Losing a single gun shouldn't be an issue.  The design should be built around the idea that it's going to employ a babbage engine, at which point it's going to have a TON of guns.  Again, I think it's fine.  But it's hard to put a hard number value to tactics.

I've used it on ships that have a lot of primaries.  IE -- De Monarchia has 9 primary guns.  And I've used it on ships with a dozen secondaries.

My input is to leave it alone.

Ooh Ooh, I was asking about subs 

One way might be to simply give the sub player a few markers to represent his hull.  One being actual, the others representing "dummy" signatures.  You can rule out the fake counter versus the real thing by having an opposing enemy ship or FAC come within a certain distance of the thing, or by targeting it with weapons fire.  Apply a gunnery penalty to hit each?  Once a fake/dummy counter has been hit, it's removed from the table. 

The real sub could also reveal itself the moment it opens fire.

For techno-babble, I don't know.

Love to see those 2nd round of Spaniards.  Want to throw my french at them 

Huh.  Well they ain't here.  And I ain't seen 'em. So I'm playing mine   

The Invaincu FAC carrier got its name from naval officers who scoffed at its thin armor, minimal firepower and gyroscopic stabilizer -- all evidence that engineers envisioned the carrier dropping its FACs, then turning tail. It did, however, manage to fill a badly niche in the Ether Fleet's roster.

Ships in class: Invaincu

Hull: 11 (M/1) PV: 25
TR: 6, AV: 1
Primary: -
Secondary: 4/d6(x2)
Light: 6/d4(x1)
Torpedoes: -
Equipment:
Gyroscopic Stabilizer
FACs X 6
Machine Guns X 2
[1-11] [12] [13-15] [-] [16-17] [18-20]

The Gambetta and Freycinet were the fleet's armored cruisers, and followed the basic French approach of scrimping on primaries while going hog wild with the secondary guns.  Later designs would  reveal the ships as poor front line combatants by the opening rounds of WWI; but the hulls would prove admirably suited to escort missions, due to their armament and Babbage Engines.

Ships in class: Gambetta, Freycinet

Hull: 15 (M/3) PV: 83
TR: 5, AV: 2
Primary: 4/d8(x2)
Secondary: 12/d4(x2)
Light: 12/d4(x1)
Torpedoes: 2/d10(x3)
Equipment:
Babbage Engine
Machine Guns X 2
[1-8] [9] [10-11] [12] [13-16] [17-20]

The D'Iberville class Defense Ship was a converted light cruiser aimed at disrupting Austro-Hungarian and Italian supply routes -- or bombing land based facilities from high orbit.  Rugged, and equipped with the armament needed to fend off enemy destroyers, it was a bizarre, if effective design.

Ships in class: D'Iberville, Cassini

Hull: 7 (S/2) PV: 32
TR: 6 AV: 2
Primary: 1/d8(x2)
Secondary: 4/d4(x2)
Light: 4/d4(x1)
Torpedoes: -
Equipment:
Bomb Racks X2
Machine Guns X2
Mine Factors X5
[1-8] [9] [10-13] [14] [15-17] [18-20]

I ain't throwin a snit    I just think fresh voices/input and all that.  Just trying to make room for some new input.

I still wanna write  .....I just dunno if other folks might have some better plot twists than the ones I've been thunkin up.

Congrats on that   
I'd have been a nervous wreck, myself.

The woman had both of hers through C-section.  We're a reduced version of the Brady Bunch (my two boys and her two girls) and we've compared all the obligatory baby pics.

My poor dudes as newborns had the mild dose of cone head you get when you're forced out.  What a relief when that goes away.

Her newborns came out all pink and perfect.

I don't have a problem with the Greeks having an ether fleet.  I'm simply saying the scale just raises some questions.  And I'm not knocking murtalianconfederacy's designs, I have them printed out.

My point was that it just feels right, in my mind, to have a fleet that roughly mirrors a state's real life capablities in the years leading up to WWI.

And as far as the whole wet navy thing, there is a big difference in courting ship builders and being interested in owning a modern BB and actually having purchased two of them and being on hand to collect them.  Intentions aren't the same as possession. 

I'm not a full-blown naval grognard, but I do know that the books I have on the naval aspect of WWI don't point to the Greeks as being on the brink of fielding modern ships.  They point to the Turks, and Churchill's decision to withhold the ships due to the fact that they could be used by the Royal Navy and because there serious concerns about where the Turks would place their allegiance once the shooting started.

And would it really matter ito enemy sailors if the acquistion of those battleships nearly bankrupted the Turks?  Wouldn't have made the Brits feel any better operating around the Dardanelles to know "well, the Turks have two modern dreadnoughts plying these waters, but on the bright side, they were really expensive." They were worried enough about the presence of Goeben.      

And the Greeks bought the Averoff with 1/4 of the money coming from a rick patriot.  It's not like they had a massive budget. 

Here's how I look at it:

Todd put together a  Spanish fleet, and he built it with the idea in mind that "the Spaniards were nearly broke and couldn't afford a massive armada.  So they have some decent cruisers, some destroyers, and the like.  I think they make sense.

The Chinese in the first IS rulebook field some really teeny tiny hulls.  They aren't packing a BB.

The Austrians have a couple of BBs, so do the Italians, so do the Turks.  Are they overpowered?  I may be biased, but I don't think so because in two cases you have nations were they did build their own wet navy BBs (even if they weren't really used).  And a 3rd state that broke its bank buying the building blocks of a navy.  They weren't close to being in Britain's league, but they had hulls all the same.

The ABC powers have one big BB in Southern Front.

I like seeing more ships popping up on the forum.  I think the Greek fleet here looks fun, and jeesh, I play enough IS on the weekends that I know it'll be used by one of the guys at the hobby shop.  But I do think if we have a big Ether-Swede fleet, and dreadnoughts operated by every state, we start to turn the IS world into a GZG setting where every faction out there has a full-blown navy.  If a dozen different powers all have the same capabilities, then they start blurring together.

Add in the dreadnought the Turks had purchased from Great Britain and would have received if the Brits hadn't held them back and the Greeks did NOT have the stronger fleet.

Residaye and Sultan Osman I

Greeks had a single modern armored cruiser bought by a millionaire patriot -- itself an Italian Pisa class AC.

The Turks only had modern Ether BBs in my mind because it mirrored what should have happened with their wet navy.

If you wanna make the Greeks on par with the Turks, its yer setting.  I was just trying to make the point that not every power would likely have a dreadnought.

I designed a few Greeks for a scenario against the Turks (part of the Balkans War heading into the Ether).

And yeah, my two cents is backwater powers should be fielding relatively small designs (and not many of those to boot). Their battleships would likely be no bigger than most other states' cruisers.

Think of the industrial capabilities of these states, and the $$ they have onhand.  I only gave the Turks legitimate battleships because in WWI, they did have some modern ships coming their way before the Brits stepped in and withheld them.

I'm thinking about the Serbs, but really, I don't see them having more than a few 3-hull destroyers, a monitor (4 hull with just enough speed to reach bombing templates, a single primary, some light guns and some bomb racks).  And maybe a single cruiser.