Woohoo...
Having mostly recovered from the weekend, it's time to get back to it:
sea_monkey said:
I may have responded to that many *comments*, but that was only in reply to 3 posts. And I didn't cover every single issue. And it took me forever.
Feel free to pick and choose the arguments to which you reply, but don't get all self-righteous on us when we point out you missed one. Anyway, there's no reason it should be very difficult for you to reply, since you have all the answers, right?
Or maybe you don't, and you work hard "inventing rationalizations" to counter what comes so easily to us?
I'm just throwing that out there...
Carriers are still the only ship that can do A & B, so they are still the most important. I never argued that they weren't however, so I don't see your point.
You continue to avoid either confronting or accepting the fact that I've proven that it's logically impossible for cruisers and destroyers to diminish, in any way, the importance of aircraft carriers in Wing Commander. I will repeat it, so you don't have to go look for it:
The importance of carriers, in Wing Commander, is a function of their ability to transport, launch and support heavy strike craft. Not dogfighters, but capship- and base-killing craft. Other warships certainly do field light interceptors for the purposes of self-defense and the defense of any ships they escort, but carriers are the offensive arm.
Now, it's been demonstrated that a traditional cruiser can, under certain circumstances, be used to transport small numbers of heavy strikers in a limited capacity (i.e. test bed,) but that's the exception, and not the rule, or there would be more than one example.
What does this mean? You would have it that the role of a gunfighter cruiser and an aircraft carrier will overlap in some fashion that diminishes, however slightly, the importance of the carrier in war. This is a fallacy, however, as the measurement of a carrier's importance is its offensive capability, which it derives from the certain kinds of fighters it can carry that a traditional cruiser can not. While overlap occurs in the area of fielding interceptors, this is not the metric by which we gauge the importance of either.
Even beyond
all that, you still have to wonder why, if cruisers could ever perform the same type of job, in any capacity, as a carrier, would Confed ever build a carrier, when they have thousands of the other ships? The increased expense and difficulty associated with producing a carrier would discourage Confed from ever commissioning one if they could just send a handful of their nearly unlimited cruiser supply to perform the same job.
Your argument would have more clout if you claimed that the cruisers, which vastly outnumber the carriers, lessened the carriers' importance by way of their capability to use their own heavy guns and missiles to strike and destroy the same targets that carriers use bombers for, but even then you'd have to contend with the fact that the offensive range of a carrier far exceeds any battlewagon. The cruisers and destroyers are far better suited, suited only, in fact, for close-range ship-to-ship combat, for the purposes of protecting a carrier from aggressive ships of their own type.
Bottom Line: Your argument is illogical because it relies on certain things (cruisers possessing a strike capability of an identical and overlapping nature with that of carriers) being true when they are not.
So there's not going to be constant fighting at every point.
But there will be constant fighting across all points which constitute the front. Any contested systems will see a constant stream of engagements until somebody wins, and then the battles merely shift to a new system. You don't simply abandon ground and expect that the enemy
won't attack you from there next.
Yeah but how many Fralthra or standard carriers for that matter could you have made with the material it took to make a Hakaga? I swear I remember them saying it took a lot of resources.
Whether a Hakaga is worth X number of Fralthras is a non-issue.
A constantly recurring theme in Wing Commander is the supercarrier. The advantages are in increased mobility and reduced logistical drain, not in cost reduction, though that
certainly would become an advantage as tooling and assembly lines were paid off.
How come I haven't heard you claim that the Midway is a joke because a handful of cheaper (already-paid-for, even) Rangers can carry the same number of fighters? Because that's a stupid assertion; everybody knows which is the best way to make a mess.
You're very smug and self-assured, surrounded, as you are, by your dime-store illogic and paper tigers (oh noes -
it's a glitch,) but you're not fooling anyone. Whenever one of your rickety arguments is shot out of the sky with facts and logic, you resort to the cheapest demagoguery (all who disagree belong to a
cult) and then reset and start again. Protip: repeating the same exhausted, debunked arguments many times does not magically make them right.
So let's see some real heart and soul here. If you're so correct, you've got to have some genuinely sound reasoning hidden up your sleeves. Break it out.
correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the movie carrier have the name "Tiger claw" there was no possessive "s" on the end of the word Tiger. THAT'S THE PROBLEM! This is an entirely different ship!
I'll be the first to admit that there's probably no convincing sea_monkey that I'm right... but it's the process itself that accomplishes something. It's a great way to stay 'current' - in a few years we'll have a new round of more important (heh) topics to yell about. Plus, as everyone points out their small references, you do learn something new that changes your overall view of the universe (if only slightly).
