Senors, ECM, FT and the way of all things.

I'm new to all this so if I do something dumb forgive me. I have been watching
the debate on ECM rules in the mail here and wish to put forward an idea. In
games that a friend and I have played we used a competative roll offs as in
SGII. Each ship, fighter group and missile had and ECM rating and a Sensor
rating which determined the type of die (D4,D6,D8,D10,D12..) to be used. When
a ship came to fire on another, the ship being shot at rolled it's ECM die,
and the attacking ship rolled one Sensor die for each firecon being used at
that target. The result was that you had to concentrate the use of your
firecons on particular targets to ensure a hit, often this meant ignoring
escorts in favour of doing heavy damage to a big nasty that was getting too
close. The same system was used for fighters except that if the fighter group
got with in 2" of a ship the fighter group could always fire. At that close a
range the ship would be a large enough target that you could simply point and
shoot rather that need presise targeting as at long range. We also used the
need for a "lock on" in dogfighting which resulted in fighter groups becoming
bogged down in dogfights but causing no damage to each other. Some rule about
breaking off is needed. This system also limited the effectiveness of missles
and to some extent called for "mass launch" tactics to ensure a reasonable
number of hits. If you don't like such moves you could easily say that missles
lauched from one ship make one test for the group as a whole, making it
possible for all the missles to miss and be wasted. Missle ECM should be
fairly low so that there is still a good chance that they can be shot down by
defencive fire. In the games in which this system has been used were not much
slower than normal. What did slow up the game was all the fighter combats.
Fighter groups were now surviving the entire battle, often without doing much
as they had never gotten a "lock on". Anyway have a think about it.

> all the missles to miss and be wasted. Missle ECM should be fairly low

Except, in theory at least, missiles would be small and hard to detect which
could be reflected by a higher ECM rating.
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> Except, in theory at least, missiles would be small and hard to detect
I agree, but higher ECM rating than what? In a campaign it shouldn't
matter because tech/research level will allow players the possiblility
of producing missles which never miss and can't be shot down (well almost
never) and those that haven't invested wisely in tech get what they deserve.
In one off games there would be a need for balance so that use of missiles
does not dominate the game entirely. Besides missiles are small annd their ECM
rating would reflect this, but apart from motor and warhead they are all senor
and not much in the way of true ECM.