OK I'll restate teh obvious, the Light fighters are virtually useless in space combat. the 10T fighter from book 2 the 6 ton fighter in Adventure 7 the 8 ton fighter in Adventure 4 and 7 the Rampart are all virtually useless in space combat. Any fighter that has a real shot at anything more space combat worthy than a Patrol Cruiser costs about half of what a Patrol Cruiser does. Unless you are putting armor on your fighter and a fairly large computer on it, ie the 50T Heavy Fighter from Suplement 9 at MCr105, they get ripped up. Primarily because of the auto crits you get when you hit them. Light fighters are obviously cannon they have so many examples of them. Even though they are all virtually useless in space combat. Forget about real Naval engagements.
Agility not speed is what I was talking about. An M1 Tank is fast, unlike fighters though with tanks Speed isn't necessarily life. How quick you can stop and start, change direction is important, perhaps even more important than actual speed. Starship agility in Traveller is a very important factor it translates directly into difficulty to hit the target. Which says to me that the things can turn, virtually on a dime. We aren't talking about F22s here, more like Harriers with the armor and sustained firepower of a tank. And the combat endurance that runs out when the crew needs a break. A combination of an M1, an SR71, an Appache and a virtually unlimited endurance and ammo supply. A Ground pounders nightmare.
An airplane has to fly faster than a helicopter because it relies on aerodynamics to stay in the air. Obviously Starships and Grav vehicles don't rely on aerodynamics to stay up. Comparing Thruster plates to grav power the difference appears to be that truster plates don't require a large mass in proximity to function. Maneuver drives are not rocket engines. (Or they would obviously require fuel instead of power.) They appear to be an advance on the same technology.
Quite frankly until recently I haven't been able to get my hands on Striker, though I am considering getting it with the reprints now available. I don'tknow what the Trepida's stats are in Striker, never used them, in MT they weren't all that impressive and they were expensive for what you were getting. The 10T fighter seemed to fill the role better, especially a modified 10T fighter. In T20 the same situation applies. The light fighter still has no real space combat role (though it is better than what it was)they have to be there to support the Ground Pounder. In MT the performance of most, less than starship weapons, didn't do much to starships, on the other hand a starship pulse laser ripped through an armored column like it was tissue paper. (Makes sense considering the power requirements and scale of the weapon systems.) T20 is similar with the damage scaling.
Am I to understand that Striker wasn't set up like that? If so then Striker didn't integrate combined arms well. (And I don't just mean tanks, infantry and airplanes.) MT Tried to integrate it fully with the single vehicle design rules that required a modern computer to run, and since it was off the shelves before the home computer was anywhere near powerful enough...
I am now going to buy Striker so I can read through it and see where the design flaws in my ground support are.
Oh and Soviet Doctrine does call for Hinds to be used exactly in the same role and the same manner as Tanks. They are just faster and less well armored. A Trade off that the Soviets were more than willing to accept. That was the design philosophy. The practical problem they had when using them in this manner was they weren't as sustainable on the battlefield as a tank.
