Anyone not like the books?

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sea_monkey

Spaceman
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 ...
 
Maybe.... but frankly not to put to fine a point on things... the books were what got me hooked on WING COMMANDER.
 
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.
 
sea_monkey said:
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.
 
ChrisReid said:
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...
 
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).
 
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.
 
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...
 
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).
 
Originally Posted by spank_monkey
blah blah blah, bullshit that has been said before . . . over and over . . . blah blah blah

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.
 
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.
 
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 lol.
 
sea_monkey said:
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
 
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).
 
sea_monkey said:
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.

sea_monkey said:
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.
 
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.)
 
Bandit LOAF said:
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.
 
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.

Bandit LOAF said:
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.

Bandit LOAF said:
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.....

Bandit LOAF said:
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....
 
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