From: Thomas Barclay <Thomas.Barclay@s...>
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 02:47:22 -0400
Subject: [OT] SFB Fighter comment
I hear a few people piping up about how few fighters were out there or how they were only nuisance value. Holy smokes, but I must disagree. Federation F-14s from the CVA or a full carrier strike wing could majorly wreck things, especially if the flight included A-10 or A- 20 attack shuttles and had good drone loadouts. Not at all to be trifled with. I saw them wreck large fleets of capships. Of course, we often played in 20 cap ship survivor style melees or in fleet battles with 2000-4000 points per side, sometimes with 3, 4, 5 or even 6 sides. One turn has been known to take three hours:) I myself (an inveterate klingon player) preferred my larger fleets to have D6Ds, D7Ds (heavy missile armed cruisers) with very extensive and sophisticated drone mixes, a wrack of pseudo- fighters (like Noam's stingboats) with warp packs and good drones, D7B and Cs with DERFACS for long range fire, and the occaisional cloakes hip or mauler. A nasty combination. But our Feds almost always took CVAs with CC and CAs as escorts and maybe a BC which had IIRC 8 photon launchers. And of course, we had Lyran players who loved to turn on ESGs and plow through the Kzinti fighter and drone waves.... To draw this vaguely back OT, any way to do warp packs for FT fighters or stingboats? I guess fast fighters cover that for the fighter side. For the stingboat, I'd go so far as to suggest an external mounting of a warp pack (ie doesn't eat internal space) which adds (say, to be arbitrary) 50% to your thrust value. The downside is your engines make threshold tests at -1 (more likely to fail) and ONE engine hit destroys the entire main drive. I don't know how I'd point this.... maybe some FT player might have suggestions/alternatives/criticisms?