What sort of sizes of force do listers keep handy to speed up the start of
pick-up games? Looking at the scenario and force examples in DS2, it
looks
as if about 4000pts for a smaller game and 8000 for a middle-to-largish
game are reasonable, or at least those are the sizes I'm working to.
For FT(FB) I prepare lists for 1000-1500 for a small game, doubling or
trebling for larger actions (unused due to lack of opponents around here).
Do listers keep much in the way of scout sections, courier boats etc. to use
up those last few points, or do people tend not to bother?
We rarely bother with courier boats, though a Phalon frigate is still a fairly
powerful fighting force. You are correct about 1500 being a good engagement
for 2 people. We usually don't allow more than 1500 points per person as
things get unwieldy after that.
> At 16:29 2000-08-12 +0100, you wrote:
to use
> up those last few points, or do people tend not to bother?
We usually run 1000-2500 FT games. Usually it is around 1500.
I have a large number of scout/couriers (picked them up as a package
deal), but rarely use them in a game. I plan to make a scenario one day that
focuses on small ships.
I have never played a pick-up DS game, so do not know how to advise you.
---
> For FT(FB) I prepare lists for 1000-1500 for a small game, doubling or
> Do listers keep much in the way of scout sections, courier boats etc.
to use
> up those last few points, or do people tend not to bother?
The Full Thrust actions I play tend to be 5000 points each, which is (by us)
considered to be a halfway major fleet action between two good sized task
forces. The loose assumption tends to be that we can fly custom forces as we
like, but that we don't have the option of just bugging out if we don't like a
given matchup, which discourages us from getting too gimmicky in our fleet
makeup.
I've had an ambition to set up some sort of larger campaign game where
resource management winds up meaning something. OTOH, I could easily see
that getting out of hand -- e.g. a carrier force attacking a battleship
force, the carrier side trades their fighter complement (but no ships) for the
opposing task force, nullifying both of their striking power for the time
being, but the carrier side goes and buys much fancier fighters the second
time around whereas the battleship side has to replace their whole task force,
thus the campaign quickly becomes worse for whoever falls behind.
Stiltman said:
> I've had an ambition to set up some sort of larger campaign game where
for
> the opposing task force, nullifying both of their striking power for
One way to help solve this is to set up your map as a square and have the
players' home systems in opposite corners. Say you have a 5x5 square, on
player's home is at 1,1 and the other is at 5,5. The initial front is along
the line from 1,5 to 5, 1. As a player gets pushed back towards his home, he
has less to garrison therefore doesn't have to spread out his forces as much
as the player who's advancing. Forces from different spaces attack in
succession, not simultaneously. You may also add maintenance costs for all the
systems acquired, but give them a lag before they start producing for
you--that way you can't just conquer everything in sight and throw your
GNP at him.
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
for
> the opposing task force, nullifying both of their striking power for
It costs at least 45 pts to field a fighter squadron (mass 12, MD 2, FTL, Hull
integrity of 1, fighter squadron bay), plus the cost of the fighters (18
minimum). Yet I would fearlessly face an equal value of these carrierlettes in
a single Konstantin (The Konstantin has interceptors*, the carrierlettes have
whatever), because I know that with six squadrons on defence and
level-2 screens, I should just be able to weather out the storm and my
class-3's will be giving some of the enemy pilots dark thoughts about
getting home
If you actually decide to defend these ships against enemy fighters, they need
escorts that can survive. This either requires more fighters (expensive), or
extra hulls that mount ADFC's and PDS's. To defend against direct fire
weapons, it has to have more thrust, but more thrust than three requires a
larger FTL, and another hull box (mass 17, MD 5, 2 hull boxes, FTL, ftr bay,
cost 60).
If the carrier force is composed of FB1 style fleet carriers, able to take
some punishment and equipped to fend off enemy scoutships and corvettes, the
number of pts per ftr squadron increases even more.
A dedicated cruiser escort, a-la Atlanta class from WWII (mass 60, MD 4,
FTL, 18 hull boxes,2xscreen, 2xADFC, 14xPDS), costs 202 and, with the fighter
break off rule, can fend off 2, maybe 3, fighter squadrons simultaneously. The
tyranny of numbers means that it does have a
limited anti-ship capability with its PDS suite, allowing it to finish
off the defenceless 45 pt carrierlettes that tried to attack it. A high
acceleration ship with a single class-4 beam can snipe away several of
the carrierlettes while dodging the fighters (mass 50, MD 10, FTL, 10
hull boxes, FC, PDS, class-4(F), cost 161). In a desperate situation, a
quickly produced design of small escort(mass 12, MD 2, FTL, hull box, ADFC,
7xPDS, cost 47) should negate the power of min. pts per ftr carrierlettes for
less cost.
So the carrier uber-task force is at the mercy of other kinds of task
forces made up of ships that a balanced spacefleet will have on hand in
sufficient numbers or can quickly build (assuming small ships build faster
[compared by mass] than large ships). Now all you have to do is prevent the
"Two entire nation fleets meet in an unbalanced situation", which is done by
allowing fleets to disengage from battles they do not need to win.
Richard Bell wrote in reply to Stiltman:
> I've had an ambition to set up some sort of larger campaign game
This depends quite a bit on what rules you use. Stiltman doesn't use the
fighter morale rules, or even the fighter squadron rules, which means that his
massed fighters are very much more powerful than they'd be if he'd used all
the published fighter rules.
No matter which dogfighting rules you use, 2:5 odds means that your
interceptors will last about one turn (unless the enemy goes all-out on
Attack or Torpedo fighters, that is). If you use the FT2 dogfight rule
(simultaneous fire) the interceptors will most likely take out enough enemies
to save the Komarov (though not without serious damage); if you use the FB
rules instead (one squadron at a time) they most likely won't save it at all.
> and my class-3's will be giving some of the enemy pilots dark thoughts
Um... exactly how did the thrust-2 Konstantin get to within 36mu of the
equally maneuverable soap-bubbles? I think you can safely assume that
the fighters launch some way away from the carriers - 60-80mu away or
so. Unless you play on a fixed board, the Konstantin is unlikely to catch the
carriers at all.
> If you actually decide to defend these ships against enemy fighters,
Fighter superiority is a pretty good defence against enemy fighters,
and the soap-bubble carriers will have fighter superiority against just
about any other type of fleet.
> To defend against direct fire weapons, it has to have more thrust, but
...or its fighters can take the attacker out before the soap-bubble
comes under fire :-/
> A dedicated cruiser escort, a-la Atlanta class from WWII (mass 60, MD
*IF* it gets close enough before the soap-bubbles hyper out, yes.
Otherwise it'll only kill the fighters (and - since Stiltman doesn't
use the fighter morale rules - will take some damage doing so, as
well).
> A high
With an (F)-arc weapon, your attack location is quite easy for the
carrier player to predict (at least within the 18mu he needs to attack
you) - which means that the enemy fighters will be there. Use an
off-set arc, or a multi-arc weapon, or have MUCH more point defences,
if you want the sniper to survive to shoot more than once.
Regards,
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> It costs at least 45 pts to field a fighter squadron (mass 12, MD 2,
Oerjan touched on a fair amount of this, but I'll go into a little more
detail. He's correct about my observation of fighter morale (i.e. none
:)
but we _do_ play on a fixed board, which makes things a little less
yucky but not much. We play simultaneous fire, all fighters in a pile fire at
once.
Even on a fixed board, a single Konstantin is highly unlikely to reach a group
of dedicated carriers alive. (Oerjan calls them "soap bubbles"... my usual
designation is "Clams".) For the amount of cost it takes you to throw those
six interceptors at me, I can as easily bring up four Clam class carriers
(weak hulled, MD 1 carriers with 4 fighter bays) that will likely throw
roughly nine heavy fighters and seven torpedo bombers back at you. The heavy
fighters are an even match for your
interceptors head-to-head, except I've got half again as many of them.
My fighters will form a "Chinese wall" between your interceptors and my
bombers and make sure your interceptors never get a shot. If there's anything
left of your single carrier and its popgun PDS armament when the bombers are
through with it (unlikely) the heavy fighters that survived annihilating your
interceptors polish it off.
> If you actually decide to defend these ships against enemy fighters,
My usual tactics for a carrier force these days usually involve one of two
backup tactics. Either I'll have a front-line force of capital ships
equipped with PBLs, or I'll have a skirmisher attachment stacked with needle
beams. In the former case, I'm figuring on simply overwhelming your PDS with
plasma, with the escorts being the first things to go. In the latter case, the
escorts lose their ADFC's to surgical needle strikes before the bombers make
their run.
About the only thing that can much hope to survive one or the other tactic is
something loaded with scatterguns.
> A dedicated cruiser escort, a-la Atlanta class from WWII (mass 60, MD
There are several failed assumptions in this paragraph.
A typical carrier-based task force for me will consist of most or all of
the following elements:
1. A front line of three or four SDN sized ships, average hulls, mass 250,
MD2, two B3's (4 arcs), 6 B2's (all arcs), six fighter bays. Optionally, I
might yank some of the beams off and put in PBL's instead, but I haven't
actually ever used that variant yet. (I typically call these "Star Destroyers"
though they're not intended as literal copies of their namesakes from
SW.)
2. A backup line of five or six "Clams", weak hulls, mass 60, MD1, four
fighter bays.
3. A skirmisher detachment of either "Needle Shrikes" (cloaking light escort
cruisers with 8 needles, MD6) or "Armor Shrikes" (non cloaking armored
strong-hulled battlecruisers, MD 6, 10 needles).
The total task force will probably have around 30-40 apiece of needles
and fighters.
Pretty much everything you describe above would get shredded pretty trivially
by this force. Your escort cruisers would have Shrikes all over them, if you
went all-PDS the Star Destroyers will munch them, if you went fast-B4
they're not going to stay out of both fighter and STD reach very long on a
fixed board,
and if you went balanced I'd simply take my pick of going ship-to-ship
if you specialized against my fighters or letting my fighters chew you up if
you
specialized to go ship-to-ship. Since the prerequisite assumption in
this campaign is that I've got the early resource advantage behind this
carrier
force, you've got a nightmarish task ahead of you playing catch-up
against me.
All I need to do is press this advantage against your production centers, and
a carrier force against a battleship force will nearly always win a war of
resource attrition once they've got the early lead -- the fighters are
far cheaper to replace than the ships they destroy. With the luxury of a
resource
advantage, the initial cheap fighters that the carrier-based navy lost
in order to secure this early advantage can be replaced with much higher
quality stock.
And in simple terms of resource attrition on a fixed-board tactical
field, there simply is no playing catchup against a well balanced carrier
force that can achieve fighter superiority at will and has heavy torpedo
bombers to burn.
> Oerjan Ohlson wrote:
In retrospect, the Konstantin is a very bad choice, as it dies horribly, the
Kra'Vak Ko'San with all interceptors is a much better choice.
> >If you actually decide to defend these ships against enemy fighters,
Not if it attacks anti-fighter heavy forces. Kra'Vak and Sa'Vasku
design rules allow these kinds of forces to be built without totally
sacrificing
their anti-ship capabilities. I shudder to think of the Kra'Vak
response (mass 10, MD 6, FTL, Hull Integrity 2, 4xScatterguns, cost 45). Ten
of these plus a soap bubble carrier against 11 soap bubble carriers will gain
fighter superiority, unless the all the fighters are heavy (which only makes
gaining fighter superiority likely, instead of certain). Point for point, the
sbCV's warp out after inflicting no damage, or are blown out of space.
> >To defend against direct fire weapons, it has to have more thrust,
This is not guaranteed.
> >A dedicated cruiser escort, a-la Atlanta class from WWII (mass 60, MD
If the soap bubbles warp out, it has won.
> >A high
I play vector, for cinematic I sacrifice two hull boxes to have the weapon
fire FP and AP (it will roll as necessary). In cinematic, at high speed it may
be just possible to plan three firing positions, each seperated by 24, and I
pick the one that the fighters can't get to.
> [quoted text omitted]
I suppose a simpler solution is to impose command ratings on the flag ship,
say 5 plus one per crew factor, plus another one for every mass point of extra
"C^3I" equipment (which has a x4 cost multiplier). This will still allow for
flotillas of small vessels, or larger fleets commanded by SDN's, but will make
the soap bubble blast harder to do.
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> A typical carrier-based task force for me will consist of most or all
Optionally, I
> might yank some of the beams off and put in PBL's instead, but I
How does this force deal with an equal valued force of mass 12 soap bubble
carriers?
> Richard Bell wrote
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> > A typical carrier-based task force for me will consist of most or
[Slash of description]
> How does this force deal with an equal valued force of mass 12
Indirectly. Soap bubble carriers are not very useful in a real campaign game
(as you yourself observed) because just about anything that gets past their
fighters can shred them in droves. My preferred method would probably
be to borrow a page from my bro-in-law's screwy tricks book and just
keep a reserve arsenal of cloaking submunition bombships. Turn one, bombships
decloak and inundate the soap bubbles in submunitions without much warning.
Turn two, bombships either cloak and bug out or, if possible and prudent,
FTL-bomb the remaining soap bubbles in kamikaze runs. I don't think
that
submunition bombships are _that_ great of a tactic on the whole, but
they're not bad for softening people up, they're virtually impossible to keep
away from their targets (particularly if the targets are comparatively
immobile, as soap bubble carriers are), and they'd take out soap bubble
carriers at
a five- or even ten-to-one clip in NPV cost.
Most gimmicky ships are not going to be very effective in a long term campaign
game... and soap bubble carriers are about as gimmicky as they get.
> on 8/16/00 20:11, stiltman@teleport.com at stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> Indirectly. Soap bubble carriers are not very useful in a real
I respectfully disagree here. Unless your group plays the cloaked rules
differently I haven't found cloaked ships to be the end all and be all of back
line hitters. The limitation of not knowing exactly where your ship is during
it's moves combined with the need to decide at the time of engaging the
cloaking device how many turns it will remain under cloak makes runs like this
type of tactic a little more chancy.
It would seem reasonable that an opponent have some idea that there are
cloaked ships around somewhere on the table (but where's the real question).
;-) After all there suppose to be a reference marker on the table that
the cloaked ship uses to figure it's new position out from after decloaking.
Another point is that some of people do not allow the cloaking field in their
campaign games, preferring to stay with the Tuffley universe ship systems.
Nova cannons, wave guns, cloak fields (and more) are usually considered genre
specific.
> Most gimmicky ships are not going to be very effective in a long term
Would not a cloaked submunition bombship be considered a "gimmicky" ship and
as such fall under the "not going to very effective in the long term..."
status.
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> My usual tactics for a carrier force these days usually involve one of
Optionally, I
> might yank some of the beams off and put in PBL's instead, but I
A human or phalon force cannot stand up to this set of tactics, except by
being initially unbalanced to start. A Sa'Vasku force of mass 240 SDN's with
20 pod launchers, and the power to use them, backed up by a stinger heavy ship
that jumps in on turn 6 may clean up, except that Sa'Vasku are easy prey for
needle beams, and the closed map kills them (unless power generators are not
allowed to be needle beam targets due to their distributed nature). Against a
Kra'Vak force that is rediculously paranoid about fighters and needle beams,
this force could
be toast (mass 240 SDN, MD 4, FTL, 72 hull, 10xFCS, 14xMKP (F?), 4xK-3
(F), 10xK-1, 32xSG, cost 1038?) I think that a squadron of these would
cause some difficulty as they are not dependent on ADFC's and will destroy all
the fighters plus a ship or two on the first pass. I suspect that the MKP's
are reserved for the shrikes.
It occurs to me that the only simple and balanced way to prevent this problem
is by excluding fighters from your campaign altogether.
> At 01:09 AM 8/17/00 -0400, mary wrote:
[snip]
> A human or phalon force cannot stand up to this set of tactics, except
Actually, the way to balance this is to get rid of the screwy (IMO) house
rules that stiltman and his group plays with, which give an overwhelming
advantage to carrier/fighter based ships.
[to stilt]
No offense intended, Stilt, but while drastically changing the rules to
suit your group's playstyle is the fine & dandy no-one-else-really-cares
sort of thing to do, all of your arguments and points are really presented in
an apples and oranges format, and your designs and tactics need to be totally
reevaluated when you step outside of your immediate playgroup and join other
games that follow more of the "book" as written.
I hope to see you up here at Dragonflight, but *don't* expect me or others
to play by your group's houserules. :-)
> --- -MWS- <mshurtleff1@uswest.net> wrote:
I like someone who states his point of view, twice.
I have only been watching this casually, as any 'over the edge' fleet will be
hard to defeat
in a normal 'one of' type of game. The real test
of the concept is in a campaign! What happen when
the 'bubble' fleet w/o fighters returns to its
'former' home planet and finds another enemy fleet awaiting its return?
Bye, Bye.
Bye for now,
> At 10:53 PM 8/16/00 -0700, John Leary wrote:
Sorry, that was simply a 'digital error' - my digits pressed the wrong
send/reply button and I didn't catch it before mailing it out.
> --- -MWS- <mshurtleff1@uswest.net> wrote:
...
> >I like someone who states his point of view, twice.
> At 01:09 AM 8/17/00 -0400, mary wrote:
> Actually, the way to balance this is to get rid of the screwy (IMO)
house
> rules that stiltman and his group plays with, which give an
No, they don't. Our rules cut both ways -- you don't get to spook the
fighters
for free, but you _can_ kill them more efficiently because we also don't
stop counting kills when you're firing into a crowd at the first six dead.
Since my email yesterday, I've been going over some of the math in my head.
The submunition bomb design I've generally settled on would probably be a mass
34 ship with a cloaking device, fragile hull, FTL, and MD 4 core drive with
modular sockets to fit whatever I felt like adding on for a particular target.
Depending on the mission that the campaign required, I'd have a relatively
small stockpile of spare MKP's, submunitions, scatterguns, fire control
modules, and sublight drive modules waiting to get fitted to them for a
particular task. For soap bubble carriers I'd probably stay with MD 4, and fit
six scatterguns, four FCs, and eight submunitions to each bombship. That would
be enough to fend off the fighter assault of three or four soap bubbles' loads
and present a high likelihood of killing at least four soap bubbles per
bombship, maybe as many as ten if the soap bubbles don't scramble fast enough
and I get a spare turn to fire submunitions against a new set of four with
scatterguns for backup. This is just 48 points' worth of ammo; those soap
bubbles cost 63 points each at barebones payload.
_Very_
cost-effective.
My bro-in-law used to use larger versions of these, which he termed
"Expendible
class escorts" as something of a half-joke to burn off extra NPV he had
in a given game. They'd fly up to my ships, fire off their submunitions to no
great effect (they're nowhere near as efficient against ships with real hulls
and armor), and then get reduced to their component atoms.
> [to stilt]
> I hope to see you up here at Dragonflight, but *don't* expect me or
I'll be there. The wife and I have already arranged for babysitting, and my
bro-in-law lives in Seattle to begin with. :)
And... likewise no offense intended here... but *don't* expect our playgroup
to be complete pushovers when we're there. Our performance at conventions with
people outside our group has not generally called our strategic soundness into
question. (That's putting it very humbly.:)
> Since my email yesterday, I've been going over some of the math in my
_Very_
> cost-effective.
Do you charge a points premium for reconfigurable ships? In campaign terms
they
have to be more valuable, mass-for-mass, than an equivalent sized ship
of fixed design.
[I haven't followed this thread too closely, so excuse me if I've got
the wrong end of the stick].
> --- Tony Francis <tony.francis@kuju.com> wrote:
...Snip...
> Do you charge a points premium for reconfigurable
IMHO a 'reconfigurable' ship must be bought as well as all the modules the
ship can 'morf' into. In a campaign the modules must sit somewhere and are
useless mass waiting to be taken by the enemy, unless they are cargo on a
freighter somewhere, which costs additional points. These are probably not
cost effective if one looks at a stratigic implication of spending lots on
points on optional (and
unusable) modules or buying non-combat
support ships to carry them around so the enemy does not capture them.
Bye for now,
> Tony wrote:
> Do you charge a points premium for reconfigurable ships ? In campaign
Haven't really thought about it. Good question, though, so I'll give you an
answer with a little bit of thought behind it.:)
My way of thinking would be that building a reconfigurable ship would always
involve a premium regardless of whether you charged an extra percentage,
because you'd have to always build more parts for the ship than the ship could
ever use at one time.
For instance, for my submunition bomb design, you'd have to have a spare set
of drives for MD 6 and MD 8 to add on to the core drive systems, and you'd
have to buy about two or three times as much mass in fire control and
expendibles as the thing could actually carry at a given moment, just so that
when you had to stick it all together for a given mission, you'll have
whatever you need. After all, if you don't have the ordnance to use with it,
then
you're stuck with whatever you _do_ have. Because you'd always need to
build more pieces than you'd ever use at once for the actual ship, the extra
unused pieces themselves probably would be the premium in question.
This is all assuming that your production phases and your strategic movement
phases are seperate. i.e. you produce ever now and then, and you have to work
with what you've built for a little while before you can correct any
procurement mistakes. For a ship to be both reconfigurable and useful, this
means you'd have to build all the ordnance you'd anticipate needing for
_all_
of its missions, rather than just building the weapons once and being ready to
send it into drydock if it gets damaged. Conversely, a
fixed-equipment
ship only needs to have the one set of weapons built for it. The gap gets even
more pronounced when all of the ordnance is expendables.
> [I haven't followed this thread too closely, so excuse me if I've got
No prob. I'm not really a meanie, I just play one in games.;)
> On Thu, 17 August 2000, stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> My way of thinking would be that building a reconfigurable ship would
It's an interesting idea. I hadn't followed much of the discussion either as I
usually try to avoid the various homegrown system design discussions. I've
seen too many that are either too specific for me, or are just silly.
The "system rack" idea sounds interesting. One thought, though... all of the
systems that go into each rack would have to either be the same mass or
multiples of the same mass, wouldn't it? Reconfigurable systems would have to
fit in the same size bays. I suppose you could have multiple sized bays,
though.
I would think you'd need some minor mass for the bay, plus systems of that
mass or smaller would be all that could fit in the bay.
Again, I'm with the others as to whether the logistics would be worthwhile in
a campaign game. To restock, the ships would have to be out of commission for
a certain amount of time, even if they didn't take damage. I suspect that a
lot of ships would have to fight in a less than optimum configuration.
Note, this isn't necessarily bad. It's a neat idea and could work well in your
universe. Not all systems have to be optimum. In fact, I happen to like
backgrounds where less than optimum design decisions were made by one force or
another. My own homegrown background has one force without FTL capability,
giving them a ship by ship advantage mass wise.
Out of curiousity, do you know of any sci-fi backgrounds that use this
idea?
I think one area were a module may be of use is in missile ships. Being able
to replace an MT with a Beam 2 when supply lines are getting long could be
useful. With a missile ship you are carting around anyway.
???????????????????????
> Allan Goodall wrote:
> My way of thinking would be that building a reconfigurable ship would
[snip]
> The "system rack" idea sounds interesting. One thought, though... all
Possibly. I probably wouldn't enforce a rule that says you've always got to
stick same-mass modules in the same spots every time. For instance, for
the submunition bomb, you might want more raw ordnance in one case to
concentrate on a single target, or you might want more fire controls to be
able to fire at numerous targets in a spread (e.g. against soap bubble
carriers), or you might want to put on less of both in order to fit an extra
drive module onto the thing so that it can run down a faster target.
For my "submunition bomb", I'd keep something like the following sitting
around ready to fit to it:
A mass-3 drive module (to bring it from MD 4 to MD 6).
A mass-4 drive module (to bring it from MD 6 to MD 8 -- rounding forces
this piece to be larger for a mass 34 ship).
About 30 submunition capsules, and/or...
About 30 MKP capsules.
About 10-20 scattergun charges.
About 6 FireCon capsules.
Ordnance stockpiles could be divided amongst several bombships over time, but
ultimately what I'm looking at here is enough ammunition to be able to carry
the bombship through three or four attack runs against a variety of enemies.
For instance, if was using these things against Noah's B6 skirmishers, I'd
stick the drives on it, use only one FC, and fill out the rest of the mass
with MKP's. For soap bubble carriers, I'd use more firecons, some of the
scatterguns, and the submunitions. For "swarmer" escorts, I'd arm it much the
same way as for soap bubble carriers except substituting more
subs/MKPs
for scatterguns. For targetting enemy shipping, just about any sort of
ship-to-ship fittings will do... although for shipping it'd probably be
a bit meaner if I used a Needle Shrike variant with FTL tug capability and
elected to disable the freighters' drives and popguns and haul them off
altogether
rather than destroying them. (That _really_ is not a nice thing to do.
:)
> Again, I'm with the others as to whether the logistics would be
I agree. You'd have to build quite a stockpile of ordnance to keep the ships
truly reconfigurable for all the missions you have in mind. It might well be
more efficient to just keep lots of variants of the ship without any spare
ordnance and just send whichever kind you need. The flip side to this is that
the various fixed pieces may be more expensive and you may get caught with the
wrong configuration, as you say. The submunition bombship is basically
designed to be combustible anyway, so the spare ordnance might not even do you
much good.
The main reason I'd even bother making the submunition bombs reconfigurable in
the first place is because (a) they're very small, (b) all of their weapons
are one-shot so I probably need to have extra ammo ready to reload for
them anyway, and (c) building a few of these wouldn't make much of a dent in
the macroeconomics of a starfleet, but they can pretty cheaply eliminate the
many forms of fragile-hulled gimmicks that an enemy might think to
invest
in (soap bubble carriers, B4+-and-PDS snipers, etc) at a very favorable
cost-benefit ratio.
> Out of curiousity, do you know of any sci-fi backgrounds that use this
If you're talking about reconfigurable systems, the only one that I can really
think of off the top of my head is the Clans' OmniMechs in the Battletech
system.
> John Leary wrote:
Reconfigurable warships should be more expensive than standard because of the
increased access points needed in the wiring,cabling, ducting,plumbing and
structural systems to allow them to be configurable. The reconfigurable ship
is more fragile because it is designed to come apart. Lastly, the
reconfigurable ship is less reliable because there are many more things to go
wrong, but they are easier to fix because of all that accessability.
So a reconfigurable hull is massx2 instead of massx1, must set
aside 10% of mass for accessways/connection points, and add 1 to the
die for threshold and damage control rolls.
There is a reason that no wet navy has tried this, even though it is nice on
paper.
Hiya stiltman,
> Out of curiousity, do you know of any sci-fi backgrounds that use
stc> If you're talking about reconfigurable systems, the only one that I can
really stc> think of off the top of my head is the Clans' OmniMechs in the
Battletech stc> system.
Star wars to a limited extent in the form of the Strike Class Cruiser which
IIRC had a limited mission configurable loadout ability.
Hi btw:o)
cya,
> At 06:05 PM 8/17/00 -0400, you wrote:
Hmm... check out the SSN-774 Virginia-class sub. I don't think it's
quite
as modular as you're talking -- no sail in to port to quick swap a
module
-- but it does sound like they designed the sub with more modularity in
mind than normal.
See "http://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/nssn.htm", about halfway down
the page.
<< SNIP lots of stuff about cheese-reeking bubble carriers and similar
space-naval abortions...>>
Reading all this stuff about the power of fighters has been interesting, esp.
given that I'm involved in an ongoing argument with other members of my gaming
group about the cost of Ft fighters.
Personal bias addmission: If fighters vanished from FT tomorrow, I wouldn't
miss them one bit...
Given that that's not going to happen, does anyone else think that
fighters are significantly undercosted and/or too powerful for their
present cost?
Fighters are, in FT, the *only* weapon system where if one player brings them
and the other leaves them at home, the figherless player is more than likely
to loose... No other single system, if one player doesn't have it, will
unbalance the game this way.
I've not done the design work or math, but fighters are basically 6
all-arc B1s, with (effectively) near-tabletop range, and they're far,
far tougher than any other method of transporting 6xB1, because you can only
kill them *after* they can already shoot at you. Not only that, they're the
only 6xB1 delivery system that bigger guns cannot kill at greater range than
the B1s can reach. You've got to have specialized
anti-fighter
systems to deal with them.
Two math-type problems that someone might want to tackle:
1. With 9 Mass & 18 NPV, what sort of ship could you build, and would it be
anywhere near as fast, dangerous or survivable as a basic fighter squadron?
(My strong feeling is No, most totally No...There is, after all, no ship
that's totally unhittable if it's over 6" from your ship...)
2. Can 18pts & 9 Mass of ADFC/PDS do a good, quick job on a standard
fighter squadron? (Probably, but I'm not sure...)
My 'fix' for fighters would have them fire as PDS - 4/5/6(x2) at other
fighters, 1pt on 6 against ships. That, or at least double the cost of a
fighter squadron. Given that the rest of my playing group is much enamoured of
fighters and doesn't see any problem with them, I've got the proverbial
snowball's chance of having any modifications accepted.
My (longish) $0.02...
> Mr. Bell wrote:
...
> There is a reason that no wet navy has tried this, even though it is
I don't know... depends on what scale you're talking about. Just about every
Navy since World War II has flown fighter craft that can carry about whatever
sorts of armaments you feel like hanging off a pylon. You could carry extra
fuel tanks, bombs, missiles, whatever... if the plane's capable of lugging it
around, you can arm it. The most obvious example in the U.S. Navy today would
be the F/A-18 -- stick air-to-air missiles on it and it's an
interceptor;
stick air-to-surface missiles on it and it's a bomber.
I see no reason why fighters or even small ships in FT couldn't advance that
technology forward to a degree where, such as in the case of my "submunition
bombs", a ship armed partially or entirely with expendible ordnance couldn't
be fitted with just about any other similar-sized ordnance in place of
whatever it used up on the previous sortie. I don't know if it would be real
believable that a "ship of the wall" could just have all its weapons torn out
and replaced, no. However, even "ships of the wall" have some of this ability
in FT in the form of whether they wish to deploy ER or normal missiles in
their SML magazines. Similarly, I see little cause for why, if the technology
is available, a small craft couldn't simply deploy any sort of ammunition in
its
one-shot arsenal, possibly mounting these on pylons much like
present-day
fighter craft... and maybe mixing those weapons pods with spare drive pods,
etc. If all of the pieces were small enough that a navy could
mass-produce
them, I don't see a reason why you couldn't fit a small ship with them at all.
G'day,
> Reconfigurable warships should be more expensive than standard
If they're dedicated modules though that slip full made and whole onto a
pre-existing spin, then why? The modular stuff I've got from my
"penguins
in space" is much more along the lines of - same bridge bit and engine
bit always, but forward bays are interchangeable between cargo space, weapon
loaded and hangar bar space. They just slot in and get locked down - I
have fiddled with doing thresholds on the joining points and it can be very
funny to suddenly see a row of hull boxes and a quarter of you ship 'float'
away;)
> So a reconfigurable hull is massx2 instead of massx1, must set
I think this is too excessive all up. Why 2xmass when they have to have the
extra mass as well, ducting is ducting in my view (now all the engineers
get free hit at Beth) and the +1 seems a bit painful if applied to all
systems not just the interchangeable ones. But that's just me.
Cheers
Beth
> --- Beth Fulton <beth.fulton@marine.csiro.au> wrote:
XXX With luck, the future will be able to design to a standard. The only thing
a module should need (in space) is; air, water, power, and a
sensor/FCS data line. There would be at least
two of these connections on a 'warship' module, and the locations would be
fore and aft. XXX
> If they're dedicated modules though that slip full
and could have only limited effect on the ship itself. More on this later. XXX
> I have
XXX The 'cargo' would not be able to take any 'hull' boxes with it if it
should be 'disconnected' from the hull. I can accept the premise that the
module can (and possibly should) have a
weak (10% of mass) hull of its own. These
hull boxes would be added to the ships hull during combat. XXX
> >So a reconfigurable hull is massx2 instead of
XXX
Just 'me too' Beth. I would think the penalty
should be not more than one mass point for the additional hatches and wiring,
if at all. The additional module costs for one ship will
be a large enough penalty. The other thing one
must consider if the limited arc of fire for an imbedded module weapons mount,
I would think that
180 degrees would be the maximum. The fore/aft
arcs are pretty much off limits to the bay mounts. A single ship might have to
build: 2 hanger bays, 2 beam bays, 2 SLM bays, 2 Pulse torp bays, 2 ADAF bays,
This would be reduced if one was willing to mount
mixed weapons bays. Still, building at least
five types of bay would bring a heavy points cost to the ship. A few of these
things could be of use in a secondary theater of war but faced with real
warships in primary operations; too much (point) cost, not enough ability,
underutilized assets. XXX
> Cheers
Bye for now,
G'day John,
> XXX
Sorry poor wording on my part, basically what I'd been playing around with was
having the 'hull' boxes associated with the module drawn on the module so when
you lost the module (link broke) you lost the lot.
> The additional module costs for one ship will
That it is.
> The other thing one
I ended up doing something like this, beams in modules being installed in
broadsides and the B1 module was always placed at the front of the ship (so
nothing in its F arc to get in the way... that was my justification anyway).
> A single ship might have to build.....
Basically I have cargo modules to fully fit out all my cargo ships then I had
a smaller and limited number of 'weapons' modules stockpiled at home
ports. I can't ever fit out all my ships as warships (less than half). This
came out of my background being sci first then a fleet to protect itself,
something I was trying to stay true to but probably not to everyone's taste in
an all out campaign.
> A few of these things could be of use in a
True, which is why the IAS now have a small dedicated fleet, but the modular
ships still help quite a lot to bulk out a force or serve as the
primary force in a pinch. There maybe a small factor of sentimentality
attached to their long and faithful service too;) For the small nations which
pepper the space we often play in they're a good way of having an OK fleet
that pays for itself in many ways.
Cheers
Beth
> --- Beth Fulton <beth.fulton@marine.csiro.au> wrote:
...
> For the small nations which pepper the space we
Greetings Beth, In some ways the concept reminds me of the a (fast) subsidized
merchant being converted to
an auxiliary cruiser (or Q ahip). The military
part in building the hull is the additional thrust
(2 civilian + 2 military = 4) that would be paid
for out of military (points)funds. I more consider this concept to be an
interesting mental exercise in design that is useable mostly in a campaign.
Bye for now,
> Basically I have cargo modules to fully fit out all my cargo ships then
This
> came out of my background being sci first then a fleet to protect
> something I was trying to stay true to but probably not to everyone's
> in an all out campaign.
Great Minds Think Alike. I had the same idea for the OU, the only difference
being that the ships were primarily patrol rather than scientific exploration.
But capable of the latter.
> Richard Bell wrote:
[Snip reasons why modular ships don't work]
> There is a reason that no wet navy has tried this, even though it is
"No wet navy" obviously doesn't include the German and Danish navies, since
they already have a number of modular warships in operation. IIRC the USN
plans to make its DD21 class modular, and there are a bunch of other navies
having the same idea as well.
It hasn't been used *earlier*, simply because it has been too hard to build
robust module interfaces. It *is* being done *now* however, and I think it's a
rather safe bet that it will be done even more in the future.
Regards
About Stiltman's fighter houserules:
IME the morale rules drop the combat power of fighters by about as much as 40%
extra casualties would if the morale rules are not used; based on "roughly
vanilla FB1" PDS levels and fighter densities.
Not using the squadron rules increases fighter casualties. If the defender
uses scatterguns or SV Interceptor pods exclusively the fighter casualties go
up by about 30%; if OTOH the defender relies mainly on PDSs (or other weapons
which use the PDS or weaker mechanics) it only adds about 10% casualties.
So, well... Yes, Stiltman's non-use of the fighter squadron rules goes
some way towards balancing his non-use of the fighter morale rules; but
even if you load up on scatterguns it doesn't go all the way.
Regards,
> Brian Burger wrote:
> Given that that's not going to happen, does anyone else think that
Not if you use the fighter morale rules. If you don't use them, then yes.
> Fighters are, in FT, the *only* weapon system where if one player
Never encountered a serious ADFC phalanx, or scatterguns?
All weapons in FT have their counters: screens vs beams and PBLs,
armour vs. everything except large K-guns, PDS etc. vs. fighters/
missiles/PBLs. If you don't have the appropriate defensive system(s) to
your opponent's main armament while *he* has the counter to *yours*,
you're in trouble - but that's just as true if you field ships with
level-2 screens and heavy armour on a Weak hull against the Kra'Vak as
if you go up against a fighter strike without any point defences <shrug>
> I've not done the design work or math, but fighters are basically 6
Um... point defences fire *before* the fighters get to shoot, you know.
> Not only that, they're the only 6xB1 delivery system that bigger guns
That's true.
> Two math-type problems that someone might want to tackle:
"9 Mass and 18 NPV" doesn't make much sense - "how far can you travel
for $10 and a horse", kind of. Translate it all into NPV instead; the 9 Mass
fighter bay costs 27pts itself plus a minimum of 16.5 pts for the hull and
engines of the carrier, for a total cost of 61.5 pts (about as much as a
frigate).
> 2. Can 18pts & 9 Mass of ADFC/PDS do a good, quick job on a >standard
Most certainly. 1 ADFC + 7 PDSs inflict on average 5.6 kills before the
fighters get to shoot back, and they cost 16 points less than the fighters.
The remaining 0.4 fighters (on average) aren't likely to do
very much damage even if they make their morale check :-/
Regards,
> At 08:18 PM 8/18/2000 +0200, Oerjan Ohlson wrote:
In our group's experience, the Fighter Morale rules are *critical* in play
balancing custom-design fleets, especially if you don't allow
'mixed-tech'
designs in your games.
> Fighters are, in FT, the *only* weapon system where if one player
<G> A good ADFC phalanx does go a long way in keeping your ships alive when
your opponent is either fighter or SM happy, doesn't it? Almost every cap ship
that I have in the K'rathri fleet includes at least 4 PDS and an
ADFC as standard equipment. When playing against a human-tech Fleet
Carrier opponent, it makes for very close and enjoyable games. :-)
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
house
> > rules that stiltman and his group plays with, which give an
_Very_
> cost-effective.
But the rules in FB2 say that you cannot mix tech (scatterguns and
submunitions) unless everyone agrees. So you need to make your fleet entirely
Kra'Vak, or forget the scatterguns. How much does it cost to make the soap
bubbles cloak? They cloak immediately after launching fighters and uncloak a
secretly determined, but random time later; hopefully to recover them,
possibly just to see that they must run. the density of fighters becomes less
than ideal, but now you have to be lucky to be uncloaked at the same time that
they are.
> Brian Burger wrote:
That is 9 Mass & 45 NPV (or 51 or 57 or 63 for better fighters) as the
fighters are not free.
> 2. Can 18pts & 9 Mass of ADFC/PDS do a good, quick job on a standard
20 pts and 9 mass gets you an ADFC and 7 PDS which should kill 4.67 fighters,
5.6 if you reroll sixes, with average rolls, which will distinctly impede the
squadron's efficient operation.
> My 'fix' for fighters would have them fire as PDS - 4/5/6(x2) at other
You group does pay for the fighter bay AND the fighters?
If you hate fighters that much, buy FB2 and play the Kra'Vak. You won't need
ADFC's and every 1 mass 5 NPV scattergun destroys d6 fighters (d3 heavies).
They only fire once, have a secondary use against ships, and typically destroy
almost twice their value in fighters (more if you include the cost of bringing
them to the battle). The extra bonus is that the K-1's, which can be
used
like class-1 beams against fighters, have a 30 range against ships.
Don't forget fighters don't fire until after the PDS's and scatterguns have
had a go at them.
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
They are not ships, they never operate for more than a few hours at a time,
typically spend as much time down for maintenance that they spend flying, and
can be brought down by a single slug into the wrong component. They prove my
point by being more fragile and less reliable. Also note that the gun pods are
less reliable than internal guns and the stuff hung from a pilon does most of
its own thinking. Lastly, the pilon would be lighter if only one kind of load
could be hung from it.
> I see no reason why fighters or even small ships in FT couldn't
Fine, but they should be limited to the same arc and same use. A fitting for
a submunition cannot handle an all arc class-1, or a scattergun (unless
they only used the same arc. You will notice that everything hung from an
aircraft's wing has exactly the same shape, which limits what it can do.
> I don't know if it would be real
I suspect what actually happened was that SML's were originally the size and
mass of SML-ER's, but a breakthrough added 50% to the range or allowed
them to
only be 2/3's as long, so magazines could handle 50% more short SML's
with the rest of the handling equipment remaining the same. This also explains
why there is only one kind of launcher, but two kinds of racks.
> and maybe mixing those weapons pods with spare drive pods,
You cannot just bolt engines onto a frame. If the pod boosts thrust by
33-50%,
attaching it to the craft is a major exercise as these are not fighter craft
where you bolt on a JATO rocket, the FT universe puts a mass unit at around
100 tonnes. The thrust loads for a dead load and an engine pod are in opposite
directions and very different in size: weapon pod, pylon pulls weapon; drive
pod, pylon pushes ship.
> Richard Bell wrote:
We've toyed with cloaking carriers. Our general experience is that they
work only when you catch your opposition by surprise -- the extra cost
to cloak them is enough that you pretty much have to go for pure fighter
complement, and if your opponent brings a strong fighter complement of their
own they can pretty easily match you fighter-for-fighter and then
annihilate
you ship-to-ship, or just plain take the fighter superiority away from
you at will. If you've got cloaking carriers and your opponent has no
significant fighter numbers, you've got a field day ahead of you... but
cloaking carriers
lose to non-cloaking ones, 100%.
> Beth Fulton wrote:
If the modular bit also incorporates all of the fire control, maybe. But there
is still the added costs of joints that withstand the extreme maneuvering of
the ship without letting go and still be disassembled (which is the hard
part).
> >So a reconfigurable hull is massx2 instead of massx1, must set
(taking my free hit)
2xMass cost for the hull only increases the cost of the ship by slightly less
than a third, and maybe the mass lost can be left out (as all that is really
necessary, upon reflection is more volume). Its not that there is more
ducting, it is that the ducting must have accessable joints in it, and it has
to be designed to be tested quickly and efficiently. Fixed config ships only
have their conduits tested once, because it is never changed and battle damage
is easy to locate. If it has swappable modules, the
ducting has to be tested after every swap. From experience, H/S
integration is expensive, time consuming, and not guaranteed to be on time or
on budget.
G'day,
> If the modular bit also incorporates all of the fire control, maybe.
The basic cargo hauler superstructure has a handful of weapons (2
class1+class2) and its own FC and then each module with weapons on it
has its own FC too.
> But there is still the added costs of joints that withstand the
Noted that's why I have the linkage points and test for them in threshold
checks, they got weakened by a shot and then failed to hold up to the strain
kind of idea.
> 2xMass cost for the hull only increases the cost of the ship by
Given you're already paying for the extra modules that just sit round doing
diddly most of the time I think the extra cost of 2xmass is uncalled for
-
it would be enough I'd say to price it out of being an option for
poor/small navies which it would otherwise be ideally suited for.
> Its not that there
changed
> and battle damage is easy to locate. If it has swappable modules, the
I'll take you're word on this, but I think our different takes have something
to do with our differing views of modules I think. I think of them as being
very discrete so you'd only need an extra bit of access around the locks as by
testing there you'd know which side the problem was on. Whereas I get the
sense you see much more integrated modules and so need more access space
(correct?).
Cheers
Beth
> So a reconfigurable hull is massx2 instead of massx1, must set
This turns out not to be the case. Modlar weapons systems are on US and German
ships, IIRC.
> Beth Fulton wrote:
> >2xMass cost for the hull only increases the cost of the ship by
This really depends on what repair model you are using. If you allow a system
to be replaced with any system of the same mass for its basic
cost, then all ships are modular anyway. If changing a "non-modular"
ship's configuration is more expensive, or more time consuming, than swapping
modules, then some expense must have gone into the modular ship to make
swapping modules easier. Lastly, the modules are not doing diddly if they can
be swapped faster than they can be repaired.
G'day,
> This really depends on what repair model you are using. If you allow
OK the repair model we use is that if its a non-modular ship then you
can only repair the class 3 into as a class 3 etc and that happens within one
week (though you can only get back a quarter of your damaged hull and armour
boxes without actually pulling into spacedock for repairs). If you
change weapons that's an refit and takes multiple turns to complete -
under our campaign scheme you could refit up to 50% of a ship's mass and the
time scale accordingly with a minimum of 1 economic phase (4 campaign turns)
between start and finish of refit. Modular ships were similar in that it
took time to swap modules (the more modules the more time), but they were
slightly faster than refits, but a whole lot slower than repair (as they
didn't happen by the next turn). And yes swapping modules was cheaper than
blanket refitting of ships, but that's because I couldn't 'tool' up all my
cargo haulers into warships (hadn't built enough modules to do that) -
guys with warships could refit all of theirs. Further I'd already paid for the
modules, plus some orbit platforms to protect their storage yards so I think
I'd more than paid fairly for them. I think we're just going to have to agree
to disagree on this one as neither side is going to convince the other I feel.
Cheers
Beth