Okay, I understand that you might prefer to sacrifice armor for speed, and if it was for me, I'd have the same preference. But the problem I was trying to adress is that a capship that avoids trouble by running away doesn't make for a good escort to a carrier. I admit that it does solve exactly half of the problem, namely the problem of these ships being liabilities. If they are fast enough to run away, they are less of a worry. But to be good team players they should be able to fight alongside the carrier. More than that, they should be protecting the carrier, since carriers are carriers, and NOT cruisers.
That's why I chose to sacrifice speed for armor: Even if they are rather lightly armed, they help the carrier just by being there and drawing fire to themselves (and NOT blowing up, of course). At worst, they are like extra armor for the carrier, as well as extra deck space and extra space for supplies. At best they score some kills, thicken the space with missiles, lauch a torpedo or two, and sometimes serve as per your tender duty. But I don't want to design them to be so specialized as tenders as to make them so to the cataclismic detriment of their escorting and transporting roles. As a matter of fact, I think that them being designed for dual purposes, corvette and transport, is already a handful. I'd rather not even consider tender roles at all, design wise.
And you should be glad, because this allows you to make your fleet officer a character with vision and spirit, who takes these ships designed for one set of roles, and makes them serve a different one; rather than someone who's just following procedures by the book.
My other problem with carrying escorts outside, as I said before, is I don't know how the jump drive works, exactly, but it's certainly not by producing a typical electric or magnetic-like field that falls by the square of the distance to the source. It's some kind of homogeneous field that moves the entire ship across a jump in a single piece. But if this field is homogeneous and yet not infinite, then it must be bounded rather sharply. I presume the bounding is possibly controlled by something on the surface of the ships. If so, ships that it carries with it across a jump point must be fully
contained. This may be very speculative on my part, but like I said, I haven't seen or heard of a ship carrying other ships on the outside across jump points, in WC; have you?; and I feel very uncomfortable about messing around with the pseudoscience, --unless it were to deliberately
fix it--, but otherwise I'd rather follow the traditions than risk raising all kinds of questions and drawing undue attention to the regrettable, albeit necessary perhaps, pseudoscience.
Besides, I don't know what the external open dockings would look like, so we'd probably end up adopting Vegastrike's external dockings and docking methods and maneuvres. Now, there's nothing wrong with VS dockings, but that's Vegastrike, and this is WC. Just to clarify: I may be sounding very unlike myself, to those who know me, but what I've always argued about the non-sacredness of canon is when confronted with the possibility to make a deliberate improvement to the game experience. In this case I'm yet to be convinced that there's any benefit at all whatsoever to be obtained from having external ship attachments, let alone some huge benefit that justifies breaking with the WC traditions.
Shissui wrote:Reduced production cost & faster catch/release. Additionally, it is not our customary transport -- the "cargo space" is dedicated to fighter transport.
1) Perhaps you missed my Cutter Class post entirely... I specifically said about the ship's history, that as a retcon to the fact that it is not later seen in WC1,2,etc., that the ship's production stopped because the Confeds found it too expensive. So your first argument --production cost-- would gratuitously deny me that one way of explaining its later disappearance.
2) I don't see why a catch/release without a roof is faster than one with one. The only difference it makes is as to the direction of release; not the speed. In fact, what about catapults?
3) If the cargo space is dedicated to fighter transport, then this is neither a cargo transport nor a corvette, but a carrier. You are trying to "specialize" this ship for tender role, and that's not a good idea. It sends us back to square 1: Like a Drayman, being a liability or utterly useless in fleet engagements. Plus, now it wouldn't be any good as a supplies transport. And last but not least, we'd have to change the story about Chen having his own, for it wouldn't serve the cargo transporting needs of a privateer.
Furthermore, if indeed there
WAS some clear and profound benefit from carrying ships on the outside, then we'd probably NOT want to take advantage of it anyways; or else we'd have to retcon all the rest of WC: to explain why external dockings aren't used more often.
In other words, I see
endless trouble, and no benefits whatsoever, to carrying fighters on the outside.
As for the ship being too big, I think I can agree to that...
It's got a lot of weight to lose... Should either be thinner, like a Khamek, or smaller in all 3 dimensions....
Let me think about it.
I think I can make the rectangular section a bit narrower, and perhaps that alone will do like 50% of the trick. Then just give it an extra shrink in all directions, to, say, 120 meters long, instead of 140...
EDIT: How about I make the two front turrets (top and bottom) lasers, and the two rear turrets flak?
And should I leave the forward facing mass drivers in the wings there, or get rid of them?
Sorry, I know very little about guns and stuff.
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