Great, that's all I needed, another excuse to give London War Room all my money.    Nifty list, though.  Have you tried an all-Cephalid army yet?  Or incorporating the airships?

Rich

SFB Maulers target only one thing at a time, but they can also fire every single impulse and (barring firing mods) they never miss and have perfectly controllable damage output...which makes them surprisingly good at selectively crippling/destroying fighters (and drones) if you want to use them that way.  They're a sniper rifle, not a shotgun, though.

The Planet Crusher "monster" is just a single very hard-hitting anti-shipping weapon.  It doesn't have an area of effect in SFB.  Never really demonstrated it in the show either, but with the wonky scale and special effects in that episode it's hard to be certain.

So, who remembers the ST novel where we find out the Planet Crusher was a prototype Borg-Killer design?  God, I hate Trek novels...

Rich

No?  Guess I'll have to nag them.  I need an excuse to buy some of their ships. 

Rich

Ummm...if I'm reading the original post correctly, a 1/4 weapon would be 2/5 the SU of a 1/1 weapon, not 1/4.  Similarly, a 1/2 weapon would be 2/3 the SU of a standard gun.  That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.  Ironchicken seems to have allowed for the advantage of getting a strong early hit.

Rich

Pay the cost of a single (60 degree) arc weapon, and declare it to be a front centerline weapon covering the 11-1 o'clock arc.  The ship designer won't support arc functions outside of ABCDEF, but past discussion about firing arcs pretty much concluded that using clockface notation to denote arc is the way to go.  It really doesn't affect play balance to use non-standard arcs, as long as your weapons are paying for the actual degrees of coverage.

I suppose you could even do arcs in 30 degree increments instead of 60 (at half the SU cost) if you wanted to maximize your options, but that might be more effort than it's worth.

Rich

I was thinking that myself.  Valks will kill fighters rapidly, but only if they can keep them from getting behind them.  OTOH, widening your firing arcs costs, and they won't be as efficient then.

If we're seriously considering a "vote" or poll on fighter effectiveness/potential rules changes, put me down in the "fighters are barely worth fielding as is, and if you weaken them dramatically they'll be useless" camp.  I wouldn't mind seeing a weapon ability granting a single-hex area of effect, though, but that raises the question of exactly what you want the de facto "stacking limit" to be.  Won't change fighter utility much for me...they're already being ripped to shreds by massed Anime Spinal Mounts, adding another area weapon option won't change that.

Rich

Or a volley of anime spinal mount fire, or a shockwave burst, or even a few well-positioned mines if they're foolish enough to ignore them, or unlucky enough to miss killing them all.

Anybody who's having problems with swarms of fighters needs to use more area weaponry, rather than nerfing the fighter rules.

Rich

With anime spinals, they also kill fighters and mines pretty efficiently, at least when you've got enough of them firing.  You need to be careful with your positioning though, or you'll end up killing friendlies with the superguns.  And they cost more...

Rich

I was under the impression that fighters only "enter" a hex during their movement phase, and aren't killed by explosions popping up in their hex at other times...ie, they get a chance to leave before dying.

If they really do die instantly, I'm going to have to experiment with uber-cheap unarmed, undefended one-hull "ships" that deploy in a two or three hex deep "ring" around my real hulls, forcing the fighters to either stop and sweep them aside (during which time my ship guns can pound them) or move into their hexes to attack my ships (at which point I'll blow them up myself and kill all the fighters in the hex...after they attack, of course).  Wonder how many I can get for the price of a single fighter squadron?

Come to think of it, even if fighters *do* get a chance to leave an explosion hex before dying, that's still a threat.  If the "suicide escort" ring is at least two hexes deep around my real ships (all stacked in one hex, of course), I can make explosions in the fighters' hex and all adjacent hexes, and they'll die horribly as soon as they try to move.

Ick.  Don't care for that much.

Rich

To "stop escorting" they have to return to a carrier, land, and refit with anti-shipping weapons (or somesuch technobabble).  So all the movement boost is going to do is get them farther away from the carriers they need to land on.

I don't think they magically teleport back to their carrier when the ship they're escorting dies either, they should have to use normal movement rules.  The "WHY?" is spelled out above, because they need to rearm (or be reassigned to a new CSP target).

About the only thing a super-fast escort with CSP will be good for is for positioning your defensive fighters where they're needed each turn, and maybe establishing a "threat zone" enemy fighters need to avoid...and even then you're taking a chance on the escort being destroyed by ship fire and leaving your CSPs out of action for a turn or two.  Might also be good for dragging fighters past a really deep mine belt, but then what do you do with them afterwards?

The rules do need to spell out what an ex-CSP flight can actually do while it's slogging back to a carrier for reassignment.  I assume they can't initiate offensive action, but do they defend themselves normally if jumped in a dogfight?

Rich

I'm assuming the argument here is that Lightning Projectors are too powerful?  They certainly work well versus high-armor targets, but against VS and S hulls (and FACs, of course) that rely on speed instead of plating, they're pretty weak compared to conventional guns.  Their effectiveness may seem higher than it really is if your opponent spent heavily on capital ships and scrimped on support vessels.

That said, if you're trying to minimax, anything designed to kill battleships probably *ought* to run LPs for Primaries, but it's going to be expensive, and you'll need escorts to keep the bombers and torpedo boats off you.

Red Russian Heat Rays may actually be a better weapon overall, as they're a better compromise between armor penetration and bulk.

That's my two cents.

Rich

Not much of an "exploit" there, since you're paying a hefty mass cost for a weapon that only outperforms more standard systems at short range, and which has very low effective damage output/mass at long range.  You stand a real chance of getting your big, expensive guns blown off by long-range sniping, and an opponent with Stealth just ruins your day.  Also,  for any given combo of range & firing arc, there are far more hexes in your medium and long range brackets than in short, so you'll have to spend *more* mass on broader arcs or risk your opponent not being in arc if/when you do finally hit your "sweet spot" range.

I really don't see where that breaks the design system.  You're getting roughly what you pay for, assuming your opponent isn't silly enough to just fly straight up to you and trade shots at point blank.

Rich