[Tnarg]

Ships that control other ships! Borrowing from ID4 and the Star Fire novels(?) ideas of propulsion and data links.

1. A series of ships linked to one that is the sole power source. So you have one large (preferably well defended) ship that houses an imense power source that is beamed to other smaller ships which are all in turn linked and dependant on the larger ship. So you eliminate space required for propulsion and power on the smaller ships and if captured the enemy can't use them unless it has the power source ship.

2. Data links that enable all ships in a fleet to concentrate their fire into a single target at once or provide adequete screening against fighters or missiles. One ship is designated as a "smart" ship that coordinates all other ships in the fleet with the adequete link package installed. I know that the AI in SEIV kind of does this when ships are placed in fleets and a strategy is determined already, but if it could be implemented furhter and ships with out it would have very little coehesion and fire randomly at targets of opertunity. In a sense it could automatically set formations to deal with appropriate threats especially in real time. Once the AI determines that a large force of fighters are closing in on the fleet, networked ships would automatically create a formation that sends all ships with PD to the front. For instances of attack say long range attack is set, all ships with long range weapons would get into appropriate firing formations and fire at once so that all fire is concentrated on a single target or mutliple targets designated.

Sorry for the wordy post!