Oerjan said, in reply to John A.:
Basic premises are reasonably OK - though note that neither torpedoes
nor
SSMs/ASMs are necessarily single-hit-kill systems against today's
warships!
- but the conclusion you draw from them is not. In historical wet-navy
conflicts the weapons carried by small ships were usually unable to even
damage large battleships until the torpedoes and missiles came around; but
in Full Thrust even a tiny B1 battery can damage a superdreadnought -
and a lot of B1s can destroy an SDN with a hundred tiny cuts. This fact alone
severely upsets comparisons between Full Thrust and historical wet-navy
fleets.
TomB: The way Oerjan describes earlier small craft vs. larger ships reminds me
of More Thrust style Kravak armour... where things just seemed to bounce off.
That style of armour offers a different type of challenge in FT in terms of a
tactical point evaluation (worth some value vs. big guns, but worth a lot more
versus effectively ineffective smaller weapons). But I do miss that sort of
idea being present in the game, despite me knowing some of the game balance
reasons why this is so.
But as OA says, in the FT universe, a swarm of well flown escorts can see the
death of cruisers and capitals. Vector makes the missile boat swarm an easier
tactic, especially against ships like the NSL SDN, which has a very limited
manouver envelope (insufficient to escape salvos placed at the endpoint of the
drift). This means the only time you won't hit it is when you are a)
blisteringly inept or b) he shoots down your missiles or takes out the
launching ships FCS or SMR. This is yet another example of where points costs
for cinematic and vector diverge (or at least should, if they map to relative
efficacy... an MD2 SDN in cinematic is no
agile cat, but at speed 20+, it can still present some tough choices to
an attacking missileer. In vector, your speed doesn't matter... there's just
no avoiding those SMs.
Do people play with the core systems optional rules?
My group does nto play with them but to me they look like they could be a
leveler between bigger and smaller ships.
A lucky hit to a SDN Core system could kill or render ineffective a larger
ship while possibly making negliable difference to the survivability of
smaller ships (which tend to be binary alive or dead).
In our campaign games destroyers and light cruisers are great for small scale
engagements but not much use in bigger fleet engagements.
I can see missile boats having a use in fleet engagements darting in to make a
missile attack from behind the main line kind of like light cavalry or for
racing around the main battle line to outflank the enemy and deliver an attack
from outside their main fire arcs.
Such attacks historically and in FT games tend to be very costly to the
attacking light ships. But they might just bag themselves a SDN with a lucky
torpedo in the life support.
> A lucky hit to a SDN Core system could kill or render
You have to get through two layers of hull to get a chance at the Core
systems. That's more than "a lucky hit".
With the rules as written, core systems make it likely that core systems take
a ship out of action before it is destroyed. Striking the flag does the same.
We play a lighter version of core systems (as outlined in the CVS repository)
where the 'core' takes a threshold check, not each core system. Even so, the
game sometimes feels like Red Chicken Rising, the space combat game whose
underlying design philosophy is that all warships are destroyed by critical
hits, none by a steady wearing down of the hull.
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> McCarthy, Tom (xwave) <Tom.McCarthy@xwave.com> wrote:
I sometimes play with a similarly implemented 'lighter' set of core rules that
a friend of mine came up with years ago (when the core rules first appeared).
They aren't as destructive to ships in question, but have their own set of fun
(such as "comms systems down, write your movement orders one turn in
advance"). I had posted them way back when (should be in the archives).
Okay, may not mean anything here or there; just a side distraction. :-)
Mk
> John Tailby wrote:
> Do people play with the core systems optional rules?
Around here we usually use the "watered down" version Tom described.
> My group does nto play with them but to me they look like they could be
'Fraid not; instead it stacks the odds even more heavily against the little
guys since they take their Core thresholds so much sooner than the big
capitals.
Regards,