FT fighters question [was Couple More Questions For FT...]

> 1. How do you model Q-ships in FT?

> From: ~ On Behalf Of Oerjan Ohlson

> Stats-wise a Q-ship is a freighter with its cargo holds

I'd say it's more entertaining to play the hunter. If you like shipbuilding,
try building a pot of ships and drawing them as needed. Your merchant convoy
starts as Bogey markers (FT2 pg 21) moving at low thrust. You need to get
close enough to ID whether you are dealing with an unarmed merchant, armed
merchant, auxiliary or full warship. You also need a reaction table to
automate the targets, which might heave to, scatter, FTL, engage then strike
or agressively pursue.

There's also the possibility that you are dealing with a
Q-ship; as scenario designer you need to determine under
what conditions your Q-ship will blow its cover and start
firing, then test for this whenever these conditions are first met when a
target is intercepted.

If you don't like shipbuilding, try the simpler approach of grabbing the stock
Privateer (MT pg 23, but do yourself
a favour and replace that needle beam with a B-battery)
and match it against an underweight escort, say the FT2 Frigate on pg 14 and a
pack of mixed merchants from both pages. Write a simple programmed sequence
for the escort but add random reaction for the merchantment, and see what
chaos results. If you put anything other than a very
small Q-ship in this mix, the Privateer will be too light.

In both cases, don't forget to add the big bad warship arriving on the
penultimate turn. Remember, raiders always lose if their drives get knocked
out!

> CS Renegade wrote:

> >You can get interesting games if the attackers use pre-

If you can set up the Q-ship's pre-programming well, yes... but IME it
is quite a lot harder to get this right (so it reveals itself neither too late
nor too early) than getting the raider's pre-programming right :-/

Later,