hello
For some time i have been thinking about designing a anti figher missle
system, At the moment the best idea i have had so far is a sort of flak
missile. This is how they work: They are launched like a salvo missile and go
off before fighters do secondary moves, every fighter group within 2" of the
missle marker has 3 dice roled against it and all damage is worked out
the same way as for PDS with re-rolls on a 6, all groups within 2-3"
have 2
dice rolled against them and any groups within 3-4 have 1 dice rolled
against them. Against ships the damage is the same for PDS with only 1 dammage
done on a 6. Please send any comments.
> At 5:56 PM -0800 11/3/99, Nathan rolfe wrote:
have 2
> dice rolled against them and any groups within 3-4 have 1 dice rolled
That's a bit on the nasty side. My first problem is with the 'every
fighter group' part, then I'm not sure if the missile gets a re-roll.
How about 1d6 attacks are made on randomly selected fighter groups with 2" (or
3") of the salvo are attacked. That makes them parallel to the SML and we can
call them a different salvo type. They'd be interchangeable with SML reloads
and would provide a lot of variety to missile armed ships and make campaign
game logistics even more interesting (read as difficult). Come to think of it,
SMLs are pretty nasty so I withdraw my objection to the rerolls.
The only problem is, how do you resolve movement orders? Neither fighters nor
SMLs use written orders. If the SMLs are placed first, the fighters can
automatically avoid them, or conversely, if the fighters move first, the SMLs
automatically hit.
How about something along the lines of the antimissile system I use for Honor
Harrington? Each antifighter SML salvo can target a single fighter group in
range (or split between groups, 1 group per firecon). The salvo supplies 6 PDS
die to fire at the target (or split amongst targets), but must be within range
and arc during the fire phase. Against ships, it is resolved as PDS with the
same range & arcs as the SML launcher.
'Neath Southern Skies - http://users.mcmedia.com.au/~denian/
[MKW] - Admiral Peter Rollins - Task Force Zulu
> -----Original Message-----
have
> 2
> dammage done on a 6. Please send any comments.
> The only problem is, how do you resolve movement orders? Neither
Errr, did you leave out the part about "resolve movement"?
I is only an idea at the momment and my major reason for this missle type is
that peole are comming along with 15+(you know who you are) fighter
groups and as i don't like using them i wanted a way to attack them before
they
actually reached my ship. One idea i came up with was to allow ships with area
defens fire control to shot at fighters withing 6" of them even they are not
attacking.
That's actually a reversion to the old FT rules, which I was surprised that it
wasn't officially brought across to FTFB.
'Neath Southern Skies - http://users.mcmedia.com.au/~denian/
[MKW] - Admiral Peter Rollins - Task Force Zulu
> -----Original Message-----
No, you use the salvo similar to energy armament. Nominate the target then
resolve PDS fire. That's why there are no autokills from the missiles.
'Neath Southern Skies - http://users.mcmedia.com.au/~denian/
[MKW] - Admiral Peter Rollins - Task Force Zulu
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Robertson, Brendan" <Brendan.Robertson@dva.gov.au>
The way you can do this is by using fighter initiative and count each missile
group as a fighter group thus taking it in turns moving and placing
each individual fighter and anti-fighter missile group.
[snipped]
Why not just have it work like a "Salvo-PDS."
All rules as per SML, except they only work on fighters, and for each missile
that hits roll is if the squadron was attacked by a PDS.
In other words, if the SML-PDS were within 6" of a fighter squadron,
which could then attempt to defend, and rolled a "4," it would then roll 4 PDS
dice against the group.
G'day Roger,
> If you know people are going to be coming at you with 15+ fighter
Actually Nathan already has a few of those, they're rather common ship in this
neck of the woods, however they're also the first to die usually.
Cheers
Beth
> Nathan rolfe wrote:
If you know people are going to be coming at you with 15+ fighter
groups it is pretty easy to deal with them. 15 fighter groups is 135 mass on
the carrier. How many PDS's with ADFC can you put in 135 mass? Make an Aegis
cruiser and keep your ships within 6 inches. As a matter of fact 90 mass of
PDS's and ADFC's should easily handle 15 fighter groups. If they have SML
backups then the 135 might be necessary if you don't dodge well.
> From: Roger Books <books@mail.state.fl.us>
> type is
> with
> they
Its not always that easy to have a fleet defence ship, as these tend to be
picked on alot if the other person has fighters. Theres no way you can knock
out 26 fighter groups on one ship with a balanced fleet. In order to
effectively defend against massed fighters, you need to take a fleet armed
with so much PDS that its useless for anything other than fighter defence.
This means that you have to take one fleet especially against the fighter
people and one against everyone else. Worse, what if the person who you
thought was going to rely on fighters has a fleet outfitted with pulse torps
instead!!
> Beth Fulton wrote:
Good morning (here anyway).
We are starting to see a bit of that happening here, but the solution seems to
be to spread it out. If everything bigger than a light cruiser has large
amounts of PDS's and everything bigger than a cruiser has an ADFC it works out
the same. I just lost 8 fighter groups and had almost 40 SM's knocked out (I
always stage fighters and SM's for the same time) on one turn. The only reason
I survived to run away was because I did manage to get enough fighters and
SM's to take out a CVL which had waited too long to launch.
That brings up a question. Can you recover fighters while warming up FTL
drives? IE, announce drive warmup, move fighters, move ship
live through turn, recover fighters, next turn 1/2 move and FTL out.
G'day guys,
Here's some rumblings from the deep (Derek):
With all this conversation about anti-fighter missile rules I thought I
would repost this, it comes from my house rules for MT missiles:
"Optional rule: If desired, players can use salvo missiles as a
long-range
missile defence. During the salvo missile launch phase, players launching
salvo missiles may, if desired, use a salvo to attack missiles. Nominate that
the salvo is being fired in anti missile mode and place the salvo as normal,
within range and arc restrictions so it is within attack range of the target
missile. During the point defence fire phase (phase 7) these salvo missiles
can attack the nearest missile within its attack range.To
resolve this attack roll 1D6-1 per salvo for the number of missiles on
target, if the final score is less than one then there are no missiles on
target from that salvo and it's a clean miss. If there are missiles on target
roll a D6 and add that number of missiles to the score rolled, if the final
result is 6 or greater then the target missile is destroyed."
As you might guess this can be extended to include fighters as well, the
fighters can get a chance to secondary move out of the way, but they do this
at the cost of their endurance (CEF). To determine the how many fighters are
'shot down', no change to the method described above. If the result is 6, one
fighter killed, 7, two fighters, 8, three fighters and so on.
Another option is for players to resolve the salvo missile anti
missile/fighter attacks immediately after placement of all salvo
missiles in the LAUNCH SALVO MISSILES phase. This would preclude the fighter
groups
getting their secondary move but allows the anti missile/fighter fire to
be resolved in one phase (the LAUNCH SALVO MISSILE phase) and not broken up
before and after ship movement (less counters to track).
This is not as efficient as some of the anti-fighter SML PDS rules
suggested but it is a secondary function, you wouldn't want the SM to have the
same level of effectiveness in a secondary backup mode as a dedicated
anti fighter/missile system.
Derek
Well, if we really want to open the topic of using missiles as a
stand-off
anti-fighter defense, then I'd argue that submunitions packs might be
more appropriate than salvo missiles.
Think about it; submunitions are described as anime-style swarms of
small missiles where salvo missiles sound more like a Trident I class
ballistic
missiles (200 tons / 6 missiles = ~33 tons each).
We wouldn't even have to really change the submunition's mechanics much
either; out to 6" they can roll 3 dice as usual, but the damage is applied as
if they were PDS dice.
I would argue that if we wanted to allow ranged attacks against fighters, then
*only* ships equipped with ADFC should be able to target them. In that case,
each submunition would roll 2 dice out to 12" and only one die
out to 18". But in that case, we might want to re-think the restriction
on PDS only targeting fighters if they attack first.
If one did want to use salvo missiles to target fighters, it seems to me this
would be more like the old "Missile Command" console game; you'd set off a
whole flight of MIRVed salvo missiles for maximum dispersion in the general
area where you think the fighters would be. Essentially, this would be similar
to a very small, very weak nova template.
It smacks of overkill, but if you want a precedence, consider that the
Bismarck shot down a couple of low-flying Swordfish torpedo bombers with
the shell splashes from its 15" guns.:)
Just another idea. Basically a missle salvo that acts like a fighter group,
bassicaly launched like a normal salvo group. They have 3 combat endurance
factor move in same phase as fighters have a movement rate of 24" use a combat
endurance factor each turn and may do a 12" secondary burn like
normal fighters. In the salvo/fighter attack phase each missile can
attack one fighter group, each salvo rolls 6 dice and all damage is resovled
as
normal figters they also do the same against ships. once they have attacked
they are removed from the table. mass and cost the same as normal missiles.
They are launched from normal launch systems. If you made any sense out of
that lot please comment. this might be play
tested tommorow.
> Nathan rolfe wrote:
> Just another idea. Basically a missle salvo that acts like a fighter
[snip]
Well, as long as each such salvo uses up 6-7 magazine spaces rather
than 2 and costs an extra 18 points each it should be OK :-/ If they're
effectively identical to fighters, they should be identical to fighters in
size and cost as well.
Regards,
In a message dated 11/5/99 6:55:31 AM Pacific Standard Time,
> jefflyon@mail.utexas.edu writes:
> It smacks of overkill, but if you want a precedence, consider that the
Cool, for some reson I think we'll need rules for dust that gets shot up when
weapons fire hits an asteroid....
-Stephen
[quoted original message omitted]
[quoted original message omitted]
> Dowd wrote:
I don't really think it's that bad, notice they don't do the damage of
a salvo missile, it looks like up to 6 dice of _beam_ damage. They have
1/2 the CE of a fighter group and they never get a second shot, unlike
fighters.
I wrote in reply to Nathan:
> > Just another idea. Basically a missle salvo that acts like a
Sorry, missed the part about not being able to attack again. I got confused by
the "acts as a normal fighter group" followed by the part indicating that
these things use up their combat endurance whether or
not they attack or use a secondary move :-/
> From: Roger Books <books@mail.state.fl.us>
use a
> > >combat endurance factor each turn and may do a 12" secondary burn
> attack
> play
Hello
all damage is exactly like beams against ships and they can still be shot with
PDS so any damage against ships will be pretty low. There will be no
other types of missiles eg/No interceptors attack etc..
Nathan rolfe wrote about the "fighter SMs":
> > > Its a little powerful....maybe if they were restricted to
The average damage per salvo which hits will be pretty low, but *all*
these fighter-salvoes will hit (thanks to the 12mu secondary move), and
- if they attack like fighters - *all six* fighter-missiles in the
salvo will attack. Even better, you can't use small ships as decoys against
them (again thanks to the 12mu secondary move). This more than compensates for
their lower average damage per individual
fighter-missile.
Regards,