I'll really don't see why redoing the entire capital ship section of the table is absolutely necessary. Even a competent FREDer can make a decent capital ship duel last long enough with good SEXP work, as CP said. Big capital ship duels that are even the least bit important can be made to last for a while to show a stalemate between forces, or be quick to show an obvious superiority of one side over another.
The fire-beam SEXP was made for a reason. In a few of my missions, I find that regulating fire-beams between capital ships can balance out a mission well. Also, it's not as if equals have to be fighting: you can easily set a Sobek to beam-free-all and set its waypoints around a destroyer while using fire-beam to adjust the destroyer's fire against the corvette.
Just take a look at any one of V's big beam fests: King's Gambit, Sicilian Defense, and Endgame are the best examples of how a well-balanced battle sequence can go about being made. King's Gambit is designed to be a fast mission involving destroying large ships within a short period of time, and therefore the rapid-fire, powerful Mjolnir cannons, coupled with the Typhon's BVas cannons, are designed to deliver heavy damage in a short amount of time.
Sicilian Defense, works in somewhat a similar fashion, though in not as rapid or desperate a scenario. Instead of being pressed for time as much as King's Gambit, Sicilian Defense uses a single corvette and bombers to attack the NTF fleet. While it may seem slightly unbalanced at points, it can easily be fixed with player intervention--destroying the Vindicator's portside beam cannons before the Hyksos arrives can prevent an early destruction of the corvette, for example. The rest of the mission involves a corvette and a weakening force of bombers attacking smaller capital ships--a corvette, then a couple of cruisers.
Finally, Endgame is one of the best-balanced and well-orchestrated missions I've ever played. Almost the entire mission is based around intercepting fighters and bombers while the larger capital ships duke it out. With swarms of fighters all around, the player almost seems to never notice how quickly the NTC Loyola gets torn up by the Monitor, for example. The battle can also be quickened, thanks to the ability to command the allied capital ships in the mission. The Fortune can aid in the destruction of the Loyola and the Danton, and, while its beam is not too powerful, it fires rapidly enough to be a factor.
If you want to look at a drawn-out capital ship battle that is involving, fun, and long-lasting, I would suggest playing Derelict--specifically the mission "The Stars Are Right". That whole mission is an excellent example of how a battle with several capital ships in a mission can be drawn out and still entertaining for the player. The same goes for the Derelict finale.
The way in which the Khefrem in the final mission attacks the Nyarlathotep uses up enough time for the Cypher to get out of range of the Shivans. Two BVas turrets attacking the million point HP Nyarlathotep, with a single LRed returning fire on the less-durable Hatshepsut balances out the damage just enough that the Khefrem does appreciable damage and lasts long enough before being annihiliated by the Shivans.
Competent FREDing can more than make up for issues of a battle being too quick or too short. I still suggest this than to completely reorganizing the tables, which, honestly, can be a pain on FREDers, especially if they're not regularly updated with the new information. I speak from experience, too--GTI Rebellion has gone through dozens of table changes, and, as a result, many missions are currently going through rebalancing to match the final set of tables.
A little SEXP headache now is a whole lot less painful than a table headache later.
Sorry to hijack the thread, I've seen you use FTW before. What does it mean?
FTW= For the Win. Something "FTW" is the way to go.
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