Dammit.

Damn damn damn.

I knew I'd forget something.

FACs are only hit by a mine on a roll of 9-10 per 1" moved. This is how we playtested it, and while moving through the minefield is still very dangerous, odds are good that at least some will survive long enough to attack the Queen.

I thought fighters would have an easier time in a minefield.  And that makes perfect sense now.

And no psbs needed.  With that kind of armor the designer's probably figured it would be redundant to add torp nets.

Very nice!

I can't wait to hear how it works out in practice...

Dan

I've got more questions after thinking about using the Goalkeeper and they involve searchlights.

Is there a need to roll night/day for battles taking place in the belt?  There's no planet to block the sun.  Also anyone have an educated guess as to how far away from the sun you'd have to be before searchlights become mandatory? 

Are freighters and stations equipped with searchlights?  And what about fighters?  (I have this mental image of a group of flashlights duct taped to the outside of a fighter.    )

And I think there ought to be an option to add searchlights.  All alone in the dark a ship like the Goalkeeper is going to have a heckuva time trying to pick out fighters without help or additional searchlights.

I guess the answer would be "no"... all fights within the cluster would be "daylight".

As far as distance before searchlights are mandatory, I'd say we don't need to worry about that at least until we take the fight to Mars.

Huh. Stations should have 'em... freighters not so much. FACs, I dunno.

I guess that's possible. What seems a fair SU price?

I know.  Me again and more questions.  I take it that for FACs that they can fire all of their MGs out of one arc?  That seems implied in their description.  I also take it that FACs cannot be rearmed after they are recovered and relaunched.  The rules didn't state that they could and that makes sense, just double checking.

The RN ships Banneret and Herschel are missing from the Scenario Six ship sheets.  And Scenario Seven has a completly different list of British ships versus the scenario discreption.

And what happens if you do not take any or all of the extra points from having freighters?

FACs are a pain to defend against when you're just fielding capital ships.  That's why the Brits came out with the Q-ship.

In pickup games that included dogfights, the frigging Astro 101 "Sprite" gave my Austrian pilots a lot of headaches, as their Hale Rockets don't suffer range penalties and hit on a 5+.  On average, a Sprite could take out a couple of Harpunes at little risk to itself before the torpedo bombers even reached their targets.

But if you used the Goalkeeper like its name implies -- maybe hanging back close to the freighters while a forward screen of Brit fighters engages the Austrian torpedo platforms -- I bet you'd see some pretty good results.

Conceptually, FACs aren't supposed to be able to rearm during a scenario.

Chuck five MGs for a pack of Hale Rockets, and you'd have a platform that could kill FACs as far away as 12" -- a good way to hit them before they reah your freighters. 

Some capital ships, like Germany's Barbarossa, have the potential to just obliterate FACs in this fashion.  Sucker packs 20 Hale Rockets.  But I never had a problem with that, as Hales are expendable. 

Once they're gone, they're gone, and it's up to you to make sure you spent them wisely.  If your capital ship has no chance of hurting that BB that's parked 10" away with just its guns, you might regret having sacrificed a bunch of your rockets on that measly torpedo bomber.

Actually I wasn't unhappy with how the Goalkeeper turned out.  And I can't believe I forgot about rockets.  I think I'll post a Goalkeeper Mk2 soon and dump the torps in favor of rockets.  I like the MGs because they're not limited by ammo.  And the rockets will still let it have a limited anti ship capability.  The one thing I do like about this design is that it gets a destroyer back to the origins of it's name... torpedo boat destroyer.