Rules Hex Command Starships

Source:  http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tactics/Naval-Tactics.html

1.1         Technical Ramifications

1.1.1      Star Trek

The use of battle lines, ramming tactics, and balanced short-range gun/missile attacks in Star Trek leads us to the following conclusions:

·         Anti-ship weaponry in Star Trek is not combat-effective at ranges exceeding ~10km, because battle lines form up at those ranges and cannot employ fleet firepower concentration without encirclement (also at that range).

·         Torpedoes and phasers can physically travel farther than that, but targeting difficulties can limit effective range even when theoretical range is very large.

·         Hulls, shields and structural forcefields are insufficient to nullify the effectiveness of ramming, because ramming attacks were so effective against undamaged, fully shielded Klingon warships in "Tears of the Prophets" (even when undertaken by miniscule 70m long ships). This suggests large disparities between Star Trek ships' ability to handle kinetic energy and electromagnetic energy.

·         Combat maneuverability of capital ships is high enough to permit Nelson-style tactics of maneuver (hence the flanking maneuvers attempted by Jem'Hadar ships), but not high enough to permit fighter plane tactics (hence their use of combat formations).

·         Based on the parallel use of phasers and photon torpedoes, the effective range of missiles seems to be far lower than their theoretical range. A likely explanation is that their limited AI and ECM (in addition to poor maneuverability) makes them easy to shoot down at long range, where the defenders have a lot of time to see them coming.

1.1.2      Star Wars

The use of concentrated gunnery tactics in conjunction with fighter harassment in Star Wars leads us to the following conclusions:

·         Anti-ship weaponry in Star Wars is combat-effective at ranges of at least several hundred kilometres based on the unimportance of battle formations, even at long visual ranges such as those seen in ROTJ. This was demonstrated when the Rebel ion cannon engaged ISD's in the Battle of Hoth, and again when the DS2 superlaser engaged Rebel cruisers in the Battle of Endor.

·         Weapons based on turbolaser technology dominate the battlefield in Star Wars, with scalability ranging as low as a hand blaster and as high as the awesome planet-destroying Death Star superlaser. Torpedoes are relatively unimportant, and seem to serve only as starfighter weapons.

·         Starfighters, by virtue of their weak armament, cannot successfully attack capital ships without capship support. There is some apocryphal literature to support the opposite notion, but it originates entirely from the notoriously propagandistic New Republic descriptions of the exaggerated exploits of Wedge Antilles and his X-wing squadron. Canon support for this notion is nonexistent, and in the Battle of ROTJ, the fighters were used merely to "finish off" ships which have already been disabled by turbolaser cannonade, such as the Imperial communications ship and the Executor (also see the novelization, in which we heard Ackbar informing his bridge crew that "if we can knock out their shields, our fighters might stand a chance against them"- a far cry from the apocryphal nonsense of fighter squadrons pummeling the shields of warships).