Federation Commander

Just an observation...looking over my ships cards today I realized that the Fed Battle Frigate and War Destroyer are essentially the same ship! Same weapons/arcs, same engines, same move cost - there is a slight difference in shields but not a significant one. The frame damage and Marine numbers are different, to reflect the smaller hull size and internal space of the FFB, but that's pretty much it. Is there a reason why the two ships are nearly twins? Just curious if I'm missing something...

Small ships start to verge towards sameness. Nature of the simulation-level of the game.

I *thought* they had different turn modes/breakdown-ratings, but I don't have the cards handy.

The DW is a little bigger and that frame damage rating does reflect that it can take a bit more of a beating.

In-universe terms, the FFB was a maxed-out design, pretty much overloading the FF hull to its limits. That's part of why you don't see a whole lot of FFB variants. The DW on the other hand was purpose built to that level of capability, had room to grow, and has a plethora of variants (most of which aren't in FedCom, yet).

They were developed in competition with each other and the more-flexible DW design won handily. The FFB design was resurrected as a way to refit FF ships to try and keep them useful in the late war period where they had become almost irrelevant.

Staying with the in-game history, what happened is the Federation made the wrong choice for the correct reasons.

The Federation chose the purpose-built ship because it had the increased volume and more flexibility. Makes perfect sense. But ...

If the Federation had chosen the FFB, it is true that it would have "less space" than the DW. However, as we have seen from the actual FFB variants, they are just as functional as the DW variants, and sometimes actually better. So, supposed benefits of the DW over the FFB are actually meaningless. But, they would have gained serious benefits for choosing the FFB:
- Without wasting all that money to build the DW, they could likely have completely replaced FF production with FFB production.
- They would not have two completely independent supply chains. Instead, the FF and FFB would have shared the same supply chain.
- With the above reduced costs, they could likely have started to convert over all existing FFs, too.
- One improved variant worth mentioning is the transport version. The FFB transport variant can carry a pod. The DW transport cannot carry a pod, which is a huge deficiency.

As an aside, this is not a criticism of the game or anything. Cool nuances like this are great and make the in-game history more "realistic". But, it is still a valid observation.

I agree - I love the history - it's a big part of what attracts me to the SFU. I'm thinking of expanding my horizons into F&E for that reason.

Re: Will's post - both are turn mode C, move cost 1/2, dam con 2. BPV is 94 for the FFB, 98 for the DW.

Thank you both for the fascinating info!

cnuzzi wrote:Re: Will's post - both are turn mode C, move cost 1/2, dam con 2. BPV is 94 for the FFB, 98 for the DW.

Thank you both for the fascinating info!

Hmm, are you looking at the FedCom cards or the SFB SSDs? Sometimes those are subtly different. There may be more to this.