Starting to get an initial handle on things for the fleet paradigms and will carry on this discussion from the battle cruiser thread.
http://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewtopic.php?f=149&t=117138
Related to that we also need to have a look at the tender/battle rider balance. As a general rule the tenders are able to lift a little under 50% of their stated weight, if you’ve got a gutted ship doing this as their primary task. That is, if you’ve got a 100,000 ton tender, it’s going to be able to get around 150,000 tons to do a jump 4, i.e. you’ve something under 50,000 tons of ships and hanger/linkage method to play with. This will vary a bit depending on how you manage the maneuver drive output etc, and the ratio you can lift decreases as the ship sizes decrease, but that is not relevant to the discussion I want to have.
Now looking at the battle riders/gunboats (which would also apply to system ships), you can just, barely, squeeze a poor spinal mount into a 5,000 ton ship, where the critical -6 to hit from another spinal mount comes into play. A good place to be and perhaps has a specific niche, but this is very tight, your more general build depending on what you want is likely to be in the 6 to 8k ton range. Looking at a 7k build your firepower is pretty much equivalent to a heavy cruiser, in a single battle rider.
Using a 7k rider, if we look at the total jump 4 tender + battle rider sizes vs the equivalent jump 4 capital ships, as a weight for weight comparison of available weaponry we get 4 battle riders vs 100,000 ton battle cruiser, or 3 battle riders vs a 75,000 ton heavy cruiser. Broadly speaking, you might have to drop to 6.5 ktons or whatever, but the direction of the conversation is valid.
Which could leave you rubbing your hands going great! 4 spinal weapons to 1, there’s only one way that battle is going to end up!!!
However battle riders have real issues. They leave
Hull points
And
Hardpoints
Back in the tender.
The 100k ton battle cruiser has approximately 22,000 hull points. The 7kton battle rider about 1500. Multiply that by 4 riders and that’s 6000 hull points vs 22000 hull points. So those spinal weapons hit and damage ratios need study.
But there’s more to it yet. I did up this, the Orc 5000 t battle rider, which I enjoyed right out of the box. This sits at the 5k point and is torpedo bay defined, with a small high thrust motor to give it a little extra something.
Now this is a nasty nasty build, which is highly relevant across all tech levels (I’ve got a related ship to this I’ll put up in a dedicated thread that I like very much). With a 50kt tender you can comfortably make 4 Orcas in a 75k ton total ship build. Now these 4 Orcas release 480 torpedos each in a salvo, the 4 combined are 1920 torpedos a turn, you are getting from an equivalent ship weight of 75 ktons and it’s being conservative, we could squeeze in more torps from that build. Yep, that’s 2000 very high yield plasma torpedoes descending upon you. Make your peace with your maker because you are shortly going to be collector particles.
If you put the 5k orca up against the 7k battle rider, the 5k orca wins easily in the percentage game, having both -6 and added evasion from the thrust drive vs the spinal mount.
Now let’s go back to the 2K rider, the Werewolf I put up in the high thrust thread. That too is bad news for the 7k rider build as the spinal mount cannot hit it at all, its thrust is so much higher it can evade and aid shooting and the 7 k rider has its bay weapons with a -2 to hit at 2000 ton craft on top of that.
So what’s happening here, the 7 k rider is vulnerable to the 5k rider, which is vulnerable to the 2k rider (or would be if weapon types, the torpedo, didn’t come into play). What is the logical follow on?
The fighter!
And there’s bingo. The fighter is simply a small battle rider. And an effective fighter, that isn’t made useless by the rules, is key. As long as a fighter can do meaningful damage to high armor battle riders, battle riders are always going to suffer against fighter screens. The 7k ton spinal mount vs. ton for ton 700 heavy fighters? No contest.
That’s a critical point. Fighters need to be part of the bigger picture.
***
While the discussion above hasn’t been too concerned with weapon balances there is particular elephant in the room that needs special attention:
THE NUCLEAR MISSILE
We can see above with the orca torpedo based build what happens when we get salvos that are far higher in relative strike power than the 1 shot/hardpoint paradigm.
Even if we aren’t considering salvos, what we have in large capital ships are hard points to burn. The battle cruiser easily has 2-3 hundred triple missile turrets looking for a target.
The triple turret nuclear missile is well capable of dealing significant damage through Armor 15.
Which means the nuclear missile is a long long way from being only useful by lower technologies, certainly not out dated at TL15 as inferred by their fluff.
Screens as written, as a one off point defense are never going to play a part of capping nuclear missiles.
For now all missiles will remain nuclear by default, unless there’s another specialized use case.
Which brings us back to the battle rider discussion. As we’ve noted, the riders have left their hard points back on their tender. They have no point defenses against missiles. When they get into a scrap with a capital ship these waves of
smart missile attacks on riders with their low hull values are certain doom. Even the battle riders could be successful, where there spinal mounts have smashed a heavy cruiser, but the masses of missiles do for the battle riders after the cruiser has broken up.
As long as turret weapons can do reasonable damage to battle riders, they will struggle, the hardpoints they leave behind in the tender are never made up.
You also then need to throw in the traditional issues with tenders. The problems of not being able to run away or being cut off from the tender.
The conclusion is that the traditional concept battle rider and tender, as the massive dispersed tender hauling in a small squadron of riders, is not a viable fleet element in itself. Perhaps a limited niche for something like the orca which has a big bang, or some specialized high thrust usage, or depending on final weapon values they might be something to bring a particular platform to war in a mixed arms batron, but that would be a limited application, not a fleet standard ship. In previous editions if fighters were useless and turret weapons unable or barely able to pass through the highest armor values it was a different scenario.
There may be usage of battle carriers depending on the final weapon rules break down as a daughter craft. A second spinal weapon that detaches from the first. But that will need a significant fire power advantage in the spinal mount vs bays ton for ton to justify it which isn’t there now.
The question also is, where do you want the balance to be? I think if you upped hull points, and then also upped the hitting power of spinal mounts by a bigger chunk, crimped the nuclear missiles a bit (but not completely), battle riders would then be a horses for courses option. You take them knowing the risk fighters could pose to them, but accepting that risk for the gains in firepower against capital ships. If you could lose 2 for taking out a cruiser, that would be a winning strategy.
***
Screens
A suggestion for nuclear dampers: make these work without any gunner role (we really don’t need another dice roll in combat!). You either have enough of them to cover the ship and they work all the time, or you don’t have them. You can control their size and effectiveness by tech level. So that by TL15 every ship can afford to carry them, just like sensors, and they automatically reduce the nuclear affect. Scaled so you don’t destroy the missile paradigm completely, but you do need to bring a bunch more to the fight.
