Well, if there were two major categories of things that would draw point

Well, if there were two major categories of things that would draw point

defense, we made them allocate in blocks as to how much got used against

plasma, how much against missiles, and how much against fighters. Any point
defense you fired at fighter attacks blew away an equal proportion of each
different sort of fighters, with the idea that they were assumed to have

good enough electronics that you couldn't easily tell who was equipped with
torpedoes and who wasn't.

We also never would have had multiple "half squadrons" in our games, these got
recombined. Fighter morale would've required too much bookkeeping (and our PBS
usually held that the interstellar powers that used fighters in any numbers
would usually use automated or lobotomized pilots of some sort that didn't
care whether they survived or not).

In the actual games, missile-fighter combinations never actually came
up. I was quite fond of combining plasma with fighters, because the area
defense phalanxes that were most effective against fighters were natural
targets for concentrated plasma. Missiles and fighters didn't really strike me
as something where you got enough of a return on your investment to be worth
combining instead of using just one or the other, so I never used them
together.  A combined plasma-and-fighter offense with beams for a modest

secondary offense to keep people honest on ship-to-ship engagements and
scatterguns to keep them honest on fighters were pretty much the optimal

strategy in our games.  (Yes, we mixed tech among the non-SV freely.)

E

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