Carriers

Well first foray into this message group.

Very interesting debate about carriers so he's my opinion. (for what its
worth)

To me what is needed to distinquish between a carrier and a battleship,
destroyer etc is armour. With all the ideas about launch methods for fighters,
unless the external option is developed any carrier will have several launch
tubes, hanger bay doors etc. If we applied some penalty for basically filling
a ship with holes for fighters to occupy then a carrier would be alot weaker.
No player will want to weaken a frontline vessel just for fighters.

I know buy having hanger bays you limit a ships weaponry I was thinking of
something a little more servere! Carriers are fragile and should be protected
by other ships.

Ok on th point of launching fighters. Most of the examples of external systems
in my opinion also have pilots who are fanatics. Having a system where if you
launch, fight, return with no garantee that you could dock again takes nerve.

Also to gain better numbers of launches this should use examples already
quoted.

Battlestar Gallactica has different landing bays to launch bays. This system
would allow no penalty to launching and retriving fighters at the same time.
However this system would not allow all fighters to be launched at the same
time.

B5(the station) Has a very simple launch method and gives the impression that
all fighters could be launched together. But I suspect that the down side is
docking those fighters again.

Maybe what we need is to actualy pay for launch bays and docking bays
separately. Therefore a ship with 2 launch bays and 1 docking bay can launch
both fighter groups together but only dock one at a time.

With this method its kept simple and you are still using the idea of flight
controls by having to pay for the specific fighter bays.

Anyway good mailing group cheers

> Jeremy Claridge wrote:

> Well first foray into this message group.

Welcome! I haven't seen any reply to this (could've come while my ISP was
down, though), and I don't agree much with you, so here goes :-)

> To me what is needed to distinquish between a carrier and

You can do this using the FTFB design system. However, what's the difference
between a fighter and a large missile (especially the MT Mass 2 type, which is
at *least* as large as a fighter),
hole-in-the-ship-wise? Should a missile-heavy design also be fragile?

Your argument can be used in both ways. You think that carriers should be
fragile; fine, use a Weak hull (or even a Fragile one) and no armour. I
don't think that a carrier - especially not one with B5- or
Starfire-style fighter bays, where each fighter has its own bay rather
than one with a single large fighter deck for all fighters (as in SAAB)
-
would be very fragile, or at least it wouldn't *have*. Lots of
compartmentalisation, and there's no reason why the bay doors shouldn't
be heavily armoured too :-/ Both design types can have high or low
launch
rates for various reasons (though I'd suspect that the 1 bay/fighter
type
would be more likely to launch fast than the single-deck one).

[snip]

> B5(the station) Has a very simple launch method and gives

They seem to dock fighters through the normal cargo bays...

Later,