Author Topic: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions  (Read 345088 times)

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Offline Father Tim

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1530 on: November 18, 2019, 03:11:27 AM »
There is approximately 25 (short) tons of gold in one cubic mile of seawater -- or 22 tonnes in 4 cubic kilometers.  I assume TNE are likewise diffuse.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1531 on: November 18, 2019, 04:41:40 AM »
Available workers has been a consistent problem in my current campaign. That solution to that is creating new colonies, as smaller colonies have faster growth and a larger manufacturing sector.

In fact, I am already spreading mines, construction factories and even shipyards to those colonies within 15 years of campaign start. Also, with the maintenance changes, it is a LOT easier to setup naval bases at new colonies
 

Offline vorpal+5

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1532 on: November 18, 2019, 05:15:11 AM »
Is that not 'artificial'? Do we really think that workers, as 'biological beings' will be the main limiting constraints in the future?

I can understand you have this limitation primarily as a gameplay feature perhaps? But if not, how about being able to produce robotics workers, as it will happen soon enough in our world? Alternatively or in addition, some techs reducing the manpower need of various industries would be simple to do and realistic?

In the grand scheme of things, being productive is a matter of logistic and industrial muscles, but the bottleneck is probably not on meatbags amounts.
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1533 on: November 18, 2019, 05:31:45 AM »
It's entirely possible that the reason it takes 50 000 people to run a mine is because you aren't dealing with just a bunch of digging machines and the logistics of moving vast amounts of materials around. Rather, due to TN shenanigans, the facilities that are needed to reach into the aether and draw in and refine even minute quantities of TN materials are huge and require a lot of upkeep, and the industry necessary for that upkeep is included in the 50 000 population support figure.

I mean, at the early game 10 tons per year production that's less than 30 kilograms per day per mine. It's a tiny supply by any measure.
 
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Offline Jorgen_CAB

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1534 on: November 18, 2019, 06:48:25 AM »
The game already have allot of automation such as auto mines, maintenance facilities etc.. so many of these things can be run without any population what so ever.

There could be some technology though that reduce the reliance of population on facilities over time down to relatively low levels at increased production costs though.

I'm pretty sure that most people in a mine are maintenance and office workers. I presume most actual labour is made by robotic machines anyway in this era. So the people are just about anyone from a clerk, engineer to a cook.

In very modern production industries most people already work with servicing the factories functions rather than working with the actual production line. Administration jobs are one of the biggest employers today in what used to be hard labour places. The actual "hard working" people tend to be highly educated engineers who oversee the machinery.

On the other hand you want to use the population for something in the game, even if realistically you don't need that man actual people to produce stuff in the future. It is more fun if the world are a bit more dystopian.  ;)
« Last Edit: November 18, 2019, 06:57:49 AM by Jorgen_CAB »
 

Offline Jorgen_CAB

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1535 on: November 18, 2019, 06:54:22 AM »
I still think that having a diminishing return of mining efforts make sense from a realistic perspective. You can only have that many mines on a surface in order to access the easy deposits, adding more should not be that effective.

Okay, but now we're arguing 'how many' is "that many".

Given that Aurora mines are fixed in size, "ten Aurora mine installations" can be defined as "one mine that is ten times bigger than that one over there."  If we define one Aurora automine as one hydraulic excavator plus two trucks plus one ore processor, it suddenly seems perfectly reasonable to have tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of them on Earth.  Given that a basic Aurora mine produces only ten tons of refined TNE per year (per mineral, yes, but I'm going to ignore that for now) it can't be that big.

- - -

Okay, sure, this implies that manned Aurora mines are insanely inefficient, but we already had that problem.  Fifty thousand people is larger than the population of Fort MacMurray, the city at the heart of Canada's oilsands mining region, and the source of over one-third of all of Canada's oil production.

I always thought of it that a "mine" is not just the bits that dig into the ground, but includes a significant chunk of supporting facilities like farms to feed the miners, schools, truck factories, workshops, entertainment and whatever else you need to have a minimally self-sufficient mining town. Low production can simply be explained by TN minerals being an absolute bugger to extract, perhaps only occurring in relatively trace amounts or whatever.

Yes... I think that ground facilities in Aurora are abstracts "units" rather than fixed buildings and trucks. A mine is simply the infrastructure, machinery and administration needed to produce a certain amount of goods and services. Not even necessarily all located in the same physical location either.

It would not be hard to come up with some rough estimation of proper number of mines, factories etc... that are suitable for each world as the optimal number and after this there is a diminishing return on their effectiveness.

You probably could use more mines on an asteroid for example in proportion to size than on say the moon or earth. So it would be way more easy to strip mine an asteroid than the moon and way more easy to strip mine the moon than earth for example.
« Last Edit: November 18, 2019, 08:12:26 AM by Jorgen_CAB »
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1536 on: November 18, 2019, 08:53:11 AM »
On the other hand, part of the lore of Aurora is that TN materials gather in gravity wells and that deeper gravity wells both draw in more TN materials and are harder to get to, so you might well need and have the room to place more mines on larger bodies than you do on smaller ones in a manner that's greater than linear.
 

Offline Jorgen_CAB

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1537 on: November 18, 2019, 04:16:27 PM »
On the other hand, part of the lore of Aurora is that TN materials gather in gravity wells and that deeper gravity wells both draw in more TN materials and are harder to get to, so you might well need and have the room to place more mines on larger bodies than you do on smaller ones in a manner that's greater than linear.

Make sense too I suppose...
 

Offline Coleslaw

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1538 on: November 19, 2019, 12:22:11 AM »
So for the navy, we have the ability to assign staff officers to give bonuses to fleet operations (for fleets located in the same system as the location of the staff offices, I believe), but would something similar be reasonable to implement for Ground Forces? Sort of as a general staff that functions similarly?
 

Offline Father Tim

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1539 on: November 19, 2019, 01:20:18 AM »
So for the navy, we have the ability to assign staff officers to give bonuses to fleet operations (for fleets located in the same system as the location of the staff offices, I believe), but would something similar be reasonable to implement for Ground Forces? Sort of as a general staff that functions similarly?

We will -- to some extent -- have that, as HQ units can stack up to several million tons of control.  With a sixteen-million-ton GF HQ, you should have plenty of room for multiple GF officers and their bonuses.
 

Offline Garfunkel

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1540 on: November 19, 2019, 01:30:50 PM »
Yes, now that rank structure for ground officers is basically unlimited (only limit is the total number of officers available) and that HQs are both customised to fit what is needed AND can be stacked on top of each other (meaning that a higher level HQ does not need to be big enough to handle everything under it, just its own level of the order-of-battle structure, it's possible to create as elaborate and complicated chains of command as you could want.

I am tempted to make a chain like this:

Platoon -> Company -> Battalion -> Regiment -> Brigade -> Division -> Corps -> Army -> Group -> Theatre -> Force

Which would require 11 ranks of GF officers but I'm not sure if I want to have a HQ vehicle in an otherwise infantry formation (rifle platoon) so I might have Company as the lowest level with an HQ for a total of 10.
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1541 on: November 19, 2019, 02:50:01 PM »
HQ units can be infantry platformed as easily as they can be vehicle platformed. And the highest level of command should probably be static platforms, for realism, or super heavy units for the 'massive crawler command base' factor you so often see in science fiction.
 

Offline King-Salomon

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1542 on: November 19, 2019, 03:05:12 PM »
I am tempted to make a chain like this:

Platoon -> Company -> Battalion -> Regiment -> Brigade -> Division -> Corps -> Army -> Group -> Theatre -> Force

Which would require 11 ranks of GF officers but I'm not sure if I want to have a HQ vehicle in an otherwise infantry formation (rifle platoon) so I might have Company as the lowest level with an HQ for a total of 10.
^

I was thinking about the same but without the platoon-level .. but after reading the AA-Reports from Steve I am not so sure anymore.. it would be a micro nightmare to fill up the looses/spent-supplytrucks "per hand" with hundreds of tiny units...
if there will be an order to bring "all units" back up to strength from a destinated replacement-unit I will try to go with a 10 level-OOB ... if you have to do it by hand I will stick to a 2-level-OOB I guess..

will find out when C# is out I guess  ;D
 

Offline Jorgen_CAB

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1543 on: November 19, 2019, 07:38:02 PM »
I am tempted to make a chain like this:

Platoon -> Company -> Battalion -> Regiment -> Brigade -> Division -> Corps -> Army -> Group -> Theatre -> Force

Which would require 11 ranks of GF officers but I'm not sure if I want to have a HQ vehicle in an otherwise infantry formation (rifle platoon) so I might have Company as the lowest level with an HQ for a total of 10.
^

I was thinking about the same but without the platoon-level .. but after reading the AA-Reports from Steve I am not so sure anymore.. it would be a micro nightmare to fill up the looses/spent-supplytrucks "per hand" with hundreds of tiny units...
if there will be an order to bring "all units" back up to strength from a destinated replacement-unit I will try to go with a 10 level-OOB ... if you have to do it by hand I will stick to a 2-level-OOB I guess..

will find out when C# is out I guess  ;D

It should actually not be terribly difficult. A unit will only draw supply from within its own unit if there are no supplies available in a higher chain of command. So unless you start to run out of supplies you can imagine the supply running down the hierarchy to each unit. You will not draw supplies from the platoons or companies unless there is a need to. You can just restock the divisional supply from time to time by dropping them down from orbit on the planet or from the factory floor if on a planet.

Its probably not going to be useful to go down below company level, that smallest HQ are 1250 ton so that would probably be a rather typical company sized formation or a really large platoon for some reason.

A platoon of heavy tanks that comprise 5 tanks might be around 500t in size, roughly.

A typical modern Company is about three Platoons and a command and or weapons section. If mechanized that would be roughly 12-15 light/medium vehicles and 100-150 men or so, that would roughly be 1000-1250 in Aurora size.
« Last Edit: November 19, 2019, 07:41:28 PM by Jorgen_CAB »
 

Offline Garfunkel

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Re: C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions
« Reply #1544 on: November 20, 2019, 11:48:06 AM »
HQ units can be infantry platformed as easily as they can be vehicle platformed. And the highest level of command should probably be static platforms, for realism, or super heavy units for the 'massive crawler command base' factor you so often see in science fiction.
Ah thanks for reminding me! I completely forgot that HQ's do not need to be vehicles.

Its probably not going to be useful to go down below company level, that smallest HQ are 1250 ton so that would probably be a rather typical company sized formation or a really large platoon for some reason.
Steve changed that. HQs are now much more modular:
Quote
You select the HQ component and then type in the required capacity. The component cost is Capacity / 2500 and the component size is Capacity / 50 with a max of 500 tons. There is no limit on cost.
So if your platoon - without the HQ - is only 50 tons, then your platoon HQ will just add 1 ton on top and cost only 0.02.

For example, a rifle platoon of 3 rifle squads each with 5 riflemen (personal weapon), 1 grenadier (light anti vehicle), 1 machinegunner (crew served anti-personnel) would be:

3x5x5 = 75 tons
3x1x16 = 48 tons
3x1x12 = 36 tons

totalling 159 tons which requires an infantry HQ of 3.18 tons. Here is a design example Steve gave us back in 2018:
Quote
Pathfinder class Transport Shuttle      451 tons       10 Crew       53.1 BP       TCS 9    TH 64    EM 0
7099 km/s      Armour 1-5       Shields 0-0       HTK 1      Sensors 1/1/0/0      DCR 0      PPV 0
Maint Life 3.55 Years     MSP 0    AFR 90%    IFR 1.3%    1YR 8    5YR 115    Max Repair 40.5 MSP
Troop Capacity 300 tons     
Lieutenant Commander    Control Rating 1   
Intended Deployment Time: 0.5 months    Morale Check Required   

Large Fighter Engine (1)    Power 64    Fuel Use 758.95%    Signature 64    Explosion 20%
Fuel Capacity 20,000 Litres    Range 1.1 billion km   (41 hours at full power)
It has capacity for 300 tons, meaning that it could actually be smaller and still transport our platoon at fighter-size.

I like it. I'm seeing the dropships from Starship Troopers or Aliens, swooping down on planet surface in their dozens to drop off the first wave of ground pounders.