Federation Commander

You go, savedFromWhat. You hit the nail on the head.

Just because scaled-down heavy DF weapons are not currently in FC (or SFB for that matter), that doesn't mean they cannot be.

I was looking for a way to give the former drone fighters more of a punch than simply phasers, but not to make them overpowered weapon-wise with full strength heavy weapons. I think half-strength photons and disruptors would work nicely. The plasma already has the D version which is basically a half strength F.

There could be a few variations of these weapon load-outs. One type of fighter could have only phasers, perhaps even a mix with Ph-3s and a Ph-1 (or Ph-2). Another could have two Ph-3s with one heavy weapon. Another could have two heavy weapons and one Ph-3. I don't believe any should have three heavy weapons, though. Throw in an ADD that could be used either offensively or defensively and that makes another possible variation to replace a phaser or a heavy weapon. For example, a "flight" of three fighters might have one fighter with two ADDs and one heavy weapon or a phaser. That fighter's role would be more of a defensive one for the flight, but it would have a regular weapon to add to an attack or to defend itself. Here's a novel idea (gasp!): let the players decide how to "build" their fighters within certain guidelines and for certain amounts of points. Surely this would be nowhere nearly as complicated to figure out as the BPVs for the capital ships.

I also like the idea of flights of 3 fighters having some incentive to group together such as the group shared defensive fire that was mentioned earlier.

Another idea I liked was the damage idea that does not slow the speed of a fighter if it becomes crippled. A crippled fighter would simply lose the capability of firing its weapons (or at least all but one of them). This would allow flights to remain together for mutual protection. A crippled fighter could still drop out of a flight and return to its base or carrier for repairs and another fighter could take its place to bring the flight back up to full strength of three fighters or the two remaining fighters would simply continue moving as separate units.

Fighters could have their own ship cards in one of two ways. One would be to group them all on a single sheet and provide a space to show the ID numbers of fighters that compose flight groups. Another would be to have the players cut them apart and physically group them together on the table (attach with clips, Post-It strips, or simply put them next to each other). Since these will probably be PDFs anyway, it doesn't really matter if players cut them up.

Even the direct-fire fighter drone rules are complicated, especially if the target ship has to track the drones into the next Impulse. Too much to remember for a game like FC. KISS!

I don't particularly care for the idea of halving DF heavy weapons; a fighter which already has a less powerful warhead (such as a light photon) would be even further reduced (from 4 to 2, in this case).

I suppose you could give an Alpha fighter ADDs, but I'm not sure it would work as well as SRCs do on FRA craft.

As to matching how Alpha SFB fighter deployments goes, there already are ships which break that link (like most BBs).

savedfromwhat: as i said " i believe the fighter/carrier rules from Sfb will not work for FC". those of us commenting on this thread have for the most part all agreed on this. so now we need to come up with something better and "Sell" Svc on it. thats part of the reason i asked Mjwest for the 2 carriers earlier on in this thread.

so if the drone fighters are to be used, how do we fix the direct fire rules using "kiss" as our guide?

My opinion: Dont use the direct fire drones. Why would their drones work different than any other drone. My thing was to make sure fighters with no drones on them are available.

so does everyone else agree no drone fighters? if not then whats your suggestion. if so then what should these fighters look like ? i have already posted a modified KZ-D and ZDAS. any others suggestions.

jeffery smith wrote:so does everyone else agree no drone fighters?

No I Don't agree.

I did like to see drones, and will explain why. I’ve been playing in SFU on and off since the original boxed TFG boxed set of SFB, and although I totally except that FC is a different game it is set in the same cannon/background. Love them or hate them missile armed fighters are now and have been for a long time a part of this background, there even in the fiction.

I’m one for keeping things simple. I don’t want to see mass stack of drone counters and have to do all the record keeping that goes with it that why I’m a supporter of DF fighter missiles in some form. This probably means a great departed from the original rules, but as has been said and here I do agree hole heartedly they are different games.

I’m also pro 2 fighter per race for the same reason, although I like rules fast and steam lined I would rather not see fighter become a vanilla, one fit all type of unit.

Coming after the battle, but...

FC have 2 scales, fleet and squadron.

Why not group fighter by squadron and treat them as a small ship with no repair capability ? and whom damage that hit an empty location aren't carried over ?

Will help lessen the clutter, no ?

A simple-ish solution suggests itself here. If we must have drone swarms, why not have drone swarm counters like in SFB?

And then, to keep a record of what drones are in the swarm, you have a card that sits off-board, labelled 'Swarm-1' or whatever, and place the drones in that swarm on the card.

That would mean that if/when a drone detaches from the swarm in order to follow a slightly different course, you just take the relevant drone off the card and place it on the board. This would avoid the horrendous situation of loads of paper record-keeping.

One other idea as well. I have proposed this before here: http://tinyurl.com/5st3gqy but the idea would be to disassociate drone control from individual units, and instead have a 'generic' drone control factor equal to the total number of all the drone control channels in the fleet. Since this would be Borders of Madness, why not do it that way, 'cos it's not 'canon' FC anyway!

(Naturally some of these ideas could extend to plasma swarms too....)

Kang, drone and plasma swarm counters already exist in FC.

I don't like the idea of "one number for the whole fleet" drone control, since it essentially creates drone control transfer, something that was deliberately left out of FC.
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Regarding the "no generic fighter" idea advanced in this thread:

When you look at the various marques of fighters in SFB and eliminate certain complications (Dogfight rating, different speeds, special rails, dogfight drones, chaff, bays, et cetera) then the most commonly used drone-armed fighters for each empire start looking VERY similar. I don't see a problem with including one generic drone fighter for everybody, since they'll be nearly impossible to distinguish in any case.

Kang wrote: Since this would be Borders of Madness, why not do it that way, 'cos it's not 'canon' FC anyway!

When I say cannon I not talk about the rules, I talking about the back ground and as I said above I have really no problem with some of the rule been drastically different from SFB.

I don’t’ want to lead this thread off topic but have to say that I think we have a problem here in what people individual perceive BOM is and how this can be achieved, correct me if I’m wrong but I thought BOM still is meant to be based on SFU ‘history’, actual and some hypothetical published what if’s (for example BB’s beside the B10). I look at it to be the layering of the cake and would rather see any rules in it bolt on, and add to FC proper, and not change the core rules when using things from BOM.

Kang I like the idea of ‘dissociated drone control’ if DF is not an option but would not like it applied to ship, but could see it been applied to a squadron or all of one sides fight.

terryoc wrote:Kang, drone and plasma swarm counters already exist in FC.

They do, Terry, yes, but I was thinking more about the cards that the 'actual' drones could be placed on. I phrased my initial sentence incorrectly duh sorry!

For the drone control transfer, I'm not sure it would 'create' transfer because as long as there are sufficient channels available in a given squadron/fleet, there would be no need to account for who is controlling which weapon, period. Therefore 'transfer' as such would be (happily!) not relevant.

‘Direct Fire Drones’ for fighters:

I might be wrong but I feel there is a lot of resistance to the idea even though it seems to offer a steam lined solution to many off the problem presented by fighter missiles.

I know there were great concerns about the present play test rules on another thread, which I can’t find at the mo., but what is the problem with the general concept?

terryoc wrote:When you look at the various marques of fighters in SFB and eliminate certain complications (Dogfight rating, different speeds, special rails, dogfight drones, chaff, bays, et cetera) then the most commonly used drone-armed fighters for each empire start looking VERY similar. I don't see a problem with including one generic drone fighter for everybody, since they'll be nearly impossible to distinguish in any case.

Yes, on giving it some thought i agree with this as long as those extras don't start to creep in. Which I think none of us want.

jeffery smith wrote:so does everyone else agree no drone fighters? if not then whats your suggestion. if so then what should these fighters look like ? i have already posted a modified KZ-D and ZDAS. any others suggestions.

I'm not in favor of eliminating drone fighters. Too much flavor would be lost.

However the more I think about it the more I think we can make flights pretty easy and not hurt the Hydrans by making the *optional*, but with advantages. The key would be to give a "wing" of fighters a slight advantage over an individual fighter operating alone and then set not a MIN but rather a MAX on the number of fighters that can be in a flight/wing.

Proposed refined rules for fighter "flights":

Definition: A flight of fighters constitutes a group of two or more fighters of the same type operating from the same carrier that were launched on the same impulse.

1) Up to 6 (or other arbitrary number based on playtest results... or perhaps based on the size of the carrier??) fighters may be grouped into a flight.
2) A flight of fighters counts as one "unit" for purposes of the number of units that can fire out of a single hex. (Not grossly overpowering as even 6 DF fighters has less direct firepower than a heavy cruiser.)
3) Damage to a flight of fighters is allocated to an individual fighter by the recipient but all damage must be allocated to one fighter before any may be allocated to the next. (So you can decide which of your fighters takes damage, such as one that has already fired, but you cannot "spread" the damage out.) If there is more than one damaged fighter in a flight (because the damaged fighters were grouped together on the carrier before launch) any damage must be allocated to the most damaged fighter.
4) For purposes of movement, a fighter in a flight is either intact or destroyed. While in a flight a fighter moves normally until destroyed.
5) A flight of fighters must move and maneuver together. (But not fire, just like a ship, mark the box of the individual weapon if/when it fires.)
6) An opponent firing on a flight merely targets the flight, not individual fighters in the flight.
7) Leaving a flight: A fighter may leave a flight during the (insert reasonable stage, I suggest at the shuttle operations phase).
Joining a flight: A fighter may not join a flight (to avoid abuse of partially damaged fighters moving in/out of a flight to protect them from crippling/destruction).
9) Launch. A flight is launched during the <shuttle operations phase RRB not available atm>. Only one flight be be launched during an impulse.
10) Recovery. A flight can be recovered in one of two ways: the fighters can leave the flight and be recovered individually under the normal fighter recovery rules. Alternately, a flight can be recovered as a unit under the following rules and restrictions. Move the flight into the hex of the carrier. Remove the flight counter/miniature and place it on the SSD of the Carrier during the <shuttle ops phase>. Carrier may not move more than 2 hexes during any Impulse of the recovery. Much like seeking weapons, once engaged in recovery the flight may not be fired upon. The flight is recovered in <some number based on the max size determined, perhaps 2> Impulses at which point the counter is remove from the SSD and all the fighters in the flight are available for reload and repair.
11) Disabled weaponry. When a fighter takes enough damage to be 'crippled' it's drones are jettisoned and it's offensive weaponry is disabled (except for the one potential remaining ph-3 shot).
12) All weapons in a flight are available for defensive fire at any seeking weapon targeted at the flight.
13) Overkill. A given weapon cannot do more damage to a flight than the maximum damage point total of a single undamaged member of the flight. (If you hit a flight of Stingers with an S torp or an overloaded photon you only do 10 pts, not 30 or 16.)
14) <not sure about this one..... clever suggestions anyone?>. If a fighter leaves a flight that is targeted by seeking weapons, roll a die for each seeking weapon to determine if the weapon follows the flight or the fighter.
15) If a fighter that has taken enough damage to be crippled leaves a flight it immediately operates under all the restrictions of a crippled shuttle.

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