Bay 12 Games Forum

You misunderstand. Taking the possibility Radio expressed as example, remember that the owners of the FTL drives are perfectly aware of their value. They can and will use the FTL drive as a "hostage" to ensure that their ship is spared from destruction. Not anything as silly as "we'll blow ourselves up if you shoot us" or "we'll blow up our FTL drive if you shoot us", which doesn't work as a deterrent - instead the FTL drive would be literally the first (or second/third after armor and weapons) thing standing between the crew and annihilation. Shoot to destroy the ship, and unless you have a flanking position to shoot from the side or the back, you are guaranteed to take the FTL drive out with the first shot. It only really works if the FTL system is sufficiently valuable, but it's one of the ways for it to work.

A tank on magnetic treads can't maneuver quickly enough to compete with a maneuvering fighter for being a "hard target". A turret fighter on fusion engine(s) can change its velocity and movement vector with downright frightening speed - several dozen meters per second per second. Any tank that propels itself normally can never match that if it uses friction against the armor surface for propulsion. It can weigh literally a ton, as much as a good-sized car, and it must change direction quickly and suddenly to avoid being shot to bits. About the only variant of a tank I see working at all is a tank on metallic ball rollers, propelled along the metallic surface via electromagnetic torque. If it draws power from the ship to function, it will be able to put out enough power to match the newtonian engines of a turret fighter, but then you have the heating problems. And you're probably drawing more power to move the magnetic tankette than you do to fire its weapon.

It's probably apparent that I am just as fond of overthinking things. Except my direction is technical.

I was half-hoping you would say that I couldn't possibly be stupid enough to think that. Because then I could say "Ken if I vants to be!"

But seriously, no. Fighters are not the perfect weapon. They are highly situational and it takes a fairly specific set of circumstances to allow their appearance. You might notice that in my descriptions, actually. I am describing how weapons progress towards those turret-fighters, explaining how the changes in the weapons affect the environment (the tactics used), and how the weapons start changing again to be better. The turret-fighters I describe have a lot of trade-offs, and as soon as tactics change enough or new weapons appear, they will probably be gone entirely.
They are, however, for reasons I described, better than little scooting tanks, and, in the circumstances of their appearance, are better than rail-turrets because the existing tactics for fighting the rail-turrets do nothing against similarly mobile yet less restricted turret fighters.

"Please don't tell me you are a hooker now..."