Federation Commander

Ok, I'm having some trouble understanding the Ranger Heavy Cruiser & the Mohawk New Heavy Cruiser. The New Heavy Cruiser should have more weapons / shields, but when you actually compare them, they have the same type and amount of weapons, on dif the Fusions on the New Heavy Cruiser a split 50/50 to R/RF & L/LF as apose to FA for all. The new Heavy Cruiser has one more emergency bridge space, one more battery, one more shuttle, one less fighter, one Less shield on the front shield, one less Tractor Beam, and one less bridge space. I don't see how this is a improved heavy cruiser. Any one have any insight on this?

It's not so much that it's an improved ship - more that it's a 'war' hull which is cheaper and easier to build in wartime (but at the expense of the long service life one can get out of a regular CA).

Nerroth wrote:It's not so much that it's an improved ship - more that it's a 'war' hull which is cheaper and easier to build in wartime (but at the expense of the long service life one can get out of a regular CA).

Wouldn't it be a "war" cruiser instead of a "new" cruiser then?

Well if your Gorn, Its like a Battle Destroyer, or some other such name to get it past the politicians.

Some races got War Cruisers, some got NCA's.

Nerroth wrote:It's not so much that it's an improved ship - more that it's a 'war' hull which is cheaper and easier to build in wartime (but at the expense of the long service life one can get out of a regular CA).

I would agree with this execpt the cots for the "New Heavy Cruiser" is 111+80 where as the Heavy Cruiser is 111+90 so the only difference in cost is the loss of the one fighter. The base cost of the Cruisers never changes from 111. And the only real gain is the shuttle, which could be considered a loss since it use to be a fighter.

It is a lot easier to think of it like this.

When dealing with a Strtegic Level Game like Federation and Empires you only have a certian number of ship yards able to build Heavy/Battle Cruisers, usually like only four or at most six a year. Where the New Heavy Crusiers came in is some one looked at the War Cruiser Hulls and came up with a away to convert/upgrade them to a unit that would function as a Heavy Cruiser in a Battle Fleet. This added atleast 2 more Heavy Cruiser Hulls to the Production schedual a year.

These New Heavy Cruisers while usually carrying or excedeing the number of Weapons of a Heavy Cruiser had were still built as attrition units designed to give hopefully as much as 5 years of service before they were destroyed in combat. As such the suffer many of the same problems as War Cruiser. (Fed NCL, Klingon D5) These hulls were not desgnied for indurance or even able to effectivly operate away from a strong supply chain with out quickly having a degraded perforamce. (So no 5 year missions like a certian ship did on TV many years ago.)

The bottom line is NCAs were intended to be equal to a CA somewere slightly better than thier base Heavy Cruiser Hulls some may be just slightly worst than their Heavy Cruiser Cousins.

Dal Downing wrote:It is a lot easier to think of it like this.

When dealing with a Strtegic Level Game like Federation and Empires you only have a certian number of ship yards able to build Heavy/Battle Cruisers, usually like only four or at most six a year. Where the New Heavy Crusiers came in is some one looked at the War Cruiser Hulls and came up with a away to convert/upgrade them to a unit that would function as a Heavy Cruiser in a Battle Fleet. This added atleast 2 more Heavy Cruiser Hulls to the Production schedual a year.

These New Heavy Cruisers while usually carrying or excedeing the number of Weapons of a Heavy Cruiser had were still built as attrition units designed to give hopefully as much as 5 years of service before they were destroyed in combat. As such the suffer many of the same problems as War Cruiser. (Fed NCL, Klingon D5) These hulls were not desgnied for indurance or even able to effectivly operate away from a strong supply chain with out quickly having a degraded perforamce. (So no 5 year missions like a certian ship did on TV many years ago.)

The bottom line is NCAs were intended to be equal to a CA somewere slightly better than thier base Heavy Cruiser Hulls some may be just slightly worst than their Heavy Cruiser Cousins.

I agree with your assesment of this, and this is good for a F&E gam since is is a larger version of the Medium Mongol Cruiser, however FC was not desgined for F&E and as a NCA it would be better to take the CA unless the point value of your game is under 200 or less.

NCAs are NEW heavy cruisers, not BIGGER/BETTER heavy cruisers. They're just another way of doing the same job. Easier to build.

A ship is worth what it's worth, and both are worth 111. There isn't anything "wrong". We could not "improve" the NCA to match your (incorrect) idea of what an NCA is (*) because it is in FC what it is in SFB.

(*) See BCH for what you're looking for.

NCAs were (as SVC says) were never meant to be better than CAs as such, but were meant to be bigger/better than the "war" cruisers (or "new light cruisers") so that they could perform the role of a heavy cruiser. While some NCAs are arguably better than their equivalent CAs in terms of sheer "combat power", others are not - and the Hydran is just one of those that wasn't really any significant improvement. The Kzinti NCA is another that isn't really any "better" than the BC (nor is it much worse, hey both have slight advantages over the other but are roughly comparable), but it is a different ship that does the same job in the wartime situation the NCAs were built in.

Plus it's worth reiterating that comparison of similar-sounding ship types from different races can also be misleading. As has been said already, the Gorn 'War Cruiser' was actually called the 'Heavy Destroyer' in order to placate the bean counters.

That's why we have the Invincible-class carriers in the Royal Navy. They were called 'through-deck cruisers', the bean counters were placated, to we have the carriers. If we'd called them 'carriers', we'd never have got near them.

The only place (so far) where a 'new' cruiser is a genuine upgrade over its predecessors is in the Cloud - where for both the Baduvai and Eneen, the war cruisers and war destroyers were superior to the earlier classes they supplanted.

But then, there were decades' worth of time between the development of the war classes and of their earlier counterparts - and despite the names used, they are not intended as the kind of cheap-production hulls you see in the Alpha Octant.



It may, or may not, be something similar in Omega when their speed-31 cruisers are published, but no-one kinows yet what will be the case there.

War Cruisers are a distinct class of ship that is an attempt to get most (not all, but most) of a Heavy Cruiser's firepower on a cheaper hull. The D5 is a good example of this. Heavy Cruisers will always out class a war cruiser.

Incidentally, the Hydran War Cruisers are the Medium Cruisers (which are improved versions of the Light Cruisers that aren't in FedCom, and also qualify as War Cruisers).

Later on, it was realized that if you improvised, you could cram a few extra systems into a War Cruiser and turn it into a ship that was functionally identical to a Heavy Cruiser (at least as far as fighting was concerned). Different races went about this in different ways (for instance, the Federation added a small hull and warp engine to the back of the New Light Cruiser, and got their New Heavy Cruiser), but the end result was roughly the same - a ship based off of the War Cruiser hull that was just as capable on the front lines as the Heavy Cruiser.

Remember that it's also different with hydrans, who have fighters and two different heavy weapons. Comapred to the Dragoon, The Mohawk is better (Counting fighters, that is).