starbreaker
Mongoose
katadder said:
Fine, I'll say it instead.
Only the Hawkwood carrier actually has a real frigate weapon array on their small carrier. The Li Halan one is on par unless it needs both broadsides. The Decados one is missing range and a little hitting power. The Al Malik is missing a quarter of their rocket battery AD. Regardless, frigates are the stanadrd for measuring gunship effectiveness, destroyers are - and destroyer guns and armor let them murder carriers point-for-point. Destroyers aren't generally quite as good at shooting down the bomber wave as a mass of frigates, but their better hull rating reduces the damage they'll take by more than enough to compensate. Only time I'd bother taking frigates for their small anti-bomber superiority would be in a fleet with a dread or cruiser - which are much worse than a similar cost in destroyers at killing bombers, and need the help.
It's 490 points empty, it better be well-armed. And it still isn't doing well even against soft-hull targets, much less destroyers. Five of anyone's frigates will wreck an Osprey with ease, or board it to death, although they'll lose 2-4 hulls doing it. Three destroyers versus (say) an Osprey and a scout (to even the points up and so your blasters will at least hit adequately) will go to the destroyers, and I doubt they'll lose more than one of them in the process.
You've got to make the bombers work to win with carriers, and that's a hard thing to do. The base hulls just cannot reliably win on their own, so you not only have to get the bombers to do enough damage to pay for themselves, they also have to pick up the slack on the point-for-point disparity between carrier and gunship effectiveness.
Still waiting to see your fleet confguration that's walking all over the enemy regularly. Like to try it out myself.
