Big versus small

These thoughts may or may not get tested out tonight. Consider a typical SDN, which will have something between 50 and 70 hull boxes and cost on the order of 600 to 700 points - as much as six destroyers, which typically have 9-12 hull boxes apiece.

With average luck, an SDN can bug out of an engagement having taken between 25 and 35 hits and still be salavageable, and with good luck (all you have to do is get lucky with the FTL drive) as many as 40 to 60 hits. Repair cost of the hull boxes will not top 120 pts. Repair of the systems lost is harder to quantify but it's probably not insane to suggest that on a big ship you'll lose about the same points worth of stuff as you lose of hull; systems cost 3 pts a ton on average, and you'll lose one system in six for the first row of hull boxes, one in three for the second, and you really ought to be thinking about leaving before you get to losing one in two. So a big SDN on a bad day could take about 60 hits and cost you 240-300 pts in repairs. The same damage to a fleet of destroyers is going to take out 5 or six of them, and cost you 500-600 pts in reconstruction.

Suddenly, big ships start to look like more economically sustainable than small ones. The question remains whether in skilled hands, more numerous and agile small ships can do enough extra damage to make up for that. Small ships have a decisive advantage in close range firefights; for any given points total, the little guys can put more dice on the table than the big guys - in close. The flip side is that they're a wasting asset - every turn, you have fewer of them.

Unless you're so good that you can put your small ships into the other guy's six and deny him a firing solution. If you could be sure of that, then you're not losing whole frigates or destroyers at the same speed that he's losing chunks of hull, and then you have a chance of - for example - completely destroying 600 points worth of SDN for the cost of only three or four destroyers or frigates.

Mind you, for a light vessel to have any chance of thinking this way, you need a vessel with a very authoritative weapon system. Which is where K guns and grasers come in. K Guns in particular. I've been thinking about grasers and will put another post up about their comparative effectiveness shortly; simply put, the big ones are potentially very dangerous at long range compared to the competition, but at close range, the same mass of large beams will give you more punch for less cash. What I haven't figured out is whether small ones are worth the money.