Wildstar's "frigates"

A thread of 2 messages, 4 October 1991 to 5 October 1991, in the order they were sent.

#2975 Wildstar's "frigates"

[unnamed sender] · 4 October 1991

Well comparing ships with Fighting ships is not really a comparison.
Most ships there are a) Impossible (by MT rules) or b) Useless and
always c) too expensive.

I while back I discussed the issue of cost effectiveness of line of
battle ship designs. The basic philosophy being that the bigger u
make your ship the worse it is. A spinal-T meson can easily fit in a
ship of 20kton (if u do it right). Anything over a 100,000t has to be
a tender not a warship. People have put designs here of ships less
10,000 t displacement with Meson-J with Def DM =+15 these things are
very hard to hit and can destroy any larger ship.

No one has yet come up with a good version of how much money a planet
geneerates but aside from that the basic idea behind ship construction
(for large ships) is to bring the largest number of spinal mesons to
bear for a given price.

A larger very expensive heavily armored ship can be taken out by a
single meson spinal hit. There larger size means that by definition
they have a lower def DM and are basically asking to be hit.


Meson screens are not that difficult to penetrate and rarely have I seen
an irregular config ship. In general it is not the tonnage imbalance that
matters but the spinal meson  bearing. Generally if u can bring an advantage
of 4 to 1 spinals note: they don't have to be equivalent, in fact this assumes
something like 4- spinal-J/H vs 1-spinal-T; the side with the 4-Js will
one. On the face of it that seems trivial but note that spinal J only take
10 hardpoints. They can (theoretically) be put on a 1000t ship.

Spinal -T can fit on a 20kt hull(maybe smaller - but Def DM calculations
don't change).



anyway..... ramblings.....


Ameer

#2977 Re: (2975) Wildstar's "frigates"

Pauli · 5 October 1991 · reply to #2975

hi,


>I while back I discussed the issue of cost effectiveness of line of
>battle ship designs. The basic philosophy being that the bigger u
>make your ship the worse it is. A spinal-T meson can easily fit in a
>ship of 20kton (if u do it right). Anything over a 100,000t has to be
>a tender not a warship. People have put designs here of ships less
>10,000 t displacement with Meson-J with Def DM =+15 these things are
>very hard to hit and can destroy any larger ship.

I agree pretty much entirely with the above, big ships burn better than
small ones.  In a purely naval conflict I would avoid big ships and
build lots of small ships based on smaller spinal mounts (Meson-J is
a very nice choice).  If you know that the opposing fleet is based
around these small meson-J armed ships that don't have all that much in
the way of defences, you would be able to build a cheaper fleet based
around spinal PAs that could be expected to defeat the meson armed fleet.
My prefered choice for a large naval fleet would include lots of ships that
are not too big (say <10kTon), armed with both PAs and meson guns (and possibly
nuke missiles).  A good all round fleet would have a better chance in an
unknown conflict (by unknown, I mean the composition of the enemy fleet is
not known before the design of the friendly fleet is done) than a highly
specialised fleet.  [I am quite sure, that if I saw the designs and
quantities of ANY fleet, I could design a specialised fleet to destroy that
fleet!].

In a fleet where space combat isn't the only thing that has to be done (like
any fleet that is designed for real rather than TCS), larger ships do have a
place.  You need troop ships, carriers for fighters/aircraft.  You have to be
able to conduct planetary invasions (and destructions :-).  A real fleet is
going to be very multi-purpose and diverse.  The intro spiel for the game
harpoon says something like: You cannot win a war at sea, you can only lose it.
I suspect that this also holds for space conflict.


>A larger very expensive heavily armored ship can be taken out by a
>single meson spinal hit. There larger size means that by definition
>they have a lower def DM and are basically asking to be hit.

And any sized meson ship can be taken out by a cheaper/smaller PA based ship
(unless the meson ship is heavily armoured, then an unarmoured meson ship
will be cheaper and able to take it out).




        						Pauli

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