Quote:
Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth
As for the counter-value strike, there's a fix for that, especially if you're using tactical maps at all. A defense in depth (with drones or point defense escorts) lets you put missiles fired into your high-value rear areas pass through the point defense filter repeatedly and get bled dry.
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I've thought about that. How well it works might depend on scale. The tactical combat scales that seem to work best for realistic ships seems to be either 3 minutes / 100 miles or 10 minutes / 1,000 miles. In the latter case, missiles will cover about three times as many miles per round, and it's fairly easy for them to zip straight through the "defense in depth" in one round unless the attacker is massively outnumbered, and "the attacker is massively outnumbered" can make things easy for the defender even without clever strategies.
In the former case (3 minutes / 100 miles) I've thought a bit less about because for long-range engagements, there's no way you're actually fitting that on your gaming mat, or even on multiple gaming mats laid end-to-end on a long table. You've actually influenced my thinking on this a lot. In terms of finding ways to range-limit missiles, you've convinced me not to do anything stricter than "must get an active sensor lock
before launching missiles". For SM+4 drones with tactical arrays, that limits engagements to 90 hexes (or squares?—squares might work better), which can be done with two game mats laid end-to-end. I guess if you wanted to use the 3/100 scale, you could use two game mats and
not have them represent adjacent areas of space, just using them to track movements of a fleet's components relative to each other, while fleet movements relative to each other are tracked with pen and paper?
Okay, so now that you've found a way to make the 3/100 scale work, if your point-defense drones have UV lasers, you can have them move ~1000 miles ahead of the thing you want to protect, and the incoming missile
will be forced to spend a round inside the laser's range on the way to the target. But
that can be countered with attack drones that boost to very high speeds before releasing their missiles. Not sure what the counter for that tactic is.
I also wonder if part of the upshot of all this is that ultimately all "stations" end up with some kind of drive (fusion pulse? fusion rocket?) to help them get out of the way of very-long-range missile sniping.