Fighter heap endurance

Was "Retrograde skirmishers" but we've gotten back into fighter discussions
again so I changed the subject...

> Oerjan wrote:

> No, you have not.

All right, if I wasn't before, I'm being clear now.

> >Heck, I've twice given you an exact count of ships and numbers of

> The Kra'Vak case, yes. You wrote that before you had tried the KV in

The ships I designed for that particular game were roughly similar to what
I'd probably fly as a custom KV-based force in a more average design.  I
originally envisioned about 95-100, wound up designing it with 90 for
the actual game. That's probably a number I'd aim to approximate in most games
with my designs.

> In the latter case, you stated "10-20 PDS on each heavy battleship",

I _did_ say exactly 20, in groups of three.  It _is_ true, however, that
I didn't specify what escorts they'd fly except that they probably would throw
nova cannons or needle beams, thus implying that they'd be their
own form of attached skirmish mini-squad rather than part of the main
phalanx, but OTOH, I wasn't completely clear on that one.

> >Keeping track of fighter endurance isn't terribly hard for me because

> Not even when some but not all fighter groups use secondary movement?

No, secondary movement is not free in our house rules.  That _is_ a
pretty good question, but my answer at this point is that I don't think I've
_ever_
used secondary movement for just part of the force. I tend to fly my
fighters in a pretty monolithic mega-flotilla, such that they move and
attack all at once. When I fire, I tend to pile them all on one ship at a time
to assure that ship's destruction, then move on to the next. If I'm firing on
more than one ship it'll be because (a) I'm not going to expose them to much
more PDS fire on two ships than I would on one and (b) I'm not expecting that
either of your ships with meaningfully survive even if I divide my fire
between two of them. The thinking's pretty simple: maximum damage for minimum
exposure to counterattack. If you were to divide your fleet up in hopes of
dividing up my fighters, I probably wouldn't divide the fighters into more
than two flotillas at a time anyway... which just means, at worst, I have to
keep track of two numbers for the active piles on the board instead of one.

When I fly them this way, keeping track of how many shots they've got left
isn't usually terribly hard, because they'll usually all have the same number.
If they don't it's usually when I've involved just some of them in fighter
screens, in which case I'll usually just not bother having the
screen-duty
fighters use their last few shots over the whole because that would expose
them to PDS fire in smaller numbers, thus making their attack that much less
cost-efficient.  In those cases, I'll just bring the whole heap back to
their carriers and refuel them all at once to resolve the disparity.

> >I'm talking about ships that might dedicate about 10-20% of their

> 46 mass for point defences are 27.6% of the total Mass of Noam's ships

VERY huge, considering that I'm talking about one thing and you're talking
about another. Weapons mass!= ships mass.