Fighter Ideas

Playtesting & Rules Development
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Tyrel Lohr
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Post by Tyrel Lohr »

Gareth_Perkins wrote:Will that not create a situation where bigger is almost always better (in all situations unless background materiel strongly emphasizes the lighter craft)?
I think it is all dependent on both the tech levels involved and the assumptions made about fighters in any given setting.

A lot of my baselines for fighters in VBAM come from the old Babylon 5 conversions. Fighters are an important element in Babylon 5 combat, and usually have some pretty hefty firepower relative to other settings. In the Babylon 5 Wars game especially, the "heavier" the fighter the larger and more powerful it was.

Here are a few of the B5W fighters that I have converted over into VBAM stats:

Aurora Starfury
Heavy Fighter, Cost 1/2, Maint 1/10, DV 3, AS 3, AF 3

Thunderbolt Starfury
Heavy Fighter, Cost 1/2, Maint 1/6, DV 4, AS 3, AF 3, Atmospheric

Nial Heavy Fighter
Heavy Fighter, Cost 1/2, Maint 1/6, DV 5, AS 4, AF 4, Stealth, Atmospheric

Sentri Medium Fighter
Medium Fighter, Cost 1/3, Maint 1/12, DV 3, AS 2, AF 4, Atmospheric

Frazi Heavy Fighter
Heavy Fighter, Cost 1/2, Maint 1/8, DV 3, AS 3, AF 2, Atmospheric

Delta-V Light Fighter
Light Fighter, Cost 1/4, Maint 1/16, DV 2, AS 1, AF 2*, Atmospheric


In this setting, heavy fighters are more capable than their lighter counterparts. Why then would anyone build the lighter fighters? The biggest reason is maintenance costs. It is nice to have the largest, best fighters you can have aboard your carriers -- but it can get expensive really fast. In most of my games, the light fighters tended to be used as attrition forces that were cheap to build, cheaper to maintain and could serve in a specific role in the fleet.

A universe with a more "traditional" view of fighter craft is the Wing Commander universe. Taking a look at the first game in the series, you end up with the following fighters: Hornet, light interceptor fighter; Scimitar, older multipurpose medium fighter (with extra emphasis on AS); Raptor, heavy bomber fighter; and Rapier, a new multipurpose medium fighter. In that setting, there is a good reason to field some or all of the fighters.

When it comes to designing fighters via a design system, however, usually you end up making tradeoffs on the stats. You may start with one of the archetypes (light, medium, heavy), but how you use the volume/mass determines the unit's qualities. You can improve the fighter's DV (representing better armor/shields, faster speed, smaller targeting signature, etc.), or you can invest them into the ship's combat stats or other abilities. I tend to play pretty low-tech VBAM campaigns, so it is not uncommon to see fighters (even heavy fighters) whose stats are simply craptastic. A medium fighter with DV 1, AS 0, AF 0? Yep, best that they could field!

I do admit that costing for flight units that exist in a set universe could be tweaked to better encourage players to purchase lesser models, but I have never personally encountered this as being a problem in my own campaigns, probably because the smaller/cheaper units still had some sort of unique benefit that made them attractive.
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Post by MarkG88 »

Very interesting topic/convo gentlemen I'm enjoying it and learning much.

-Mark
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Post by mriddle »

I guess it is unusual to me that the B5 fighters would be so powerful in AS but not AF.. ie to my expectation a DV 3 AS 3 AF 3 fighter would cost about the same as a DV 3 AS 1 AF 8 fighter... ie .. there seems to be a lack of First Class Interceptors in most published back-grounds..

The other issue is the use of Heavy / Light implies SIZE but does not effect basing... ie a carrier with a basing of 8 carries the same number of light and heavy and that seems wrong.. (but that is probably just me and my interpretation of HEAVY and LIGHT)

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Post by zyffyr »

mriddle wrote:The other issue is the use of Heavy / Light implies SIZE but does not effect basing... ie a carrier with a basing of 8 carries the same number of light and heavy and that seems wrong.. (but that is probably just me and my interpretation of HEAVY and LIGHT)

Mike
How much effect (if any) "Light" vs "Heavy" should have really depends on how your background treats the fighter basing. In most fictional universes you have flight ops that are very much like those of 20th century navies. All the open space involved in the operations pretty much nullifies small differences in size - if your Heavies are only 10-20% larger in a given dimension (which works out to 1/3 to 3/4 more mass) then you could put the fighters in the same spots and the only difference would be a slightly smaller work space around them - see the current Battlestar Galactica for a specific example of such ops.

On the other hand, if you look at Babylon 5 the station's Cobra Bays don't have space for a fighter much larger than the standard Star Fury. In that case, Heavy vs Light is a major consideration for basing. The same would go for the original BSG where the launch tubes would presumably handle a longer fighter but wouldn't be able to handle a wider/taller one.
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Post by mwaschak »

zyffyr wrote: On the other hand, if you look at Babylon 5 the station's Cobra Bays don't have space for a fighter much larger than the standard Star Fury. In that case, Heavy vs Light is a major consideration for basing. The same would go for the original BSG where the launch tubes would presumably handle a longer fighter but wouldn't be able to handle a wider/taller one.
I think most sci-fi fighter sources I can think of have similar launch considerations. In Wing Commander, well the novel End Run anyway, they constantly talked about how many and what size of fighters the deck could handle. In that case launch and recovered were on the same platform. In BSG there are the launch tubes very much like the Cobra Bays.

William and I have been going over this for the future versions of the WC games (yes, I will probably run another after the Dilgar invasion). I would probably alter basing and combat to show how unique the Escort Carriers that could handle fighter/bombers were, and why the Kilrathi end up with so many light fighters in a battle. Their cap ship killers only made an appears on their fleet carriers.

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Post by Gareth_Perkins »

I think we're fairly rapidly approaching the school of thought that there are two main sci-fi fighter "clichés",

There's backgrounds like Honor Harrington, Star Trek, Babylon 5, etc where bigger is almost always better (admittedly this is probably the more "realistic" option), and perhaps where more care needs to be taken here to ensure that hanger and launch facilities are suitable for the class of small-craft (light and heavy basing capacity perhaps. This is more like the stats we've already seen in the basic rule book),

And there are backgrounds like Star Wars, Jovian Chronicles, Battlestar Galactica, Battlefleet Gothic, Wing Commander, etc where smaller craft tend to be significantly harder to kill because of their nimbleness, while larger vessels can carry much heavier payloads (these diverge significantly from the rulebook as printed, as the lighter craft will tend to be tougher and have higher AF scores than heavier craft),

Both have significantly different outcomes in terms of what people are likely to field, and the game stats for their units,
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Post by MarkG88 »

Gareth_Perkins wrote:I think we're fairly rapidly approaching the school of thought that there are two main sci-fi fighter "clichés",

There's backgrounds like Honor Harrington, Star Trek, Babylon 5, etc where bigger is almost always better (admittedly this is probably the more "realistic" option), and perhaps where more care needs to be taken here to ensure that hanger and launch facilities are suitable for the class of small-craft (light and heavy basing capacity perhaps. This is more like the stats we've already seen in the basic rule book),

And there are backgrounds like Star Wars, Jovian Chronicles, Battlestar Galactica, Battlefleet Gothic, Wing Commander, etc where smaller craft tend to be significantly harder to kill because of their nimbleness, while larger vessels can carry much heavier payloads (these diverge significantly from the rulebook as printed, as the lighter craft will tend to be tougher and have higher AF scores than heavier craft),

Both have significantly different outcomes in terms of what people are likely to field, and the game stats for their units,
Yes I agree with your statements here Gareth, this is what I was alluding to in my comments about campaign setting several posts ago. But VBAM's modular nature can cover these two conflicting fighter concepts (pick your posion: A where heavy fighters rule the roost, or B. where light fighters will hunt you down and kill you before you can blink). I lean towards the former setting myself for realism reasons but it will depend on group playing and setting chosen etc.
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Post by Gareth_Perkins »

MarkG88 wrote: I lean towards the former setting myself for realism reasons but it will depend on group playing and setting chosen etc.
Well, if you want realism then I'd suggest something like the Attack Vector/Ten Worlds solution of no fighters at all ;)
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Post by MarkG88 »

Gareth_Perkins wrote:
MarkG88 wrote: I lean towards the former setting myself for realism reasons but it will depend on group playing and setting chosen etc.
Well, if you want realism then I'd suggest something like the Attack Vector/Ten Worlds solution of no fighters at all ;)

I said I lean towards more realism in regards towards fighters, doesn't mean it's a necessity. I likes me some rip-roaring space opera battles too from time-to-time. Bring on the X-wings vs. Star Destroyers woohoo. :lol:

VBAM's "plug and play" modular ability allows a great deal of latitude either way. My main issue from a general purpose strategic warfare point of view is having light fighters (which cost "pennies" to build and very little to maintain) shouldn't necessarily have the strategic impact of battlecruisers (meaning powerful space warship) etc. At least not unless the light fighter is a much higher technology level (again based on whatever system one picks from VBAM's options) compared to the aforementioned large and powerful space warships.
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Post by Tyrel Lohr »

For backgrounds where fighter sizes should matter, it would be a fairly simple exercise to add a Size attribute to each fighter type. A flight's Size could then either be made to be equal to either A) the amount of Basing Capacity the flight required to base; or B) the number of flights of that type that could be based from a single point of Basing Capacity. "A" is easier to deal with in the long-term, though I think "B" is a bit more backwards compatible with settings that don't assume large Basing Capacity totals (which most don't).

As for the conceits of various fictional settings, the survivability of the fighter is rolled into the DV, so if light fighters are supposed to be more difficult to kill in any given setting then they would receive a higher DV.

I do agree with Gareth's overview of the situation, as well as the general breakdown between the two camps. I would argue that Wing Commander almost falls in the other camp, however, as (at least in the first two games) the light fighters were trivial to kill, regardless of how hard they were to hit. The Salthi and Hornet definitely wheren't very survivable! It also is a setting where the bigger the unit, the more capable it is (though sometimes in only in DV and AS; AF excellence seemed to be the near exclusive realm of the light and medium fighter classes, not the heavy bombers).
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Post by jygro »

You could state that for each basing that a ship has, you get 2 flight points (or something along those lines). Light fighters cost 1 flight point, medium fighters cost 2 flight points and heavy fighters cost 3. So a ship that has a basing of 2 could have 4 light fighter flights, 2 med. fighter flights or 1 heavy and 1 light fighter flight.

-Bren
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