What I really want to know... what I really really want to know...
Is... to what degree is one battle rider better than another battle rider? What's the measurement? What are the parameters? How granular are those parameters really?
BRs going toe-to-toe with BRs:
You might chant "TL TL TL", and you'd be right. But I think the design choices you make are constrained by TL, and therefore the actual playing of the game need not use TL directly.
You might say "Size", but I think that's not truly a parameter: rather, it is a conclusion based on your payload.
* Defensive Tradeoffs matter. What's your defense against mesons, beams, nuclear explosions, and kinetics? Are they balanced, or do you put more into meson defense? (And do you have a globe?)
* Offense matters. The bigger the spine, the badder-ass your Rider. But really the point is that a BR's offensive mix is skewed in one particular direction (the meson attack) -- and it appears to always be maximally skewed. And let's not forget skill. What's your crew like? Is the computer capable enough to boost offensive capability?
* Engines matter. Can you overtake/outrun your enemy?
There are other things that help, but is there anything else that matters as much as these Big Three?
I think straight hg2 has been beat to death, several times over. I was under the impression they wanted something a little more advanced.
You can not answer Robjects without a combat and design system. Combat to demonstrate effectiveness of systems, design to demonstrate costs and other physical limitations.
And I appreciate this is a T5 thread, but the only other system "universally" recognized on this board is HG2, frankly. Plus, most of the original canon, fleets and portrayed doctrine were done when HG2 was active.
The problem is that people posit these ideas and "what should work" etc., but nobody, and I mean nobody, plays them out. And it's understandable. Any realistic test is going to be very involved.
If someone wants to know the BR to BB ratio, you have to come up with ships and game it out. If you want to know the BR to BB ratio broken down by TL, you have to game it out. If you want to know how many TL 13 BBs it takes to match TL 15 BBs, you HAVE TO GAME IT OUT.
And to do that, you need a system.
HG2 happens to actually suit this problem quite well, since maneuver is abstracted out. Line 'em up, shoot it out. But no one wants to take a Tigress and fire 500 missile batteries.
If you start with no combat system, then you can't answer "are BR or BB better" because you can design the system to "do what you want".
If you don't want to use HG2, then the answers to Robjects questions are "whatever you want", because there's no ACCEPTED combat system in place to answer it. So, make one that plays the flavor you like.
If you do want to use HG2, then software like mine will happily salvo 500 missile batteries against your Gazelle and tally up the carnage. And it'll do that in less than a second.
As for HG2 being beat to death, I think there's a lot of folklore surrounding it -- because I see some surprising results that don't match the paradigms presented in canon.