On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 6:42 PM, Ian Whitchurch
<xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
> Regarding massive ships, in High Guard size was one of the primary defenses
> of a ship - tonnage smaller than the weapon USP led to automatic crits.
>
> In FFS2, lasers were limited in megajoulage by TL, so having enough armor to
> protect against lasers of your own TL is, in my mind, the dividing line
> between real military ships and auxilaries suitable only for interacting
> with civilians. As armor is a surface area thing, and surface area goes up
> more slowly than volume, its difficult to get enough performance out of a
> small armored ship.
>
> I can see 'Fighters' on an escort carrier still being a thing for piracy
> suppression, but real military ships swat virtually unlimited fighters out
> of space, as it's real easy to build ~600 MJ lasers that fire every thirty
> seconds, and real hard to put weapons that hurt real warships onto a small
> craft.

Not to put too fine a point on it, and I'm not trying it start a
version flame war or any thing, but I don't play CT,MT, TNE (shudder),
T4 or T5, so what those rules say about a given topic are sort of, as
I'm found of saying, orthogonal to the debate.  I play MgT, and if I
wanted to I could make ship killing LAC, ala Honor Harrington series
with out to much work.  Might be pushing it to call them a fighter but
a 50 dTon small craft could carry two shipping killing weapons (to
include a pair of torpedoes, but would be defenseless after launch.