Asylum is live on Amazon Kindle! http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TVF0S8E
Whoo hoo! (Time to do the happy dance!) And because we are doing the Happy Dance, both Alecto and The Morning which Breaks are on sale for a week! Get Alecto for only $0.99 and The Morning which Breaks for $1.99!
Okay, now we’ll get back to work…
Look for news of the print edition in a few days.
Update: If anyone out there uses a Kindle Voyage, could you please leave a comment to that effect here? Thanks!
Just finished the book and liked it quite well overall qnd am already looking forward to the next one.
Though I have to ask. What exactly is the use of fighters? They seem to only engage with other fighters, never with larger classes of ships. So why would you push the resources and hundreds of hours of work in training pilots and building the fighters instead of just building more of the larger ships. (after all Kris’ fighter was vaporized even before she could launch her second wave of missiles on a stationary target…)
Funny you should ask! 😉 (No one has yet.) We have some brief notes on this sort of thing, which we’ve debated adding the the Extra’s page. (So far, we’ve elected to concentrate on the books, since we’re behind where we’d like to be there.)
Basically, the short answer is this. Fighters come in 3 flavors: recon, strike, intercept. Recon fighters are very fast, more lightly armed, long-range assets. Although called “recon”, they are also used to escort strike fighters and LMACs (Light Missile/Multipurpose Attack Craft), which are heavy, long-range craft armed with torps and anti-ship missiles. Recon fighters can also act as EW suppression assets to support strikes (analogous to Wild Weasels squadrons). Strike fighters are used for anti-ship operations and come in long-range and short-range variants. (I’ll defer the trade-offs between strike fighters and LMACs for now. There’s a bit more in the glossary). Interceptors are short-range fighters for area (fleet) defense, and can also play an EW role.
The idea of fighters is to launch “softening-up” strikes, especially against screening ships (DDs and FFs) to degrade the enemy’s area-defense capability, and create opportunities for capitol ships to close, break up the formation and isolate enemy ships. So it is unusual that fighters would attack anything bigger than an light cruiser, unless the ship was isolated and susceptible to a mass attack. (I don’t want to give too many details here, but there is such an example at the end of WR.) Fighters can also be used to screen attacks, and open holes for massed torpedo attacks, follow-on attacks, and that sort of thing. Of course, they also provide an extended outer defense layer against all these.
So basically, fighters are just one arm that provides a complementary, flexible, layered attack and/or defense scheme, along with light capitol ships, and major capitol ships, etc. That hasn’t been shown in the books because Kris is a recon pilot, and we decided in WR that we wanted to split those functions, to give our characters more chance to be on their own (as it were), as opposed to describing what (in our universe) might be called a “classic” fleet action.
I hope that helps a bit.
Uhh, yea. Thanks for the long answer, that clears it up. I guess some kind of low range fighter could be very effective in dispatching wounded ships if it is piloted by a decent pilot, who uses every dead-zone caused by hull damage on the target ship.
Just finished, WoooW. Liked Asylium part. Loralynn…. was how to tell it… Unleashed I gues?
Thanks Kira! So happy you enjoyed!
just finished reading it. awesome thank you!
Thank you! 🙂