Anyone not like the books?

[sea_monkey]

I shouldn't say "not like" because I thought they were enjoyable works of fiction, but I don't consider End Run, Fleet Action, Heart of the Tiger or the other books to be "the official word" on what happened in the WC universe. Some of the things I didn't like:

1) Kilrathi and Terrans too evenly matched. From playing the game I always got the impression that the Kilrathi outnumber the Terrans by AT LEAST 4 to 1 and probably more. Anything less and the games were just ridiculous with missions where you came back with 20 kills. When the Kilrathi lose 3 Snakeir at Firekka, that is bad but when the Terrans lose the Tiger's Claw it is a catastrophe.

In the books they make it seem like the Kilrathi have only a slight edge in numbers, like 1.5 to 1. In that case the odds of ever having two pilots with 100+ kills on the same carrier would be 1 in a number with 30 zeroes.

2) Too carrier centric. #1 -- I always got the impression that the Kilrathi employed lots of heavy cruisers as their main force instead of carriers. You see lots of Fralthra around but few carriers. Thrakhath's flagship is a heavy cruiser.

#2 -- in space carriers aren't as big a deal. In WW2 you needed a carrier to transport aircraft from point A to B through the Pacific. So they were the limiting factor in any engagement. In space, *every ship* has a hangar since there are no transporter beams like in Star Trek. So every ship can carry a fighter or two. The big issue in WC is the # of fighters in an engagement.

For instance, in the Battle of Earth it made no sense for Confed to be fretting about how many carriers they had or to focus strikes on enemy carriers. They could just scramble all fighters from the various bases in the solar system, they don't even need carriers. Plus Confed's target should have been the cruisers with the nukes all along, the enemy carriers serve no purpose but to carry fighters to the battle.

So it strikes me as a little silly that the Kilrathi super carrier is considered some kind of "ultimate weapon." Who cares? The question is do you have 300 good fighters to put on that carrier that can match up with Confed fighters?

Other stuff I can't think of right now ...

[pygmypiranha]

Maybe.... but frankly not to put to fine a point on things... the books were what got me hooked on WING COMMANDER.

[psych]

Originally Posted by spank_monkey

blah blah blah, bullshit that has been said before . . . over and over . . . blah blah blah

you make me sad

[Drizzt Do Urden]

I disagree the carriers were the greatest threat at the battle of earth. Because the fighters were capable of carrying nukes and bombs to attack earth, and further more if you were to use only fighters to stop a fleet of that size, there are so many flaws with that plan.
#1 no where near enough torps or bombers to take down a fleet of that size.
#2 and even if you had enough bombers you would need enough fighter cover to keep the 1,800 from the six super carriers off them while they launch their torps.
#3 The Confed fleet doesn't even have 1,800 fighter all togather. So they needed very ship they could get their hands on to try and stop the Kilrathi.
#4 If they had targeted ony the cruisers carrying the nukes then the rest of the fleet would become sitting duck for the fighters and bombers launched from the super carriers. They were very lucky to win the battle at all they would have been beaten to a pulp in seconds if they had only used fighters.

[ChrisReid]

Originally Posted by sea_monkey

I shouldn't say "not like" because I thought they were enjoyable works of fiction, but I don't consider End Run, Fleet Action, Heart of the Tiger or the other books to be "the official word" on what happened in the WC universe. Some of the things I didn't like:

I've commented on your individual points about 8000 times in the last eight years, but the final conclusion is that you just can't pick and choose things to exclude because you don't like them. If you don't like them, that's fine, but Origin worked with the novel authors to make those books, and Origin used the foundations from those books to establish the backstory for numerous games. There's really no way to reasonably exclude them from the universe.

[pygmypiranha]

Originally Posted by ChrisReid

Origin used the foundations from those books to establish the backstory for numerous games. There's really no way to reasonably exclude them from the universe.

Ya know, I think he's got a point...

[Bandit LOAF]

Now, now, people, the original poster raises some valid concerns - lets have intelligent debate rather than just dismissing them.

1) Kilrathi and Terrans too evenly matched. From playing the game I always got the impression that the Kilrathi outnumber the Terrans by AT LEAST 4 to 1 and probably more. Anything less and the games were just ridiculous with missions where you came back with 20 kills. When the Kilrathi lose 3 Snakeir at Firekka, that is bad but when the Terrans lose the Tiger's Claw it is a catastrophe.

In the books they make it seem like the Kilrathi have only a slight edge in numbers, like 1.5 to 1. In that case the odds of ever having two pilots with 100+ kills on the same carrier would be 1 in a number with 30 zeroes.

I'm not sure your probability math is correct - our favorite historical analogue, World War II, involved similar odds... and there were a number of Luftwaffe pilots who ended up with several hundred air to air kills each.

Per the Wing Commander universe, Blair and Maniac would be the exception rather than the rule... their four digit kill count (ICIS Manual) is an amazing feat accomplished through surviving at the front lines against all odds for many years, and it places them far and above their contemporary peers. The indication is that the average 'well known ace' (contradiction, I know) might expect to score a hundred or so kills (per Hawk's lack of a century award in the TPoF novel). You also have to consider the flip side of the coin - for every ace you're going to lose dozens of regular pilots... and for every mass of downed Kilrathi pilots you'll come across an ace who will have destroyed dozens of human fighters.

Much of this complaint is based on your personal perception rather than anything ever stated anywhere... we see absolutely no Kilrathi reaction to their losses at Firekka, and very little human reaction fo the destruction of the Tiger's Claw (and that's primarily with regards to the moral blow of having lost such a noted ship).

2) Too carrier centric. #1 -- I always got the impression that the Kilrathi employed lots of heavy cruisers as their main force instead of carriers. You see lots of Fralthra around but few carriers. Thrakhath's flagship is a heavy cruiser.

This would seem to be the exact *opposite* of complaint #1. Carriers are more important, so we rarely ever have a chance to destroy them. ArmPrankBlairerick scores most of his kills against cruisers and destroyers. (Fleet Action talks about the strength of the fighter-capable Kilrathi heavy carrier force...)

(To the best of my knowledge, however, Thrakhath's flagship is always a carrier or a dreadnought.)

#2 -- in space carriers aren't as big a deal. In WW2 you needed a carrier to transport aircraft from point A to B through the Pacific. So they were the limiting factor in any engagement. In space, *every ship* has a hangar since there are no transporter beams like in Star Trek. So every ship can carry a fighter or two. The big issue in WC is the # of fighters in an engagement.

For instance, in the Battle of Earth it made no sense for Confed to be fretting about how many carriers they had or to focus strikes on enemy carriers. They could just scramble all fighters from the various bases in the solar system, they don't even need carriers. Plus Confed's target should have been the cruisers with the nukes all along, the enemy carriers serve no purpose but to carry fighters to the battle.

So it strikes me as a little silly that the Kilrathi super carrier is considered some kind of "ultimate weapon." Who cares? The question is do you have 300 good fighters to put on that carrier that can match up with Confed fighters?

Eh, it seems like stretching to claim that carriers aren't a big deal in a video game universe based entirely around the idea of serving aboard them. Certainly, they're vastly outnumbered by destroyers and such (just like in 'real life')... and a lot of the war will be fought destroyer-to-destroyer. But that's like saying that aircraft carriers weren't instrumental in World War II because of how much shipping submarines managed to sink - it's essentially a non-sequitor.

(It's also worth noting that the novels point this out - jump capable carriers weren't necessary once the fleet had fallen back to Earth... but just doing so was such a tremendous loss that it supports the necessity of having them in the first place. By the time you're fighting over the homeworld itself you've lost dozens of other core planets and you've already expended your best equipped and most experienced pilots).

[Moonsword]

Well said. Also, the carriers are needed to ferry fighters to the front lines. Once you're fighting a purely defensive war, with no supply lines to the outer worlds (which you would be if you have to rely on planet-based fighters), you're already losing in WC terms. The Kilrathi can cut off a world, destroy it, and move on at their leisure if the Confed Fleet, including carriers, aren't there to stop the. The carriers are necessary for at least two reasons: fighter cover and bombers. Fighters to protect other capships (and themselves!) and bombers to deal with other capships. Also, bombers are far less valuable and can be risked more easily than a destroyer.

[Edfilho]

Thankfully LOAF addressed the points respectfully. Even though I'm a book supporter, I find it healthy to debate particular points. Personally I like the non-game named books better, (I prefer to believe that whatever happened in the game while I played also happened in the WCU, isn't that why we play the games in first place?), and I find it very nice to read about book events (battle of Terra) in the Game manuals (Voices of war is the best connection). I take everything in ER, FA and FC to be canon, as most of the people do. Maybe there is some bias here and there, after all, there are no facts, only versions. But the core of the narratives can't be argued.

BTW, how could Dekker be a survivor of Repleetah if everyone died in the end? I figured he was wounded and evac'ed while transports still visited the planet...

[Haesslich]

I have but one or two questions to ask of the initial poster.

How does he justify point 2, stating that 'every ship has a hangar' and that the supercarriers were no big deal because they could scramble 'every fighter in the solar system'?

First; prove that every ship has a hangar. Corvettes are very small craft, being just large enough to fit several crew and enough torpedoes and missiles to make life interesting. Where's the hangar room on that particular capital ship? Here, we've already blown point one out of the water - not every ship is large enough to have a hangar, much less one that can house a significant force of fighters; for that, we needed Light Carriers or Escort Carriers, as the Kilrathi mention in Fleet Action. The logic chain justifying the 'books are not canon' idea has already lost some credence here, as he's ignoring in-game visuals and in-manual documentation as well. Corvettes are not big enough to house fighters, and most transports don't have hangars that can house fighters, to judge by their lack of defensive capability in game, requiring a fighter scort. That's two classes of ships which don't generally have them, at least in game.

Remember that the fighter threat posed by the number of craft off an escort carrier, even the ramshackle ones that the Tarawa and her sisters represented, were enough to overwhelm anything but heavy cruisers. P. 6 of Fleet Action notes that 'even destroyers are outclassed'; we've seen destroyers carry fighters before in WC, and even the modern (by WC3) Coventry could only carry a half-squadron of six fighters. Notice that those fighters weren't the ones escorting the Behemoth, or being used on most missions. Why? Because six is JUST enough to cover a destroyer, and nothing more. And the WC3 novel, I may add, is taken from the WC3 script and whatever notes Origin made available to Forstchen.

Therefore, the problem that is presented is this; it's not enough to just have a hangar on a capital ship, but that you can deliver a sufficiently large group of fighters to a target in order to threaten it - if you've got just three or four fighters, there's not much of a threat to a well-armed capital ship. One or two bomber squadrons complete with escorts, on the other hand, are a significant hazard to the ship in question. The ability to deliver strike craft in sufficient numbers to an engagement are what make carriers so useful, given that most fighters are short-ranged craft.

Point two is that the supercarrier threat, 300+ fighters, was insignificant compared to the number of fighters that one could scramble in a star system. My response is this - three hundred fighters may not be a lot, but when you have three hundred or more craft striking at one time in one place... that's deadly.

If you want an example of the above, just look at the novel End Run - which was referenced in later game documentation; one carrier and her escorts had less than fifty fighters between them, but in a raid on Kilrah succeeded and despite the hundreds of fighters available to the Kilrathi, did not stop the Terran force from fleeting. Why is this? Because star systems are BIG - it can take hours even moving at several thousand kps to cross between planets. That's why we've got autopilots to move between points on patrols, and why a run to a planet (the Niven system's Ferret-courier runs) were whole missions in themselves. Yes, you may have several thousand fighters scattered across the solar system, by the Battle of Earth. What good does that do you? They put most of those fighters on bases on Mars or on the carriers because that planet was the nearest launching platform to the jump point that led to Earth; and they'd had a few days to move everyone over there. In the Kilrah Raid, most of the reinforcements took time to get there, and in the process some bases got smashed as the Terrans were elsewhere.

You may have a few thousand fighters in an area... but if they're scattered all over, they're not going to stop a determined attack. Concentration of forces is one key to success in a military engagement - that's what carriers allow. The Kilrathi had five of them on the way to Earth, and if they'd had but one more, the Terran Confederation's core would've been destroyed. If the Kilrathi had kept all their fighters by Kilrah or its moons, and sent them up to engage the Tarawa during the Raid on Kilrah, none of the Confederation raiders would have survived the engagement, much less gone on to smash the shipyard and its carriers.

I'd examine that train of thought again... especially as some documentation already made reference to events that occured in the novels BEFORE the novels were published (the Battle of Earth is probably the best example of this), and later docs go on to mention in-novel occurences (Vukar Tag) or the game scripts themselves form the basis of the novels (WC3, WC4).

[sea_monkey]

OOOHHHHHH ... I have been uber-geeked.

Relax bro, we're on the same side. *Flashed NWA (Nerds With Attitudes) gang symbol*

I'm not sure your probability math is correct - our favorite historical analogue, World War II, involved similar odds... and there were a number of Luftwaffe pilots who ended up with several hundred air to air kills each.

I just figured if you have a 1:1 chance of winning a battle, winning 100+ dogfights is equivalent to flipping a coin and getting "heads" 100 times in a row, the odds of which are like 1 in a number with 15 zeroes. Then factor in there's ANOTHER guy out of like a few thousand pilots who did the same thing, AND you happen to serve together on the same ship, you get some ridiculous number. The math isn't correct because kills aren't a function of pure luck, and looking back at it I didn't do it right anyway ... but I argue the point stands.

I just got done with WC1 & the Secret Missions (hence my sudden interest in WC again after 10 years), and I had something like 450 kills. And, if you look at the scoreboard on the Tiger's Claw, lots of other pilots have close to 100 kills as well. It adds up to something like 8 enemy fleet carriers singlehandedly eradicated by the Tiger's Claw -- 4 by ONE pilot -- in a short period of time. To an extent I'm willing to concede these numbers are inflated by lack of computer AI -- it is a video game after all and since they were so stupid the only way to make missions hard was throw a lot of them at you -- and so I can pretend the numbers are "really" lower. But still, the games make no sense if the odds are close to even. Sure you would have aces here and there with 100+ kills ... but you wouldn't rejoin the fleet in 10 years and see all your old buddies still flying. They'd be dead.

You also have to consider the flip side of the coin - for every ace you're going to lose dozens of regular pilots... and for every mass of downed Kilrathi pilots you'll come across an ace who will have destroyed dozens of human fighters.

Yeah, that is sort of my take on it as well. 20% of Confed pilots do 80% of the killing, like in any line of work. The majority of pilots probably die before they get 5 kills. I don't disagree with you here. I'm just saying the games make a LOT more sense if Kilrathi outnumber Confed by 4 or more to 1, and in general, Confed has survived through superior skill and technology. Which is why Confed pilots last a lot longer than Kilrathi ones.

I have another take on some of this stuff but it's really another thread.

Much of this complaint is based on your personal perception rather than anything ever stated anywhere... we see absolutely no Kilrathi reaction to their losses at Firekka, and very little human reaction fo the destruction of the Tiger's Claw (and that's primarily with regards to the moral blow of having lost such a noted ship).

Well that's true about everything. Other than in the books -- which I am questioning here -- these things aren't really spelled out.

This would seem to be the exact *opposite* of complaint #1. Carriers are more important, so we rarely ever have a chance to destroy them.

Maybe so but I would think after you completely decimated a carrier's 100 fighter complement, you would get a crack at the mother ship. I'm trying to picture empty Kilrathi carriers arriving back at Kilrah after the Vega campaign ... "Yeah we lost another batch. Fill 'er up!"

I'm not saying this is impossible but it just fits the games to me better if the Kilrathi use carriers more as mobile headquarters while the cruisers do the dirty work on the front lines. IMHO.

I believe at the beginning of WC2 you see a Fralthra fly by, with the subtitle reading "Prince Thrakhath's flagship".

Eh, it seems like stretching to claim that carriers aren't a big deal in a video game universe based entirely around the idea of serving aboard them. Certainly, they're vastly outnumbered by destroyers and such (just like in 'real life')... and a lot of the war will be fought destroyer-to-destroyer. But that's like saying that aircraft carriers weren't instrumental in World War II because of how much shipping submarines managed to sink - it's essentially a non-sequitor.

I'm not saying they're not important, I'm saying they're not AS important. In WW2 the number of carriers in any battle was critical. This was because the only way of bringing aircraft to the battle was building a giant floating metal runway in the middle of the ocean. In space that's not necessary because there's no gravity, you don't need to running start to get up into the air. So destroyers and cruisers can carry a small amount of ships too, unlike in WW2.

So Forstchen had this idea for a Kilrathi super weapon -- a carrier that carry 300 fighters and eat 4 torpedoes -- which is nice I suppose, but not really superior in any way to say, 7-8 Fralthra carrying 40 fighters each, and each of which take 2 torpedoes to kill.

Yeah I read that in Fleet Action, (regarding the non-jump capable carriers), but that just got me thinking. Why would you even NEED them there in the first place, unless they were going to ram the Kilrathi in the last ditch scenario. The Concordia could shoot down enemy ships with the phase transit cannon (which I never saw mentioned in the books), but other than that they are just floating empty boxes. Likewise, the Kilrathi carriers were not the threat, the cruisers carrying the nukes were. Why would you focus your attack on a bunch of empty boxes when theres a squadron of enemy ships heading off to the side to nuke your homeworld.

And actually, that reminded me of the first thing I didn't like about Fleet Action. If it's so easy to destroy an entire planet with atomic weapons from a few cruisers, seems like the war would have been over much quicker. Also kinda of makes the Sivar weapon redundant wouldn't you say.

If you guys liked the books, that's fine. Wing Commander has major continuity issues throughout the entire series so I figure everyone has to pick and choose what they like to some extent. I was just wondering if anyone else saw the same issues that I did.

[sea_monkey]

I'd examine that train of thought again... especially as some documentation already made reference to events that occured in the novels BEFORE the novels were published (the Battle of Earth is probably the best example of this), and later docs go on to mention in-novel occurences (Vukar Tag) or the game scripts themselves form the basis of the novels (WC3, WC4).

I rate the manuals behind the books in terms of "canon". Blair is 32 in 2669 according to "Victory Streak". That would make him 17 in 2654 as a 2nd Lt on the Claw. Angel is *Dutch* in "Claw Marks", and French thereafter.

First; prove that every ship has a hangar. Corvettes are very small craft, being just large enough to fit several crew and enough torpedoes and missiles to make life interesting. Where's the hangar room on that particular capital ship? Here, we've already blown point one out of the water - not every ship is large enough to have a hangar, much less one that can house a significant force of fighters; for that, we needed Light Carriers or Escort Carriers, as the Kilrathi mention in Fleet Action.

Because dude, they're in SPACE. You can't park the ship offshore, and have everybody walk off a ramp. You need some way to transfer people, fuel, munitions and repair materials back and forth. A docking bay and a ladder won't cut it. So every ship has to be able to "open up" some way to allow stuff to transfer.

Also you picked corvettes and transports as your examples, which hardly blows my point out of the water. I wasn't arguing it would be more realistic if Confed had pursued a "Venture-corvette-only" strategy. And you missed my point entirely. I'm saying the real threat IS the 300 fighters -- NOT the carrier. Doesn't matter whether you have a supercarrier bringing the 300 fighters or 7 Fralthra. Actually the Fralthra would probably be superior for all of the reasons the super-carrier was supposed to be so awesome: more resilient (at least 2 torpedoes each), 7 landing bays instead of six, etc.

[BlackJack2064]

Yeah it would be difficult to field a wing of fighters and keep them armed, if you are defending the asteroid belt and you have to fly back to Earth to re-arm. It's all about power projecting, the ability to strike at different targets from a non static base, which in its self is a better defense than lets say Alexandria from AS. You can't get shot if you can't be seen. There were examples in WW2 when US and Japenese carriers passed within 40 miles of one another, pretty good defense to me if neither got any sorties off ~~~.

[Viper61]

Originally Posted by sea_monkey

Also you picked corvettes and transports as your examples, which hardly blows my point out of the water. I wasn't arguing it would be more realistic if Confed had pursued a "Venture-corvette-only" strategy. And you missed my point entirely. I'm saying the real threat IS the 300 fighters -- NOT the carrier. Doesn't matter whether you have a supercarrier bringing the 300 fighters or 7 Fralthra. Actually the Fralthra would probably be superior for all of the reasons the super-carrier was supposed to be so awesome: more resilient (at least 2 torpedoes each), 7 landing bays instead of six, etc.

To effectively project these 300 craft, you need a base of operations that is just that, geared specifically for the service, rearming, and storage of all types of ships. Cruisers and Destroyers must also carry the capability onboard to effectively fight a ship-to-ship engagement, which takes up much needed space for fighters and their associated amenities.
Also, Cruisers, while not usually carrying the ability to support all of their craft for the long haul, also don't have the hanger space to carry all the fighters needed to wage a war. Usually cruisers can carry the amount of fighters they can because they can only support light and medium (sometimes heavy) fighters. They usually do not have the space to carry the larger bombers required to project the power required in an engagement.

C-ya

[BlackJack2064]

Don't forget cruisers are packed to the gills with weapons and armor, in order act as cruisers. Strip them of that and they are just light carriers. Destroyers even more so, space is a premium on those kind of vessels.

Having 8 Fralthra cruiser/carriers, wouldn't that make it a little more difficult to coordinate tactics with wings from the other ships. You would need like 26 of them (more probably) just to match the strike power of 3 Hakagas.

Game design question, did they make a Fralthi carrier conversion, by using the same ship, just changing the missions around the models and simply saying "these are cruiser/lt carrier conversions."

The Kilrathi did outnumber confed in pretty much every catagory through most the war didn't they? Two to one don't seem like much until they are carriers and they outnumber you in fighter support, and that isn't including support craft. From what I have seen, Kilrathi ships seem to have fighter bays more than Confed ships. Probably one of the reasons they are slightly inferior to Confed ships (aside from technological considerations of course).

[Haesslich]

Originally Posted by sea_monkey

I rate the manuals behind the books in terms of "canon". Blair is 32 in 2669 according to "Victory Streak". That would make him 17 in 2654 as a 2nd Lt on the Claw. Angel is *Dutch* in "Claw Marks", and French thereafter.

If the manuals, which detail the game's workings and the stats for the fighters or carriers in the game are even more 'wrong' than the books... I guess even the games aren't accurate representations of the 'real life' fighters which don't exist in anything outside of those manuals, the writers' bible for the game, those novels you've stated as being not 'canon'... oh, and the games, which are based on the stats in those manuals. The most serious problem I've seen with the manuals are that the writers weren't very familiar with the metric system sometimes - mixing up 'feet' with 'meters' at some points. However, they're still 'canon' documentation by virtue of the fact that they're based on the same materials that created the games.

Saying that the books and manuals aren't as 'canon' as the games is rather like telling a fundamentalist Muslim that the Qu'ran and various Islamic scholars' writers aren't as canon as what you say the Qu'ran means because the latter sources were written down, and are erroneous from your own point of view.

Back to the drawing board.

Originally Posted by sea_monkey

Because dude, they're in SPACE. You can't park the ship offshore, and have everybody walk off a ramp. You need some way to transfer people, fuel, munitions and repair materials back and forth. A docking bay and a ladder won't cut it. So every ship has to be able to "open up" some way to allow stuff to transfer.

Also you picked corvettes and transports as your examples, which hardly blows my point out of the water. I wasn't arguing it would be more realistic if Confed had pursued a "Venture-corvette-only" strategy. And you missed my point entirely. I'm saying the real threat IS the 300 fighters -- NOT the carrier. Doesn't matter whether you have a supercarrier bringing the 300 fighters or 7 Fralthra. Actually the Fralthra would probably be superior for all of the reasons the super-carrier was supposed to be so awesome: more resilient (at least 2 torpedoes each), 7 landing bays instead of six, etc.

Actually, with craft as small as corvettes, they can LAND in hangar bays. Remember, there are light transports like the Bonnie Heather which are 83m long and Corvettes which are 80m long which land on planets or dock in space station hangars. You don't have to shuttle from a corvette, which at 80m is too bloody small to carry a fighter a quarter of its size unless it's mostly empty space - which most corvettes are not. Transports, on the other hand, CAN be fairly empty... but unless they're special-ops ships, are usually carrying other cargo.

You've also got extendable docking umbilicals, which are preferable to shuttles when you need to connect a ship to the dockyard's pressurized areas to transfew crew and don't need to worry about gravity - shuttles are inefficient in comparison when it comes to moving a large number of people around, especially when the ship's 'at rest'. You're talking about fuel expenditures for something that, when a ship's not in combat or not out on patrol, can be done a lot more simply and cheaply.

Not all ships have hangar bays, which is what your initial statement earlier in the thread suggested. Some ships are too small for proper ones, especially warships which are already rather hard-pressed for usable volume. Others don't need them, as they wouldn't be able to do all that much with the number of fighters they could carry, anyhow. There's also the fact that it's going to up the cost of a ship if you're putting fighters on it - you've got the support staff, the repair equipment, and so on.

Also, regarding the supercarriers - the main threat was that those ships not only packed more fighters than many carrier battle groups, but that they were nearly invulnerable to current weapons . While two torpedoes would take out the Fralthra or Fralthi configured as a carrier (which robs it of most of the weapons you mentioned, in favor of fighter space and support equipment, plus fighter supplies), those two torpedoes didn't even make a dent in those supercarriers. That, and the fact that they could launch and service 300 fighters at any given time made them a true threat - the seven Fralthi you mentioned above MIGHT be able to launch seven fighters... but they're also harder to defend, and they were far more vulnerable to being destroyed than the single Hakaga-class ship.

If each destroyer had six fighters, that would allow you to spread your forces around some... but that's also a liability when you realize that it's only a theoretical advantage as it means that your strength is dispersed, and thus you end up having to drag all those destroyers or cruisers off the battle lines to concentrate them at one point, for a particular engagement.

Contrast this with a single craft that can carry a larger fighter group in and out of combat, plus have the room to service and launch them all at once, and the savings in time, logistics, and construction costs are clear. Remember; to keep a fighter flying you need parts, missiles, fuel, repair equipment, storage space for spare fighters so that you're not giving up a lot of your fighter strength should one get downchecked or destroyed, crew quarters for your fighter techs and pilots,

That's why there are dedicated carriers. They're cheaper, easier to defend, more effective as they're designed to accomplish just one mission - delivering fighters and supporting them as a mobile base - which makes them far more usable than many ships carrying a small number of fighters, at least outside of raids or lightly-defended convoy runs well behind friendly lines.

[Bandit LOAF]

The math isn't correct because kills aren't a function of pure luck, and looking back at it I didn't do it right anyway ... but I argue the point stands.

So... you realize the math didn't make sense... and you didn't address the historical reference... but you still stand by your point?

Sure you would have aces here and there with 100+ kills ... but you wouldn't rejoin the fleet in 10 years and see all your old buddies still flying. They'd be dead.

Only one pilot from the original Wing Commander is still flying combat missions in Wing Commander II, though (Spirit). The others that we see in WC2 have moved on (Angel is a Wing Commander, Paladin is a spy, Maniac is a test pilot, others are dead).

Maybe so but I would think after you completely decimated a carrier's 100 fighter complement, you would get a crack at the mother ship. I'm trying to picture empty Kilrathi carriers arriving back at Kilrah after the Vega campaign ... "Yeah we lost another batch. Fill 'er up!"

I'm not saying this is impossible but it just fits the games to me better if the Kilrathi use carriers more as mobile headquarters while the cruisers do the dirty work on the front lines. IMHO.

Ehh, that's Space Invaders, not 'real' war. Any fleet is going to work with a large supply line behind it that will bring fresh fighters and other munitions. We see many instances of this in just the games... escorting in supply transports of all sorts. Armada's small attempt at fleet command involves the ability to produce resource-carrying transports... and then we see things like the fighter transports on WCA and the escort carriers in the novels that are designed specifically to bring fresh fighters to the front.

I believe at the beginning of WC2 you see a Fralthra fly by, with the subtitle reading "Prince Thrakhath's flagship".

Nope, go back and watch it - it's an entirely different ship (it's roughly the same shape as a Ralatha, but it has a large launch tube in the 'nose').

I'm not saying they're not important, I'm saying they're not AS important. In WW2 the number of carriers in any battle was critical. This was because the only way of bringing aircraft to the battle was building a giant floating metal runway in the middle of the ocean. In space that's not necessary because there's no gravity, you don't need to running start to get up into the air. So destroyers and cruisers can carry a small amount of ships too, unlike in WW2.

Never let science mix with Wing Commander... for whatever reason, you do seem to need a flight deck of a certain length to launch fighters in Wing Commander. (Cruisers and destroyers are analagous to those used in the Navy today... they can launch and recover helicopters and such for various utility purposes, but you wouldn't expect them to launch massive airstrikes).

Yeah I read that in Fleet Action, (regarding the non-jump capable carriers), but that just got me thinking. Why would you even NEED them there in the first place, unless they were going to ram the Kilrathi in the last ditch scenario. The Concordia could shoot down enemy ships with the phase transit cannon (which I never saw mentioned in the books), but other than that they are just floating empty boxes. Likewise, the Kilrathi carriers were not the threat, the cruisers carrying the nukes were. Why would you focus your attack on a bunch of empty boxes when theres a squadron of enemy ships heading off to the side to nuke your homeworld.

This is two issues.

* Why do we need carriers at Earth? Why did we need carriers at the Battle of Midway? Why didn't the US fleet just land all their strike craft on Midway and then sail off to greener pastures? Because an aircraft/spacecraft carrier is a more valuable platform than a stationary base, no matter what century you're in.

* Why target the Kilrathi carriers over the cruisers? Ignoring the fact that the cruisers were targetted (by destroyer squadrons), it's because the carriers are the more important target. If Earth was lost, the Hakagas would have brought the war forward to the rest of the Confederation... so destroying them is the better strategic choice.

And actually, that reminded me of the first thing I didn't like about Fleet Action. If it's so easy to destroy an entire planet with atomic weapons from a few cruisers, seems like the war would have been over much quicker. Also kinda of makes the Sivar weapon redundant wouldn't you say.

Again, you're complaining about issues explained in the novel itself. Until Fleet Action no one was fighting the war purely to destroy the other side... using weapons that destroy entire biospheres means you aren't taking slaves/resources/territory/etc. It's just like today: technically, we could destroy MiddleEastCountryOfTheWeek with atomic weapons... but there's a million reasons why we probably never will.

I'd examine that train of thought again... especially as some documentation already made reference to events that occured in the novels BEFORE the novels were published (the Battle of Earth is probably the best example of this), and later docs go on to mention in-novel occurences (Vukar Tag) or the game scripts themselves form the basis of the novels (WC3, WC4).

I don't think any in-game documentation mentioned the Battle of Earth before Fleet Action was published.

I rate the manuals behind the books in terms of "canon". Blair is 32 in 2669 according to "Victory Streak". That would make him 17 in 2654 as a 2nd Lt on the Claw. Angel is *Dutch* in "Claw Marks", and French thereafter.

I don't think Angel is *ever* Dutch *or* French.

(... she's from Belgium in 'Claw Marks', and that's never questioned to the best of my knowledge.)

[Haesslich]

Originally Posted by Bandit LOAF

I don't think any in-game documentation mentioned the Battle of Earth before Fleet Action was published.

I thought Armada came out before Fleet Action, and Voices of War is the first time that the Battle of Earth is mentioned, IIRC. They even name the Hakaga class and note the Marine boarding operation that destroyed three of them.

Fleet Action came out in 1994 or so, and Armada was a year earlier, from what I recall.

[Dundradal]

Wow, I hadn't looked at the CZ in a day and a bunch of interesting threads pop up...

After reading through posts it seems like most things have been answered just wanted to add my own thoughts about things. Most of these are in response to sea monkey but I'm lazy and didn't want to quote both question and LOAF's answer so for clarity I'm just putting his.

Originally Posted by Bandit LOAF

Ehh, that's Space Invaders, not 'real' war. Any fleet is going to work with a large supply line behind it that will bring fresh fighters and other munitions. We see many instances of this in just the games... escorting in supply transports of all sorts. Armada's small attempt at fleet command involves the ability to produce resource-carrying transports... and then we see things like the fighter transports on WCA and the escort carriers in the novels that are designed specifically to bring fresh fighters to the front.

It's kind of interesting to note that the Japanese built one of the first ships of this type designed to resupply frontline units. The Shinano was built on the hull of the 3rd yamato battleship after Midway. Kind of the opposite of other groups which usually used smaller ships to ferry planes to the front.

Originally Posted by Bandit LOAF

Again, you're complaining about issues explained in the novel itself. Until Fleet Action no one was fighting the war purely to destroy the other side... using weapons that destroy entire biospheres means you aren't taking slaves/resources/territory/etc. It's just like today: technically, we could destroy MiddleEastCountryOfTheWeek with atomic weapons... but there's a million reasons why we probably never will.

Total destruction of the enemy is not often a common result of warfare. Most of the time people go to war to gain things, namely resources and/or access to said resources. The Kilrathi are extremely imperialist. They don't want to just destroy Confed because it's Confed (although some of them might), they want confed's technology and resources. If the kats nuked every planet they came across they would lose their ability to exploit those resources. In a society where imperialism is known, most, if not all wars can be connected to imperialist tendencies. I just finished a class (Anthropology 715: Global Warring) which looked at how warfare has evolved in human society and the concept of imperialism and different theories to explain why imperialism causes violence.
It's all about the benjamin's.....

Originally Posted by Bandit LOAF

I don't think any in-game documentation mentioned the Battle of Earth before Fleet Action was published.

I think the first place it's mentioned is in Armada's VOW. I don't think there's an earlier manual with any kind of timeline....

[Bandit LOAF]

Fleet Action came out in 1994 or so, and Armada was a year earlier, from what I recall.

Nope, Fleet Action (March 1994) was before Armada (August 1994).

[sea_monkey]

If the manuals, which detail the game's workings and the stats for the fighters or carriers in the game are even more 'wrong' than the books... I guess even the games aren't accurate representations of the 'real life' fighters which don't exist in anything outside of those manuals, the writers' bible for the game, those novels you've stated as being not 'canon'... oh, and the games, which are based on the stats in those manuals.

I consider the WC3, WC2, WC1 & SMs1&2, and *lightly* S01&2 canon in that order because to me they make the most sense like that. After that, stuff like the books, Privateer, Academy, Armada, the manuals, as far as they don't contradict each other and the "main" games. From what I saw of the movie it seemed like that is best considered a parallel universe.

The manuals have all sorts of mistakes in them, from the ones I mentioned and lots of others including fighter statistics. I notice no one is trying to rationalize Blair being 17 in 2654. You can either go to extreme lengths to rationalize every inconsistency, however ridiculous -- or you can say, "okay, the manual creators made a mistake. I'll pretend they didn't say that."

I think that's the big difference here between me and some of you guys. I would rather pick and choose elements of all the materials that make the most consistent and enjoyable universe rather than try to force contradictory elements (written by different people with entirely different ideas about the games) together in the same universe.

Also, regarding the supercarriers - the main threat was that those ships not only packed more fighters than many carrier battle groups, but that they were nearly invulnerable to current weapons . While two torpedoes would take out the Fralthra or Fralthi configured as a carrier (which robs it of most of the weapons you mentioned, in favor of fighter space and support equipment, plus fighter supplies), those two torpedoes didn't even make a dent in those supercarriers. That, and the fact that they could launch and service 300 fighters at any given time made them a true threat - the seven Fralthi you mentioned above MIGHT be able to launch seven fighters... but they're also harder to defend, and they were far more vulnerable to being destroyed than the single Hakaga-class ship.

7 Fralthra could take 14 torpedoes. They could take 8 torpedoes and still have have their firepower and fighter capacity left. Can a Hakaga eat 14 torpedoes and still be kicking? If so I'll agree they are an unstoppable superweapon. However I think from the novel it was pretty clear that 4 torpedoes would mess it up pretty bad, let alone 10 more.

And you're still talking about corvettes. Who cares, that is a trifling point. I wasn't arguing corvettes > carriers. I was saying having hangar bays in destroyers and cruisers (which was impossible in WW2), make carriers (NOT fighters) less important in both fleets.

To effectively project these 300 craft, you need a base of operations that is just that, geared specifically for the service, rearming, and storage of all types of ships. Cruisers and Destroyers must also carry the capability onboard to effectively fight a ship-to-ship engagement, which takes up much needed space for fighters and their associated amenities.

Ok, but we're starting to go from "Hakagas are super-weapons" to "Hakagas would be really nice to have if you wanted to carry 300 fighters." I'm not saying Hakagas suck. I'm saying they're not that big a deal and basically a somewhat IMHO lame plot device.

[sea_monkey]

So... you realize the math didn't make sense... and you didn't address the historical reference... but you still stand by your point?

Well, sure. I mean, in my initial example, I picked "100 kills" because that seemed like a ridiculous enough number. Pointing out that this isn't such a ridiculous amount of kills doesn't really make your point, because in Wing Commander we're talking about guys with 1000+ kills serving on carriers full of people with 100+ kills. I just took a look at my WC1 save game and at the end of the Crusade, the Tiger's Claw scoreboard has 1300+ kills on it, not counting Bossman who is dead. Any carriers or Luftwaffe squadrons that racked up 1300+ kills in WW2? Remember this was in a pretty short period of time for the Claw as well, only a few years if that.

So to me, you're faced with two contradictory elements: 1) In WC1, the Claw singlehandedly eliminated 13 fleet carriers worth of fighters in a few years, and the Kilrathi were still kicking and even managed to turn the tide of the war back sometime in the next 10 years. 2) In Forstchen's books, the Kilrathi's edge over Confed in terms of numbers is roughly 1.5 to 1. With Confed having about 10-15 carriers at any given time. Meaning losing 13 carriers in 2 years. would mean basically the total destruction of either fleet.

How you can pretend both are true at the same time is beyond me. My take: it's somewhere in the middle. The games stats are inflated due to crappy AI, and the Kilrathi outnumber Confed by about 5 to 1.

Nope, go back and watch it - it's an entirely different ship (it's roughly the same shape as a Ralatha, but it has a large launch tube in the 'nose').

Still looks an awful lot like a Fralthra to me. Has those six wings, the "nose" looks different ... but I don't see a flight deck anywhere.

This is two issues.

* Why do we need carriers at Earth? Why did we need carriers at the Battle of Midway? Why didn't the US fleet just land all their strike craft on Midway and then sail off to greener pastures? Because an aircraft/spacecraft carrier is a more valuable platform than a stationary base, no matter what century you're in.

* Why target the Kilrathi carriers over the cruisers? Ignoring the fact that the cruisers were targetted (by destroyer squadrons), it's because the carriers are the more important target. If Earth was lost, the Hakagas would have brought the war forward to the rest of the Confederation... so destroying them is the better strategic choice.

Midway (an island in the middle of the Pacific) isn't a good analogy for Earth (the center of the Confederation). I'll say having carriers present at the Battle of Earth helped their cause somewhat, but the # of number would be totally irrelevant compared to the # of fighters -- which, fighting a battle right by your construction yards, I would think would not be limited by the # of carriers present.

The second point we'll have to agree to disagree. If I'm commanding the Fleet in defending Earth I'm not making plans for "what if we lose."

Again, you're complaining about issues explained in the novel itself. Until Fleet Action no one was fighting the war purely to destroy the other side... using weapons that destroy entire biospheres means you aren't taking slaves/resources/territory/etc. It's just like today: technically, we could destroy MiddleEastCountryOfTheWeek with atomic weapons... but there's a million reasons why we probably never will.

I read it, I just didn't find it convincing.

I don't think Angel is *ever* Dutch *or* French.

(... she's from Belgium in 'Claw Marks', and that's never questioned to the best of my knowledge.)

Fair enough, I just assumed everyone in Belgium spoke Dutch and not French like Angel does all the time, but apparently a lot of them do speak French.

[Haesslich]

Originally Posted by sea_monkey

I consider the WC3, WC2, WC1 & SMs1&2, and *lightly* S01&2 canon in that order because to me they make the most sense like that. After that, stuff like the books, Privateer, Academy, Armada, the manuals, as far as they don't contradict each other and the "main" games. From what I saw of the movie it seemed like that is best considered a parallel universe.

The manuals have all sorts of mistakes in them, from the ones I mentioned and lots of others including fighter statistics. I notice no one is trying to rationalize Blair being 17 in 2654. You can either go to extreme lengths to rationalize every inconsistency, however ridiculous -- or you can say, "okay, the manual creators made a mistake. I'll pretend they didn't say that."

I think that's the big difference here between me and some of you guys. I would rather pick and choose elements of all the materials that make the most consistent and enjoyable universe rather than try to force contradictory elements (written by different people with entirely different ideas about the games) together in the same universe.

Yes, there are mistakes in manuals. However, they are official material which is either based on the same materials that define the events and stats in the games, or become the materials from which future games' in-game stats are drawn.

It's like saying that Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: DS9 took place in different universes, especially given all the inconsistencies which showed up within even the runs of each series, much less comparing both. Paramount says both series are canon, and Origin said that the manuals and books were canon (as per the note on the back of each novel, stating that the novels were based in the WC Universe).

If the people who created it say it's official, then it's official. If it comes from the materials they used to create the games which you consider 'canon', then those materials are also official. Otherwise, it's an opinion. That's what everyone else has been trying to tell you.

Originally Posted by sea_monkey

7 Fralthra could take 14 torpedoes. They could take 8 torpedoes and still have have their firepower and fighter capacity left. Can a Hakaga eat 14 torpedoes and still be kicking? If so I'll agree they are an unstoppable superweapon. However I think from the novel it was pretty clear that 4 torpedoes would mess it up pretty bad, let alone 10 more.

If you actually read the novel, you'll note on p. 253 that the barrage of four torpedoes on the first carrier knocked out one or two hangar bays - but that was all the damage it did, due to the armor. Similar hits on the Concordia, the Confederation's most heavily-armored ship class would have destroyed it. That's why Kevin Tolwyn was shocked when he flew by one of those ships at the Battle of Sirius Prime; it literally ate those torpedoes up and was still fighting. Yes, more targets means more torpedoes are needed to destroy them - but even one torpedo would've crippled the Fralthra, making it incapable of acting as a mobile fighter support platform, and possibly even removing its ability to service fighters. She was still flying and fighting, with only one launch bay written off because of a strike that would've flayed any other ship in space.

Between the sorry state of the Confederation fleet at that point, and the apparent invulnerability of the Hakaga-class ships, they were in a tight spot. A fleet with fighters spread out in small numbers among various destroyers and cruisers would only have made things worse. Yes, you'd have the ability to deploy fighters in a lot more places than you had carriers, but you'd also lose a lot of striking power and coordination in the process.

It took the deployment of nuclear mines inside several Hakaga-class supercarriers, using the own ship's armor to contain the effects of the blast and to direct all that force into the ship's own reactors, to stop them. Otherwise, they were just about impossible to hurt - something that could not be said about the far more lightly armored cruisers and destroyers. I don't doubt that they may have been able to take sixteen torps without being destroyed - though it would've resulted in some serious damage to the carrier in question. A similar number of torpedoes, or even half that, would've stopped the Fralthra force, however - and also made it easier to take out the fighter-launching ships, since you've got seven targets to worry about.

And don't forget the money factor - even in war, Confed wasn't made out of it.

Originally Posted by sea_monkey

And you're still talking about corvettes. Who cares, that is a trifling point. I wasn't arguing corvettes > carriers. I was saying having hangar bays in destroyers and cruisers (which was impossible in WW2), make carriers (NOT fighters) less important in both fleets.

I'm arguing that because I wanted to point out that not every ship had a hangar, or needed one, and that not every ship had the space to house fighters or the need to do so. Your initial statements were that 'every ship had a hangar', which is patently false. You also ignore the fact that supporting fighters means that you end up dedicating a lot of space to them... which is one reason that the full-fledged carriers of the United States Navy are so important to America's power-projection capabilities. Yes, you can make smaller carriers or retrofit cruisers to carry fighters, but then you've stuck with far fewer fighters because the smaller ship just doesn't have the volume to support all the associated equipment and crew.

Originally Posted by sea_monkey

Ok, but we're starting to go from "Hakagas are super-weapons" to "Hakagas would be really nice to have if you wanted to carry 300 fighters." I'm not saying Hakagas suck. I'm saying they're not that big a deal and basically a somewhat IMHO lame plot device.

The 'Hakaga-class carriers are super weapons' part is perfectly true - they had shielding and armor designed to repel the Confederation's heaviest Mark IV and V torpedoes. It took four of them firing at once to even do damage to one hangar bay... but that's all they did. Even one torpedo would've done serious damage to most carriers, and probably trashed or destroyed most cruisers or destroyers outright. That means those fighters, formerly based on that ship, no longer have a place to refuel or a means to get home... and you've robbed the enemy of those few fighters.

The 'Hakaga-class carriers are good because they carry a lot of fighters' is also true. This is because you've got a LOT of striking power handy, which means you can do more than one thing at a time fairly well, or you could overwhelm enemy defenses without having to pull a lot of ships off a battlefront to deploy that amount of force. A cruiser just doesn't carry enough fighters by itself to prosecute more than a raid or an escort mission - and if you have a fleet of six or seven of them all going for the same mission, that's six or seven targets that are easily taken cheaper destroyers or bomber squadrons. A carrier, on the other hand, is easier to defend and would be able to deploy all those fighters at once, applying the same amount of force. It's also cheaper.

If you've read the novels, and actually read beyond skimming for words like 'Hakaga', 'Blair' and 'torpedo', you'd probably have understood that a long time ago.

[BlackJack2064]

Of course aside from the armor and sheilding, it had massive anti-starfighter and torpedo batteries. They probably fired dozens of torpedoes at that ship (can't remember I think it was alot) and only four hit, you could proabably take out several Fralthras with that amount of firepower since they have less point defense weapons.

[BigsWickDagger]

Wow, I can see I've missed out on a lot by not having read any of the books- to say the least. Would anyone here be kind enough to provide me with a list of all the WC novels and when they were published? I'd really appreciate it!

[Haesslich]

Originally Posted by BigsWickDagger

Wow, I can see I've missed out on a lot by not having read any of the books- to say the least. Would anyone here be kind enough to provide me with a list of all the WC novels and when they were published? I'd really appreciate it!

There's the books list on the main site if you're interested in looking.

[BigsWickDagger]

Hey thanks- I found it about 30 seconds ago.....should have kept looking .

[Edfilho]

The novels are REALLY important in WCU. Half or more of the action we've seen is in there.

[BigsWickDagger]

Originally Posted by Edfilho

The novels are REALLY important in WCU. Half or more of the action we've seen is in there.

I'm sure you are right. They are very important and, much to my chagrin, I've missed out on a lot by not having read them. I don't read a lot of Sci-Fi, but some: I really like Arthur C. Clarke's stuff and I've read most of the X-Wing Rogue Squadron series. My first choice is Military History. But, I think the time has come for me to collect the novels and give them a thorough perusing.

[Edfilho]

Wc Novels are kinda easy to follow, there are few of them, compared to the endless books on SW. thankfully, Lucasfilms already stated that ONLY the movies are 100% canon. There are some really weird things in thos books. But WC stuff is really tight with the games. Sure, lots of little pieces of info are different here and there, but the main WC concept is thoroghly preserved.

[pygmypiranha]

Originally Posted by Edfilho

Wc Novels are kinda easy to follow, there are few of them[...].

Yea, but when is the next WC novel going to come out and who is going to write it...?

[Bandit LOAF]

Well, sure. I mean, in my initial example, I picked "100 kills" because that seemed like a ridiculous enough number. Pointing out that this isn't such a ridiculous amount of kills doesn't really make your point, because in Wing Commander we're talking about guys with 1000+ kills serving on carriers full of people with 100+ kills. I just took a look at my WC1 save game and at the end of the Crusade, the Tiger's Claw scoreboard has 1300+ kills on it, not counting Bossman who is dead. Any carriers or Luftwaffe squadrons that racked up 1300+ kills in WW2? Remember this was in a pretty short period of time for the Claw as well, only a few years if that.

So to me, you're faced with two contradictory elements: 1) In WC1, the Claw singlehandedly eliminated 13 fleet carriers worth of fighters in a few years, and the Kilrathi were still kicking and even managed to turn the tide of the war back sometime in the next 10 years. 2) In Forstchen's books, the Kilrathi's edge over Confed in terms of numbers is roughly 1.5 to 1. With Confed having about 10-15 carriers at any given time. Meaning losing 13 carriers in 2 years. would mean basically the total destruction of either fleet.

How you can pretend both are true at the same time is beyond me. My take: it's somewhere in the middle. The games stats are inflated due to crappy AI, and the Kilrathi outnumber Confed by about 5 to 1.

I don't think you're looking at both sides of the issue... yes, the eight pilots in the original Wing Commander score a lot of kills. So do, however, the Kilrathi aces in the same game - there's a Krant pilot with 99 kills, a Salthi pilot with 64 kills, a Jalthi pilot with 75... and Secret Missions II is full of Drakhai pilots who've each scored at least eight kills to get where they are.

You're taking eight out of a hundred and four pilots (/crews) on Confed's most acclaimed ship and trying to say that they're the rule rather than the exception... but everything we've ever seen indicates that they're special. Maniac and Blair are specifically singled out in Prophecy as having kill scores that are far and away above even the normal 'ace' level... Iceman, who fictionally ends up with 347 kills, is considered one of Confed's best pilots. It's not a case of "these eight guys represent everyone in the fleet" by any stretch of the imagination.

There's plenty of situations where the Kilrathi outgun the Confeds. Heck, there's two in the WC3 manual alone - a Sorthak that takes out eighteen Confed ships and a Strakha that destroys five fighters at once. And for every hugely victorious Tiger's Claw there's one (or two or three) TCS Exeter's blown out of space.

To return to World War II, superior technology frequently generates a superior kill ratio without saying anything for the total number of aircraft in service. Consider the famous 19-to-1 ratio of the F6F Hellcat. By the same logic you are applying to Wing Commander Japanese aircraft must have outnumbered American fighters by some vast amount... when in reality, just the opposite ended up being true.

(This is, of course, all treating 1,300 as a serious number instead of as what it is - a randomly generated number influenced by your success or failure in the game).

(Speaking of inflating, you've gone from claiming that the Kilrathi outnumber Confed by 3 to 1 at the beginning of the debate to 5 to 1 now... what changed?)

In reference to your second point, I don't see how 1,300 fighters equates to 13 fleet carriers... the vast majority of the things we shoot down in the original Wing Commander are probably ground-based or cruiser-based spacecraft... and the Kilrathi do the same to us when we're on the offensive (heck, we never even *see* a carrier).

Still looks an awful lot like a Fralthra to me. Has those six wings, the "nose" looks different ... but I don't see a flight deck anywhere.

The Fralthra is a large singular 'cone' of a ship with wings at the very end. Its engine nacelles attach directly to its body rather than at the end of the wings:



Thrakhath's dreadnought is more like the Ralatha. It's an oval at the front, a strut and then a rear hull... and the engine nacelles are at the end of each wing. It differs from the Ralatha in that it has a flight deck in the front. Here's some pictures of the two:

Thrakhath's Dreadnought:



Ralatha Destroyer:

Midway (an island in the middle of the Pacific) isn't a good analogy for Earth (the center of the Confederation). I'll say having carriers present at the Battle of Earth helped their cause somewhat, but the # of number would be totally irrelevant compared to the # of fighters -- which, fighting a battle right by your construction yards, I would think would not be limited by the # of carriers present.

Well, it's a good analogy in that it's literally what Fleet Action is about. Like most of the WC novels (and most military sci fi), it's "take real battle, put sci fi over it". End Run is the Doolittle Raid, Action Stations is Pearl Harbor... and Fleet Action is Coral Sea and Midway.

I don't really see the issue here, though... the novel specifically states that the amount of fighters isn't limited by the carriers at the Battle of Earth (like it is at Sirius) - there's plenty of talk about how pilots will be flying from the bases on the inner worlds and from the training schools and what-not.

Fair enough, I just assumed everyone in Belgium spoke Dutch and not French like Angel does all the time, but apparently a lot of them do speak French.

Roughly half the population speaks French - it's one of three official languages. Brussels, where Angel is from, is the capital of the French-speaking portion of Belgium.

[BigsWickDagger]

If anyone is interested in locating any of the novels I found all of them on Amazon.com yesterday. I had to buy only one of them used. Some cost as little as .80 cents new, the rest were around $3.00-$5.00. Heck, shipping cost almost as much as the books.

[sea_monkey]

I don't think you're looking at both sides of the issue... yes, the eight pilots in the original Wing Commander score a lot of kills. So do, however, the Kilrathi aces in the same game - there's a Krant pilot with 99 kills, a Salthi pilot with 64 kills, a Jalthi pilot with 75... and Secret Missions II is full of Drakhai pilots who've each scored at least eight kills to get where they are.

I don't think that is incompatible with my scenario. SOMEONE has to be killing Confed pilots. My take is this: in the Confed fleet, 20% of the pilots do 80% of the killing. In the Kilrathi, it is something like 5% do 95%. They have a core of highly skilled, highly talented pilots who are the core of the Kilrathi fleet. Due to their sheer amount of overpopulation, and a culture demanding that warriors prove themselves in battle, much of the rest of their fighter force is made up of young, inexperienced rookies flying cheap, hastily constructed fighters. This results in a high rate of attrition with a handful of extremely successful Kilrathi pilots.

To return to World War II, superior technology frequently generates a superior kill ratio without saying anything for the total number of aircraft in service. Consider the famous 19-to-1 ratio of the F6F Hellcat. By the same logic you are applying to Wing Commander Japanese aircraft must have outnumbered American fighters by some vast amount... when in reality, just the opposite ended up being true.

Yeah, but Japan lost the war in a few years. By comparison the Kilrathi war was a stalemate for decades. If Confed was maintaining a kill-ratio much greater than the relative numbers advantage the Kilrathi held, they would have won the war fairly quickly.

I actually kind of wrote a little timeline for WC based on my own interpretation. The way I figured it is that, the Vega Campaign and the survey of the data obtained from the wreckage of the Venice starbase revealed to Confed Tactical what they had expected all along -- that the Kilrathi outnumbered Confed greatly and that this would only get worse due to the size of the Empire and the sheer amount of population pressure (they're cats after all, they have like 8 kids in a go).

An controversial intelligence report at the highest level of classification, read only by the very top military officers, reveals that military simulation and wargaming based on the data obtained reveals that Confed has less than a 10% chance of winning a war of attrition with the Kilrathi, even taking into account the relative technological advantages held by Confed (which the intelligence report also saw declining as the war progressed). This spawned a series of secret research projects designed to find an alternative method of victory, which eventually led to the beginning of the Behemoth project in 2659.

This explains why we always seemed outnumbered in the WC games and why the Behemoth was being constructed almost a decade before the Battle of Earth.

(This is, of course, all treating 1,300 as a serious number instead of as what it is - a randomly generated number influenced by your success or failure in the game).

(Speaking of inflating, you've gone from claiming that the Kilrathi outnumber Confed by 3 to 1 at the beginning of the debate to 5 to 1 now... what changed?)

In reference to your second point, I don't see how 1,300 fighters equates to 13 fleet carriers... the vast majority of the things we shoot down in the original Wing Commander are probably ground-based or cruiser-based spacecraft... and the Kilrathi do the same to us when we're on the offensive (heck, we never even *see* a carrier).

I'm just sort of equating 100 fighters = 1 fleet carrier or equivalent. I'm not saying those 13 carriers are *destroyed*, but without fighters they are empty floating boxes. The implication behind Confed having 10-15 fleet carriers is that they have about 1000-1500 fighters aboard these carriers. So with a 1.5 ratio, the Kilrathi would have about 1500-2250 fighters aboard their heavy carriers. So a loss of 1300 fighters would represent the annihilation of half their fighter force aboard these carriers -- a catastrophic loss regardless whether they were ground based, cruiser-based or carrier-based -- inflicted by 7 pilots in less than 3 years. And it doesn't really matter whether the number is 900, 1000, or 1300 either.

I just think it's easier to assume the Kilrathi hold a large numerical advantage such that losing 1000 fighters, the Sivar, and the Vega Sector is bad, real bad. But FAR from beating them. As far as the number, I said *at least* 4 to 1. I waffle on the actual number since there's no way of knowing. In SM2, it feels like it has to be 5 to 1 or greater. In WC2, more like 3 to 1. In WC3, 5 to 1 again.

Thrakhath's dreadnought is more like the Ralatha. It's an oval at the front, a strut and then a rear hull... and the engine nacelles are at the end of each wing. It differs from the Ralatha in that it has a flight deck in the front. Here's some pictures of the two:

Fair enough. From what I could see from watching it fly by real quick it seemed like they were close enough to be considered the same ship.

Well, it's a good analogy in that it's literally what Fleet Action is about. Like most of the WC novels (and most military sci fi), it's "take real battle, put sci fi over it". End Run is the Doolittle Raid, Action Stations is Pearl Harbor... and Fleet Action is Coral Sea and Midway.

I don't really see the issue here, though... the novel specifically states that the amount of fighters isn't limited by the carriers at the Battle of Earth (like it is at Sirius) - there's plenty of talk about how pilots will be flying from the bases on the inner worlds and from the training schools and what-not.

This was just an off-shoot of my argument that Forstchen places too much importance on carriers (because cruisers and destroyers can carry them too unlike in WW2). I just got the picture when I read Fleet Action that they were real concerned about how many carriers they had where as I saw it, it wouldn't really make a difference.

I have no idea regarding the similarities behind Midway and the Battle of Earth. I was just arguing the base at Midway isn't equivalent to Earth. I would think the various orbital and planetary bases in the Sol System would make fine staging points for a defense. I have no idea what Midway's was like.

[sea_monkey]

If you actually read the novel, you'll note on p. 253 that the barrage of four torpedoes on the first carrier knocked out one or two hangar bays - but that was all the damage it did, due to the armor ... A similar number of torpedoes, or even half that, would've stopped the Fralthra force, however - and also made it easier to take out the fighter-launching ships, since you've got seven targets to worry about.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that carrier did not continue on to the Battle of Earth due to the damage it took. Four torpedoes messed it up pretty bad, I don't think it's fair to say it could have taken 10 more based on what was in the book. But four torpedoes will mess up a Hakaga but only take down two Fralthra, leaving five more perfectly functional ships.

A carrier, on the other hand, is easier to defend and would be able to deploy all those fighters at once, applying the same amount of force. It's also cheaper.

Easier to defend? A few lucky hits and the ship is crippled. 7-8 ships are much, MUCH easier to defend do to the nature of their being 7-8 of them. All other things being equal any sane commander would rather have multiple small ships as a means of reducing the risk involved. Cheaper? How the heck would you know? Judging by the fact it took so much effort just to build five of them, I'm guessing they're not very cheap at all.

I'm arguing that because I wanted to point out that not every ship had a hangar, or needed one, and that not every ship had the space to house fighters or the need to do so. Your initial statements were that 'every ship had a hangar', which is patently false. You also ignore the fact that supporting fighters means that you end up dedicating a lot of space to them... which is one reason that the full-fledged carriers of the United States Navy are so important to America's power-projection capabilities. Yes, you can make smaller carriers or retrofit cruisers to carry fighters, but then you've stuck with far fewer fighters because the smaller ship just doesn't have the volume to support all the associated equipment and crew.

Yeah, and it makes no difference whatsoever to my argument that corvettes don't have hangar bays. You bring up the US Navy, but that is my whole point. On Earth -- with gravity -- you NEED a massive metal floating runway to carry fighters through the ocean. You CANNOT do it on cruiser or destroyer. In SPACE, you can, hence the Fralthra carrying 40 fighters. Yes, there are tradeoffs involved, but the fact that ships that are not dedicated carriers can carry a lot of fighters, does in fact DIMINISH, NOT ELIMINATE the importance of carriers in space. IMHO, the games seem to indicate the Kilrathi generally prefer to use heavy cruisers/light carriers on the front lines as a means of deploying fighters, using carriers more as mobile headquarters and resupply. This is something I think Forstchen missed, hence the obsession with the # of carriers on both sides at every engagement.

[Dundradal]

If you carefully read AS, Jukaga's father (his name has slipped my mind) talks with others about how much bigger confed is than the empire. He views the empire as an empty shell, while he sees confed as a solid mass, as confed assimilates the races it comes into contact with into the confed. Sometimes I think its better to relate the kilrathi to the russians in WW2, as they tend to throw (in certain situations) huge masses at their objective with the hope of finally breaking through. This isn't always the case, but as it is mentioned in AS, "The terrans seem to value individual lives"

In talking aobut number of hits a hakaga can take, it all depends on when their commander decides enough is enough and pulls his ship out. It seems realistic that a hakaga could take 14 hits and still be remotely functional, no where near 100% but it could still do something I'm sure.

Midway is a small atoll with I think 2 large islands, one has a runway and a base on it.

[Fenris Ulven]

Originally Posted by Dundradal

"The terrans seem to value individual lives"

more then the kilrathi, but not ever kinf of individual lives, you get some stories from vegabond in wc3.

[Haesslich]

Originally Posted by sea_monkey

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that carrier did not continue on to the Battle of Earth due to the damage it took. Four torpedoes messed it up pretty bad, I don't think it's fair to say it could have taken 10 more based on what was in the book. But four torpedoes will mess up a Hakaga but only take down two Fralthra, leaving five more perfectly functional ships.

Actually, those four torpedoes would have completely destroyed two Fralthra, or would have disabled four Fralthra. Assuming 40 craft per cruiser, you've damaged the bases for about 160 fighters, which is about 60 more than the average fleet carrier
carries. That battle at Sirius disabled one ship, the Tarvakh, due to internal fires and having three launch bays shut down. We're not sure if the ship that Tolwyn's strike force hit was the Tarvakh, or if it was the Yu'ba'tuk which had the shield generator issue. However, it's reported that one launch bay on the latter ship was closed, which seems consistent with the gun-camera footage that Lone Wolf had.

And in that one assault, against those heavily armed and armored carriers, the Confederation lost about 260 craft out of 480. Even with the heavy Kilrathi fighter losses, 464 or so fighters, that wasn't a cheap engagement.

The most remarkable thing about those carriers was the fact that they not only carried a lot of craft, but were able to function with damage that would've crippled the flight operations of almost any other ship in space. One torpedo hit, enough to seriously cripple a vessel like a Fraltha, would end its usefulness as a carrier at least until some repairs were made.

Originally Posted by sea_monkey

Easier to defend? A few lucky hits and the ship is crippled. 7-8 ships are much, MUCH easier to defend do to the nature of their being 7-8 of them. All other things being equal any sane commander would rather have multiple small ships as a means of reducing the risk involved. Cheaper? How the heck would you know? Judging by the fact it took so much effort just to build five of them, I'm guessing they're not very cheap at all.

The reason those carriers were expensive was because of the extra bays and the state of the art technology they employed, especially when it came to shielding and armor. It took at least four hits to do serious damage to one of them, and that one we did see kept fighting. In comparison, one shot was enough to disable the Lexington's ability to launch fighters in WC4, and a relatively small amount of explosives kept Concordia from launching craft in WC2.

And seven targets IS a problem - if you have to worry about the health of each ship, knowing that the loss of one means that three or so squadrons won't have a home to return to, it's an issue. There's a reason that the Midway was constructed in WCP; it was cheaper than building the equivalent number of carriers, and was easier to defend - and its extra size could be put to use powering generators that would feed starbase-sized shields. If you spread out your forces too much, then you don't have effective striking power; at the most, you'll be up to the task of detecting incursions, but not stopping them.

Remember that much of the reason for all the space in the carriers, at the expense of armor and weapons, is because they need that space to service fighters and carry spares. You need room for all that, which means that you're giving up torpedo tubes, larger engines, or generators for extra guns.

Originally Posted by sea_monkey

Yeah, and it makes no difference whatsoever to my argument that corvettes don't have hangar bays. You bring up the US Navy, but that is my whole point. On Earth -- with gravity -- you NEED a massive metal floating runway to carry fighters through the ocean. You CANNOT do it on cruiser or destroyer. In SPACE, you can, hence the Fralthra carrying 40 fighters. Yes, there are tradeoffs involved, but the fact that ships that are not dedicated carriers can carry a lot of fighters, does in fact DIMINISH, NOT ELIMINATE the importance of carriers in space. IMHO, the games seem to indicate the Kilrathi generally prefer to use heavy cruisers/light carriers on the front lines as a means of deploying fighters, using carriers more as mobile headquarters and resupply. This is something I think Forstchen missed, hence the obsession with the # of carriers on both sides at every engagement.

It does make a difference - you stated that ALL ships needed hangars; but the smaller ones don't necessarily need them, especially as there are other methods of getting to ships that have been detailed in game and novel. It's not the runway that's the issue specifically, though having room to accelerate or decelerate the fighter to zero velocity relative to the carrier is good; it's the space you need for the support equipment, the fighter itself, the parts to keep it running, the fuel to keep it going, the missiles to keep it armed, and the crew that keeps it flying plus a little extra space to keep a few more in case one fighter gets dinged up too much to be easily repaired or is lost in action without killing its pilot.

Cruisers can carry fighters; but at the same time, cruisers are still expensive, heavy units which are needed on the front lines. Carriers can carry more fighters than cruisers can, which makes them useful in battle groups as you can keep a bunch of fighters flying - more than can be launched and served on a cruiser, which means some more flexibility in assigning missions.

Cruisers and destroyers can carry torpedoes, which are the most reliable method by which to kill a ship in the WC universe. However, fighters can also carry them, and these can be built more quickly and cheaply than cruisers or destroyers can be. However, fighters are short-ranged craft; this is why you have carriers which can carry a hundred or more of them, and thus increase the striking power of a fleet without the expense involved in building a lot of cruisers and destroyers. Fighters are less of a loss when they go down - it's one to three people and a fighter/bomber that cost a few million in contrast to a hundred or more people on a destroyer that cost the equivalent of thirty or forty fighters, at least in relative terms.

Yes, you can station fighters on cruisers and destroyers - but at the same time, this means refitting the cruiser or destroyer to carry fighters and their support equipment, which means giving up some of the capabilities that a cruiser or fighter has... and increasing its expense should the craft be lost. When you've got dedicated fighter-support ships, then why should you build more carriers which carry fighters? Yes, we've seen them in game - the Austin and the Gettysburg were cruisers, and they did well in fighter support. However, the Tiger's Claw and the Concordia were the ships that were used for the serious assaults, given that they were a) capable of carry bombers, and b) had the ability to better support fighters.

That's one thing that most cruisers or destroyers just don't have the space to do - and I think that the only cruiser-class ship that ever carried bombers in game was the Cerberus from WC:SO, using the Black Devastators.

Light carriers were built before the war began, and apparently abandoned until the 'disposable' Escort Carrier concept made its return in the 2660's - it's probably due to the size of bombers and the torpedoes they had that made them less desirable than Concordia-class ships. The relatively low price of escort carrier construction due to the missing extras typically found on fleet carriers - lots of gun turrets and armor - were what made Confed begin construction of this class of ship again. By WC3, the class seems to have made a comeback if the Eagle's title of 'one of the newest and most modern escort carriers' is any indication.

Note it's also in Fleet Action that Thrakath notes that it's the Confederation's use of light and escort carriers in raids that began to make a difference on the front lines - carriers had to go back to base, and transports needed cruiser escorts, which meant fewer cruisers could go on raids of their own.

[sea_monkey]

And seven targets IS a problem - if you have to worry about the health of each ship, knowing that the loss of one means that three or so squadrons won't have a home to return to, it's an issue.

You know what's better than having 3 layers of armor protecting your 300 fighter super-carrier? Having 1 layer of armor, seperated by 10km of vacuum from the next. The seperate ships reduces risk, if something goes wrong with 1 or 2 the rest keep fighting. A few lucky hits on the Hakaga and you just lost 300 ships. Also I don't really understand why you think the Hakaga could take so many more hits ... not to mix science with WC but I would think once the layers of armor have been breached the next hit is goodbye. But whatever, I'm only willing to debate about a fictional object vs fictional object matchup to a point.

You point out some marginal advantages a Hakaga would have but it still doesn't look like a super-weapon to me.

It does make a difference - you stated that ALL ships needed hangars; but the smaller ones don't necessarily need them, especially as there are other methods of getting to ships that have been detailed in game and novel. It's not the runway that's the issue specifically, though having room to accelerate or decelerate the fighter to zero velocity relative to the carrier is good; it's the space you need for the support equipment, the fighter itself, the parts to keep it running, the fuel to keep it going, the missiles to keep it armed, and the crew that keeps it flying plus a little extra space to keep a few more in case one fighter gets dinged up too much to be easily repaired or is lost in action without killing its pilot.

Cruisers can carry fighters; but at the same time, cruisers are still expensive, heavy units which are needed on the front lines. Carriers can carry more fighters than cruisers can, which makes them useful in battle groups as you can keep a bunch of fighters flying - more than can be launched and served on a cruiser, which means some more flexibility in assigning missions.

Cruisers and destroyers can carry torpedoes, which are the most reliable method by which to kill a ship in the WC universe. However, fighters can also carry them, and these can be built more quickly and cheaply than cruisers or destroyers can be. However, fighters are short-ranged craft; this is why you have carriers which can carry a hundred or more of them, and thus increase the striking power of a fleet without the expense involved in building a lot of cruisers and destroyers. Fighters are less of a loss when they go down - it's one to three people and a fighter/bomber that cost a few million in contrast to a hundred or more people on a destroyer that cost the equivalent of thirty or forty fighters, at least in relative terms.

Yes, you can station fighters on cruisers and destroyers - but at the same time, this means refitting the cruiser or destroyer to carry fighters and their support equipment, which means giving up some of the capabilities that a cruiser or fighter has... and increasing its expense should the craft be lost. When you've got dedicated fighter-support ships, then why should you build more carriers which carry fighters? Yes, we've seen them in game - the Austin and the Gettysburg were cruisers, and they did well in fighter support. However, the Tiger's Claw and the Concordia were the ships that were used for the serious assaults, given that they were a) capable of carry bombers, and b) had the ability to better support fighters.

That's one thing that most cruisers or destroyers just don't have the space to do - and I think that the only cruiser-class ship that ever carried bombers in game was the Cerberus from WC:SO, using the Black Devastators.

Light carriers were built before the war began, and apparently abandoned until the 'disposable' Escort Carrier concept made its return in the 2660's - it's probably due to the size of bombers and the torpedoes they had that made them less desirable than Concordia-class ships. The relatively low price of escort carrier construction due to the missing extras typically found on fleet carriers - lots of gun turrets and armor - were what made Confed begin construction of this class of ship again. By WC3, the class seems to have made a comeback if the Eagle's title of 'one of the newest and most modern escort carriers' is any indication.

Note it's also in Fleet Action that Thrakath notes that it's the Confederation's use of light and escort carriers in raids that began to make a difference on the front lines - carriers had to go back to base, and transports needed cruiser escorts, which meant fewer cruisers could go on raids of their own.

So ... what you're saying is that the presence of destroyers and cruisers which can carry fighters, diminishes but not eliminates the importance of carriers in WC? Gee that sound's familiar, I wonder who said that?

[Dundradal]

What he's trying to say is that fighter carrying cruisers and destroyers diminishes their capacity to act like destroyers and cruisers, whose job it is to guard more important vessels and also to destroy enemy vessels. By carrying fighters it diminishes their ability to do this because of the amount of space a fighter wing takes up, and to point out again most of the wings on cruisers and destroyers are fighter wings, not strike wings, so they are only good for protection or scouting ahead for ships that the heavier ship can engage.

[Bandit LOAF]

I don't think that is incompatible with my scenario. SOMEONE has to be killing Confed pilots. My take is this: in the Confed fleet, 20% of the pilots do 80% of the killing. In the Kilrathi, it is something like 5% do 95%. They have a core of highly skilled, highly talented pilots who are the core of the Kilrathi fleet. Due to their sheer amount of overpopulation, and a culture demanding that warriors prove themselves in battle, much of the rest of their fighter force is made up of young, inexperienced rookies flying cheap, hastily constructed fighters. This results in a high rate of attrition with a handful of extremely successful Kilrathi pilots.

I understand your take (shifting numbers aside)... but the issue here is finding something in the games (heck, or the novels or manuals since I acknowledge those) that supports that take. As best I can tell, there's no evidence of Kilrathi overpopulation.

(That said, these particular claims don't really affect the debate... since percentages do not define a whole.)

Yeah, but Japan lost the war in a few years. By comparison the Kilrathi war was a stalemate for decades. If Confed was maintaining a kill-ratio much greater than the relative numbers advantage the Kilrathi held, they would have won the war fairly quickly.

But there's no evidence that Confed *does* have a higher kill-ratio (in WC1, at least - we know from the WCP Guide they did before Custer's Carnival and that that changed). Confed's ability to kill a thousand enemy fighters with ten ace pilots doesn't in any way counterindicate that the Kilrathi are doing the same thing.

I actually kind of wrote a little timeline for WC based on my own interpretation. The way I figured it is that, the Vega Campaign and the survey of the data obtained from the wreckage of the Venice starbase revealed to Confed Tactical what they had expected all along -- that the Kilrathi outnumbered Confed greatly and that this would only get worse due to the size of the Empire and the sheer amount of population pressure (they're cats after all, they have like 8 kids in a go).

I'm all for supporting fanfic... but if Confed's intelligence didn't have an idea of what size force they were fighting for *twenty years* then they really really didn't deserve to win the war in the first place.

(With regards to the 'litters' issue... there's not necessarily any evidence of this. Every set of Kilrathi 'siblings' we've ever seen have been of different ages. Furthermore, every Kilrathi birth we've ever seen mentioned has been a single individual. Looking like cats isn't necessarily the same as being cats, in this instance.)

I'm just sort of equating 100 fighters = 1 fleet carrier or equivalent. I'm not saying those 13 carriers are *destroyed*, but without fighters they are empty floating boxes. The implication behind Confed having 10-15 fleet carriers is that they have about 1000-1500 fighters aboard these carriers. So with a 1.5 ratio, the Kilrathi would have about 1500-2250 fighters aboard their heavy carriers. So a loss of 1300 fighters would represent the annihilation of half their fighter force aboard these carriers -- a catastrophic loss regardless whether they were ground based, cruiser-based or carrier-based -- inflicted by 7 pilots in less than 3 years. And it doesn't really matter whether the number is 900, 1000, or 1300 either.

The problem with that assumption is that 1,300 fighters alone lack the most important ability of the carrier: power projection. Every planet/moon/star base/etc. in the Wing Commander universe has its supply of fighters - heck, the round starbases in WC2 carrrier four times the complement of a carrier. Without the ability to move those fighters from System A to System C those fighters are generally unimportant.

In the process of fighting through eleven systems (in WC1, not counting various concurrent fiction) the Tiger's Claw may have shot down 1,300 fighters... but killing a dozen local garrisons worth of fighters isn't the same thing as destroying a fleet carrier and its complement, because those local squadrons would never be a direct threat in any other situation.

Here's the modern equivalent: China has a two hundred million man army. That's significantly larger than any other force in the world... and communist China is generally looked upon in an unfavorable light by the rest of the world. Why aren't they a thread? No power projection. China has no lifting capacity... their army may be two hundred times the size of any other, but it can't really be sent anywhere to fight a war.

I just think it's easier to assume the Kilrathi hold a large numerical advantage such that losing 1000 fighters, the Sivar, and the Vega Sector is bad, real bad. But FAR from beating them. As far as the number, I said *at least* 4 to 1. I waffle on the actual number since there's no way of knowing. In SM2, it feels like it has to be 5 to 1 or greater. In WC2, more like 3 to 1. In WC3, 5 to 1 again.

Well, see, exactly - there's no way to tell (save in the novels, where it's actually stated). You just can't establish facts about an entire universe worth of facts based on one man (Blair)'s experiences, nor can odds be used to establish a total number (in any situation).

Aside: Of *course* the odds are 5 to 1 in the Secret Missions... your carrier is alone behind enemy lines. If a Kilrathi carrier were in Confed space, the odds would be 5 to 1 against it. The same thing applies to the entire WC1 experience... if a Kilrathi carrier were attacking a Confed system it'd be up against the 400 fighters from that systems base (mentioned earlier) and the odds would be 4 to 1 against it.

This was just an off-shoot of my argument that Forstchen places too much importance on carriers (because cruisers and destroyers can carry them too unlike in WW2). I just got the picture when I read Fleet Action that they were real concerned about how many carriers they had where as I saw it, it wouldn't really make a difference.

The fighters carried by cruisers and destroyers in the Wing Commander universe are light and medium units, though. The Exeter carried eighteen Rapier, the Tallahassee carried five Hellcats and the mighty Waterloo carried forty Ferrets and Epees. These are small recon and light strike units... they don't fulfill the same role as a carrier at all (not to mention that their limited numbers means that the vast majority of an escort ships fighter complement will be for point defense...).

I have no idea regarding the similarities behind Midway and the Battle of Earth. I was just arguing the base at Midway isn't equivalent to Earth. I would think the various orbital and planetary bases in the Sol System would make fine staging points for a defense. I have no idea what Midway's was like.

Midway was (essentially) two islands. One of them had three airstrips, the other had a seaplane base. Planes from Midway performed reconassance missions during the battle, but none were involved in the air strikes.

Orbital and planetary bases were used to defend Earth (there's a great example of that in the TPoF novel, which talks about how Confed moved Orion into LEO for the final defense of Earth)... but that doesn't change the fact that the units based on them aren't the experienced and well equipped units that have already been depleted facing the Kilrathi on the frontier.

(Relying on orbital bases in a situation like the Battle of Terra may be a problem - as Fleet Action pointed out, orbital mechanics means that there's a good chance that some of your bases are going to be on the other side of the system when the enemy attacks. All of Confed's outer planets assets (Port of Titan and such) were farther away from Earth than the Kilrathi.)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that carrier did not continue on to the Battle of Earth due to the damage it took. Four torpedoes messed it up pretty bad, I don't think it's fair to say it could have taken 10 more based on what was in the book. But four torpedoes will mess up a Hakaga but only take down two Fralthra, leaving five more perfectly functional ships.

The carrier was still operating under its own power... a big part of the decision to send it home (along with two regular carriers) was because it simply wasn't needed. The Kilrathi were rushing forward without establishing a supply line... so as fighters were depleted they could return entire carriers to their space rather than risk them in further actions.

Easier to defend? A few lucky hits and the ship is crippled. 7-8 ships are much, MUCH easier to defend do to the nature of their being 7-8 of them. All other things being equal any sane commander would rather have multiple small ships as a means of reducing the risk involved. Cheaper? How the heck would you know? Judging by the fact it took so much effort just to build five of them, I'm guessing they're not very cheap at all.

One of the first things Thrakhath introduced regarding the Hakagas was their massive amount of anti-fighter defenses. Destroyers and cruisers are quick to build assembly line ships which don't have the anti-fighter weaponry of a carrier.

Yeah, and it makes no difference whatsoever to my argument that corvettes don't have hangar bays. You bring up the US Navy, but that is my whole point. On Earth -- with gravity -- you NEED a massive metal floating runway to carry fighters through the ocean. You CANNOT do it on cruiser or destroyer. In SPACE, you can, hence the Fralthra carrying 40 fighters. Yes, there are tradeoffs involved, but the fact that ships that are not dedicated carriers can carry a lot of fighters, does in fact DIMINISH, NOT ELIMINATE the importance of carriers in space. IMHO, the games seem to indicate the Kilrathi generally prefer to use heavy cruisers/light carriers on the front lines as a means of deploying fighters, using carriers more as mobile headquarters and resupply. This is something I think Forstchen missed, hence the obsession with the # of carriers on both sides at every engagement.

The implication in the Wing Commander games has always been that a flight deck is necessary for a 'true' fighter complement - regardless of physics, you need a flight deck (for whatever reason) to launch heavy fighters and bombers.

[Dundradal]

Originally Posted by Bandit LOAF

Midway was (essentially) two islands. One of them had three airstrips, the other had a seaplane base. Planes from Midway performed reconassance missions during the battle, but none were involved in the air strikes.

B-17s and dauntlesses from midway attacked the japanese carriers earlier in the day but were totally unsuccessful.

[Haesslich]

Originally Posted by sea_monkey

You know what's better than having 3 layers of armor protecting your 300 fighter super-carrier? Having 1 layer of armor, seperated by 10km of vacuum from the next. The seperate ships reduces risk, if something goes wrong with 1 or 2 the rest keep fighting. A few lucky hits on the Hakaga and you just lost 300 ships. Also I don't really understand why you think the Hakaga could take so many more hits ... not to mix science with WC but I would think once the layers of armor have been breached the next hit is goodbye. But whatever, I'm only willing to debate about a fictional object vs fictional object matchup to a point.

You point out some marginal advantages a Hakaga would have but it still doesn't look like a super-weapon to me.

Actually, that distance can be a liability, especially when you pit that cruiser against a real carrier. Here's a hypothetical example:

A Fraltha cruiser carries 40 fighters. A group of three Fralthra and their escort destroyers have been dispatched to a system to engage in an action against a Confederation dreadnought and her battle group. These ships enter the system after the leading destroyer clears the jump point, deploying a fighter screen from the first Fralthra.

After a quick patrol to confirm the immediate area is clear of Confederation fighters, the mission is launched. The Fralthra carry Drakhri, Sartha, and Jalkehi from what we've seen in game; we've never seen them with Grikath or Gothri fighter-bombers in the game. This means that the Kilrathi cruisers are short on striking power, and unless a Snakier or some other carrier shows up to launch bombers, they're unable to take on the Confederation cruisers or destroyers with just their fighters alone.

Thus, the whole Fralthra battlegroup moves into the system to attack, using their fighter screen to scramble the defenders' own and try to keep the enemy carrier's bombers from launching a strike on them in turn. In the meantime, the Confederation's Gilgamesh-class destroyers surge ahead to form a protective screen, engaging the enemy destroyers and cruisers should they penetrate, while the cruisers help deliver solid blows to the Ralatha. Should any enemy bombers or destroyers make it through this defensive barrier, the Fralthra are vulnerable; it only takes two torpedoes to destroy any one of the three ships, whose combined fighter complement equals that of the Confederation-class dreadnought.

There have been recorded instances of relatively minor damage which did not destroy the ship having crippled their ability to launch or land fighters - in the novel Freedom Flight, the cruiser Kraj'nishk took a missile to its launch bay, which rendered it unable to continue launching fighters. This was relatively minor damage, but it was enough to kill its effectiveness as a carrier. Normally, it took eight or so missiles against a fully-shielded Fralthi to kill it from the front; it only took one dumb-fire missile to kill its launch bay once the shields were bypassed.

We can also bring up the example of Gwynned B: the TCS Concordia, chased by several Fralthra, was unable to launch fighters and without an escort since its own, the TCS Beowulf, went down. While it's not stated that this was done by torpedoes, the ship was otherwise able to flee combat with great haste; another example of minor damage killing its abilty to launch craft.

While carriers would be as vulnerable to this sort of damage as a cruiser, the cruiser has fewer fighters with which to defend itself... and usually fewer anti-fighter guns given that its mission is capship escort and capship killing along with light patrols. In this situation, if even one Fralthra is damaged, then either it's not launching fighters... or those fighters aren't going home. If the Confederation battle group ambushes the cruisers one at a time (and remember that 10km in space isn't exactly all that much distance - you'd be best served going 10000km), then you've lost the launch platform for forty fighters. More targets to defend = bigger logistical issues. Would you, as a commander, want 120 fighters defending one target, or 40 fighters to defend each target, knowing that a strike of about 100 fighters and bombers is being launched at you?

This doesn't count the monetary cost of the refits and supporting those cruiser-carriers. One reason there weren't many carriers in the fleet was because they were both expensive, and needed a heavy investment in time to build. Cruisers, on the other hand, could be popped out far more quickly... but they lacked some guns and were supposed to be less costly when lost as compared to a carrier.

Originally Posted by sea_monkey

So ... what you're saying is that the presence of destroyers and cruisers which can carry fighters, diminishes but not eliminates the importance of carriers in WC? Gee that sound's familiar, I wonder who said that?

Actually, I'm saying that carriers do several jobs very well - they're able to carry heavy strike craft, they're already designed to do the job of carrying fighters without having to add more time and money to the construction of a cruiser or destroyer to give it carrier capacity - which also reduces its ability to act as an escort, since you don't want to lose the cruiser which has all that expensive equipment on it - and the carrier carries MORE fighters, which means that you've got a credible strike force when combining it with normal cruisers and destroyers, without having to spend more money than you absolutely needed to. The cruisers and destroyers are - and have to be - more expendable than the targets they're defending, and adding the extra expense by refitting one of these to carry a large number of fighters kinda goes against that idea.

Carriers are important due to their ability to be 'floating bases' - and carriers can't have just a few fighters if they're to be effective weapons. Sacrificing the cruiser's or destroyer's speed or weapons to make it a 'not-very-capable' carrier makes little sense in this respect, unless you're just using it on escort missions where you can't spare a full-sized carrier or don't have enough light/escort carriers to go around.

[sea_monkey]

But there's no evidence that Confed *does* have a higher kill-ratio (in WC1, at least - we know from the WCP Guide they did before Custer's Carnival and that that changed). Confed's ability to kill a thousand enemy fighters with ten ace pilots doesn't in any way counterindicate that the Kilrathi are doing the same thing.

Well, I presented the WC1 killboard. There is also a killboard in WC3 I believe which is quite high in number of kills. That's evidence from the game. It doesn't SAY explicitly anywhere in the game that the ratio is that high, but the action in the game definitely seems to imply it. On the contrary, there is NOTHING in the games that suggests Confed is completely getting its butt kicked by seven Kilrathi pilots on the other side of the galaxy, which is what you are implying.

With the exception of the Secret Missions, at least half of the WC games take place on the defensive. Where you are still outnumbered.

The problem with that assumption is that 1,300 fighters alone lack the most important ability of the carrier: power projection. Every planet/moon/star base/etc. in the Wing Commander universe has its supply of fighters - heck, the round starbases in WC2 carrrier four times the complement of a carrier. Without the ability to move those fighters from System A to System C those fighters are generally unimportant.

Losing 1300 fighters can only not be catastrophic if you have a surplus of fighters (well over 5000+), whether they are carrier or ground-based. If 7 pilots down 20-50% of your fighter fleet that's going to stretch your forces thin no matter where the fighters came from. Don't see your point here.

The fighters carried by cruisers and destroyers in the Wing Commander universe are light and medium units, though. The Exeter carried eighteen Rapier, the Tallahassee carried five Hellcats and the mighty Waterloo carried forty Ferrets and Epees. These are small recon and light strike units... they don't fulfill the same role as a carrier at all (not to mention that their limited numbers means that the vast majority of an escort ships fighter complement will be for point defense...).

I agree. Wouldn't you say though that this *diminishes, but not eliminates* the importance of carriers in WC? In WW2 a carrier was responsible for recon, point defense and air strikes, because a destroyer couldn't do ANY of that.

After a quick patrol to confirm the immediate area is clear of Confederation fighters, the mission is launched. The Fralthra carry Drakhri, Sartha, and Jalkehi from what we've seen in game; we've never seen them with Grikath or Gothri fighter-bombers in the game.

Sure we have, last mission in SO1 you have Fralthra carrying Gothri. That's just off the top of my head. Second that would imply every time you see a Grikath, Paktahn or Gothri that there is a Snakeir in the system, which is also shaky since we see a lot of Grikaths but no Snakeirs. I'll agree that a carrier might be better equipped to handle heavy bombers but that doesn't mean cruisers don't ever do it.

Would you, as a commander, want 120 fighters defending one target, or 40 fighters to defend each target, knowing that a strike of about 100 fighters and bombers is being launched at you?

Absolutely because that would mean the attacking force would be divided into three groups of 33 as well, or at least I wouldn't have to worry about losing 2 cruisers. Bottomline, 1 target = more risky than 3 targets.

If you have 60 bombers and 60 fighters approaching your carrier, that's 60 bombers that MUST be destroyed in the 30 seconds before they obtain a lock otherwise your carrier takes a torpedo. A little bit of bad luck and you've got a long walk home. With three ships, the probability is higher that you'll lose 1 of them, but much, much lower that you will lose all of them.

I hope you realize that your arguments (Hakaga can carry more bombers, Hakaga can take MAYBE a few more hits, Hakaga is a better command center) *might* indicate that one Hakaga > 7 Fralthra. But it doesn't indicate that Hakagas = so much greater than an equivalent # of heavy cruisers that they are super weapons.

Actually, I'm saying that carriers do several jobs very well - they're able to carry heavy strike craft, they're already designed to do the job of carrying fighters without having to add more time and money to the construction of a cruiser or destroyer to give it carrier capacity ...

You guys just don't wnat to concede this point, which isn't that big a deal. Bottomline, in the WC universe, other ships can take over roles the carrier was solely responsible for in WW2. They are important but not as important as in WW2. The # of fighters is more important than the # of carriers.

[Bandit LOAF]

Well, I presented the WC1 killboard. There is also a killboard in WC3 I believe which is quite high in number of kills. That's evidence from the game. It doesn't SAY explicitly anywhere in the game that the ratio is that high, but the action in the game definitely seems to imply it. On the contrary, there is NOTHING in the games that suggests Confed is completely getting its butt kicked by seven Kilrathi pilots on the other side of the galaxy, which is what you are implying.

The killboard is completely one-sided, though - it's completely logically impossible ot determine anything from it. It's a single data point (well, not even that, since it's not representative of the entire Tiger's Claw). If I tell you that I have ten dollars you cannot determine how much money everyone (or anyone) else in the world has.

As for evidence of Kilrathi success: the aces in the original game account for 324 kills (Dakhath 86, Bhurak 64, Bakhtosh 75, Khajja 99). That's more than twice as many as the PlayerCharacter will 'score' on a winning run through the game. Then add Secret Missions 2: By my (rough) count there are 49 Drakhai encountered by Blair alone in SM2 - which accounts for at least 392 (8x49) kills. That's a *minimum of 792 kills by Kilrathi pilots encountered by Blair alone. Apply your knowledge of statistics to this data.

As for the more general theme of Kilrathi victories... for all the success the Tiger's Claw has had, how many other Bengals have we seen blown up -- two or three, at least.

Losing 1300 fighters can only not be catastrophic if you have a surplus of fighters (well over 5000+), whether they are carrier or ground-based. If 7 pilots down 20-50% of your fighter fleet that's going to stretch your forces thin no matter where the fighters came from. Don't see your point here.

... and where's the indication that there's *not* a large base of fighters? No major Confed victory in any of the early games seems to affect the Kilrathi... why the belief that they're suffering horrific losses? (Or that we aren't suffering equal losses?).

I agree. Wouldn't you say though that this *diminishes, but not eliminates* the importance of carriers in WC? In WW2 a carrier was responsible for recon, point defense and air strikes, because a destroyer couldn't do ANY of that.

... I'm not really following you here. There's an absolutely crucial role that *only* carriers can play (strike missions) - that's pretty much the definition of an importance.

Sure we have, last mission in SO1 you have Fralthra carrying Gothri. That's just off the top of my head. Second that would imply every time you see a Grikath, Paktahn or Gothri that there is a Snakeir in the system, which is also shaky since we see a lot of Grikaths but no Snakeirs. I'll agree that a carrier might be better equipped to handle heavy bombers but that doesn't mean cruisers don't ever do it.

Since Wing Commander II makes no provision for 'launching fighters' (as later games do), since Gothri are jump capable and since we know there are carrier groups in the system at the end of Special Operations One you may have trouble proving that the Fralthra launched them. As for Grikaths and such - we do know that Kilrathi carriers are present in WC2, even if Blair never actually encounters one... Jazz talks about having blown one up at one point (and of course Thrakhath sends Khasra after the Concordia with the one from the intro).

Absolutely because that would mean the attacking force would be divided into three groups of 33 as well, or at least I wouldn't have to worry about losing 2 cruisers. Bottomline, 1 target = more risky than 3 targets.

If you have 60 bombers and 60 fighters approaching your carrier, that's 60 bombers that MUST be destroyed in the 30 seconds before they obtain a lock otherwise your carrier takes a torpedo. A little bit of bad luck and you've got a long walk home. With three ships, the probability is higher that you'll lose 1 of them, but much, much lower that you will lose all of them.

I hope you realize that your arguments (Hakaga can carry more bombers, Hakaga can take MAYBE a few more hits, Hakaga is a better command center) *might* indicate that one Hakaga > 7 Fralthra. But it doesn't indicate that Hakagas = so much greater than an equivalent # of heavy cruisers that they are super weapons.

I don't think you're looking at this from all the defensive angles. Ignoring the vastly superior anti-fighter defenses in the ships themselves, the fact that they're a single target works to the advantage of a carrier fighter-wise. Consider that the single Hakaga can commit its entire complement to its own defense - 288 fighters. Your three (or seven or whatever) Fralthra must divide their entire force of fighters among three (or seven or whatever) defensive targets. It's a neat numerical trick to take a bunch of small complements to form a big one, but they don't function the same in terms of defense (for that reason) or for offense (since they're lighter units).

(.... also, something no one has bothered to point out yet for some reason. With regards to the amazing Fralthra, Fleet Action claims that the Kilrathi have only twenty of them circa Fleet Action. Which sort of puts a damper on the 'overload them with Fralthras!' plan regardless.)

To step back and discuss this once again from a theoretical point of view - isn't the "biggest carrier as the ultimate weapon" a theme that exists very distinctly in the game? Hence Confed working towards the Vesuvius and Midway in WCIV and Prophecy respectively? It just seems really strange to blame the novels for something that's such a basic cornerstone of the games.

You guys just don't wnat to concede this point, which isn't that big a deal. Bottomline, in the WC universe, other ships can take over roles the carrier was solely responsible for in WW2. They are important but not as important as in WW2. The # of fighters is more important than the # of carriers.

Fighters exists in droves, though. Replacements are always readily available, and common starbases and HD squadrons have huge amounts of them just because they can. The important thing is moving those fighters from place to place (as it is in any war).

[Fenris Ulven]

The carriers are importan, without the fighters it isent good for nothing, but a fighter without a carrier is also not good for anything.

[Dundradal]

I would agree with LOAF in saying that confed most likely had a massive amount of spare fighters, the problems is moving them from place to place.
In ER it is mentioned that confed is rushing pilots out of the academies (as Bear mentions to Starlight and Doomsday about their pups). However, if you've played WC4 and do the Speradon missions, you get to see a cut scene of the fighter production factory which is producing bearcats at a pretty good rate.
Pilots not planes are the production bottleneck, they tend to take just a bit longer to produce and especially of good quality.

[Bandit LOAF]

Exactly - exerienced pilots are precious on both sides... which is why Blair and company (or Baktosh and the Drakhai) score so many kills. There's plenty of home defense squadrons with rookie pilots out there...

[Dundradal]

And the kilrathi like to keep a lot of their high scoring aces with the home fleet as is mentioned in ER....I don't think confed has a similar thing, as they tend to move around for other reasons besides kill score

[sea_monkey]

As for evidence of Kilrathi success: the aces in the original game account for 324 kills (Dakhath 86, Bhurak 64, Bakhtosh 75, Khajja 99). That's more than twice as many as the PlayerCharacter will 'score' on a winning run through the game. Then add Secret Missions 2: By my (rough) count there are 49 Drakhai encountered by Blair alone in SM2 - which accounts for at least 392 (8x49) kills. That's a *minimum of 792 kills by Kilrathi pilots encountered by Blair alone. Apply your knowledge of statistics to this data.

That's a lot of dead Kilrathi aces.

But besides that, those kill numbers are stock variables, accumulated since the beginning of the war. 800 kills is a lot, but not so much over a course of 20 years (only about 40 a year). On the other hand the Tiger's Claw scoreboard reads under 200 (minus Bossman) when the game starts and somewhere from 900 to 1300+ a year later. That's 700 to 1100 kills in a year (by 7 pilots). That's a crapload.

... and where's the indication that there's *not* a large base of fighters?

I don't know. Where's the indication there's *not* a Santa Claus? It's not possible to prove something doesn't exist.

No major Confed victory in any of the early games seems to affect the Kilrathi... why the belief that they're suffering horrific losses? (Or that we aren't suffering equal losses?).

Well that is exactly the first question I started with. How can the Kilrathi lose the Vega Sector, the Sivar, and take over 1100 fighter casualties in a year or two, and still be fine? I concluded that they outnumber Confed significantly and hold more territory, so the edge of Vega is right next to the human homeworlds but the other end is not right by Kilrah.

Now that doesn't agree with the books, which is why I don't like the books all that much (among other reasons). You can TRY and pretend both the books and the games are true, but that leads to ridiculous explanation/spins for why we see the casualty numbers we do -- either Confed is somehow losing 1100 pilots a year in some corner of the galaxy we don't hear about, or it's no big deal because they have fighters just sitting around.

If they had so many fighters sitting around, both sides would be building more carriers until the fighters were being deployed. It would be hugely inefficient to let so many fighters collect dust until they're obsolete. That is like a business that just keeps losing money building a massive widget inventory that no one ever buys. Makes no sense.

... I'm not really following you here. There's an absolutely crucial role that *only* carriers can play (strike missions) - that's pretty much the definition of an importance.

I think the confusion comes from the assumption that since I criticized the books, I must be wrong, even though I said something that was pretty much true -- that destroyers and cruisers carrying fighters would lessen the importance of carriers, although obviously carriers would still be important. I think we agree on more than we disagree.

Since Wing Commander II makes no provision for 'launching fighters' (as later games do), since Gothri are jump capable and since we know there are carrier groups in the system at the end of Special Operations One you may have trouble proving that the Fralthra launched them. As for Grikaths and such - we do know that Kilrathi carriers are present in WC2, even if Blair never actually encounters one... Jazz talks about having blown one up at one point (and of course Thrakhath sends Khasra after the Concordia with the one from the intro).

That tells you more about what Confed considers a Kilrathi carrier than anything else. In WC2, you see two Fralthra on a patrol one mission, and in the next cutscene Jazz says something about 2 carriers being in the system. In SO1, they say "five carrier groups" are attacking Ghorah Khar, 3 were in the first wave and two are left. When you get to the Nav point, what do you know, 2 Fralthra. To a certain extent, I'm willing to concede the limitations of the WC2 engine had something to do with that ... in my imagination there WAS a cat carrier present at that battle ... but as far as the game goes, the word carrier seems to apply to Fralthra as well.

I don't think you're looking at this from all the defensive angles. Ignoring the vastly superior anti-fighter defenses in the ships themselves, the fact that they're a single target works to the advantage of a carrier fighter-wise. Consider that the single Hakaga can commit its entire complement to its own defense - 288 fighters. Your three (or seven or whatever) Fralthra must divide their entire force of fighters among three (or seven or whatever) defensive targets. It's a neat numerical trick to take a bunch of small complements to form a big one, but they don't function the same in terms of defense (for that reason) or for offense (since they're lighter units).

If the Hakaga is carrying so many bombers for offense then it will be less effective on defense. Regardless, having more smaller ships lowers the risk in the engagement. If you have one large Confed carrier with 120 fighters that takes 4 torpedoes to down, then in an attack of 60 bombers, 4 out of 60 have to complete their attack run to down it. Let's say the odds of that are 1/7. By contrast let's take 3 Waterloo cruisers with 40 fighters each. Lets be extremely generous and say the odds of 2 out of 20 bombers hitting a Waterloo are 1/2 (even though the % of hits is higher). The odds of all 3 cruisers being blown up is 1/8 (.5*.5*.5), still lower than the heavy carrier. It's just safer to have more ships.

(.... also, something no one has bothered to point out yet for some reason. With regards to the amazing Fralthra, Fleet Action claims that the Kilrathi have only twenty of them circa Fleet Action. Which sort of puts a damper on the 'overload them with Fralthras!' plan regardless.)

Well I'm not a big fan of the books in the first place, so that doesn't really bother me. Forstchen must not have played SO1.

To step back and discuss this once again from a theoretical point of view - isn't the "biggest carrier as the ultimate weapon" a theme that exists very distinctly in the game? Hence Confed working towards the Vesuvius and Midway in WCIV and Prophecy respectively? It just seems really strange to blame the novels for something that's such a basic cornerstone of the games.

I always chalked that up to bad writing. Never played Prophecy and I thought WC4 was just okay. The Vesuvius bothered me for the same reasons.