Big Badass Battleships

[alex_brunius (OP)]

So I wanted to build some really badass Battleships inspired by WW2 designs (Yamato, Iowa, Bismarck exc).   

The first big design problem I encountered was that all these classical Battleships used an "all or nothing" approach to armor allocation.       

What this means is that critical components such as the Main Weapons, Magazines, Command(combat bridge) and Engines get a very thick armor layer, while all other non-critical components get none at all.       

In Aurora however it's only possible (as far as I found) to give extra armor to magazines and laser turrets.   Since I wanted to build a bad-ass classical style Battleship I was obviously using railguns to throw big chunks of metal at far ranges.       

So what I suggest is two things:

1.   ) The ability to give individual armor to any internal component working like a second layer.   Or the ability to group them into a armor box, with a set secondary armor layer.       
2.   ) The ability to mount railguns into turrets for armor protection.   I don't care for their tracking bonus, if tracking would make them overpowered remove the tracking and let us just be put into turrets for cool and armor.   

Since these could historically be placed in a smaller box the armor could be around 2-4 times as thick as if it had been spread out evenly over the ship.   

Also I don't really agree with the design logic that weapons have the same tracking speed as the ship speed.     A big ship can turn be a bitch to turn around even if it goes fast (inertia).       


And finally a question since I'm a newb that only played 6.  0 for a week so far.   Is it really intended that Annual Fail-rate % grows so crazy out of control as ships start to grow big?
The same ratio of Engineering spaces will have 800% AFR on a 10k ton vessle, 1600% on a 20k ton, 2400% on a 30k ton and so on.  .  .       
When you get to 100'000 ton it gets so bad that you need to dedicate 40% of the entire tonnage towards engineering spaces to get it down to 100% AFR.       
For a 5000 ton design 2% engineering spaces is enough!

Why would anyone ever want to build these big battleships ??


Edit: Removed some pictures and links since first time posters apparently are not trusted with links and pictures

[metalax]

As regards to the annual faliure rate, that isn't really the value you want to be looking at. The important one to look at is Maint Life, as while your AFR goes up as ship size increases, so too does the amount of MSP carried. Having a high AFR simply means that there will be multiple uses of maintainance supplies each year, but if each use only takes a small amount of the total carried it isn't really something to worry about.

[Nathan_]

Larger components have a larger HTK(which is mechanically what the armor on turrets/magazines is anyway), so build a bunch of size 1 reactors if you want no armor on them, and so on.

[alex_brunius (OP)]

As regards to the annual faliure rate, that isn't really the value you want to be looking at.  The important one to look at is Maint Life, as while your AFR goes up as ship size increases, so too does the amount of MSP carried.  Having a high AFR simply means that there will be multiple uses of maintainance supplies each year, but if each use only takes a small amount of the total carried it isn't really something to worry about.     

Ah thanks for clearing out that confusion.  Maint life does still seem to go down a bit with size and constant engineering space % but not nearly as drastically as AFR.  If you got 100 times more components just anyone of them failing will be more frequent, makes sense!

Larger components have a larger HTK(which is mechanically what the armor on turrets/magazines is anyway), so build a bunch of size 1 reactors if you want no armor on them, and so on.   

This I don't understand.  When I check the game one size 30 reactor has 15 HTK which is half of what 30 size 1 reactors will have combined. 

[metalax]

The difference there is that any damage will destroy the sie 1 reactors while if only a small amount of damage impacts the larger reactor it has a chance to not be destroyed.

Chance for a component to be destroyed = damage done / HTK of the component.

So if for example only 1 damage penetrated the armour the size 1 HTK 1 reactor would automatically be destroyed, while the size 30 HTK 15 reactor would only be destroyed 1/15th of the time.

[alex_brunius (OP)]

The difference there is that any damage will destroy the sie 1 reactors while if only a small amount of damage impacts the larger reactor it has a chance to not be destroyed. 

Chance for a component to be destroyed = damage done / HTK of the component.

So if for example only 1 damage penetrated the armour the size 1 HTK 1 reactor would automatically be destroyed, while the size 30 HTK 15 reactor would only be destroyed 1/15th of the time.

But you will still only lose one of the 29 reactors when hit right? So after 15 hits you should still have half your power left.

With everything in a big one you have a 6. 6% chance to lose it all every hit (even the first) and after 15 hits you only have 35. 5% chance that it's still alive ( (1 - 0. 06666)^15)

Sounds to me like smaller would actually be better in terms of survivability.

But all that is beside my point.  My point is that I want to build Battleships with armored internal components and with railguns in armored turrets

[ThatBlondeGuy]

Not entirely its one reactor which is 30x larger than a single reactor, rather than 30 small reactors in one location. HTK stands for Hits to kill and on average it means that 15 1 damage hits will kill the component or destroy it, and the Explo chance is the chance that the component will explode when destroyed or hit. - that is if i'm right -

[Erik L]

Don't forget explosions tend to cascade.

[Nathan_]

Likewise < 1.0HS components have no HTK, so 60 0.5 reactors will all die at the same time if you do that. But that giant 50cm railgun? its going to survive a few hits.

[alex_brunius (OP)]

But that giant 50cm railgun? its going to survive a few hits.   

Will it really survive more hits then another weapon of similar size that's in a turret with armor?

Or will it survive more hits then any other component of similar size without armor?


What I want to do is move armor protecting insignificant things like fueltanks and crew spaces, onto protecting things that are critical in battle like the rail gun and the engines.

[Nathan_]

Will it really survive more hits then another weapon of similar size that's in a turret with armor?

Or will it survive more hits then any other component of similar size without armor?


What I want to do is move armor protecting insignificant things like fueltanks and crew spaces, onto protecting things that are critical in battle like the rail gun and the engines.

Those things are already basically HTK=1, which means unarmored, one hit and they are done. Only militarily valuable stuff can be built that big in any event.

[alex_brunius (OP)]

Those things are already basically HTK=1, which means unarmored, one hit and they are done.  Only militarily valuable stuff can be built that big in any event.   

Did you even read my post? If you put 10 levels of armor ALL OVER YOUR SHIP then they are NOT unarmored!!! That armor will protect everything equally much.   

When I look at the damage allocation chart my ships fuel storage, crew quarters, engineering spaces, hangars and other not combat vital systems tend to typically make up around half of it.  That means if they didn't have any armor I could have had twice as much protecting the stuff I really need to work in combat. 

What those things lack in HTK they make up for in numbers.  It's not uncommon for bigger battleships to have over 100 crew quarters. 

If I wanted to put most of my armor on the main-guns I could make it even thicker.  If you look at for example the Iowa she had 19,7" armor protecting the main guns, and 6" general armor protecting the deck.   That's over 3 times as thick. 

[Panopticon]

Build em and see what happens, I think though that you will find the armored internal components not helping a ton, either the enemies never get through your ten or so layers of armor, or if they do they will be doing enough internal damage that they won't care about your armored components.

Might make for an interesting AAR though, and I would be more than happy to be wrong.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

if you want to beef up your internal HTK use magazines.  They're pretty imba in terms of HTK

Even non-abusive uses of magazines result in magazine ships having like twice the HTK of box launcher ships.

[ThatBlondeGuy]

Did you even read my post? If you put 10 levels of armor ALL OVER YOUR SHIP then they are NOT unarmored!!! That armor will protect everything equally much.   

When I look at the damage allocation chart my ships fuel storage, crew quarters, engineering spaces, hangars and other not combat vital systems tend to typically make up around half of it.  That means if they didn't have any armor I could have had twice as much protecting the stuff I really need to work in combat. 

What those things lack in HTK they make up for in numbers.  It's not uncommon for bigger battleships to have over 100 crew quarters. 

If I wanted to put most of my armor on the main-guns I could make it even thicker.  If you look at for example the Iowa she had 19,7" armor protecting the main guns, and 6" general armor protecting the deck.   That's over 3 times as thick. 

Which is why you add additional armour to the turrets, and the base armour is effectively deck/belt armour, so have that at 1-2 then use mostly turrets with thicker armour... much thicker armour. Also the main reason it's difficult to simulate is that in space, your entire ship is armoured/protected and there isn't really a surface deck, and there isn't a need to designate which areas of the ship require more/less armour because you can't target subsystems only individual ships, if you could say target the weapons, or the dorsal turret of the ship then armouring weapons would be beneficial as you can keep your guns firing for longer if the enemy can't neutralize them ASAP.

So to cut a long convoluted paragraph short, due to limitations of the combat system there isn't any need to integrate a complex armour system; despite this there are ways to simulate it.