Re: [GZG] a peek from FT3 on fighters/ordnance (was: Re:

>From: Indy <indy.kochte@gmail.com>
>And CIDS would be the new "point" defense. :-)

I've actually been finding myself calling it a "lightning shield",
because it reminds me greatly of a system by that name from the old
Master of Orion games, and conceptually it also makes more sense to me
in that kind of a vein.  i.e. a violent, active shield that would
destroy some significant fraction of the small objects that went through
it but had no effect on energy weapons, and due to its nature it can't
be used to help other ships.

Two extra questions.  One, what about heavy fighters?  The way I'm
looking at this, I think that main weapons should be unaffected against
them, PDS are reduced to one fewer small target die against them but the
to-hit number is unchanged, while lightning shields are reduced by -1
against them.  The other is, what about plasma bolts?  Does the defense
change against those at all?  Lightning shields, I'm thinking it should
be roll the to-hit and each shield reduces the plasma by one class, and
after that it's up to your PDS/scatterguns.

-----Original Message-----
>From: John Lerchey <lerchey@gmail.com>
>Quick thought about CIDS and cost issues for very small/very large
>ships.  On larger ships I think that the increased mass can be PSB'd
>away as having to simply cover more area because the hull is huge.  If
>it seems to be too cheap/small on very small ships, give it a minimum
>mass and cost that is prohibitive for whatever class is "too small" to
>have CIDS, beit it FF, DD or whatever.

Yeah, I've been thinking of that, and when I think of it as a "lightning
shield" that gets easier to visualize (in fact I'm probably going to
wind up using that as my standard term for it), and I can also
understand that part of the idea is to scale it so that it's usable in
any scale of fleet battle, and at the same time it's intended that the
lightning shield would also replace amassed PDS at all levels and become
an insurance for amassed fighters without ever being so powerful that
fighters become useless.  I _get_ all that.

I basically did the math after I sent that email in my head, and what I
came up with is that for every 20 mass of your ship, you would need one
more fighter group attacking you before you break even on using the
lightning shield (of _any_ level, assuming 5%) versus taking the same
amount of mass in PDS.	That bothers me.  When it's a passive screen
system that simply dampens the damage coming in, it's easier to justify
than when it's a counterattack weapon that kills resources that the
opponent spends a linear cost on.  At the same time, it also would
bother me if you had a fixed cost and a dreadplanet effectively becomes
immune to fighters because the first half of them die for
(proportionately) free and the dreadplanet is only really on the hook to
mount the PDS/scatterguns to kill the other half.

Grr.  I guess the latter case probably bothers me a little more than the
former.  As long as you're not spending radically more on the lightning
shield than on regular PDS/scatterguns I guess you don't wind up taking
a particularly bad penalty... although yeah, I do still think it
probably should have a fairly steep minimum mass.  I'm thinking 8 is
probably a good number, this is going to be a pretty dang powerful
system.

E
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