Posted by: sloanjh
« on: April 15, 2010, 12:09:43 AM »Quote from: "Charlie Beeler"
Squadron jump radius (the later tech jump distance is the same thing) governs how fair from the jump point you arrive on the other side. 250k is only 3rd level tech and 4000rp, a long way from max tech. That's well outside equivilent laser tech ranges.Good point. In addition, don't forget that the limit on beam weapon ranges is usually NOT the range of the beam weapon - it's the range of the beam fire control. And IIRC, it's pretty tough to get above 100k or so for the first ~3 tech levels.
The other point here is that ISTR a discussion during 4.9x when Steve formalized the difference between standard and squadron transit. My recollection is that we realized that the various weapons ranges had changed since the jump radius tech was defined, and that he bumped them up by a factor of 10x to ensure that you had a reasonable chance of jumping outside the range of beam-armed ships camped on the warp point.
One of the things in SF that Steve was expressly trying to avoid in Aurora was the strong choke-point nature of warp points. The jump radius tech is designed precisely to avoid the thing you're worried about, so if it's broken, then the fix should be made by tweaking jump radius range bands, rather than by introducing yet-another-tech.
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Ignore the the technobable. Post jump sensor blindness is here to stay. It's a holdover from when the core player group came over from Starfire 3rdR. It's not a shipkiller, just something to account for when planning to force a contested jump point.Well said. I think it probably has roots even further than that - I always think of it as the crew disorentiation from Pournelle's CoDominion universe (especially Niven & Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye) - computers are messed up by the act of passing through the wormhole. I've always had it in my head (just from similarities, not from a factual basis) that SF jump mechanics might have been patterned on the Alderson drive.
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So, in the hypothetical case of sending a single scout FAC your assuming that the defender will have good enough task force training that the the FAC will be detected, engaged and destroyed before it can jump out with scans of the defenders deployment. And that this lack of recon data will stalemate the JP. It's only a stalemate if both sides continue to consider short range beam combat the only resolution.I ran into this sort of situation a year or two ago - there was an NPR fleet with big honking plasma cannon parked on a WP with a scout trapped in their system. I designed a jump ship that was just a big ball of armor (lvl 20, IIRC), along with engines and an active sensor, and sent two of them through on a scout mission. One got vaporized, but the other made it back with intel.
Easy counter to beamships defending at point blank range:
1)Build a jumgate and mass fighters.
2)Jump squadron size =>4 and radius at least 250k for missile ship divisions to envelope the JP from range
3)FAC or fighter equiped with selfjump engines for a dispersed swarm attack
The above ideas are certainly not the only solutions.
John