Re: (2975) Wildstar's "frigates"

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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