Hiya
With all this talk about new ideas for FT III, I thought I should add
something that I'd like to see clarified in the fleet book. This question has
been discussed on the mailing list in the past:
How do you determine if a ship is a "carrier"? This is relevant to the rules,
since only carriers can launch two fighter groups per turn. There are also a
couple of related questions: a) Can escorts & cruisers carry fighter groups?
b) If a cruiser has two or three fighter bays, does that make it a "carrier"?
> Hiya
We could probably define a "carrier" as any ship that devotes at least a
certain given% of its available system mass to fighter bays (how about 50%,
though perhaps it should be more?).
a) The original intention in FT was "no", but in hindsight I don't see a
problem if your opponents agree with your designs. Little carriers can be fun.
b) see mass % answer above - depends what % limit you set; most cruisers
won't have room for much else if they have more than 1 fighter bay!
On Wed, 2 Apr 1997, Ground Zero Games wrote, in reply to Rick:
> >How do you determine if a ship is a "carrier"?
> We could probably define a "carrier" as any ship that devotes at least
Well... the two percentages I've seen suggested on this List are 50% and 66%.
It is irrelevant for escort since they can't carry more than one fighter bay,
though, and a cruiser with two fighter bays always uses at least 66% of its
mass and probably more:)
> a) The original intention in FT was "no", but in hindsight I don't see
Another FT3 suggestion.
If all mass is available, but a certain percentage is taken by drives and FTL,
then the first fire con had best be free or cheaper than 3 MASS or something,
or the smallest ships don't get designed.
Similarly, if MASS is the only design limit, what's extra the cost for extra
damage control parties?