In answer to Rob Dean's letter:
> As it is--which comes first? If I reduce armor
>then the enemy will build PA armed ships in their next procurement cycle, and
>I will have to uparmor mine to compensate, as well as be left with a bunch
>of vulnerable ships.
1. Starting with a warship of 52G, agility 6; there is never any possibility of
criticals or interior explosions from any spinal PA via the regular damage
charts. Auto crits cease at 50kt or greater. This is with the largest spinal PA
at TL-15(T-PAWS).
The penalization of having a spinal-PA goes beyond just not doing enough damage.
They take more volume and hardpoints and are much heavier in general than meson
guns. This more than overwhelms any advantage gained via a smaller power
requirement.
On the defensive end, the armor consideration has to be balanced by the
tremendous increase in price, not just for the hull but also for the power-plant
and in crew spaces required to handle this extra increase. A ship designer while
increasing price to add armor should consider the increasing vulnerability to
meson guns and consider increasing the size of the vessel or just building
another one.
> I think real designers faced with this problem would
>either a) accept the PA casualties for increased agility or b) routinely armor
>at such a level as to render PAs useless, and either solution would be
>acceptable.
Agreed. However I would consider armoring to a level to render PAs ineffectual
but not to a level to render them totally useless. PAs can be forced into a
situation where their primary use is to be in a commerce raider type role where
typically unarmored vessels can be found, or against smaller craft where the size
difference overwhelms the armor protection. In the long run your fleet will be
better off as lightly armored(armor<60) with multiple very agile smaller craft
with meson and PA spinal weapons. In a way it is a compromise between the two
points mentioned above.
Battle-tenders vs 'battleships':
>The retreat issue as discussed in old Trav is still valid though--
I am forced to agree but I'll add that if all ships are downscaled then a given
tender could carry more vessels and the ratio of riders lost while screening the
escaping ones can be improved. Their might also be a tendency to commit the
riders to battle first, before any jump capable ships engage. Thus they'll be the
first to be lost in any case leaving the tender with its options open. Finally
as jump drive size and its fuel requirement has gone down, it might be possible
to equip ALL riders with an emergency J-1 drive. They can even jump using their
original P-Plant fuel if it is a large enough amount. A rendezvous point could
be prearranged w/ the tender. In that case the tender might need to be carrying
excess fuel to allow it to do 3+ jumps without refuelling.
>I tend to expect that fleets would run toward medium meson gun jump capable
>cruisers for forward system screens (which would run if disadvantaged) and
>rider squadrons to remain concentrated for the counterattack.
See above for a different view.
>Battleships are very questionable.
Agreed. Atleast in the sense as we believe them to be currently (100ktons+).
Although we can now call anything over 50kt could be a battleship. Any spinal
vessel less than 50kton a cruiser etc.
>A reasonable specification system. Note that thrust based maneuver
>calculations can make it difficult to actually achieve 6-G in any ship
>with even minimal (50+) armor.
That is your variant system. Which incidently means that atleast in your world
protection against meson guns or PA spinals is almost an exclusive or option.
You can be protected against one or the other but not both - atleast not in any
reasonable way.
>Well, I might wish that you would include the Atlantis' 13 2kt+ riders and
>the several hundred fighters with comp-9s in the analysis, figuring that
>these subcraft will act as a screen for a couple of rounds before the main
>ship actually joins combat. After all, they are included in the price you're
>quoting for the price comparison.
Well, I hate to bring this up but in the final analysis the riders and the
fighters are irrelevant and barely worth it (but Glisten is loaded so who cares).
Here is what I got:
The Atlantis battleship is worth between 120 and 150 Sikkinthar SDBs, depending
on whether you go by price or total displacement. We'll take the smaller value.
All values are approximate and broadly rounded in favor of the Atlantis.
Assumption 1:
Atlantis uses its craft as screens, so it takes no part in initial combat.
At any stage if the Atlantis makes an appearance it will be immediately destroyed
as is clear enough from my earlier example.
The 'Atlantis' class carry 3x10kt, 10x2kt, 6x200t, 15x50t, 250x40t
Assumption 2:
It is assumed that each of the 2000t+ ships is capable of destroying one SDB per
round(this is stretching it a bit far as the ration is more likely 3 ships to
destroy 1 SDB). All craft are agility 6 w/ Model 9 comps.
Assumption 3:
All craft under 2000t are armed with missile turrets. The reasoning being that
it has the highest probabity of a hit at any range for a 1 or 2 turret craft.
Round 1:
The 2000t+ craft destroy 13 SDBs. All the other craft combined achieve 23 hits.
It takes about 30 to strip the SDB. End of round 1, 14 SDB destroyed. 106 to go.
The SDBs achieve 40 hits with their missiles and 33 with their spinals. The 13
2kt+ ships are all destroyed as are atleast 40 fighters.
At this rate by the time the entire group will be destroyed in 6 rounds. At which
time there will be about 100 SDBs left. It only takes 5 to blast the Atlantis.
In fact about 50 SDBs of the Sikkinthar type will take out the entire group.
As Dean pointed out Atlantis is a poor design. This situation does not improve
if you take its entire group into account.
> My ships, at least, were High Guard
>conversions, and it should be remembered that it was easy under those
>rules to keep your agility up to the level of your maneuver drive _and_ have
>a reasonable armor class, so the ships mentioned above were not quite so
>crippled as they appear to be now.
Point well taken. But I guess (To belabor the point), not only is MT radically
different than High Guard in construction designs, it also changes the way in
which Space combat takes place.
>Please check my recent designs for the number of craft carrying armor 52
>for this reason...Your analysis is quite correct. The other potentially
>useful armor values are 82 (minimum to avoid all surface damage from
>secondary weapons) and 100 (minimum to avoid all surface damage.) I
>might calculate the mimimum necessary to avoid manuever hits from surface
>damage too. Once again, the spectre of High Guard hovers over the fleets.
Usefulness aside, are they practical in the sense of combat. You may have 82
armor but someone with a "pocket" meson can blow your ship just as easily as a
as a 40 armor cargo ship except your ship cost and weighs 40 times more. High
agility at peak performance provides a more cost-effective defense than armor.
Instead of having agility as a secondary consideration, craft should be built for
agility with armor as an addon if it does not effect performance too much.
>Rob Dean
By some unfortunate coincidence I seemed to have picked all of Rob's design to
prove my theory on. It was an unfortunate coincidence. I'll try to be less
discriminatory in my next few postings.
I'll also try to put up some warships meeting my requirements as soon as they are
done.
Ameer