right end of a species'
bell curve, whose training involves significant time and cost just to
make it all the way to "nugget."

2. In the campaign setting, making good fighter losses -- even with the
sorriest nuggets one can scrape out of the bottom of the flight school
-- will be a relative trickle. The surviving American carriers were near
the end of their rope by the end of the Battle of Midway, due to
aircraft attrition.

I'm sorry that I don't have a copy of the rules right in front of me, to
ground-truth these ideas, but they're just things I wanted to toss out
for general consideration anyway.

Best,
Ken
United Stars

--- On Mon, 5/3/10, Eric Foley <stiltman@teleport.com> wrote:

From: Eric Foley <stiltman@teleport.com>
Subject: Re: [GZG] FT:XD changes, part 1
To: gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
Date: Monday, May 3, 2010, 4:35 PM

-----Original Message-----
>From: Damond Walker <damosan@gmail.com>
>[...]
>This is the trap of a points system - while there may be a good
>solution out there somewhere the minute you get it out to the genpop
>someone will break it.
>
>You are always going to have edge cases that will break a system.  For
>me the fleet books set the tone for my games and designs so I was
>never really concerned about the system's edge cases.

Yeah.  I agree completely.  If people are willing to agree on about
how many fighters they want their game to have, we don't need to have
this conversation.  I think it's pretty much necessary in playing with
FB1 ships with strangers; I'm only throwing out the logistics limit as a
way to keep the rules lawyers at bay and still have the fleet book ships
"make sense".  On the other hand, if you want to take all the gloves
off with custom ships with no such limitations (implied or quantified),
I think it needs to be implicitly understood that the winning ships
won't look like the stuff in the fleet books.

E