Fighters, Flights, Flight Wings and Basing Capacity

[virtutis.umbra]

One of my players asked the following Fighter/Flight related questions, and I've got a gut-feeling about the right answers but I'm not 100% certain. There's enough ambiguity and vagueness in the explanations of terms like "Flight" vs "Fighter" vs "Basing Capacity" that I wanted to double-check my rulings.

a) What exactly is a Flight? They were kind of unclear on exactly the organization or composition of one. Is a flight of fighters whatever number of fighters is required to equal 1 Economic Point? So in the Jains case a medium fighter flight would be 3 individual fighters?

Flights: A flight is a combat unit made up of one
or more super heavy, heavy, medium, light or
ultra-light fighters, shuttles (armed or not), or
breaching pods. The number of individual
fighters or shuttles in a flight is not defined within
the scope of these rules, but the flight is the
smallest functional unit of these types of craft.

As far as I read the intent of the rules, “Flight” is interchangeable with “Flight Unit” which means a single Fighter or Shuttle.

b)If this is the case, all fighter flights cost 1 EP always right?

Assuming the above, no - fighter “flights” (which are single “flight units”) cost their listed cost.
However, you have to buy them in groups of 1 EP cost; and no fractional accounting is allowed, and no buying a ½ EP shuttle and a ½ EP med fighter.

c) Do the combat stats reflect an individual fighter? or a group of them forming the flight? What about maintenance? Is 2/15 maintenance for individual craft or flights? So if I bought 72 medium fighters, that would be 24 flights of medium fighters and it would cost me 4 maintenance (2/15 for 24 flights)? Or would it be 10 maintenance (2/15 for 72 fighters)?

Combat Stats and maintenance costs, just like EP costs, are per fighter. That’s the simplest and most coherent way to read the data, and that’s why I’m ruling the way I am on the question of Flight == Flight Unit == Fighter.

d) Is it possible to have 1600 light fighters in your home system? I am assuming 1 light fighter wing/squadron is four flights, and a flight is 4 light fighters. So that's 16 fighters per wing. Basing for fighters/shuttles is utilized productivity squared. The utilized productivity at your homeworld will be 10 so thats 100 * 16 fighters for 1600 fighters... =D

I believe 1 point of basing capacity = 1 EP worth of fighters. So a homeworld with 10 Utilized Productivity can field 10*10=100 EP worth of fighters, or 400 Light Fighters @ 1/4 EP cost each.

Please feel free to shoot me down (HA!) where I'm wrong.

[Tyrel Lohr]

The size and composition of a flight is purposefully left vague because it varies from setting to setting. The Babylon 5 Wars game had 6 fighters in each fighter flight, but games like Wing Commander usually have 2 fighters per flight. Therefore the actual size of your flight and how many fighters/shuttles it contains is wholly dependent on your source material.

The terms Flight and Flight Unit are entirely interchangeable.

The economic costs for flights are just the cost to purchase one flight. You aren't buying individual fighters are shuttles unless your setting explicitly says that 1 flight = 1 fighter. You are correct that there is no fractional accounting in VBAM, but the player could elect to spend 1 EP to buy a single 1/3 EP medium fighter if he wanted to. Or he could spend the 1 EP for 3 @ 1/3 EP medium fighters.

The combat stats and costs are all per flight. The construction and maintenance costs are only fractional because the units cost so little to build and maintain and have no other in-game ramifications beyond that. His 24 flights of medium fighters would cost 8 EP to build and (if maintenance is 2/15) would cost 4 EP per turn to maintain (2/15 x 24, rounding fractions up for the maintenance group).

As to the homeworld question, the number of flights that can be based there is equal to utilized Productivity squared, so strictly speaking a 10 Productivity system could base 100 flights. I kind of like your interpretation of the rules better, though, as it scales better. The only issue is that it makes the homeworld fighter horde even worse to contend with. I've tried finding better solutions for planetary basing of flights in 2E and just haven't found a good solution yet. I may end up stealing your solution and just allow Productivity^2 EP of atmospheric flights to be included in a fixed defense squadron in Defensive Scenarios. The actual percentage that can launch would be tied to commitment levels in that case, with 25% at Minor, 50% at Normal, and 100% at Major. Still, 25 EP of atmospheric flights thrown into a squadron to defend your homeworld via a minor attack is always going to be helpful.

[virtutis.umbra]

Aha, now the light clicks on.

If I'm reading you correctly, the line-item from the Force List for (say) the Jain Light Fighter Flight Unit is the cost / combat factors / maintenance cost for one Flight which consists of N Fighters, where N is a positive integer determined by the flavor desired by the campaign.

I could arbitrarily say that a Flight contains 1 Fighter, or 4, or 10, as long as I'm consistent within a particular campaign. It doesn't matter how many Fighters are in a Flight because Flights, not Fighters, are the unit at which stats/costs/maintenance resolve. So, 1/3 EP either buys a single Jain Light Fighter, or four Jain Light Fighters, but either way that combat unit as a whole has the stats and maint. cost listed in the source materials.

Basing Capacity, then, is the number of Flights of Fighters a particular carrier / base / system can house at any given time? Or is it the number of EP of Flights? I would have thought a given carrier could field more Light Fighters than Heavy Fighters...

[Tyrel Lohr]

If I'm reading you correctly, the line-item from the Force List for (say) the Jain Light Fighter Flight Unitis the cost / combat factors / maintenance cost for one Flight which consists of N Fighters, where N is a positive integer determined by the flavor desired by the campaign.

Correct. There can be 1, 2, 3, or 1000 fighters in each flight, depending on your setting. The stats and costs are for a flight as a whole. As the sample races from the Campaign Guide or Menagerie don't have any thematic background accompanying them, you can interpret the flights to be as large or small as you would like.

Basing Capacity, then, is the number of Flights of Fighters a particular carrier / base / system can house at any given time? Or is it the number of EP of Flights? I would have thought a given carrier could field more Light Fighters than Heavy Fighters...

As written a unit's Basing Capacity is the number of flights that the carrier can carry and deploy. Your method makes more sense and how it works in 2E, but in 1E a flight was a flight for the purposes of basing capacity. You could certainly have 1 Basing Capacity = 1 EP of fighters, but you would then need to implement a balancing mechanism to keep fighters from becoming even more overpowered than they could be in 1E. A quick simple fix would be that each carrier can carry a total construction cost of fighters equal to their Basing Capacity, but that only X could be "launched" and provide benefits or take damage each combat round, where X is the units Basing Capacity. For example, a Jain Light Cruiser I could therefore base 3 medium fighters, but could only use 2 of them each combat round.

Looking at the sample source materials in the CG, the Lorans would stand to gain the most from this system as their Light Carrier II (ISD 3002, BC 6) could hold 24 light fighters and then field 6 of them per round. Or they could have 18 Bomber-I and still field 6 per round.

[zyffyr]

I would have thought a given carrier could field more Light Fighters than Heavy Fighters...

Given that the number of Fighters in a Flight is entirely arbitrary, you could look at it as a Light flight consisting of 12 fighters and a Heavy flight being 8 larger units. Or any other numbers you want.

Alternatively, you could see the fighters as being carried in mostly external pods. You only have X spots for those pods to be hooked on to, so fighter size becomes essentially irrelevant as long as the fighter can physically fit into the area. For specific examples of how such a system would work, see the Babylon 5 Cobra Bays, or the facilities for the Hammerhead fighters in Space:Above and Beyond.