Campaign Rules Question

I've been working for a while on an operational or theatre level campaign for
FT off and on for a while now and I'm having some trouble with an easy way to
deal with logistics. More specificly, commerce raiding. The basic mechanism
I'm using for logistics is as follows. Each side has a
supply rating, a number that corresponds to a supply level (ie 0-10
Unsupplied, 11-25 Badly Supplied, etc). For ships to be repaired or to
take on new stores of expendables (missiles, fighters, submunitions, etc) they
roll on a Logistics table. Obviously, the better their supply situation, the
better their chance to get repaired or resupplied is. This seems like a fairly
simple yet accurate enough way of dealing with the logistics situation, at
least at this level. My problem is dealing with commerce raiding. Since I
didn't want to deal with keeping track of every
convoy (and this is a 2-player campaign, so double-blind isn't a factor
here) I wanted to abstract the process. My first thought was that each player
could assign ships to Commerce Raiding and Convoy Protection pools. During the
Logistics phase of the Strategic turns we could roll on a CRT using the PV of
the respective pools against each other. This seems like a pretty good method,
except that I don't think it would model the damage to the ships in the pools
too well (the point being, of course, to damage to other fellows Supply rating
and not so much the elimination of the pool ships, though that would be a
seconday goal). A thought occurs to me while typing, possibly a two step
process. The first roll to indicate the "convoy battle) so to speak between
the warships (this would be where the damage to the warships is accounted for)
then a second roll modified by the first (column shift or die mod) tht
reflects the damage done to the enemies Supply level. The problem of applying
the damage to the warships still remains, but that may not be too much of a
problem. Well, now that I think I solved my problem, are there any thoughts
out there?

Don

> IronLimper@aol.com wrote:

> I've been working for a while on an operational or theatre level

Here is something I have been thinking of, off and on for a while:

Have the "Commerse Raiders" state which system they are in. Add up the values
of the planets in that system and the two or three nearest systems. IMHO gives
a "feel" for the level of trade in that area. Then you could divid the total
by some number, to get the average number of freighters that pass through that
system. Then work out some method of damaging the convoy and the raiders...