From: [email removed] (David Johnson)
>> I would be hard put to imagine that a world with Regina's yard
>> capacity and budget was restricted to 10 overgrown fighters, or that
>> 10 oversized fighters would pose a serious threat to an invading
>> fleet.
>It may be hard to imagine but it's consist with canonical material. I
>believe there was some stuff in *JTAS* that referred specifically to the
>Regina SDBs as being the 400-ton variety (something in TNS about them
>"vectoring toward Assiniboia"?).
One of the things that happened after High Guard came out was a
major change in the sizes and numbers of Naval vessels cruising about.
For pre-High Guard CT, 10 400-ton SDBs WAS a major defense force --
and a 400-ton patrol cruiser was a real warship, and the Kinunir
(1200-tons) WAS a Cruiser capable of subduing anything in the
subsector. Post-High Guard and "Supplement 9: Fighting Ships" (the
REAL "Fighting Ships"), 10 SDBs was a joke, not a force. The Kinunir
becomes a light escort, comparable (loosely) with the Chyrsanthemum
and Fer-de-Lance class escorts. If you are playing in a High
Guard/MT/TNE universe, do not take anything from early JTAS or very
early supplements about Naval strength as "canonical". The "canonical"
material isn't self-consistent; it was composed over at least two
different "world-views". You have to decide which world-view you are
using, and throw out the material that is inconsistent with that view.
I have been assuming a post-High Guard+ worldview. It is
possible, even likely, that the apparent inconsistency between TCS
strengths and 5FW counters relates to the shift in Naval strength
between pre-and post-High Guard. Did 5FW come out before or after
High Guard?
>It's clear from *5FW* that SDBs depend
>upon world population (although I couldn't find a clear pattern and
>I played with the values from *5FW* and *S3:SM* for quite a while).
>I feel Imperial military doctrine doesn't call for SDBs to be a
>significant factor in a major war - that's the role of the Navy.
>SDBs are more for dealing with raiders and pirates.
I believe that the WAR! issue of JTAS had designer's notes for
5FW, and how to derive your own defense batallions and SDB strengths.
Unfortunately, I don't have it with me today to look up.
Many aspects of Imperial doctrine appear to have be thought up by
someone who never played a TCS (or similar Naval warfare) campaign;
they just don't work in practice. For instance, after some TCS
campaigning, it turns out that the Battlerider/Battleship controversy
is a non-issue: if your enemy does not have meson weapons, use
Battleships, because the jump drive allows you to get your expensive
hull and jump drive away when your guns and M-drive have been
crippled, and if he does have meson weapons, use Battleriders because
a meson hit is just as likely to cripple the J-drive as any other
system. With the battleships just as likely to be lost as the
battlerider, the battlerider's ability to carry more weaponry,
screens, armor and fighters makes a difference. Proper doctrine
reduces the vulnerability of the tender -- it should either be fully
combat capable, or stay the hell away from the battlefield.
I think that real Imperial Naval officers, who have 10,000 years
of space combat experience to draw on, would use doctrines based on
that experience, that make sense; therefore, I regard most of what was
said regarding Imperial Naval doctrine in JTAS and Challenge as so
much hogwash.
-- Cynthia Higginbotham
"Q: What is the difference between the BATF and the Gestapo?"
"A: BATF agents speak English."