OT: Somebody's critique of my story

[Fyron]

Note on fighters: I was thinking that as well, fighters can probobly do a little more maneuvering then a capital ship but for the most part they'd still have to come in 'streight and level' to eving begin an attack run, and while they were doing that the cap ships would dust them.

Not really. Take everything you know about jet planes and throw it out the window. In space, facing is wholely irrelevant as far as inertia is concerned. You can quite easily face your target and fire at it while moving in any direction. Fire some side thrusters to change your facing without affecting your direction of travel significantly. Go watch some Babylon 5 episodes with fighter combats. They did it rather well in that show.

The difference between tiny craft, such as fighters, and gigantic craft, such as dreadnoughts, is that the tiny craft do not have much mass to whip about, combined with being rather small. The stress and shearing forces caused to the ship are far, far more drastic when you have a massive vessel compared to a small one. The small ones can execute wacky maneuvers far more easily than can a huge vessel. If you were to try and take a dreadnought and rotate it 180 degrees in a few seconds, you would probably rip it in half (or many more pieces). Maybe if it was a perfect sphere (or perhaps ellipsoidal even) you could design it to be structurally stable enough to perform fighter-like manuevers, but definitely not some other shape. Odd shapes become harder and harder to make reinforced and resitent to rapid maneuvers as the object gets more massive.

Make sure not to base anything on Star Trek. They have a cheesy "warp field makes mass negligible" effect going.

[El_Phil]

Yep definetly B5 for watching it. For how to chuck it into the story I do like the FreeSpace2 style. There's some line in the editing manual along the lines of making the cap ship combat roughly even with the fighters/bombers the deciding factor. So one decent bombing run can tip the balance, one 'suicide king' turret run can knock effectively take a cap ship out of the battle.

As for variable ship size, hmmm... Well you wouldn't need full DNs everywhere, just in your main fleet(s). There would be smaller ships for anti-pirate duty, convoy escort, etc. Plus say (battle)cruisers which are faster but less guns/armour. Dedicated anti-fighter escort vessels as well maybe, because your aren't going to waste space on a ship of the line with too much anti-fighter weaponry are you.

For ships of the line, if you want to use the Royal Navy system then Dreadnought is big primary gun only while Battleships have primaries and smaller secondaries for taking out yappy things.

Mind you, when (if ) I carry on my stab I do plan to use most of the above ideas..

[Hunpecked]

El-Phil writes:

"Well you wouldn't need full DNs everywhere, just in your main fleet(s). There would be smaller ships for anti-pirate duty, convoy escort, etc."

Perhaps. On the other hand, there's something to be said for having one ship that can fill BOTH roles vs 2-3 that can fill only one, and then only against similar-sized ships.

"...your aren't going to waste space on a ship of the line with too much anti-fighter weaponry are you."

Depends. In strategic combat, with its brain-dead AI, there's no guarantee the anti-fighter/missile ship(s) will always be where it's needed (e.g. it could be dead or out of position).

"For ships of the line, if you want to use the Royal Navy system then Dreadnought is big primary gun only while Battleships have primaries and smaller secondaries for taking out yappy things."

Actually, it seems BOTH the primary (12 - 13.5 inch) and secondary (6 - 9.2 inch) batteries of pre-dreadnoughts were intended for the enemy's battleships, with the tertiary battery (3 inch and below) targeted on "yappy things" (LOL) like torpedo boats. At the expected engagement range of 3,000 yards or so, the secondaries would theoretically shred the lightly armored parts of the enemy battleships while the heavy guns delivered the death blow. In practice, however, the shell splashes from the secondaries tended to interfere with spotting for the big guns. Moreover, after the Battle of Tsushima, where much of the firing was at two to three times the expected range, it was recognized that the secondaries would be ineffective at "modern" distances. Dreadnoughts of the early 1900s basically dispensed with the intermediate guns and mounted a secondary battery (6 inch and below) for torpedo defense. HMS Dreadnought herself was built with 18 12-pounders to deal with "yappy things".

Reference: http://www.gwpda.org/naval/pdredmdg.htm

As I've read on this forum, the SE IV strategic battle AI also has something of a problem handling ships with mixed-range batteries. I've even seen this myself in a strategic battle with a TDM AI. Each of the AI's BCs, apparently using a Max Range strategy, closed to the range of its single range 7 weapon (shield depleter?), ignoring its three range 6 weapons (acid globule?). After an ineffective enemy salvo, my own BCs (also Max Range) closed to range 6 and fired 6 PPB V each. The 6 to 1 exchange of fire essentially decided the battle.

[Starhawk]

Fyron what i mean by "coming in streight and level" is that the fighter would still HAVE to approach in a streight line like any other ship it can't be dancing about while it's just approaching it's target because it would take forever to get anywhere lol and since a capital ship's guns outrange a fighters by a significant margin the fighters would get pounded before they got into a range where the "Dodging" and whirling would become effective.

Actually as stated I do have Light Raiders of the Hunt class and Artemis class SM raiders designed for capital ship steals. However since mainly I've been focusing on the main battle fleets I didn't much focus on the Light Raiders who've been stealing a whole load of colony ships for me

Battlecruisers, I don't have the economy to support both a battle line and a patrol squadron and so I have chosen the primary battle line.

Convoys actually if you think about it would probobly have a dreadnought or superdreadnought escorting it depending on how big the convoy is and where it is headed

And yeah I have 2 battleship sized craft, one is a point defense craft the other is a fleet maintenance ship that has repair bays and the like.

I am not a firm beleiver in throwing in small ships just for pizazz effect since as said by Hunpecked there is no need to follow the modern ship design requirements.

Although yet another thing that never made sense ST wise, why does starfleet build so dang many classes of starship? I mean most modern navies build 1 or 2 class of ship per size grouping not 10 or more lol.
And why build such itty bitty ships when they clearly show that a Galaxy class (battleship) can juke and swing just as quick as a Defiant class (destroyer)

[El_Phil]

The cap ships main guns may outrange a fighters but such guns wouldn't have the fast tracking you'd need to hit a rapidly dodging fighter. Unless you've got some funky tech. of course. Besides a fighter should be a hell of alot faster than a cap ship, even when dodging and weaving, due to having a tiny fraction of the mass.

Frontline convoy maybe a ship of the line escort, but for anti-pirate duty it would be massive overkill, hence smaller ships. Also for a high speed convoy a DN would/could just slow things down. It depends upon the threat what escort is appropriate, so flexibility is good.

ST tends to keep ships around for decades so once something is built it stays. But you would build the newest design ship in your yards not a xx year old design, hence lots of different class ships that are similar sized.

Small ships for all the reasons above AND why build a BB sized science vessel? AND the Defiant was just guns no exploration role hence alot smaller.

[Starhawk]

El_Phil said:
The cap ships main guns may outrange a fighters but such guns wouldn't have the fast tracking you'd need to hit a rapidly dodging fighter. Unless you've got some funky tech. of course. Besides a fighter should be a hell of alot faster than a cap ship, even when dodging and weaving, due to having a tiny fraction of the mass.

Well as shown even in Babylon 5 (which btw I am a big fan of) a beam weapon just slices so you make a sweep with your beam cannons your bound to hurt a bunch of the fighters until they come within range of your PD cannons then they'll get torn up by those thus fighter=useless. Especially when (like me) you have at least two dedicated 24 PD cannon Point Defense ships in your fleets.

Frontline convoy maybe a ship of the line escort, but for anti-pirate duty it would be massive overkill, hence smaller ships. Also for a high speed convoy a DN would/could just slow things down. It depends upon the threat what escort is appropriate, so flexibility is good.

Well I've never mentioned non frontline convoys so that's a moot point, especailly since the only real convoys I have right now are transport fleets carrying State Security forces and those all have SD escorts for obvious reasons.

ST tends to keep ships around for decades so once something is built it stays. But you would build the newest design ship in your yards not a xx year old design, hence lots of different class ships that are similar sized.

Another thing that is illogical I wouldn't keep an 80 year old ship in my fleet if I have a state of the art 2-10 year old ship to replace it, especially since in Star Trek money has nothing to do with it.

Small ships for all the reasons above AND why build a BB sized science vessel? AND the Defiant was just guns no exploration role hence alot smaller.

Ah yes but in star trek there are "no pirates" out there except the Maquis who were alll butchered by Cardies and Jem'He'Dar.

The Enterprise E actually is smaller than the D which is funny considering it's newer and an "Advanced Explorer" which as we've all seen by her firepower in Starfleet "Advanced Explorer" means "Battleship" lol.

I find it funny however that the defiant apparently packs more firepower then a freakin galaxy and yet they didn't create any more Defiants or outfit capital ships with pulse phaser cannons which are apparently much more powerful then a standard beam phaser.

Anyway my point is when it comes to the story so far I've had no need to mention light raiders or raiders and no need to mention my handful of BCs that are still patrolling my frontier sysems (2 last I counted) so meh.

Although I was thinking of producing a few battleships to act as a rapid strike force

[El_Phil]

Meh!

Right what I was vaugely discussing wasn't something you'd use in the game, just a general suggestion for what would make a sparkly SEIV inspired battle.

As for keeping old ships in the fleet I know I do, even with a massive economy and loads of ship yards I still keep old BCs,etc knocking around. Now admitedly it's partly sentimental (How can you scrap a 'Legendary' ship? It's wrong I tell you! ) but partly because they work and are good enough because of either A. Better Tech B. Better design (no wasted PD, SSD, etc) or C. Loads of numbers.

Of course this only applies to playing the AI.

If an exploration ship still works, why scrap it? If your a peacefull group why build brand new warships? If your stupid enough to employ Janeway and then make her an Admiral your entire high command is clearly senile

[Starhawk]

Yeah in a non-game story I'd of course throw smaller ships into the mix other then DNs and SDs.

As far as keeping the old "legendary" ships knocking around, yeah I used to do that because it was "legendary" and had been through many battles, but it was also always a heart breaker when my Legendary 34th BC squadron got blown to hell by 6 SDs at a warp point battle.
In my newest game I have 1 of every old ship class in orbit of my homeworld in mothballs as a museum and put it as.
"Enterprise Museum" or so on so my most legendary ships (including Saber and Enterprise) are still around except that they are educating the youth of Icara and their names are carried on with honors by newer warships.

I do admit though my Yu Hing's have one critical flaw in their design, they all have only lvl IV multi-plex trackers and not Vs so hehe in that department I am outdated though so far I've had no problems because of it. Other then that all my ships have the latest technology and size so that I don't end up out of date when fighting.

Yeah if you make Jane the I got lost in the wrong bloody quadrent and gave up half a dozen chances to return home because "it wasn't moral" or whatever as an Admiral you know starfleet is desperate for flag officers lol.....though she made Admiral and Picard didn't BULL HOCK! what did she do that Picard didn't other then stupid stuff that Picard was too smart to do?

[El_Phil]

That's the problem clearly. He was too smart to be Admiral, these are the same people who made Riker an admiral and sacked Kirk from the job.

That's the only solution: There is a maximum IQ level for an admiral in ST. It would explain alot


Back to stock fighters I must admit my current favourite use for them: Mobile ablative armour. Vast screens of dirt cheap small fighters forming mobile armour around my cap ships. Ridiculoulsly impractical, almost pointless and it does require several systems building nothing but fighters. Still if you can't muck around in stock what can you do?

[tesco samoa]

well if you want to get into writing get used to it. And this person is reading your chapters. As far as i can see here. the dudes comments made some sence to you so you posted it here looking for some support before you began attacking them. You attacked me for posting that you should take something positive out of the situation. Stories are about Conflict and Growth. As is writing.