Brendan, if you are going to run a warp point defence/assault, using FT
rules, there are some things to be carful of. SML`s are a very leathal weapon
to use when the targets cannot maneuver or have limited speed (like emerging
from a warp point), and if you are using WARPHAWK pods, you need to give these
enough range to clear a area to allow you room to deploy. The warphawk pods
should be small, independently guided ships armed with
SML`s*.
I say this because it allows them to be targeted by ship to ship weapons
(which is given in the novels), and the best tactics for using them is in mass
transits, to overwhelm the opponents. If you design warphawk pods as small
ships, it also allows them to be used as independent missile platform
controlled by a starship. I say this because I once ran a FT senario with
warppoints, and if you can keep your players from realising what you have
planed (and have more than 2 players, so allowing you to have 2 sides, in
different room, with a umpire, you can game the fact that the assaulting
player will have no knoledge of what is on the other side) it makes the game a
lot more interesting. If you can keep the other side from realising what you
have waiting (warphawk pods), they can make a very NICE <g> suprise (well,
nice for one person anyway). This may make the warphawk pods sound very
overpowered, but if you are playing a strategic game, over several
engaugements, and you say that the warphawk pods do ont have FTL (the way I
used them), using them requires a lot of freighters which eats into your
supply/ship construction resorces. This makes the deployment of these
weapons not altogether simple or automatically given.
Hope this give you some ideas, and if done right, it can make a very
enjoyable/ interesting game (and especially if your oppenents figure out
a tactic that you had not thought of to combat the pods, it is a very nice
supprise<g>).
> BIF Smith wrote:
> ...if you are using WARPHAWK pods, you need to give these
Called "SBMHAWKs" or just "pods" in the novel.
> The warphawk pods should be small, independently guided ships >armed
Kinda-sorta.
Just about all Starfire ship-to-ship weapons have *some* ability to hit
pods, but for most of them the range is very short (equivalent to 6mu in FT)
and the hit probability is very low. The only real exceptions are missile
launchers able to fire AFHAWKs or AFMc (that's the capital version of the
AFHAWK, with about three times the range of the standard
version...).
The pods are tricky in Full Thrust, though - particularly their
targetting: each pod is programmed to attack enemy ships of a specific "ship
type" (CL, BB, SD etc). Starfire ship types don't overlap in size the way FT
ships do, so the FT equivalent would be to specify a Mass range instead.
When the pods fire, they spread their salvoes as evenly as possible over *all*
ships of the specified size that are within range. In Starfire this gives rise
to a whole bunch of tricks you can use to counter the pods, but all of these
depend on the missiles being aimed *directly* at their intended target. FT
missiles OTOH are aimed at
*where you think the target is going to be* - and if your intended
target didn't go there but something else did, then the "something else" eats
the missiles instead.
The Bugs didn't use SBMHAWKs in IDG. Instead they used gunboats
(half-way in size between the smallest real starships and the tiny
fighters). One of the strange things with these was that they (unlike fighters
or pods) could be targetted as if they were "real" (but
hard-to-hit) starships (at the full weapon ranges, etc), but *also* as
(easy-to-hit) fighters.
Regards,
Oerjan, a question?
Do MT missiles require the use of a firecon?, because originally they didn`t
(MT saying they had their own AI, this is from memory, don`t have MT to hand
at the moment). I`m asking because it would require the alteration of my
SBMHAWK pod to include a f.con if they do (reduce thrust to 4). Would a lower
thrust pod be a better representation of a pod anyway?