Re: New Full Thrust point defence rules

On Sun, 22 Mar 2015 15:55:57 +1100, <john.tailby@xtra.co.nz> wrote:

> I am not sure that having a single squadron of fighters on a
dreadnought  
> is intended to be a heavy attack weapon. they are more likely to be  
> scouting or for projecting some power to a place the dreadnought does 

> not want to be in combat they are likely to be defensive.

Agreed. But under the current rules the single squadrons of fighters, or
 
the few squadrons on the smaller carriers, become totally useless very	
quickly. I don't just want to fix the problem with soap bubble carriers;
I  
want to make sure that small numbers of fighters or missiles still have 

some effect.

>
> If soap bubble carriers are the problem then the design rules for  
> carriers might need to be looked at. increasing the minimum hull  
> percentage to 20% or 30%. this wouldn't affect most other ships.

The problem isn't really that you can build soap bubble carriers, it's	
that a large number of fighters works too well. The increase in  
effectiveness is non-linear. Soap bubbles are just the extreme case: you
 
can get the same effect at say 3,000 points with more "reasonable"  
carriers.

> You might also want to look at the fighter launch rules.
>
> Launching your aircraft into a battle before the enemy have been
located  
> and confirmed isn't something most captains would do. So unless you
have  
> other intelligence about an enemy fleet location you need to get to  
> within detection range of the enemy before launching your strike.
>
> Having the detection range be the whole table gives a massive
advantage  
> to such fragile carriers. Especially if they don't need to provide  
> logistical or sensor support to their fighters and can simply flee the
 
> battlefield.

But it's also common to launch aircraft into battle before you've
located  
the enemy because you don't want to get caught by surprise. And even  
before we get into the whole "no stealth in space" discussion, your
fleet  
does know the enemy is out there, otherwise why the heck is it deployed?

A big part of the problem is how much ship redesigning you want to do.	
These new rules are a bit more complex than I really like, but they work
 
with all the existing ship designs from the past twenty years.

I've also thought about completely redesigning point defence systems to
be  
more like screens, and completely redesigning fighters as a sort of long
 
range missile. And then I look at my own collection of SSDs and think
how  
much work it would be to redo them all...

-- 
	 cheers,
	 Hugh Fisher