ScrapYard Armory

How about a game of Aerospace with all the bells and whistles?  Including the new Electronic Warfare rules into your Warship battles adds complexity, but dials up the strategy.  Hopefully you’ll get the opportunity to blast your opponents into space junk, but a little help along the way wouldn’t hurt anyone, right? (except your opponent maybe…)

The Electronic Warfare rules in Strategic Operations include new uses for ECM and Active Probes for Fighters.  Proper use of your ECM fields coupled with the disruption of your opponent’s will mean the difference between victory and a cold silent death in deep space.

Unfortunately, there are not a whole lot of options when using only canon fighters.  They can be divided into two categories: Offense and Defense.  Offensive fighters mount an Active Probe that will effectively cut through the bonus provided by all enemy ECM fields.  Let me repeat, that includes all ECM fields.  Fighters, small craft, and large craft are all affected.  Defensive fighters mount an ECM suite.  These will only defend against enemy fighters and small craft, so it won’t stop an opposing Warship from blasting you with Anti-Fighter Laser Batteries.  But every bonus counts, and staying alive and getting through a fighter screen to put some heat on those Warships is all part of the game.

OFFENSIVE

HCT-213B Hellcat II

The Hellcat is a great medium EW fighter that fits its niche nicely.  While skimpy on the offensive punch (only two large and one medium laser) it mounts an impressive amount of armor.  Your opponents are going to have to chew through 215 points of armor to down this monster.  Until that happens the Active Probe will be doing it’s own damage by cutting through ECM fields left and right.

Vandal (Prime)

This light Clan Omni-Fighter will need some protecting to get it into the knife fight required to bring the Active Probe into play.  It has a pitiful armament for a Clan unit (only 3 tons of pod space total).  Decent armor for a light fighter is the only saving grace.

DEFENSIVE

Sabutai (B)

The Sabutai is an all around Fighter with good weapons, good armor, and impressive speed for a Heavy.  The addition of a Guardian ECM adds this Omni to the list.  Watch your heat though, and use your alpha strikes wisely.

Jengiz (Prime)

Along the same lines as the Sabutai, the only thing to gripe about with this Fighter is the heat sink capacity.  But then, with the monstrous amount of weapons on the thing, it is a wonder anything but another Heavy fighter will be left alive after an Alpha Strike.  As you would expect from Clan Technology, this thing is a beast.

S-HA-0 Shade (Invictus)

This 35 ton Word of Blake Omni-Fighter packs quite a punch with a nose mounted Heavy PPC complemented by a pair of pulse lasers.  Honestly this thing is scary for an Inner Sphere Fighter.  Plenty of speed and armor make it a clear threat. Damn Word of Blake is always up to no good.

Don’t See What You’d Like?

While I didn’t see anything to confirm my prediction of bomb rack mountable EW equipment, we still have plenty of Omni-Fighters out there.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few home-brew variants pop up that remove a few unused lasers to fit an EW pod.  Don’t like what you see?  Make your own up on the spot with only minor modifications.

Watch out because you can easily go overboard.  Every fighter in the game had better not mount both Probes and ECM.  That would make for an overly complex and ultimately boring game.  Once every fighter in the game is special, no one is.  Agree with your opponent on a set number of EW pods (players choice of either ECM or Probes) available for each force.  Now you have some options to make things interesting and strategic.

Do you run majority ECM in hopes of taking a defensive advantage?  Or do you tack on all the Probes you can muster in hopes of doing enough damage quickly to counteract the lack of ECM.  Better yet, do you spread those pods around or stack your ECM and Probes into single squadrons?  Is putting all your eggs in one basket a game winner in Deep Space?

See the evolving strategies?  You’ve got a lot of things to think about if you chose to build your own forces this way.

The Bottom Line

So what is the net effect?  I would expect that all EW fighter squadrons will attract a significant amount of attention from your opponent.  This makes sense to a point but you have to think about the big picture.  Every shot fired at a fighter squadron is one less shot directed at your opponent’s Warships.  Don’t win the battle so you can lose the war.