Uh, I didn't know where to put this but the description for this forum says 'FRED included', so here goes. This is one of those really pretentious ideas that always get shot down, stomped on, digested by Carl aka Our Resident Shivan, then used as building material for the Collosus. I was thinking about ways to compare the in-practice strength of FS combat groups, by which I mean any set of ships/installations/sentry guns. Ideally, you would eventually be able to say "the GVCv Sobek is about 1.5 times stronger than the GTC Deimos".
My proposal is to compare that strength of combat groups to multiples of a certain 'standard battle unit', which for convenience should be small, but contain a bit of all the main types of firepower in FS. So my current proposed SBU consists of a Fenris, plus 2 weak assault fighters, I think Hercs, and 2 bombers, again weak so maybe Medusas or Artemis. Now n * some combat group= every shipclass in the combat group, but n times as many. So say I wanted to test how strong a Deimos was. Now usually a Deimos would have fighter escort, and for some ships fighter escorts can have a fairly big effect on strength. So lets say we attach 4 myrmidons.
Now in general we want to FRED a mission where the two sides start some distance from each other - the centres of power of each side doesn't have a good reason to be anything in particular, but 5000m is probably good for letting the capships maneuver into their strongest orientation. The two sides should have one goal - to obliterate the other. Now let's start by having 2 SBUs face that Deimos+escort. Say the Deimos side wins eventually. Ok, try 3 SBUs. Say the Deimos still wins (I have no idea what would actually happen). But then 4 SBUs beat the Deimos. Ok, so (assuming the given choice of escort and SBU) we know that 3 Fenris +6 hercs +6 Medusas <= Deimos + 4 Myrmidons <= 4 Fenris +8 hercs + 8 Medusas.
That's our first rating. But, let's say it takes the Deimos side 3 minutes to win against 3 SBU but 4 SBU beat the Deimos side in 2 minutes. If the Deimos side was exactly as weaker than 4 SBU as it was stronger than 3, i.e. 3.5 rating, then the two times should have been equal. Since the Deimos was beaten faster by 4 SBU, the rating must be lower than 3.5 and greater than 3. So, on average, that's 3.25 SBUs are approx. equivalent to Deimos + 4 Myrmidons. Now, this system only provides ratings to within .25 of the true ones, since the actualy Deimos could be very close to 3 or very close to 3.5. BUT this isn't really a problem because: 1. If we have two ships (sorry, combat groups to maintain generality) with the same '3 to 3.5, so about 3.25' rating, then we can just compare them directly. 2. By multiplying both sides we can reach finer granularity, ie. if we determine 2 * (Deimos+escort) is between 6 and 6.5, we divide to find that one of the deimos groups is between 3 and 3.25, or on closest guess, equal to 3.125 SBUs. Of course, in general this more than we actually need, and anyway the system probably isn't that accurate. But you get the idea. Now on to what I've been ignoring.
This is a mission, so in FRED you're going to have to put the player somewhere. But you don't want the player to interfere with the battle. So the way I thought of getting around there being no 'observer mode' (ahem - by which I mean, no observer mode, yet - nudge nudge, wink wink to the SCP team): Have the player start a fair distance away from the battle, and tell any ships that will automatically attack the player (hostile, neutral) to ignore the player's ship, and do this from the beginning.
However...I am such a horribly miserable failure at FRED that I have read the FRED2 manual and still don't know how to FRED a mission like this (actually, I'm worse - you remember that bare-bones ulysses-mara duel that there were click-by-click instructions on making, in the very first part of the manual? Yeah - I failed the first time I tried to make it.)
I would appreciate two things: 1. Theoretical comments on the system I've thought up. 2. Actual results from anyone who FREDed something like this.
