BlackLegion wrote:Disallow PD in atmosphere and you have Corvettes as AA.
An interesting idea, but beyond the fact that PD is available in atmosphere fluffwise (New Orlean's use their PD lasers to provide ground support in the form of Kodiak attacks), mechanically it does very little.
As an example, the probability of a squadron of three Santiagos, including crippling damage, fully destroying a New Orleans, Gargoyle, or Medea are as follows:
New Orleans: 57.87%
Gargoyle: 60.55
Medea: 25.68
Without PD in atmosphere, the probabilities become the following:
New Orleans: 68.81%
Gargoyle: 77.57
Medea: 34.16
Better, certainly, but still a bit of a tossup. For instance, even the best case scenario (against Gargoyles), more than 1 in 5 attacks will result in an undestroyed Gargoyle. For nearly three times the point investment in ships that are specifically designed to destroy strike carriers, that's a still fairly low rate of success. It'd certainly make corvettes more effective, but it's not really the best way to go in my opinion. Optimally, 3 corvettes would have an 85-90% success rate of destroying a New Orleans or Gargoyle as a baseline.
This is mostly due to the fact that PD has less and less of an impact the more CAW is consolidated into a single attack; 3 PD is an effective defense against a single corvette, but becomes proportionally less effective against 3 or more corvettes. It still helps some, but losing that PD wouldn't hurt as much as it would against smaller, individual attacks.