Allaria Kriss
Elipse Inc.
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Posted - 2008.05.28 23:11:00 -
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I think a big part of the Falcon problem is the range they can jam at - At 190km, missing a jam cycle doesn't mean anything since the few ships that CAN shoot that far usually aren't present in a small gang since they're worthless for any other purpose except fleet sniping. Nanoships, even interceptors, can take a while to close 200km to get to a Falcon giving it more than enough time to jam them and make its getaway then return, cloaked, to a new spot and start it all over again.
Most of the solutions I've seen presented as anti-Falcon don't really work very well considering how I've seen Falcons fight. Sniper battleships can get jammed too, and are pretty useless in a small fleet; they're also usually expensive and will get taken down readily by the enemy fleet even without the Falcon. Nanoships have low sensor strength, except for recons, and the Falcon can cloak, jam them, or run away. Nor is the Ishtar some mystical Falcon-killer - If the drones are not out or not in range when the Falcon initially aggresses, they will never automatically engage it, at least not that I've ever seen. Nano-logistics is grabbing at straws. Sensor damps have a very short range compared to ECM. ECCM doesn't work often enough to prevent a permajam, and is also a loss of a vital midslot.
Permajamming does exist; simply, it's when the enemy's chance of jamming you is so high that the chance they have of failing is minimal. This can easily happen, and I can prove this with basic probability math. Example:
Assume that with one jammer, a Falcon has a 20% chance of success with a 20-second cycle time. This means it has an 80% chance of failure. Assume it has 6 jammers. What is its overall chance of failure?
80%=0.8, and it has to fail this effect six times for the ECM run to be a total failure. Its chance of failure is thus (0.8)^6. Thus, the Falcon's actual chance of failure is about 26.2%. It will fail to jam its target about once every minute and 20 seconds.
Now let's up that success rate to 33%. The failure chance drops to .67^6 = 9% - This is about the effect a Falcon will have with racial jammers against a battleship target with 1 ECCM. It will fail to jam its target once every three minutes and 20 seconds.
Low let's up that to 66%, representing a battleship without ECCM. .33^6 = 0.13%. Yes, less than one percent. It will fail a jam approximately once every 33 minutes. This is a permajam - The Falcon's chances of failing are so minimal as to be negligible over the course of the fight.
If the Falcon is smart he'll stagger his ECMs so that he only has to use enough jammers to quiet the target; other jammers can then be used to disable other ships and reapplied on the primary as needed.
All this on a ship that can not only move cloaked, but WARP cloaked, and you've got an overpowered little fleet boat.
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