From: Oerjan Ohlson <oerjan.ohlson@t...>
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2004 18:14:31 +0200
Subject: Re: [FT] Fighter thoughts (LONG)
> Grant A. Ladue wrote:
> >>Unless I'm misremembering, fighters have a primary move of 24 mu,
Looking it up in the rules would probably be faster... provided that you
have the rules, of course.
> >>Now, the only way for a ship to outrun a fighter right beside it is
Only if you make the fighter spend CEF for its normal primary move as well as
for "longer" ones, or it has to spend CEFs on other things than moving.
If the accelerating ship is thrust-6, your proposal only makes the
fighters spend CEFs to keep up with it for the last three turns.
> It seems like the fighters in the game are designed to be combat
3 turns sounds overly optimistic to me; 1 or 2 turns is rather more likely
in my experience unless you're using Long-Range fighters. More on this
elsewhere in this post.
> I would consider that 3 turn "combat effectiveness" to be the measure
Coupling this to your concept of using defensive fighters instead of PDS, why
should a fighter be able to stay with a ship for much longer than the number
of combat turns in which it could actually *protect* the ship? Answer: because
otherwise the nasty enemy will delay his attack until your
fighters have to withdraw :-/ (Remember, the movement rules have to work
both when your fighters interact with *enemy* ships and when they interact
with *friendly* ones.)
> >>That means it's got one big honkin' engine or else it it was hauling
Not all of us are, but enough. If no-one flew this fast, then your
worries about fighters getting an effectively "infinite" range by "hitching a
ride"
on fast ships - which was what started this entire thread - would be
completely unfounded :-)
I haven't put many AARs on publicly accessible parts of the web, I'm afraid
(most of them are playtest battles posted to restricted mailing lists). These
two battles
http://lists.firedrake.org/gzg/199912/msg00491.html
http://lists.firedrake.org/gzg/199912/msg00784.html
are pretty typical for my tactics (I flew the FSE in both of them); both
feature relatively fast attacks - IIRC I didn't give any exact
velocities in these AARs, but the FSE light units' ability to go from outside
B3 range
to point-blank in a single turn against stationary NSL ships in the
second (msg00784) battle gives you an idea of their speeds. The FSE heavies
moved at a more stately pace in both battles though (at times flying as slowly
as
20 mu/turn), since the Roma-class BBs are only thrust-4.
(FWIW the second of those battles also saw me using my FSE interceptors in
a PDS role, but keep in mind that this was under the FB1 rules - ie.,
the enemy didn't have *any* weapons capable of shooting at my interceptors
since he had no fighters of his own and his PDSs could only shoot at fighters
attacking their ships... which my interceptors for obvious reasons never did!)
This Australian tournament report
http://lists.firedrake.org/gzg/200104/msg00904.html
features some more extreme velocities, though admittedly that unnamed Phalon
player seem to have had somewhat unusual ideas of what would be
effective fleets and tactics :-/
> At 1 mu = 1", you're going to flying off the edge of the average gaming
> table in 2 turns at that speed.
If you're flying in a straight line, sure - so you need to remember to
change course occasionally! However, it gets much easier to fly fast if you
use 1 mu = 1cm <g>
> Perhaps the best idea is to set your fighter's primary move nearer to
The ships' starting speeds are pretty irrelevant for this, unless you forbid
both sides' ships from accellerating above their respective starting speeds.
Average ship speeds are more relevant, but they don't help much either since
1) players adust their tactics, and thus their average speeds, rather quickly
whenever the rules are changed, and 2) in Cinematic it still only takes one
misjudged fighter primary move to leave the fighters hopelessly unable to
catch up with the ships. (In Vector it is very
difficult to misjudge your fighte primary moves in this way :-/)
> >>In the first case, shouldn't a giant engine *be* able to outrun a
The only reason why they don't seem to use the same physics set to you is that
you are trying to derive the physics from the game mechanics instead of going
the other way around.
To use a similar example from a completely different era: rifles vs. artillery
in WW2 wargames. These two types of weapons operate under the same set of
physical laws both during the actual firing of the weapon and during the
projectile's flight towards its target (the terminal effects of a small solid
bullet obviously differ from the terminal effects of a large HE shell, of
course), yet in spite of that every WW2 wargame I've seen to date uses
different rules for firing and hitting with rifles than they do for firing and
hitting with artillery (even when you ignore the different rules needed to
account for the different terminal effects, that is).
In this WW2 example, slightly different aspects of the same set of physical
laws - mainly muzzle velocity, size-related differences in drag
coefficients between bullets and shells, and elevation - lead to
completely different game mechanics being used to represent the ballistics of
these
two types of weapons on the gaming table. (In this particular case the
physical laws in question are also quite well known, so if you tried to
explain the differences in game mechanics between these weapon types by
claiming that they don't follow the same physical laws your opponents would
most likely laugh you out of the room! There's a lot more room for PSB in
SF games, but that doesn't mean that it is always necessary - or even a
good idea - to actually use all of the PSB room available <g>)
The principal differences between the Full Thrust fighter and ship movement
game mechanics are similar to the above rifle-vs-artillery ones. The
fighter movement game mechanics are essentially the result of a compromise
between on one hand the desire to represent the "zippyness" fighters
demonstrate in the various SF universes that feature fighters at all, and
on the other the game-play requirements of not having to write movement
orders for fighters, not making fast-moving ships able to easily outrun
friendly and enemy fighters during tactical battles, and enabling you to
keep your fighters close to your fleet without letting the enemy know where to
launch his missiles and plasma bolts until you actually move the ships. IOW,
unless you absolutely *want* the fighters to follow different physical
laws than the ships, slightly different aspects of the same physics - in
this case high vs low manoeuvrability - are quite sufficient to explain
why they use different game mechanics.
> In any case, I would also argue that the fighter has much less reaction
> mass to push *with* as well.
In absolute terms, the fighter certainly has less reaction mass. But does it
have less reaction mass *in proportion to its payload mass* than the
ship has? :-)
> A ship can be 99% engine much more easily than a fighter.
Not if said ship is simultaneously expected to carry any useful amounts of
weapons and defences, a crew larger than the fighter's single pilot, and
enough life support to keep said larger crew alive for weeks or months.
('Course, if you're determined to derive PSB from the existing game mechanics,
your "ships can be 99% engine" theory is also flatly
contradicted by the Fleet Book ship design rules - ships can never use
more than 93% of their mass for engines, and even 93% is only possible if the
ship is completely unarmed...)
> Heck, how many actual games take much more than seven turns?
Quite a few if you use Cinematic movement; not so many if you use Vector.
You seem to be equating "combat effective duration" with "turns of firing",
BTW - but tactical battles often feature a number of turns during which
there is no firing at all (only movement) because none of the units
involved are in range of the enemy. Your proposals - particularly the
second one - can easily result in fighters getting only one or even zero
turns of firing (ie., what you call "combat effective duration") simply
because they can't catch up with the enemy without expending a lot of CEF and
need to spend some of the CEF not used for moving on other things than firing.
> >>I mean the rule as it is now means that a large ship can *never*
Would the 5-man scoutship "towing along" a mere 12 one-man fighters be
any
more palatable? Or, for that matter, a 61-man escort cruiser towing 96
one-man fighters (16 groups, ie. 2-3 fleet carriers' worth of fighters),
or
if the battle is 5000+ pts a 220-man superdreadnought towing along 330
one-man fighters (55 squadrons)?
> >Your second concept - burn CEF whenever the fighter is moving faster
Only for secondary moves. Screening movement currently doesn't require any
explicit burning of fuel at all...
> >The 4 PDSs fire 4 dice at the missiles; the PDS/fighter combo fires 8
One less FCS on the PDS/fighter side makes the comparison 20-25 pts for
the
4 PDSs vs 65-75 pts for the PDS/fighter combo, so the PDS/fighter combo
still costs at least three times as much to buy as the 4 PDSs.
Of course, by reducing the number of FCSs you also increase the risk of having
your ship end up with too few FCSs to use its surviving *offensive*
weapons effectively after a threshold check or two :-/
> >If you add some FCSs and/or ADFCs to the 4 PDSs, their total cost
Every single direct-fire anti-ship weapon covering the correct fire
arc(s) aboard the enemy ship.
> How much damage potential do they lose by not shooting at the ship
Depending on exactly what types of weapons they are, how much CEF your
fighters spend on evasive manoeuvres, and what screen level your ship has,
those weapons could lose anything from 90+% of their damage potential
all
the way down to negative amounts - ie., in some situations they'll
actually *gain* damage potential by shooting at your fighters (usually if your
ship is heavily screened and your fighters don't spend enough CEFs on
evasion).
In addition any direct-fire damage potential lost by shooting at your
fighters also has to be weighed against the damage potential *gained* by
the incoming enemy *missiles* through the destruction of some or all of the
fighters you hoped would stop said missiles from harming your ship.
> Still, I'm wondering how many rounds of really effective anti-missile
Most do; a few run out sooner.
However... you're assuming that you'll actually get 3 turns of shooting out of
the 6 CEFs your fighters have each. As mentioned in passing above, that
looks like a pretty optimistic assumption to me even under the beta-test
rules as written: fighters in a defensive posture will most likely have to
spend CEFs on evasive manoeuvres even on turns when there aren't any missiles
or similar to defend against (otherwise they become attractive
targets for enemy long-range fire, particularly if the enemy plans to
hit you with missiles later on), they may very well need to spend more than 1
CEF on evasion in a single turn (particularly if the enemy gets close), and in
fleet actions they may even have to make secondary moves in order to get into
position to engage the incoming missiles.
> >>The positive is [snip a number of true positives] no vulnerability
If you really do think that, you have completely forgotten about the part of
the enemy's firepower which caused you to put your fighters onto PDS
duties in the first place - namely the enemy missile salvoes homing in
on your ship. You need your fighters alive to shoot those missiles down; if
your fighters are shot down by the enemy ship, the missiles are likely to rip
your ship a new set of engine exhausts.
> In effect, he's spending fire on shooting at your PDS (the fighters)
with
> no chance of hitting hull.
But he isn't just "shooting at your PDS with no chance of hitting hull".
Quite aside from the fact that each defending fighter destroyed makes it
easier for his missiles to inflict some very real hull damage on your ship,
those fighters are more than "just PDS" - they're also part of your
entire *fleet's* hull integrity and offensive firepower. In order to win the
battle the enemy needs to defeat your *fleet*, which usually isn't the same as
defeating the one specific *ship* you are analysing... but since you're
looking at this one single ship only, you're effectively ignoring what happens
to the rest of your fleet. This skews your analysis.
In addition, when you bought your fighters you spent points on their
non-PDS aspects as well as on their PDS capabilities - and these points
are points you *didn't* use to improve the hull integrity or offensive
firepower of the one ship you're analysing. Because of this, if the enemy
brought fewer fighters to the battle than you did he almost certainly starts
the battle with more of both offensive firepower and hull integrity
than your *ship* did - so even if he "wastes" some of his firepower
against your fighters (and doesn't manage to recoup it by improving his
missiles'
chances to damage your ship), you're the one playing catch-up since you
are in effect keeping the part of your fleet's offensive firepower and hull
integrity made up by your fighters out of the fight. In this situation your
ship *has* to inflict more damage on him than he inflicts on your ship just to
get a draw... and that's assuming that any fighter losses you take are
irrelevant for the victory conditions :-/
(FWIW each of your fighter groups has about the same combat power and points
cost as a frigate, though of course the fighters' options for applying their
combat power are different than the options available to the frigate.)
> On top of that, he's just lost any extra damage each hit would do
If he's using K-guns of size 2 or larger, P-torps or Grasers to shoot at
your fighters with, then he loses any extra damage per hit. Beams, Pulsers and
SMPs OTOH inflict one damage point per hit (and conversely each damage point
they inflict is a separate hit), so they only waste damage against
fighters if they overkill an entire fighter *group*; and K1s very rarely
inflict more than 1 pt of damage per hit anyway so the risk of them wasting
damage isn't very big either :-/
> Would you shoot at a PDS when all you could damage was the PDS itself?
If you need that PDS to defend against my missiles, of course I'd shoot at the
PDS. This is of course exactly the situation your ship is in in the example
forming the basis for this current discussion: according to your
specification it has three enemy salvo missile salvoes homing in on it, no
nearby friendly ships to help it out, and the friendly fighter group
screening it form the majority of its anti-missile defences...
If OTOH there *aren't* any missiles threatening your ship, then I'd
probably ignore your fighters if you kept them in a defensive posture -
but in this case keeping your fighters in a defensive posture would be a waste
of points (ie., poor tactics) on your part, since doing so would prevent
your fighters from contributing anything to your fleet's performance!
> >(Generally speaking, you seem to be thinking in terms of one single
> analyze.
Maybe it is too complicated for inexperienced players (though I've seen
some quite good fleet-level analyses by newbies, so it can't be too
complicated for *all* of you), but not for veteran players. This may sound
arrogant, but you'll probably find it a lot easier to make fleet-level
analyses when you have gained more on-table FT gaming experience.
> If you don't simplify it somewhat, it's too hard.
The trick is to simplify away the right details. Unfortunately some of the
details you're leaving out are very important indeed for fleet-level
battles.
> What works for a single ship versus an equal point count of ships
It "should"? Too bad, because it doesn't. Full Thrust's fleet dynamics are
quite different from single-ship dynamics even when all ships in the
battle
are identical - and if the ships are *not* identical, the differences in
ship- and fleet-level game dynamics quickly become profound.
> It's not exact, but it's a lot more manageable.
It may be more managable, but it's not just "not exact" - it is directly
misleading outside single-ship duels. In effect your single-ship
approach makes you think that you're victorious because the one ship you're
looking at is untouched, while in reality you're losing badly because the
*rest* of your fleet has been destroyed... which is a mistake you'd never make
in an
actual on-table game where you can see the status of your entire fleet
at the same time.
> >>>PDS and fighters definetly, but just fighters...eeek.
Sorry, I was unclear here. This should have read "On a single
*fighter-carrying* ship, yes." - a pretty important difference, as
you'll see below:
> >In an entire fleet, usually not (though of course it
Only if all ships in the battle carry similar proportions of PDS to fighters.
However, unless your fleet consists of dreadnoughts only you'll most likely
have a number of smaller ships as well which don't carry any
fighters at all, but which do carry one or more PDSs each... and under the
beta-test fighter rules they're a lot more able to use those PDSs than
they
used to be, too :-/
Regards,