Quote:
Originally Posted by Rupert
It will certainly encourage the use of message torpedoes/probes. If you use Spaceships there's already incentive to use many small ships over few large ones, even for civilian use - the cost per ton is the same, the payload per ton is the same, and the 'small ship fleet' is more flexible. For military purposes, the small ships are even more strongly selected for - missiles make ships eggshells with hammers, so you want each egg to be as cheap as possible.
The proposed FTL system hammers this home, even with a relatively slow loss of speed with increasing mass.
It would likely kill carrier+fighter and carrier+rider concepts, because the big carrier would be strategically slow compared to a fleet of small ships.
It would make small PC-owned ships faster than the lumbering great warships of the Evil Empire. However, if two FTL drives means you go twice as fast, a 30,000 ton ship with two drives is very nearly as fast as a 1,000 ton ship with just one, which might not be a strong enough speed difference to really differentiate ships by speed.
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Assuming that you include the defense favouring switches then it creates the early 20th century paradigm of battleships for heavy firepower, destroyers for speed and cruisers to catch destroyers.