SDN Worlds 4 Commentary Thread IV

[PeZook]

Well, no, it's just that I'd like to move on so as to leave a reasonable time gap between stuff happening.

[Simon_Jester]

I'll abandon my objections to further time jumps when I finish Zebes, which shouldn't be that much longer.

[Karmic Knight]

I am really all ready to move on to 3401, though.

I am as well.

[Simon_Jester]

Karmic, you have complete freedom to decide when plots for your nation start, and you haven't got any ongoing events that you need other things to happen a reasonable time after (as PeZook does). What have you got planned for 3401 that you can't do just as well in Q4 3400?

[Master_Baerne]

Much oblidged. I asked because so much of next year's Starfleet construction is going to consist of carriers or line ships with large fighter bays, and because our fighters seem broadly similar (your cutters and my gunboats, anyway), my Admiralty was thinking of asking for instructions. Since we're not actually allies, I'm guessing that's a no-go?

Oh, I don't know. I'm sure we have naval attachés, and there's quite substantial published literature in Umeria too. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see some friendly pointers being thrown around. Shall we tentatively schedule something for late Q4 of '00 or '01?

Of course, our fighter tactics are for unmanned drones deemed highly expendable and thus unsuited, and equipment differences lead to tactical differences, but there's going to be some cross-applicable experience.

You could also try to get some observers into TOP SHEP...

I'm all for some sort of collaborative thing later on - in-universe, all the stuff that's written down won't do a lick of good if my Navy hasn't figured out how to coordinate large parasite forces, which they haven't had a need to do for two hundred years or so, and out-of-universe, I don't know how to write convincing fighter interactions on anything above squadron scale.

I think my fighters operate closer to gunboats in terms of tactics and style than 'traditional' starfighters (the standard 10/$1 ones most people seem to use). They're certainly mathematically closer to gunboats than fighters at 2/$1, and I've fluffed my fighters as carrying the same energy weapons as my gunboats, just less in the way of missiles and shield capacity and no hyperdrive. Anyway, Umerian experience coordinating cutters will be more valuable than other people's experience coordinating normal fighter operations.

[fgalkin]

Retconned the message to September.

I have no objections to jumping to 3401, once the current BEEEF storyline is concluded (and I know people, myself included, still want to do more BEEEF posts).

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[RogueIce]

I think my fighters operate closer to gunboats in terms of tactics and style than 'traditional' starfighters (the standard 10/$1 ones most people seem to use). They're certainly mathematically closer to gunboats than fighters at 2/$1, and I've fluffed my fighters as carrying the same energy weapons as my gunboats, just less in the way of missiles and shield capacity and no hyperdrive. Anyway, Umerian experience coordinating cutters will be more valuable than other people's experience coordinating normal fighter operations.

FYI, my "fighters" are all Gunboats of the 1/$1 type. That said, since they all have FTL drives our tactics are naturally different than those who use fighters with no FTL. In short, they tend to be of the "carrier sits outside system, sends fighters in to ruin shit" type, though of course they will defend the fleet if need be.

We just try to avoid having that be needed.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm all for some sort of collaborative thing later on - in-universe, all the stuff that's written down won't do a lick of good if my Navy hasn't figured out how to coordinate large parasite forces, which they haven't had a need to do for two hundred years or so, and out-of-universe, I don't know how to write convincing fighter interactions on anything above squadron scale.

Ah, yes. For that you need some advisors with experience at that level- mass coordination of FTL small craft. I know just the viewpoint character...

Hmm. Some kind of formal agreement might be in order; drop Dr. Chernov a note and I'll see what he can do.

FYI, my "fighters" are all Gunboats of the 1/$1 type. That said, since they all have FTL drives our tactics are naturally different than those who use fighters with no FTL. In short, they tend to be of the "carrier sits outside system, sends fighters in to ruin shit" type, though of course they will defend the fleet if need be.

We just try to avoid having that be needed.

The divide between sublight and FTL-capable small craft tends to encourage segregation of carriers into 'escort' and 'strategic' roles, in my opinion. Umeria has both types, with the 'escort' carriers being capital ships effectively welded to the battleline, while the 'strategic' carriers wind up being multirole workhorses. Tiny workhorses...

[Master_Baerne]

I'm all for some sort of collaborative thing later on - in-universe, all the stuff that's written down won't do a lick of good if my Navy hasn't figured out how to coordinate large parasite forces, which they haven't had a need to do for two hundred years or so, and out-of-universe, I don't know how to write convincing fighter interactions on anything above squadron scale.

Ah, yes. For that you need some advisors with experience at that level- mass coordination of FTL small craft. I know just the viewpoint character...

Hmm. Some kind of formal agreement might be in order; drop Dr. Chernov a note and I'll see what he can do.

Delightful. The Foreign Ministry will put something together as soon as reasonably possible - they've had a lot to do recently with all the first contacts, BEEEF-related silliness, and suchlike.

FYI, my "fighters" are all Gunboats of the 1/$1 type. That said, since they all have FTL drives our tactics are naturally different than those who use fighters with no FTL. In short, they tend to be of the "carrier sits outside system, sends fighters in to ruin shit" type, though of course they will defend the fleet if need be.

We just try to avoid having that be needed.

The divide between sublight and FTL-capable small craft tends to encourage segregation of carriers into 'escort' and 'strategic' roles, in my opinion. Umeria has both types, with the 'escort' carriers being capital ships effectively welded to the battleline, while the 'strategic' carriers wind up being multirole workhorses. Tiny workhorses...

If you're going to have line-of-battle carriers, it seems like it might be a better idea to simply stick hangars on battleships and call it a day. Putting an actual full-deck carrier, with all the hollow, explosive-filled, eminently destructible problems that implies in position to have the crap shot out of it seems like a bad idea.

[fgalkin]

It depends entirely on the size of the battleship in question, I think. I could easily put in 50 points of strike craft into my 800-pt attack ships (rules-wise, at least. I don't think it's actually physically possible to cram that many strike craft into a 500m ship), and suffer almost no performance loss in terms of big gun shooty dakka. Stick those 50 points on a 300-pointer, however, and that's a pretty significant drop in firepower and you end up with a weird hybrid thingy that is undergunned for its size AND doesn't carry enough strike craft to make a real difference. Not to mention that all that empty space is even worse in something that actually expects to be shot at in a wall of battle. At least you can keep the carrier in the back of the formation out of the line of fire.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Master_Baerne]

I'd think what you wind up with is a flexible ship that can be, for many intents and purposes, in two places at once. A 300-point dreadnought/carrier hybrid with 50 points of fighters is basically a 250-point dreadnought that can send 100 points of combat power off to do something entirely different, while still leaving the dreadnought itself fully capable of fighting. The same cannot be said of a full carrier - and doesn't any ship that depends on not being shot at have something rather intensely wrong with it?

[RogueIce]

I'd think what you wind up with is a flexible ship that can be, for many intents and purposes, in two places at once. A 300-point dreadnought/carrier hybrid with 50 points of fighters is basically a 250-point dreadnought that can send 100 points of combat power off to do something entirely different, while still leaving the dreadnought itself fully capable of fighting. The same cannot be said of a full carrier - and doesn't any ship that depends on not being shot at have something rather intensely wrong with it?

Nitpick, but it has 200-point power. Hybrid ships take the carrier capacity and double that to figure out what is lost in pure combat power (otherwise, your 300-point hybrid ends up with 350-points of total punch).

Of course, it all depends on what you want it to do. It does give flexibility in terms of reach, as well as extra options (you can have the strikecraft perform CAS in a planetary assault rather than depending on orbital bombardment, FE). And, of course, the broader question of, "What does my Navy actually do?" is entirely relevent.

Still, there is a point of diminishing returns, I imagine.

[Simon_Jester]

From a doctrinal standpoint there's a tomay-to/tomah-toe aspect to it. Since Baerne's fleet relies entirely on FTL-capable small craft, there are good arguments for building a strategic carrier not designed to engage in direct combat. That's exactly what I did with my cutter tenders; they have negligible firepower and only limited defensive strength, as shown in the attack on USS Nantucket.

But it's quite possible to come up with design concepts for carrying sublight parasite craft that do not grossly compromise the durability of the design, creating a ship that can stand in the line of battle without getting chewed to pieces faster than a 'gun' ship of equivalent tonnage would.

The divide between sublight and FTL-capable small craft tends to encourage segregation of carriers into 'escort' and 'strategic' roles, in my opinion. Umeria has both types, with the 'escort' carriers being capital ships effectively welded to the battleline, while the 'strategic' carriers wind up being multirole workhorses. Tiny workhorses...

If you're going to have line-of-battle carriers, it seems like it might be a better idea to simply stick hangars on battleships and call it a day. Putting an actual full-deck carrier, with all the hollow, explosive-filled, eminently destructible problems that implies in position to have the crap shot out of it seems like a bad idea.

There's no obvious reason why a carrier should be any more destructible than a missile ship of comparable tonnage; the line between a missile and a fighter in this kind of setting blurs at the edges a bit. Given the kind of volume we tend to play with, it's really not hard to justify putting in sufficient defensive cofferdamming and protection to keep the hangar bays segregated from easy destructibility.

For example, in working out detailed doctrine for the Centrality, I submit (subject to Force Lord's approval) that since Centrality ships tend to focus on defensive strength and hardening, their carriers may actually keep the small craft in internal bays far from the surface of the hull, with the usual heavy armor belts and 'crumple zones' to take the shock of hits so that nothing penetrates into the hangar spaces. The fighters would be launched out through internal tubes, like very heavy torpedoes. Sort of Battlestar Galactica-style, I think, though I'm not really an expert on that show.

Umerian fleet carriers of the newer type take the opposite approach, with each drone fighter housed in a very small mini-hangar on the surface of one of the ship's docking arms (basestars, remember?) In this case, most of the really fragile stuff is in the arms, which can be lost without critically impeding the function of the ship due to the high modularity and compartmentalization of the design- the manned component and the critical systems that keep the ship mobile and powered are tucked in towards the central hull, not on the docking arms.

But either way, you're essentially reprising the role of a missile ship: either firing missiles/fighters out of launch tubes that are loaded from well-protected magazines deep within the ship's core hull, or firing them out of VLS cell-equivalents on the outside of the main protective belt. Those methods tend to limit the vulnerability of the carrier to enemy fire, at least enemy fire of its own weight class.

There's no real need to have huge internal hangars as giant holes in the main armor belt, in my opinion.

[fgalkin]

I'd think what you wind up with is a flexible ship that can be, for many intents and purposes, in two places at once. A 300-point dreadnought/carrier hybrid with 50 points of fighters is basically a 250-point dreadnought that can send 100 points of combat power off to do something entirely different, while still leaving the dreadnought itself fully capable of fighting. The same cannot be said of a full carrier - and doesn't any ship that depends on not being shot at have something rather intensely wrong with it?

That looks good on paper, but I think that fighters in combat in SDNW4 are actually massively overrated. Let's take RogueIce's $1 gunboats, for example. This isn't TGG where strike craft carried heavy cap-ship killer missiles. A $1 gunboat will be still limited to $2 worth of weapons it can carry. It won't be able to carry heavy capital-grade energy weapons or torpedoes that will threaten the biggest ships. It will carry a smaller, shorter ranged antiship weapon and will have to rely on overwhelming the enemy's shields enmasse. The problem is, with the combat distances we're talking about, a modern force from a major power with a proper escort screen will eat up fighter swarms like candy, since most heavy ship weapons can be reconfigured for anti-fighter role AND have a longer range. By the time an unsupported fighter swarm will enter engagement range, it will already be at a fraction of its efficiency and fail to do a lot of damage. To be effective, you need really huge swarms of fighters, probably outnumbering the target at least 2-1 points-wise.

A fighter swarm that is supported by warships will do better, but that will defeat the purpose of the hybrid, which is to be in two places at the same time. Unless you send them escorting a smaller warship, but at that point, you could just build a strategic carrier sitting outside combat somewhere.

Make no mistake, I love my fighters and gunboats- I have almost $5500 worth of strike craft, which is more than most navies. But I use them for things like long-range recon of my local shoals and, yes, really huge swarms of thousands in support of capital ships, as well as for supplementing my point defense. What I'm not using them for is independent strikes against enemy warships.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Force Lord]

Simon is correct about Centralist carrier design, though I would add that my carriers use the same basic hull as my non-carrier warships, to ease logistics and reduce costs.

[fgalkin]

I'd think what you wind up with is a flexible ship that can be, for many intents and purposes, in two places at once. A 300-point dreadnought/carrier hybrid with 50 points of fighters is basically a 250-point dreadnought that can send 100 points of combat power off to do something entirely different, while still leaving the dreadnought itself fully capable of fighting. The same cannot be said of a full carrier - and doesn't any ship that depends on not being shot at have something rather intensely wrong with it?

Nitpick, but it has 200-point power. Hybrid ships take the carrier capacity and double that to figure out what is lost in pure combat power (otherwise, your 300-point hybrid ends up with 350-points of total punch).

Really? I have not seen such a rule, and, in fact, if this were true, this would make fighters a grossly inefficient investment, since a 100 point carrier, which actually costs 150 points (since you have to buy the 50 point fighter complement separately) will only do 100 points of damage (plus the carrier's own 10 damage to light craft). I think you just forgot to pay for your fighters which are not included in the carrier hull costs, since in your own example the 300 point hybrid which does 350 points of damage also costs you 350 points.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Kartr_Kana]

Everyone gets confused at this point and I'm not sure why. You can carry half the point value specified so $2 of hull is worth $1 of fighters/gunboats. Fighters and Gunboats are worth twice their value in combat so $1 worth of fighters is $2 worth of combat value. This means that if you take that $300 hybrid and it has $50 worth of fighters then the pure combat capability of the ship is $200 + $50x2 = $300.

F(x)=total cost of ship and the combat capability including fighter complement.
F(x)=Y+2(x) where Y is the pure combat capability and X is the value of fighters you want to carry.

I hope I'm being clearer than mud.

[Simon_Jester]

That looks good on paper, but I think that fighters in combat in SDNW4 are actually massively overrated. Let's take RogueIce's $1 gunboats, for example. This isn't TGG where strike craft carried heavy cap-ship killer missiles.

Says who?

Small craft suited for the strike role are perfectly capable of carrying antiship missiles.

Now, you can argue (as I do) that unless you go well out of your way to design high-quality missiles you wind up having to throw antiship missiles in overwhelming quantity. Which, yes, requires a lot of launch platforms... but where did you get the notion that this is somehow impractical?

It's ridiculous to argue that a 1$ gunboat is 'overrated' because, operating alone, it cannot kill a 300$ battleship. The battleship should not be compared to the gunboat. It should be compared to the full gunboat complement of a 300$ carrier. While one 1$ gunboat will not destroy a battleship by firing its limited ordnance or beam weapons, 150 such gunboats are an entirely different matter.

You're explicitly contradicting both the spirit of the point system (units of equal cost have comparable combat performance) and material already written in story thread featuring carrier-launched strike formations performing quite well, when pitted against starship forces of comparable point value.

When an undersized small craft element attacks a fleet it gets squashed at long range, or simply fails to do any damage. When a properly sized small craft element attacks a fleet it can count on achieving point defense saturation and causing very serious damage. How is that different from fleets of full-up starships?

You could equally well say 40$ destroyers are useless because you need about twelve to fourteen of them to be confident of killing one 400$ battleship. Send one destroyer to attack one battleship and it goes bang very quickly; that proves nothing about the relative utility of destroyers and battleships.

The problem is, with the combat distances we're talking about, a modern force from a major power with a proper escort screen will eat up fighter swarms like candy, since most heavy ship weapons can be reconfigured for anti-fighter role AND have a longer range. By the time an unsupported fighter swarm will enter engagement range, it will already be at a fraction of its efficiency and fail to do a lot of damage. To be effective, you need really huge swarms of fighters, probably outnumbering the target at least 2-1 points-wise.

Again, this is nonsense, and there is no meaningful support for it in the material anyone's written, in the letter of the rules, or the spirit of the rules.

[fgalkin]

Everyone gets confused at this point and I'm not sure why. You can carry half the point value specified so $2 of hull is worth $1 of fighters/gunboats. Fighters and Gunboats are worth twice their value in combat so $1 worth of fighters is $2 worth of combat value. This means that if you take that $300 hybrid and it has $50 worth of fighters then the pure combat capability of the ship is $200 + $50x2 = $300.

F(x)=total cost of ship and the combat capability including fighter complement.
F(x)=Y+2(x) where Y is the pure combat capability and X is the value of fighters you want to carry.

I hope I'm being clearer than mud.

Except what the rules actually say is "A Hull size's carrying capacity is equivalent to half its cost," NOT that 2 points of hull carry 1 point of fighters. Again, fighters are not included in the hull cost, so a $300 hybrid costs $300 for the hull, and $50 for the fighter complement, since those don't come free. So, it actually costs you $350 and does 350 points of damage.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Simon_Jester]

Construction costs of carriers is a problematic issue under the rules, one that was not resolved gracefully at the beginning in my opinion. However, carrier small craft wings integrated into the order of battle at game start are free- a 50$ carrier comes with its small craft complement and still only counts as 50 points out of your starting order of battle.

Since then, things have gotten tricky; it's not easy to adjudicate because there are several balance issues involved.

But I question your interpretation of the rules, Fima. In fact...

[puts on modhat]

Your interpretation is supported by nothing more than your own say-so, and therefore no one is under any obligation to regard it as a true statement about the rules.

However, this does bring up the legitimate issue of carrier construction costs and their relation to carrier combat power.

If a (carrier+wing) is to punch at 300 points in combat, it should not cost 450$ to build (carrier+wing), unless there is some profound advantage to having a (carrier+wing) that punches at 300 points in combat compared to having a battleship that punches at 300 points in combat.

Arguably, the advantage is that you can write off the fighter wing without losing the carrier: trade the fighters for enemy starships, retreat, and restock the carrier with new fighters.

The problem with this approach is that it could raise balance issues if done on a large scale in wartime to the point where it became strategically important.

This issue is complicated; as I said, there are balance issues involved. I think it's time for the mods to come up with some formal statement about the carrier rules that is generally acceptable to the players... with the attached guarantee that we won't let anyone abuse the carrier rules, because the real priority is to establish parity between carriers and battleships, so that neither choice is inferior to the other as a way of spending your defense budget.

I'll try to hash this out with the other mods, because I think it's worth nailing this down.

[Master_Baerne]

Probably the confusing bit of the fighter rules is the sheer number of twices and halfs in the explanation - that's what got me, I know. As I recall from the planning thread, we didn't have to pay for game-start fighter complements but replacements cost us, which certainly added to the confusion. Anyway, thanks for explaining it, Kartr.

Simon has a good point (which I should really be getting used to) about missiles and fighters being largely interchangable, except that fighters actually cost money and suffer from attrition to a much more obvious degree. This strikes me as something of a problem: Fighters really don't work, at least in a long war - If Player A has to pay for replacement fighter swarms but Player B doesn't have to pay for the missiles that killed them all from way out of range, Player B has a vast advantage in a war of attrition. Fortunately, we all seem prepared to throw numbers out the airlock in service to storytelling, but this could become an issue at some point.

[Kartr_Kana]

Negative Fima you can divide up the hull however you want $300 pure combat, $300 pure carrier, $150 to each, $200-$100 or any other mixture. Bottom line is that it's still $300, everything else is just fluff. True the fluff is constrained by the fact that 1/2 of what ever you designate carrier space is the value of fighters you can carry, but those fighters with their 2*$value combat rating balance that out.

It's all in the fluff, if you want to write your fighters needing 2:1 odds to take anything down, bear in mind that the rest of us have accepted that fighters have the ECM/Armor/Agility/etc so that if they have a combined combat value of 1:1 with their target then they have an even chance of taking them down.

[fgalkin]

That looks good on paper, but I think that fighters in combat in SDNW4 are actually massively overrated. Let's take RogueIce's $1 gunboats, for example. This isn't TGG where strike craft carried heavy cap-ship killer missiles.

Says who?

Small craft suited for the strike role are perfectly capable of carrying antiship missiles.

Now, you can argue (as I do) that unless you go well out of your way to design high-quality missiles you wind up having to throw antiship missiles in overwhelming quantity. Which, yes, requires a lot of launch platforms... but where did you get the notion that this is somehow impractical?

It's ridiculous to argue that a 1$ gunboat is 'overrated' because, operating alone, it cannot kill a 300$ battleship. The battleship should not be compared to the gunboat. It should be compared to the full gunboat complement of a 300$ carrier. While one 1$ gunboat will not destroy a battleship by firing its limited ordnance or beam weapons, 150 such gunboats are an entirely different matter.

But there is an inherent limit to how much a $1 gunboat can carry. It cannot, for example, carry the beam armament of a $40 destroyer, or the heavy missile armament of same. Anything it carries will be limited by the size of the gunboat, its carrying capacity and power output. What this means is that strikecraft weapons inherently have a shorter range. Hell, unless I'm gravely mistaken you even wrote something like that yourself in Hawk's Nest (unless those fighters and gunboats were engaging at warship ranges.....).

You're explicitly contradicting both the spirit of the point system (units of equal cost have comparable combat performance) and material already written in story thread featuring carrier-launched strike formations performing quite well, when pitted against starship forces of comparable point value.

Note that I said "against a properly escorted modern navy." 150 gunboats may well overwhelm a $300 battleship's point defense. But, were they facing, say, 10 $30 frigattes and it might well be a different story. I am not disputing that fighters can and will damage warships of comparable point value. What I'm saying is that in a modern battlefield against a competent enemy with technological parity, they will rarely have a chance to.

When an undersized small craft element attacks a fleet it gets squashed at long range, or simply fails to do any damage. When a properly sized small craft element attacks a fleet it can count on achieving point defense saturation and causing very serious damage. How is that different from fleets of full-up starships?

You could equally well say 40$ destroyers are useless because you need about twelve to fourteen of them to be confident of killing one 400$ battleship. Send one destroyer to attack one battleship and it goes bang very quickly; that proves nothing about the relative utility of destroyers and battleships.

I would argue that strike craft represent their own category, since their attack values are higher than their defense values, and their inherent design limitations place them at a relative disadvantage. Other than that, I am in complete agreement, and as I've said above, I fully agree that strike craft can and will achieve kills against warships if they achieve point-defense saturation. What I'm saying is that they might have trouble doing that. It's a doctrinal issue, not a points or rules one.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Kartr_Kana]

Oh btw the Baerne I have added stuff to our mutual story and I'm going to keep writing stuff and try to leave room for your perspective.

[Simon_Jester]

Probably the confusing bit of the fighter rules is the sheer number of twices and halfs in the explanation - that's what got me, I know. As I recall from the planning thread, we didn't have to pay for game-start fighter complements but replacements cost us, which certainly added to the confusion. Anyway, thanks for explaining it, Kartr.

Simon has a good point (which I should really be getting used to) about missiles and fighters being largely interchangable, except that fighters actually cost money and suffer from attrition to a much more obvious degree. This strikes me as something of a problem: Fighters really don't work, at least in a long war - If Player A has to pay for replacement fighter swarms but Player B doesn't have to pay for the missiles that killed them all from way out of range, Player B has a vast advantage in a war of attrition. Fortunately, we all seem prepared to throw numbers out the airlock in service to storytelling, but this could become an issue at some point.

The trick is that if Player A is bringing enough fighters to the battlefield (pitting 500 points of carriers against 500 points of cruisers, not 250 points of carriers against 500 points of cruisers), this goes away.

Because now, while Player A is paying for the cost of replacing the attritional losses to his fighter wings, Player B is paying for the cost of the cruisers that got shot full of torpedos by Player A's fighter attacks.

If my fighters attack, lose 100$ worth of fighters, and return, having destroyed 100$ worth of warships, I am hardly at a disadvantage in a war of attrition. Indeed, the real concern is that in this situation I might be at an advantage, an unfair one, if I can exploit the fact that I can theoretically replace those fighters faster than he can replace the battlecruiser they destroyed.

[modhat on]

However, we're already committed to keeping this from being a problem in the 'light vs heavy ship' issue. Steve's game rules theoretically allow you to trade 10 30 point ships for 1 300 point ship and replace your 10 ships faster than I can replace my 1 ship. In practice, if you try to do this, you will run into (mod-imposed) problems. Like low morale among the fleet, production bottlenecks forcing you to space out production of your replacement ships so that they don't all enter service at once, things like that.

So we can do similar things to keep it from becoming a problem in the case of carriers vs. battleships.

[modhat off]

But there is an inherent limit to how much a $1 gunboat can carry. It cannot, for example, carry the beam armament of a $40 destroyer, or the heavy missile armament of same.

Yep. But it can carry, for example, a few ALBM-sized antiship torpedos like some of the variants of my Mk. IV 'Cantaloupe'... the same ones that blow holes in battleships if they can get into attack range.

Fima, you are smart enough to know that "one gunship cannot carry as much ordnance as one destroyer" does not mean "gunships are inferior to destroyers."

Note that I said "against a properly escorted modern navy." 150 gunboats may well overwhelm a $300 battleship's point defense. But, were they facing, say, 10 $30 frigattes and it might well be a different story.

Nope.

If you have a 300$ battleship (with poor point defense for its tonnage) escorted by 10 30$ frigates (with good point defense for their tonnage), what you have is one 600$ battlefleet (with no better point defense for its aggregate tonnage than normal).

When confronted with the combined carrier wings of 600$ worth of carriers, you can confidently expect this battlefleet to take a lot of damage, while dishing out a lot of damage to the carriers' small craft (and/or the carriers themselves). But it will be a roughly equal battle... because both sides' battlefleets are worth 600 points. It really is that simple.

I would argue that strike craft represent their own category, since their attack values are higher than their defense values, and their inherent design limitations place them at a relative disadvantage. Other than that, I am in complete agreement, and as I've said above, I fully agree that strike craft can and will achieve kills against warships if they achieve point-defense saturation. What I'm saying is that they might have trouble doing that. It's a doctrinal issue, not a points or rules one.

The rules pretty much require that anyone who employs carriers have solved the doctrinal issues implicit in using them. The Umerians and Centrality have, for instance, as illustrated by the role played by the cutter/gunship forces at the Battle of Hawk's Nest.