Czechmate wrote:Okay, first, chill out, it is not repeat not the end of the world.
First, if it was, you'd see me screaming something along the lines of "Sweet Jesus on a Harley rollin' into East Berlin, it's the end of the world!".
Second, springsharp keeps designs mostly-realistic - no putting fifteen 18" guns on a 25kt hull and trying to cheat the system, etc.
You have missed my point. That's not "mostly-realistic" in my book. Sure, in terms of guns-per-ton it might be, but then so were 103,000 tonne carriers in SDN World 1...
Except they weren't: you might
theoretically be able to build a 103t supercarrier, but the strategic reality of the game ordained that such a ship would be preposterously useless. The world consisted of small islands the distance between which an F-111 could cross in no time whatsoever. In the face of that a Nimitz-class ship is nothing but an epic wast of resources that would be far better spent on long-range tac-bombers.
Admittedly SDN World #1 was a fairly bizarre world from the get-go, and it ended pretty quick, so then we created #2... Yet the same thing happened: as an example MESS nations for a very long time had in their OOB an epically
huge fleet of A-10 gunships. What could those possibly be any good for? Attacking armadas of non-existant Soviet tanks crossing the non-existant Fulda gap? Likewise for the ridiculous 80,000+ tonne amphibious assault carriers they kept unveiling near the end of the game; we CATO members rationalized it as "there's no conceivable defensive use for them, so they MUST BE designed to invade shit". No-one ever deigned to give any rational purpose for those ships.
My point, then, is that there's more to this sort of game than what's "mostly-realistic" from a technical point of view; there's also what makes sense
practically. I want people to have ships that make sense according to the strategic realities of the game. I might be able to afford some kind of super maximal battleship in Springsharp terms, but if it doesn't make a lick of sense for me to have a ship like that in terms of my strategic position I want someone to say I can't bloody have it.
For example if the end result of the formation of the game world OOBs is that air power is far more developed than it was in OTL, then destroyers etc. should have more AA guns on 'em. If there are more battleships than there were in OTL, then it makes sense that our fleets focus more on the sort of weaponry that can take down a BB. Likewise with battlecruisers, destroyer leaders, whatever. This should not just be a matter of what can technically be done, it should be a matter of what makes sense from a strategic point of view.
This is the issue with this Springsharp business in my opinion: it only focuses solely on what might technically be done. It's the same trap MESS players fell into at the start of SDN World #2: they went with what was super gee-what tech was available in our world, and then Shep demolished them because he reasoned that if their arsenal was such, his own would reflect that and have the means to effectively counter their crap. Whine about knowledge of obscure weapons systems or not, but this demonstrates that settling for what was available in OTL is a particularly crappy way of going about establishing original OOBs; what you should really be looking at is what the actual game world demands in terms of capabilities, and then going for
that instead.
I believe the term Stuart uses is (and I'm paraphrasing here) 'first determine what you want your army to do, then determine what equipment you need to do it', instead of the other way around. In other words, you oughtta look at what you want your fleet to do, before you determine what kind of battleship you need. So what I want our estmeemed moderators (whoever they turn out to be) to do, is to veto any OOB that doesn't make sense from this point of view. If you want super battleships that's fine, but you ought to be able to provide a reason why you need 'em. If it's to fight Super Resurgent Germany, the Eternal Grand Dominion or whomever that's okay, but please let's focus on the
necessity of weapons platforms before looking at their technical feasibility.
In closing, then, what I'm saying is not that no-one should use Springsharp to design some fancy ships of their own. If people want to do that, then by all means. I do feel, however, that focussing exclusively on this aspect of the OOB creation business, to the exclususion of strategic alternate-reality-realities (if that's even a term) would be a major mistake that's going to inevitable come back to bite us in the ass later on -- a lesson I would hope people would've learned after two games of getting fucked with by Shep...
