Fighters

This is, lest anyone bridle instinctively, a rumination on fighters as a way of getting things done, not a statement of intent.

The obvious work of fighters is blowing up large ships. The only way to take a large ship out of play quickly is to inflict literally dozens of damage points in a single turn, and it's quite hard to inflict that level of damage with ship mounted weapons without taking a matching beating of your own. Fighters let you throw damage at the enemy before he can reach you, and if you can put enough of them on the target, the damage can be significant enough to take a large combatant off the table.

So the argument for fighters is pretty simple; large amounts of damage delivered without risk to the launching platforms. This argument only holds good when fighters are used in large numbers; the most you can expect to get out of a single fighter squadron is a limited amount of local protection from other fighter groups. Even six fighter squadrons, the average number in a "book" heavy carrier, is not really enough to deliver a killer blow to a combatant the same size as the launching platform

However, the risk to the fighters is very high, and fighter operations have a high attrition cost. And given the length of time a battle actually lasts, fighters have to be seen as one shot weapons. You're unlikely to recover them and rearm them in time to use them a second time, even if enough of them survive to make up a worthwhile force for a second strike.

The question I want to ponder in this post is whether fighters make economic sense; does the inevitable cost of using them work out lower than the costs they inflict on the enemy? It's taken as a given that winning a battle can deliver benefits that have no way of being measured with mere money, let alone the limited economic model this campaign uses. What I'm interested in here is trying to tease out whether fighters are affordable in the longer run when no dramatic resolution of the conflict can be expected. I'm partly driven by the parallels in the real world; to what extent does maintaining an unassailable military hollow out your economy to the point that you're defeated by making yourself undefeatable?

Fighters have two principal roles in our games; blowing up large combatants, and shooting down other pesky fighters. The ideal machine for the first job is the torpedo bomber, and the ideal tool for the second job is the heavy interceptor.

Starting with the already trodden ground; an interceptor squadron is all but guaranteed to knock out a normal squadron in a dogfight (two kills on a 5 or 6, one kill on a 3 or 4, six dice rolled). They will take losses in doing so; a vanilla dogfight between normal fighters results in the loss of four fighters from each squadron on average. Heavy fighter squadrons ignore 4s and so only lose three fighters per dogfight. Send in a heavy interceptor squadron against a torpedo squadron and the torpedo squadron will be wiped out; the interceptors will lose one fighter. (The current rules give a dogfight kill to Attack and Torpedo fighters only on 6, and allow heavies to ignore rolls of 4, so perversely, being heavy makes no difference to your chances of surviving a dogfight against Attack or Torpedo fighters). The attacker thus has to take out the interceptors in advance or send in enough fighters to make them irrelevant

Our conclusion, such as it is, is that for every interceptor squadron you expect to face, you'll need either at least two torpedo squadrons or one torpedo squadron and one interceptor squadron to fly cover. The second option is a lot cheaper in points/money terms, although the mass cost is the same.

Next, how much damage can a torpedo squadron actually do? Each fighter has a 50:50 chance of a hit and a hit does one d6 damage. So in some wonder universe where all you roll is sixes, you could do 36 points of damage with one squadron, but on average you're going to do 6/2*3.5 = 10.5 points. If you're going in against serious opposition - and it's hard to imagine doing this against anything else - it's taken you two squadrons of fighters to do it, one of which you've pretty much lost in the process. If you went cost effective and bought one torpedo squadron backed by one heavy interceptor squadron, that cost you 66 points to do and you lost 24-30 points in interceptor losses on the way in. Your opponent will repair the hull damage for 21 points...

Now this analysis is flawed, because it overlooks the fact that you're not sending in one squadron; you're sending in several, and you're going to do so much damage on average that you're looking at inflicting system checks and all kinds of other repair bills; this tilts the repair economics the other way. Let's say that a single large carrier can put eight squadrons on target and you go for an even mix. 42 points of damage on the target is going to obliterate all but the heaviest combatants and give pause for thought to anything; it's about half the hull boxes of a typical SDN or CVH. Put two groups like that onto a target, and you've knocked out anything in existence. And most of the time, when we've seen carrier operations, that's what we've seen, so that should be our typical business case; two CVH sending everything they've got against a single high value target. So 66 by 8 is 528 points to buy, and you should expect to lose almost half of them to interceptors. So you take out about 700 points worth of ship for 250 points - and of course your opponent has lost about the same points worth of fighters inflicting the losses. This starts to look like an argument for never doing anything else.

However, I've left out till now two things. The first is point and area defences. Each PDS knocks out .8 of a fighter on average. A high value target is studded with PDS, typically 4 to 6. They can't fire into a dogfight, but fighters in a dogfight are not attacking you at the same time; whatever comes out of the dogfight will have to run the gamut of the PDS during the attack run. So knock off another three or four fighters from the torpedo bombers. Doesn't really affect the arithmetic, but it's a shame not to be complete. And of course there's no way that the enemy is sticking around putting a high value combatant at risk from two CVHs unless he's got the idea that he's still in with a chance. Which means he's got as much heavy metal in the system as you do. One thing which you can be sure of - anything worth attacking this way will have escorts with area defence. So expect to lose more torpedo fighters to those PDS. Now this does affect the arithmetic because a couple of serious escorts will add eight to twelve PDS to the gauntlet for your torpedo bombers, and that adds 6 to 9 fighters to your likely losses. Add that to local defence by the target and you're looking at losing two squadrons from the eight you put in; which gives the hulk of the target a chance of survival and escape. Not looking quite so good, although the balance sheet is still in your favour; the interceptor losses cancel out and the cost of replacing the fighters is far less than the cost of the likely repairs to the target.

The second thing is less amenable to analysis. The enemy is only sticking around because he thinks he's got the weight to make it pay. So the question you need to ask is, what's he going to do while I'm sending in the fighters? Up to now the analysis has assumed that he's got at least enough carriers to cancel out your interceptors (and that if he doesn't, you have to expect that he will, and field interceptor cover anyhow). If that's true, you have to expect that something very similar is about to happen to one of your high value combatants. Let's assume, however, that he's fielded a single carrier stuffed with interceptors, and used other approaches instead of torpedo bombers. I think it's fair to say that the one thing which comes out of all verbiage above is that the likely effective weight of strike you'd actually deliver with 2 CVHs is eight squadrons of torpedo bombers; although you will have spent as much again in support fighters and hangar space and a lot more on top of that for hulls and systems to make the ship, what delivers the damage is the fighters you get on target and your opponent will have spent similar sums on putting up his defences and the hulls to mount his weapons.

Eight squadrons of torpedo bombers weighs in at 72 mass (the hangars) and costs 243 (hangar cost plus fighter cost) points to do an average of 75 points of damage at a range of more than 24" in a game, making a modest allowance for PDS attrition. For the same mass and less money, you can have 8 class 2 grasers or 3 class 3 grasers; 18 Class 3 beams 9 class 4 beams or 4 class 5 beams and one class 4; or 14 class K guns. Assuming that setting up and executing a fighter attack is going to take three turns, what sort of damage could you expect to do with ship mounted weapons in the same period of time at say, 36" or less?

With Class 2 grasers; 8*2.8*3 = 67

With Class 3 grasers 3*5.6*3=50

With Class 3 Beams 18*.8*3 = 43

With Class 4 Beams 9*1.6*3 = 43

With Class 5 Beams 4*2.4*3 = 30.6

With K Guns 14*3*.75= 32 (to thirty inches only)

These all go up dramatically if you get in close; if you close to within 24" you can double the effect of the Class 3 beams or the K guns, for example, which brings them into the same sphere as the torpedo bomber damage; come in to eighteen inches and you double the Graser 2 damage and add a further 50 percent to the Graser 3 and K gun damage. And you don't have to accept attrition to these weapons as the cost of doing business; even when you lose them to system checks, they come in cheaper per ton than advanced fighters do. On the other hand, all of these weapons require aggressive manoeuvre to be any use at all, because they have restricted arcs. Another thing hard to analyse on pure numbers.

I'm not sure I've convinced myself yet, but I'm coming around to the idea that aggressively handled, ship borne weapons give you more for your money than fighters do - the key being aggression.

One of these days I must think about missiles.