Aurora 4x
VB6 Aurora => Aurora Suggestions => Topic started by: linkxsc on January 01, 2016, 09:58:27 PM
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After 7.2 we will be able to have civilian ships equipped with proper MSP storage arrays, for fleet support, and stockpiling MSP at forward bases. Which is nice.
Thus after the change we'll have civilian fuel transport, mineral and installation transport, troop transport, and personnel transport, and MSP transport. This leaves 2 gaps in civilian transport capability.
The ability to move missiles, and the ability to move ships.
Ofcourse we can't have warships loading fighters and missiles out of civilian transports directly in combat and such, so there must be some limiting system to this.
So I've come up with my own view on a set of "rules" for how this could be done, which I will post here. I'll also post the views of another player from the thread the topic originated from and hope perhaps some good discussion can happen.
Idea
Introduce 2 new modules.
Civilian Magazine Standard storage unit for transport of missiles by civilians. Size 10 module (500t) able to store 100MSP (assorted missile size). Research-able after completing the first level of each magazine related tech. Single un-upgradable module. No ejection tech, may detonate when hit.
Civilian Hangar Module Standard storage for transport of warships by civilians. Size 20 module (1000t) able to store 500t of ship (as hangar space already stacks). Research-able after completing the Hangar Deck tech. Un-upgradable. Follows same rules when hit as existing hangars.
Rules governing loading and unloading.
Rule 1. Civilian magazines and hangars can only be loaded and unloaded at a planet with at least 1 active maintenance facility, or maintenance module.
Rule 2. They are loaded/unloaded at a rate of 250tons per maintenance facility, per 5 day increment. OR 100MSP per maintenance facility, per 5 day increment.
These rules operate on a couple of principles.
1. Maintenance facilities make it so that you can't just dump stuff on random planets. Though there is nothing preventing the player from having a maintenance module installed in the transport ship. And if one wishes to dump stuff on random planets quickly, military ammo transports can still drop off on planets at current speeds.
2. 100MSP per 5day is roughly equal to the maintenance facility reload time of a size 100 box launcher. (125hour actual reload time vs 120 hour 5 day increment). This is also equal to a rate of roughly 250t per 5 day increment as 100MSP=5HS=250t. This as the loading and unloading speed is to act as the missiles or ships are being broken down by maintenance crews, made "safe" for transport, and then have to be reassembled at the destination.
Few side thoughts on my own idea is that perhaps some size scaling of the modules would be fine (larger "more efficient" storage versions) however, due ot the cheap civilian nature, shouldn't require extensive research to enable.
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In the changelog 7.2 thread another user had his own thoughts on this.
"alex_brunis"
That all sounds awfully complex with several new separated game mechanics?
Why not instead aim for the common denominator and try to keep the concept as simple as possible?
The common property of all this is that they are "disassembled" into neat packages for transportation, and then assembled on site.
But, Hey don't we already have something like that, but for PDCs only?
So, the conceptually best way to do this (IMO) would be to expand/improve the PDC option to also include fighters and stacks of missiles?!
Construction option "Prefab PDC" could be changed to a more general "Disassemble" command which allows you to take any number of PDCs, fighters or missiles, and "pack" it into one or more pre-set "crates" which is the same standard size as a PDC Component, but the game remembers the contents. The Industrial cost of this derived the same as the PDC assembly cost ( and no minerals here either ), but you now have to build the PDCs first.
This means you can take for example a completed PDC Hangar loaded with fighters which in turn are loaded with missiles, Select the PDC in a single click, add a few spare reloads worth of missiles and have it all neatly disassembled and packed down into a creates for shipping ( via the Industry->Stockpiles menu ). Once on site you give a single order to disassemble the crates and you have a operational PDC Hangar stocked with fighters and missiles!
This also could be an interesting way of doing it in my opinion. Then the missiles and ships could be transported by regular freighters.
However personally I find forward bases are more likely to have a maintenance module, than construction factories or brigades to do the reassembling.
Perhaps a construction module for a ship might help with this?
Another issue I can see is with fighters (or any ship) in particular, in that if it needs to get shipped a second time, "disassembling" them for shipping in this manner would essentially be "destroying" the ship, and "making a new" elsewhere, which might cause issue with the crew and commanders and such. my assumption on the maintenance packaged ones would be that the extra crew just becomes part of the freighter's crew when this happens. However with actually disassembling them, there is no "crew".
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Another post from original thread
"MarcAFK"
Why not just use the preexisting launcher reload system with some modifiers based on tech like reload level, feed system efficiency, and cargo handling multiplier.
Lets assume a missile load speed 10 times slower than launcher reload rate.
We'll look at a tier 2 destroyer from my last game.
Code: [Select]
Portland class Destroyer 9000 tons 256 Crew 1097.6 BP TCS 180 TH 500 EM 0
2777 km/s Armour 5-38 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control 2 PPV 42
Annual Failure Rate: 27% IFR: 0.4% Maintenance Capacity 191 MSP
Magazine 342 Spare Berths 7
10HS 100 EP Nuclear Pulse Engine (5) Power 100 Fuel Use 141.5% Armour 0 Exp 12%
Fuel Capacity 360,000 Litres Range 5.1 billion km (21 days at full power)
Size 6 Missile Launcher (R2) (7) Missile Size 6 Rate of Fire 90
Missile Fire Control 10/5 FC61-R120 (1) Range 61.6m km Resolution 120
Maverick Mk III (57) Speed: 13,800 km/s End: 84.2m Range: 69.7m km WH: 7 Size: 6 TH: 46 / 27 / 13
Active Search Sensor 10 /5 MR65-R120 (1) GPS 14400 Range 65.7m km Resolution 120
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This design is classed as a military vessel for maintenance purposes
Default reload rate is 90 for a size 6 missile, we'll assume it will take 900 seconds to load a single size 6 into the magazine, lets make this per cargo handling system on the ammunition ship, improved can load 2 in this time, advanced 4 in this time. Note that this is reload rate of 1, lets assume that increased launcher reload rate doesn't help magazine load speed, but magazine feed efficiency should however.
Magazine is about 1000 tons and holds 342 in total, that's 57 missiles at 900 seconds each so default reload time is 14.25 hours. Cargo handling systems weigh in at 100 tons a piece, it's not unreasonable to assume that an ammunition ship serving this 9000 ton ship will be of similar size, lets say we put 4 cargo handling system which is a mere 4% of the ship.
Load rate then is 3.56 hours. Which is significant, but compares to loading speed of other cargo, it will certainly prevent immediate reloads of a fleet during a battle, except in the case of box launchers which obviously can reload very fast by comparison. That time will be halved once improved handling is added, and of course if you have multiple ammo ships in the fleet you get improved transfer speed.
Next there magazine feed efficiency, what about each level reducing the speed penalty compared to normal launcher speed, research reducing load rate from 10 times down by 1 per level, the final feed efficiency tech drops it down to merely double.
So by top tech tier loading a size 6 missile would take only 180 seconds, you can load 4 per advanced cargo handling system, the hypothetical ammo tender we had above would reload the destroyer in only 10.6 minutes.
Without going to that extreme lets just assume we increase cargo handling systems to 6, and have researched improved cargo handling (10,000 points) and feed efficiency 80 and 85% (6000 points total).
Load time per size 6 missile becomes 720 seconds, thats 11 hours, divided by 12 for the 6 improved handling systems makes reloading the ship only take 57 minutes.
How does this sound?
Edit: I like the maintenance changes, my last game I placed a single maintenance colony in Barnards star which required either frequent mineral shipments, or mines on 5 movies in the system and even still needed shipping in uridium and neutronium.
Eeh. My intention was to stay away from that level of complexity, as this means that each generation of magazine tech, you'd actually have to update your civilian transports for this "faster" reload rate to remain competitive. Also there seems to be nothing in that idea that actually restricts the player from using your new civilian colliers from rearming ships in deep space. Albeit at a low rate. But it'd be nothing to rendezvous your described collier with a fleet enroute, and have it rearm them over the course of a couple days. Also this would kinda steer players to bring these ships in close to the fleet. And thats what a military ammunition transport should be for.
Also where you are saying 10x slower than normal reload, my suggestion is similar to standard box launcher reload rate.
Though if we go off of what you are working with, perhaps we could compromise.
Rule: Civilian ammo transports can only transplant ammo to and from planets, and to or from military magazines, at a rate set by the civilian magazine reload rate.
This way all ships will load out of a military transport properly, requiring no changes to that system. Or they could be told to load out of the civilians, which they would slowly feed ammo into the ship magazine, and then they themselves would have to use their own reload rate from there. Also prevents people from exploiting and quickly dumping missiles from civilians into military ammo transports.
The magazine is built with a "reload rate" (the extra space in the magazine can be assumed as the space where the missiles are prepped). And this reload rate is teched up at the same time as missile launcher reload tech. This reload rate is 1/10th what it would be for the equal size missile going into the launcher.
Now, your civilian transport, with say 100MSP of storage (in its 1 magazine), reload rate 1: Takes 300 seconds to load or unload 1 size 1 missile (150 seconds faster than hangar reload rate for a size 1 box), and assuming it only has 1 magazine, will take 300,000 seconds to unload into a military ammo ship. Which is 20 days.... which sounds rather abyssmal I know.
But scale it up to reload tech 6.
5 second load time for a size 1 launcher > 50 second load/unload time for a size 1 missile, the transport can dump its load in 5000seconds, which is 83 hours... 3 days to unload 250t worth of ammo... perhaps thats not so bad to do while out on operation. And its a bit faster than my initial suggestion, and certainly not doable during combat.
Also having 2 magazines, it wills till take that much time to unload them if they are full, but they'll move 2x the ammo rate.
And if the magazines are 500T like I suggested above. A 5kt ammo transport (civilian) with 5 of the things and a nice civilian engine could be a handy little thing.
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Dunno, just some thoughts and responses to points made by other players.
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I'm still unsure civilians should be handling munitions, it's dangerous and security is needed, but ill coco tribute to the discussion when I have ideas.
Regarding hangers why not just keep existing hangers and add a mechanic that prevents ships from quickly launching from commercial ships equipped with hangers.
While doing this we might finally see a timer that stops ships launching immediately on military hangers too. Landing should obviously be much faster.
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One thing that's would be nice to see from a realism perspective is launch capacity. Depending on the launch facilities, x parasites can launch per y seconds. As it is now, a carrier can crash launch 100+ fighters in 5 seconds, which makes sense for something like external docking for a Queen, but not so much for a carrier with internal bays.
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I like the principle of the civilian magazine idea. If we make it low capacity (in terms of efficiency of size vs. capacity) but relatively cheap and will explode if hit, that might be sufficient. No one would use that magazine on a warship and no one is going to take that ship into harm's way. It would be a behind-the-scenes auxiliary, which I think is what we need. We probably don't even need restrictions on unloading.
One option would be to allow only unloading to planets and not ships. However, if we do have deep space stations you would probably want this ship to be able to transfer ammunition into the magazines of that station
With regard to civilian hangars, perhaps a similar principle. Inefficient in terms of size and easily destroyed. Also, they can be used to repair ships but not to reload them. They would be useless on a normal carrier but it would allow the creation of 'auxiliary carriers' that could transport fighters for a single strike (or transfer them between factories and fleet carriers) but would extremely vulnerable to damage.
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I like the principle of the civilian magazine idea. If we make it low capacity (in terms of efficiency of size vs. capacity) but relatively cheap and will explode if hit, that might be sufficient. No one would use that magazine on a warship and no one is going to take that ship into harm's way. It would be a behind-the-scenes auxiliary, which I think is what we need. We probably don't even need restrictions on unloading.
One option would be to allow only unloading to planets and not ships. However, if we do have deep space stations you would probably want this ship to be able to transfer ammunition into the magazines of that station
With regard to civilian hangars, perhaps a similar principle. Inefficient in terms of size and easily destroyed. Also, they can be used to repair ships but not to reload them. They would be useless on a normal carrier but it would allow the creation of 'auxiliary carriers' that could transport fighters for a single strike (or transfer them between factories and fleet carriers) but would extremely vulnerable to damage.
I think all that sounds awesome, given one exception ( civilian hangars able to carry out a single strike or launch military fighters ).
Given how much people like the Massive Alfa Strike doctrine and the fact that Civilian stuff inherently is 10 times bigger we need to thread VERY carefully. Also remember that Carriers can launch fighters well out of range of the enemy and we have a recipe for abuse IMO since many Carriers are designed to operate outside of harms way anyways. People could even design either a small military support Carrier to reload the squads one at a time and cycle them, or just have a collier deposit the ammo at any nearby body and rearm from there.
To coordinate and carry out even a single strike you should IMO need military stuff.
I think the following restrictions are probably needed on Civilian hangars:
- Can only repair civilian ships
- Can only refuel civilian ships
- Can not carry ships loaded with missiles
Even if the above is implemented we also have the issue of beam fighters and beam FACs, These could abuse the generous capacity of cheaper civilian hangars and be launched en-masse since they never need to reload.
Maybe we need something like:
- Can not launch military ships unless at a friendly population, maintenance facility or next to a military hangar.
(but could probably still be abused).
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I kind of like the idea of civilian hangars and magazines requiring a maintenance facility/module myself. That makes forward military bases more valuable, which I think adds strategic depth.
It's not a big deal, though, so I wouldn't worry about it if it proves difficult to code.
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Civilians can carry maintenence now anyway so it's an idea.
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I'm all for whatever is easiest to code ofcourse. And if you are planning on making sustainable deep space bases a thing, well perhaps you could make another version of the maintenance module that doesn't require being at a planet to run. Too bad they're size 100 (5000t) but can only support 200t each, but a maint facility is 25000t so, least they're efficient.
Actually that is something I honestly don't know. If I had 5 ships with 1 maintenance module each at a planet (thus, 5 maint mods total, 1000t support) would that actually let me overhaul some FACs, or would it get mad and only work if I had 1 ship with all 5 modules? So far I've always done 40kt ships with 5 modules on them as FAC tenders. And thinking about what it would need for a single ship to be a destroyer tender (6000-8000t) makes me cringe, as that is a huge ship.
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I'm all for whatever is easiest to code ofcourse. And if you are planning on making sustainable deep space bases a thing, well perhaps you could make another version of the maintenance module that doesn't require being at a planet to run. Too bad they're size 100 (5000t) but can only support 200t each, but a maint facility is 25000t so, least they're efficient.
Actually that is something I honestly don't know. If I had 5 ships with 1 maintenance module each at a planet (thus, 5 maint mods total, 1000t support) would that actually let me overhaul some FACs, or would it get mad and only work if I had 1 ship with all 5 modules? So far I've always done 40kt ships with 5 modules on them as FAC tenders. And thinking about what it would need for a single ship to be a destroyer tender (6000-8000t) makes me cringe, as that is a huge ship.
I believe Steve mentioned he was working on making maintenance modules work in deep space. And IIRC, maintenance modules do indeed stack, so 5 ships with 1 each should be able to maintain FACs.
Edit: I had an idea for civilian hangars. Would it be doable if they prevented maintenance failures but didn't keep a ship's maintenance clock from ticking up? It would represent that the ships are inactive, but still sitting around without maintenance crews to take care of them.
That would make them much less useful for alpha strikes (since the fighters or FACs would likely explode the first time maintenance ticked while they were in space), but wouldn't be a problem if the fighters were transferred to military carriers where they could be maintained. It would also prevent them from being used to avoid maintenance costs on larger ships, since you'd just be deferring the maintenance costs until you overhauled the ships. Lastly, it would mean civilian hangars would work just fine for commercial craft that didn't have maintenance clocks, assuming you wanted to have a civilian carrier with survey shuttles or something similar.
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That's right, if you make a bunch of smaller maintenence vessels they'll maintain each other when they're at the same location.
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Edit: I had an idea for civilian hangars. Would it be doable if they prevented maintenance failures but didn't keep a ship's maintenance clock from ticking up? It would represent that the ships are inactive, but still sitting around without maintenance crews to take care of them.
That would make them much less useful for alpha strikes (since the fighters or FACs would likely explode the first time maintenance ticked while they were in space), but wouldn't be a problem if the fighters were transferred to military carriers where they could be maintained. It would also prevent them from being used to avoid maintenance costs on larger ships, since you'd just be deferring the maintenance costs until you overhauled the ships. Lastly, it would mean civilian hangars would work just fine for commercial craft that didn't have maintenance clocks, assuming you wanted to have a civilian carrier with survey shuttles or something similar.
That sounds awesome, and like something I didn't know I wanted.
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Edit: I had an idea for civilian hangars. Would it be doable if they prevented maintenance failures but didn't keep a ship's maintenance clock from ticking up? It would represent that the ships are inactive, but still sitting around without maintenance crews to take care of them.
That would make them much less useful for alpha strikes (since the fighters or FACs would likely explode the first time maintenance ticked while they were in space), but wouldn't be a problem if the fighters were transferred to military carriers where they could be maintained. It would also prevent them from being used to avoid maintenance costs on larger ships, since you'd just be deferring the maintenance costs until you overhauled the ships. Lastly, it would mean civilian hangars would work just fine for commercial craft that didn't have maintenance clocks, assuming you wanted to have a civilian carrier with survey shuttles or something similar.
In fact, why not just have them not affect maintenance status at all (doesn't prevent failures or the clock ticking). As you mention, this would still allow the transport of civilian ships as they don't need maintenance but would mean fighters and FACs would not be practicable. However, civilian hangars would still be able to carry out repairs and any military ships within the hangar could still be maintained by maintenance facilities in the same location. This allows you to create a base with both maintenance facilities and civilian hangars that could maintain, overhaul and repair military ships in deep space, or repair ships that can fix military vessels in deep space, even if their clock keeps ticking.
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In fact, why not just have them not affect maintenance status at all (doesn't prevent failures or the clock ticking). As you mention, this would still allow the transport of civilian ships as they don't need maintenance but would mean fighters and FACs would not be practicable. However, civilian hangars would still be able to carry out repairs and any military ships within the hangar could still be maintained by maintenance facilities in the same location. This allows you to create a base with both maintenance facilities and civilian hangars that could maintain, overhaul and repair military ships in deep space, or repair ships that can fix military vessels in deep space, even if their clock keeps ticking.
I see an interesting jumpoint assault exploit, there.
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I see an interesting jumpoint assault exploit, there.
Good point :)
Four options:
1) Jump-equipped commercial carriers cannot jump with military ships in the hold. Question would be why not? :)
2) Some form of delay in commercial carriers releasing ships, although hard to enforce because you can simply detach from the task group.
3) Something equivalent to jump shock after leaving a commercial hangar (in fact, probably should have this from any carrier but worse from commercial carrier)
4) Accept this as OK. After all, commercial hangars would be larger for the same capacity and with a jump drive as well, that would be a large, expensive and very vulnerable ship.
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Good point :)
Four options:
1) Jump-equipped commercial carriers cannot jump with military ships in the hold. Question would be why not? :)
2) Some form of delay in commercial carriers releasing ships, although hard to enforce because you can simply detach from the task group.
3) Something equivalent to jump shock after leaving a commercial hangar (in fact, probably should have this from any carrier but worse from commercial carrier)
4) Accept this as OK. After all, commercial hangars would be larger for the same capacity and with a jump drive as well, that would be a large, expensive and very vulnerable ship.
Well, personally I don't care that much about this kind of exploits. There will always be possible exploits, it's up to the player whether or not he does things that from a RP point of view are not very nice. Being a single player game and all, who cares...
That said, the thing that makes the most sense is that a commercial hangar would be much slower releasing ships, number 2). It makes sense, a commercial hangar is not optimized to quickly let out hordes of combat ready ships. But you said it's hard to enforce so...
If you cannot enforce it, I'd go with 4). Once again, not nice. But the resulting ship would be extremely frail. I don't think ANY intelligent nation would send its prized 4 squadrons of fighters inside a ship that would go boom in an instant. And a player can always avoid using that kind of exploit.
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I'm not a fan of launch delays. Missiles set a precedent for instant launch with slow reload so a launch delay would just add extra micromanagement of timing launch time vs jump time. Adding loading delays for parasite recovery, missile transfers, collier/population reloads etc while welcome would do nothing for balancing jump assaults with civilian hangers.
My preference is option #3. That would both add a small check against transit abuse while simultaneously legitimizing the use of a civilian jump-shells as a new gate assault tactic. Maybe reuse the Squadron Jump delay on military hanger launches and the Standard Transit Jump delay on civilian hanger launches? Bonus points if jump shock and launch shock stack when applicable.
Speaking of hanger craft and hangers is there any chance deployment time and moral checks could occur on the same time intervals as damage control repair checks? As of 6.43 I think this only updated on the construction cycles which made for odd moral behavior when using fighters with short and ultra short 0.5 and 0.1 month intended deployments.
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I seem to recall that commercial freighters have been used for fighter squadron transport/deployment in several science-fiction novels - the most notable example I can think of happened in the Star Wars universe... either the Heir to the Empire trilogy by Zahn or one/several of the X-Wing books. I also think that Honor Harrington carried the feat off at least once, though right now I can't place the book that it was done in - maybe when she was handling Q-ships?
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3 sounds good, as sublight said the standard jump sensor blindness / delay would be fine.
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3 sounds good to me as well. I always thought this should be the case for fighters deployed straight after jumping.
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In fact, why not just have them not affect maintenance status at all (doesn't prevent failures or the clock ticking). As you mention, this would still allow the transport of civilian ships as they don't need maintenance but would mean fighters and FACs would not be practicable. However, civilian hangars would still be able to carry out repairs and any military ships within the hangar could still be maintained by maintenance facilities in the same location. This allows you to create a base with both maintenance facilities and civilian hangars that could maintain, overhaul and repair military ships in deep space, or repair ships that can fix military vessels in deep space, even if their clock keeps ticking.
I was envisioning civilian hangars as being used for logistics, sort of like civilian magazines basically bringing fighters to stock PDCs or to replace combat losses. I know I usually don't put any engineering spaces on my fighters at all, giving them a maintenance life measured in days, so it would be very problematic to do that if they didn't effect maintenance status in any way. I know you mentioned still being able to perform repairs but it would quickly get prohibitively expensive to ship fighters anywhere in a civilian hangar (not to mention if you were building the fighters into the civilian hangar before shipping, since IIRC maintenance facilities at a colony wont prevents fighters from accruing maintenance clock).
That's why I suggested the compromise of no maintenance failures but still maintenance clock. That way if you just fly them to the front and transfer them to a carrier, the carrier hangar can quickly rewind their clock, but if you try to launch them into combat from a civilian hangar they'll probably all quickly explode.
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That's a good idea.
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The more this discussion of commercial hangars goes on, the more I feel like we're overthinking it. If the point is to move war materiel around without relying on military carriers, then alex's original idea of using prefab PDCs as a model seems simplest.
Add an option to flag the fighter upon construction as a flatpack IKEA fighter, and allow any fighter with that flag to be transported as cargo on a commercial freighter. Allow an order to transfer a flatpack fighter to a carrier (if there's sufficient space in the carrier), and let the hangar crew pull off the shrink wrap and do the final assembly.
No worries about commercial hangars and jump assaults, no new unitasker commercial carrier designs, and further differentiation gamewise between full sized warships and fighters. Is there really any other functionality we're looking to work in with this suggested feature?
In fact, why not just have them not affect maintenance status at all (doesn't prevent failures or the clock ticking). As you mention, this would still allow the transport of civilian ships as they don't need maintenance but would mean fighters and FACs would not be practicable. However, civilian hangars would still be able to carry out repairs and any military ships within the hangar could still be maintained by maintenance facilities in the same location. This allows you to create a base with both maintenance facilities and civilian hangars that could maintain, overhaul and repair military ships in deep space, or repair ships that can fix military vessels in deep space, even if their clock keeps ticking.
I'm not really seeing how this is either different or better than having a commercial deep space maintenance base supporting one or more military carriers. It just combines them into one hull. Even if it were an option, why would a player choose it?
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I think with fighter training and the expectation that you may want to redeploy fighters as your empire moves the idea of a flat pack fighter, whilst good, is going to be very hard to implement.
I do however agree that having fighters that typically have a deployment time in days rather than months have this accrue when in a civilian hanger is going to make it difficult to use.
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I'd really kinda hate the idea of them losing maintenance when in storage as heres my thought for implimentation.
New maintenance deep space bases. Personally I'd build the thing, then give it a couple civvy hangars, load them up with a few fighters and FACs. Then after they're planted at a jump point, their maintenance can cover some small defense platforms and sensor platforms. Also carriers can return to it to replenish fighters (and missile stores) without having to make the trek all the way back to earth or another colony.
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I'm not really seeing how this is either different or better than having a commercial deep space maintenance base supporting one or more military carriers. It just combines them into one hull. Even if it were an option, why would a player choose it?
The idea for civilian hangars would be to carry civilian ships, or to act as repair facilities for military ships. A military carrier large enough for repairing other ships would require a very large shipyard to build and a lot of maintenance facilities to support it. Civilian hangars shouldn't replace military ones but have a different role, in line with the concept of deep space facilities able to maintain and repair military ships.
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I'd really kinda hate the idea of them losing maintenance when in storage as heres my thought for implimentation.
New maintenance deep space bases. Personally I'd build the thing, then give it a couple civvy hangars, load them up with a few fighters and FACs. Then after they're planted at a jump point, their maintenance can cover some small defense platforms and sensor platforms. Also carriers can return to it to replenish fighters (and missile stores) without having to make the trek all the way back to earth or another colony.
If you want fighters or FACs to protect the deep space maintenance base, just build small fighter bases or carriers that can be maintained by the base itself.
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The idea for civilian hangars would be to carry civilian ships, or to act as repair facilities for military ships. A military carrier large enough for repairing other ships would require a very large shipyard to build and a lot of maintenance facilities to support it. Civilian hangars shouldn't replace military ones but have a different role, in line with the concept of deep space facilities able to maintain and repair military ships.
Oh, I see, so you're thinking of civilian hangars for things like mobile drydock ships, big things able to hold a cruiser or something and repair it away from a shipyard. That makes sense, and is something I could see being useful even if I've never personally needed it.
I was more thinking of them for things like shipping fighters around, which having normal maintenance failures wouldn't help with.
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Oh, I see, so you're thinking of civilian hangars for things like mobile drydock ships, big things able to hold a cruiser or something and repair it away from a shipyard. That makes sense, and is something I could see being useful even if I've never personally needed it.
I was more thinking of them for things like shipping fighters around, which having normal maintenance failures wouldn't help with.
I think Steve mentioned that for that case you'd put a maintenance facility on your "freighter" if you wanted to transport fighters. If this idea doesn't work thenn I think I agree that the idea of "crated" fighters makes more sense for the desired mechanic (ferrying fighters between systems as cargo).
John
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I was more thinking of them for things like shipping fighters around, which having normal maintenance failures wouldn't help with.
Best of-course if you can use it for all roles. So maybe the right way to go about it is to start of with thinking what we can imagine being able to use it for?
I can think of a few ideas (some which have been mentioned, others more wild ):
- Transporting Fighters/FACs to their forward base/Carrier
- Transporting larger (fuelhungry and/or low range) bigger ships to their forward base
- Repairing Military vehicles away from home
- Use as a tug? ( dock ships without engines and haul them around )
- Dismantling or repairing wrecks?! ( if we can put our own military ships inside a mobile hangar for repairs why not also wrecks? )
- Hauling Cargo?! What is conceptually the difference between a freighter and a large hangar?
- Transport ground troops with heavy equipment?!
The more I think about these questions, the more I think it might be a good idea for a unified system for transporting all "bulk freight". Hangars, Cargo Holds and Troop Transports could have overlapping abilities, splitting transporting of everything into men and bulk. Transporting a Ship of 4000 ton and it's 400 man crew requires both a 4000t hangar and 400 Spare Berths, Transporting say a Heavy Ground Unit might be possible with for example a 1000t hangar for it's equipment and 1000 Spare Berths for the men... and so on...
In a pinch you could load up some ground forces inside bigger Capital ships ( overloading their crew capacity a bit ), and you could build combined freighters/troop transports able to fill dual roles.
But sorry, now I've gone way Off-topic again :)
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Perhaps the maintenance clock should be slowed when in a civ hanger? I don't imagine a ship would wear out much during transport.
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Perhaps the maintenance clock should be slowed when in a civ hanger? I don't imagine a ship would wear out much during transport.
I was under the impression that already with ships in a hanger they suffer zero changes to the maint clock anyway?
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I was under the impression that already with ships in a hanger they suffer zero changes to the maint clock anyway?
We're discussing the possibility of adding civilian hangers, they need to be balanced so the most prominent idea is allowing the maintenance clock to still tick for military vessels inside.
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I'd vote for a reduced rate of maintenance clock time. Say 1/10th or so.
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I've been playing around with commercial hangars. At the moment I have a system that is identical to the military hangar in terms of cost, capacity and crew but is 50% larger and has 1 HTK instead of 4. Using this system and the commercial magazine I attempted to replicate the capability of the US Kennedy class carrier show below. While the commercial ship is larger and slower and will probably explode if you sneeze on it, it replicates the major KPIs of the Kennedy (Hangar Size, Magazine Size, Fuel Capacity), costs 400 BP less, requires no maintenance and can be built far more easily (48,000 ton commercial yard vs 24,000 naval yard).
So everything else being equal, the civilian hangar is probably too useful :)
There needs to be some penalty and I think it will have to be a lack of maintenance. Even in this case, the commercial hangar would provide a 'dry dock' capability for repairing ships in forward areas, be able to transport smaller commercial ships and act as a ferry for military ships (probably to save fuel). Also you could add a few maintenance modules and create a commercial FAC carrier that does provide maintenance for the FACs in the hangar.
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Kennedy class Carrier 24,000 tons 402 Crew 2879.8 BP TCS 480 TH 1920 EM 0
4000 km/s Armour 2-74 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 13 PPV 0
Maint Life 2.07 Years MSP 975 AFR 354% IFR 4.9% 1YR 305 5YR 4576 Max Repair 120 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Flight Crew Berths 67
Hangar Deck Capacity 8000 tons Magazine 960
Pratt & Whitney F240 Ion Drive (8) Power 240 Fuel Use 64% Signature 240 Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 1,600,000 Litres Range 18.8 billion km (54 days at full power)
Adelson-Vasko SPS-1 Active Search Sensor - MSR8413 (1) GPS 11520 Range 84.1m km Resolution 120
RGM-1 Sabre (192) Speed: 22,700 km/s End: 94.7m Range: 129m km WH: 9 Size: 5 TH: 75/45/22
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Chatham class Auxiliary Carrier 47,450 tons 434 Crew 2356 BP TCS 949 TH 3000 EM 0
3161 km/s Armour 2-116 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/6/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
MSP 31 Max Repair 75 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months Flight Crew Berths 86
Hangar Deck Capacity 8000 tons Magazine 1000
Rolls-Royce Commercial Ion Drive (10) Power 300 Fuel Use 6.19% Signature 300 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 1,500,000 Litres Range 91.9 billion km (336 days at full power)
Navigation Sensor (1) GPS 1920 Range 10.5m km Resolution 120
EM Detection Sensor (1) Sensitivity 6 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 6m km
**************************************************************************************************
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There needs to be some penalty and I think it will have to be a lack of maintenance.
I'm still liking the idea of a severe "launch disruption" penalty (similar to the jump penalty) for commercial hangers. I still don't think that's a big enough penalty though, since when launching e.g. an FAC or fighter strike an extra 10 minutes of delay for the strike is probably not a big deal (unless you just jumped). Even better would be an actual launch delay, so fighters/fac could be caught in their hangers, but that's probably a lot more difficult to code up. Another thought might be a "launch tube" component (that could have a tech tree) - similar to catapults on a modern carrier. They could have a reload time associated with them (similar to a missile launcher) and be a military system. That way you could put a huge penalty on a commercial hanger - the launch penalty might be e.g. 1 hour. The downside of this is that I wouldn't want to have to micro-manage launching a strike of 20 FAC four at a time (on a ship with four launch tubes); I'd want a button/command/order that launched the whole squadron and gradually filled up the resulting TG.
None of the above are intended to replace your "no maintenance" idea above; just additional ideas. OTOH, if they're severe enough, you might be able to use Erik's idea of "10% maintenance".
John
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I figure a feature that renders ships "mothballed", that is, unusable, with no maintenance upkeep, but to do so and as well to undo it would be a construction (or fighter factory, or shipyard) project that uses no minerals but takes deal of time depending on the cost of the ship, and would permit it to be loaded into commercial hangars? Might have been suggested before, but it seems especially relevant to the concept of civilian hangars.
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Civilian Hangar Module Standard storage for transport of warships by civilians. Size 20 module (1000t) able to store 500t of ship (as hangar space already stacks). Research-able after completing the Hangar Deck tech. Un-upgradable. Follows same rules when hit as existing hangars.
What would be the main purpose of that? creating support ships\bases which can be used to disregard usual military crew\moral\maintenance requirements for profit :/
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Trust me, I've been making deep space stations (on planetary bodies because of mechanics) that were far ahead (3-5 jumps usually) of the frontier 'worlds' in order to support a small fleet in case of enemy invasions and whatnot. And these civilian hangars will be a BIG help when it comes to repair yards. Before, you would either have to create a military design that would be larger than any of your ships, requiring a larger maintenance facility, thus requiring even more materials (in both construction and maintenance). Or, you could tug a large, fragile, tactically useless shipyard that would require a somewhat substantial civilian population on your military 'base' in order to function.
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Trust me, I've been making deep space stations (on planetary bodies because of mechanics) that were far ahead (3-5 jumps usually) of the frontier 'worlds' in order to support a small fleet in case of enemy invasions and whatnot. And these civilian hangars will be a BIG help when it comes to repair yards. Before, you would either have to create a military design that would be larger than any of your ships, requiring a larger maintenance facility, thus requiring even more materials (in both construction and maintenance). Or, you could tug a large, fragile, tactically useless shipyard that would require a somewhat substantial civilian population on your military 'base' in order to function.
Or you can build a PDC-based hangar on-site, which has no maintenance requirements and can be built arbitrarily large.
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@83athom, so right now invasions are a tricky business, you need to maintain forward bases to address various fleet issues. And this "mobile shipyard" will make the games easier and allow your fleet operate in hostile territory like it is your back yard.
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@83athom, so right now invasions are a tricky business, you need to maintain forward bases to address various fleet issues. And this "mobile shipyard" will make the games easier and allow your fleet operate in hostile territory like it is your back yard.
That example I gave was from my last long game with real stars, systems were spread out in lines 4-6 long connected by nexus systems with 6+ jump points each (with some 1-2 system deep offshoots here and there). And a lot of those were empty stars (or only had Super Jovians and asteroids) without a habitable body. The fleet bases were meant to keep things out of my space before they ever reached it (still had small patrol ships for RP and/or invasion from hidden JP stationed at colonies). And how are invasions tricky atm? An enemy empire is pretty regular in trying to bombard my systems by sending waves of ships every few months (no idea how he is building so fast or how many ships he has in reserve). And yes, I know that a 'mobile' shipyard is useful, but it requires a population over what I want to be a strictly military operation as well as the direct materials to repair. On the other hand, hangars need maintenance supplies which can be transported in mass quantities (made even easier with another change or v7.2). And another of the changes make it so you can build msp from any maintenance facilities without the need for factories, so you can build them right from the maintenance yards in orbit. So now the only thing you need for a self sustaining base is materials that can be auto-mined from the system and shot to the base via mass driver (which could still be done with shipyard/factory, but that would require a civilian population).
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Trust me, I've been making deep space stations (on planetary bodies because of mechanics)
And a lot of those were empty stars (or only had Super Jovians and asteroids) without a habitable body.
Now your not being consistent ::) ;)
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Now your not being consistent ::) ;)
A lot of the systems were empty, meaning they only had the star. Others had a Super Jovian(s) with moons and asteroids. I put the bases on the moons or asteroids.
Or you can build a PDC-based hangar on-site, which has no maintenance requirements and can be built arbitrarily large.
While yes, I prefer the ability for it to be mobile once the lines have moved. For example, say you find a system 3-4 jumps ahead of your base with a perfectly habitable body, you move the base to there, set up the colony there, then move it farther down the line once the colony finished with a patrol group. You don't need to point out the inefficiencies/illogic of doing this, because I do see it, like why not have them over frontier colonies and there would be too many paths with nexus systems etc. There were reasons for that (most of the nexus systems' JPs either looped back to known space or into another pocket branch with only a few leading to larger lines).
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That is exactly it. To operate in deep space you need to design "cruisers", ships less heavily armed but capable of longer deployment time away from supply chains. You need to establish forward bases for resupply and other crew needs (whoring iirc ::)), this requires significant logistic investment and hence you need to scouts and plan a ahead. While you could have carriers that would affect underway repairs for smaller ship elements, smeg could still go wrong and you had to face the choice of whether go back or continue without major capital ship. And eventually you always had to comeback to port.
Now, forget cruisers or carrier fleets, scientific advancement allowed us to create the concept of fleet in box. This magic box is like a carrier, but our lawyers were able to classify it civilian for logistic\tax deduction purpose. Thus it suffer no breakdowns and other silly things. You can even overhaul your fleet while in enemy territory... Overall it seem like a pure convince feature.
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That is exactly it. To operate in deep space you need to design "cruisers", ships less heavily armed but capable of longer deployment time away from supply chains. You need to establish forward bases for resupply and other crew needs (whoring iirc ::)), this requires significant logistic investment and hence you need to scouts and plan a ahead. While you could have carriers that would affect underway repairs for smaller ship elements, smeg could still go wrong and you had to face the choice of whether go back or continue without major capital ship. And eventually you always had to comeback to port.
Now, forget cruisers or carrier fleets, scientific advancement allowed us to create the concept of fleet in box. This magic box is like a carrier, but our lawyers were able to classify it civilian for logistic\tax deduction purpose. Thus it suffer no breakdowns and other silly things. You can even overhaul your fleet while in enemy territory... Overall it seem like a pure convince feature.
Then surely the best option is simply to not use it? But by not having this concept in place it forces everyone playing the game to endure the micromanagement that the old system entails, this way both parties get to play the game in the way they wish.
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Off course you can play whatever mix of options that floats your boat, I am just trying to make sure I understand what this feature implies and if it is something of interest for me.
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Now, forget cruisers or carrier fleets, scientific advancement allowed us to create the concept of fleet in box. This magic box is like a carrier, but our lawyers were able to classify it civilian for logistic\tax deduction purpose. Thus it suffer no breakdowns and other silly things. You can even overhaul your fleet while in enemy territory... Overall it seem like a pure convince feature.
Remember a few things; 1) They come after Hangars in tech, meaning they may end up being really costly to research in the first place. 2) While similar in cost, they are 50% larger, so instead of 1050 tons to support 1000 tons, it takes 1575. In a purely military ship, that is wasted space that could go to something else. 3) Its only 1 htk. Anything that scratches it will probably blow all the hangars of a massive commercial carrier in a few hits (once armor is gone). Not to even mention shock damage. 4) The design couldn't protect itself. While you could escort it with warships, that completely negates the point of it in the first place.
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I think that it can be very interesting if we had PvP and for RP as deep space station (as advertised in the log) but other than that I am going to avoid this.
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I really want this feature, as I tend to run big fleet games, and my existing repair ships/ARDs are expensive and annoying to deal with. Some way to repair ships well forward without using shipyards would be very nice.
In conjunction with it, I'd like to see civilian damage control units, because otherwise we're looking at absurd amounts of engineering spaces, and that would be annoying.
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I really want this feature, as I tend to run big fleet games, and my existing repair ships/ARDs are expensive and annoying to deal with. Some way to repair ships well forward without using shipyards would be very nice.
In conjunction with it, I'd like to see civilian damage control units, because otherwise we're looking at absurd amounts of engineering spaces, and that would be annoying.
I've added civilian damage control for v7.2. Here is a possible future Commonwealth repair base.
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Portsmouth class Fleet Base (Repair) 110,000 tons 1000 Crew 7298 BP TCS 2200 TH 0 EM 0
1 km/s Armour 1-204 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/11/0/0 Damage Control Rating 31 PPV 0
MSP 24041 Max Repair 36 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months Flight Crew Berths 5
Hangar Deck Capacity 60000 tons
Fuel Capacity 4,000,000 Litres Range N/A
CIWS-160 (1x6) Range 1000 km TS: 16000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
Ryan Techsystems RTN-25 Navigation Sensor (1) GPS 2520 Range 25.3m km Resolution 120
EM-11 Passive Detection Sensor (1) Sensitivity 11 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 11m km
**************************************************************************************
It will probably be matched up with several of these. Both bases can operate in deep space.
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Weymouth class Fleet Base (Maintenance) 85,000 tons 780 Crew 3963 BP TCS 1700 TH 0 EM 0
1 km/s Armour 1-172 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
MSP 6029 Max Repair 200 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months Spare Berths 0
Maintenance Modules: 15 module(s) capable of supporting ships of 3000 tons
Fuel Capacity 6,000,000 Litres Range N/A
CIWS-160 (1x6) Range 1000 km TS: 16000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
**************************************************************************************
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Then surely the best option is simply to not use it?
This is a really poor argument for game design.
But by not having this concept in place it forces everyone playing the game to endure the micromanagement that the old system entails, this way both parties get to play the game in the way they wish.
If it is really that significant of a problem... You do know that maintenance as a feature can already be disabled, yes?
Steve already has deep space maintenance facilities for civilians being designed for civilian use, and he's streamlining maintenance anyway, so certainly, it should be less of a pain to keep your ships serviced. However, it's still gonna cost you MSP, and whatever "logistics nightmares" that somehow induces is more a consequence of you overextending too big of a fleet and expecting it to not be costly to maintain, attention-wise and materials-wise.
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This is a really poor argument for game design.If it is really that significant of a problem... You do know that maintenance as a feature can already be disabled, yes?
Steve already has deep space maintenance facilities for civilians being designed for civilian use, and he's streamlining maintenance anyway, so certainly, it should be less of a pain to keep your ships serviced. However, it's still gonna cost you MSP, and whatever "logistics nightmares" that somehow induces is more a consequence of you overextending too big of a fleet and expecting it to not be costly to maintain, attention-wise and materials-wise.
Have you ever run a really big fleet? One that's supposed to be able to do what the US did during WWII, and operate out of forward bases basically indefinitely? I have, and in the current version, it's borderline impossible, and requires a level of micromanagement that's above and beyond even what normal Aurora needs. The changes made in 7.2 will make it much easier. Not 'your fleet can skip about with gay abandon, ignoring logistical constraints entirely' easier. You still need fuel and munitions. But you won't have to haul a bunch of different minerals to whatever planet you've decided to set up as your base. And you won't run into the situations where there's no convenient planet, so you're just out of luck. You won't have to waste military yard capacity on colliers and supply ships, and then make absurd and complicated vessels to help get around the maintenance rules. (Most of my colliers in my current big fleet game are barges with nothing but magazines aboard. There's nothing to go wrong, and the tugs are civilian.)
And you definitely won't be faced with the problem of having no way to repair your battleship if it gets damaged without either setting up a colony and towing a big shipyard forward, building an absurdly large PDC you'll abandon just after it gets finished, or sending it all the way home.
Steve, please hurry. I'm itching to get started on my best empire yet.
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I'm a little wary of these changes.
Civilian carriers have some limitations, but the ability to shove all proper military craft into a mobile hangar and avoiding maintenance forever will have a huge effect on long-running games.
Civilian damage control units and maintenance storage: What about purpose-built damage sinks (mostly low-powered engines, those cost practically nothing) that can be repaired a few dozen times over?
Most attempts to break the system resulted in interesting things that may or may not be worth the limitations compared to a respectable approach... which is fantastic.
I'm afraid these might hand out gamebreaking concepts like candy, and players would have to actively hold back to get the richness and complexity we have now.
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I'm a little wary of these changes.
Civilian carriers have some limitations, but the ability to shove all proper military craft into a mobile hangar and avoiding maintenance forever will have a huge effect on long-running games.
Civilian damage control units and maintenance storage: What about purpose-built damage sinks (mostly low-powered engines, those cost practically nothing) that can be repaired a few dozen times over?
Most attempts to break the system resulted in interesting things that may or may not be worth the limitations compared to a respectable approach... which is fantastic.
I'm afraid these might hand out gamebreaking concepts like candy, and players would have to actively hold back to get the richness and complexity we have now.
You are still affected by maintenance requirements while in a civilian hangar.
The concern about purpose-built damage sinks is valid, but you can already do that with massively armoured freighters. It depends to what extent you want to use what are plainly exploits in a single-player game.
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I'm a little wary of these changes.
We've seen a lot of new stuff over the past 5 years, and none of it has caused the sort of problem you refer to. (Or this sort of controversy, IIRC.) I haven't looked forward to a new version this much since 6.0. (Well, maybe 6.43, but that was because the bug was holding up my game.)
Civilian damage control units and maintenance storage: What about purpose-built damage sinks (mostly low-powered engines, those cost practically nothing) that can be repaired a few dozen times over?
This can be done today, with engineering spaces. The reason is that it's sort of pointless, and most civilian components have low HTK. Or, if that's not enough, make civil damcon explosive.
Most attempts to break the system resulted in interesting things that may or may not be worth the limitations compared to a respectable approach... which is fantastic.
I'm afraid these might hand out gamebreaking concepts like candy, and players would have to actively hold back to get the richness and complexity we have now.
And then Steve fixes the problem and we get 7.3 rather quickly.
Honestly, the biggest exploit I see likely to come out of this has to do with long-range missiles. It's possible to soak up enemy missile fire by moving ships out of hangars, waiting until the enemy has fired off missiles at them, then putting them back in the hangar. Repeat as needed. Previously, it was difficult to apply against anything other than antimissile platforms because of the size of hangar required for a ship which could draw fire near the limits of range. You could build a civilian carrier which could do this, but it's a fairly big headache, and it's probably cheaper to just build a few more PD cruisers.
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You are still affected by maintenance requirements while in a civilian hangar.
I just realised I never got around to adding commercial hangars to the Change Log for v7.2, Added now.
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You can already build civilian damage sinks, but the ability to repair themselves will be greatly enhanced.
If a ship is dirt-cheap for its size, engineering bays will only add a few MSPs. For this kind of ship, Maintenance Storage Bays can get 10 times the density and they're cheap.
Low-power engines aren't that sturdy for their size, but they're sturdy for their cost. Which is what counts when tonnage is no object - heck, we can throw in a habitat and build it in the multiple megaton range for less than a midsized warship.
Now give us efficient MSP storage and access to decent damage control... I see a problem.
Making civil damage control explosive sounds very strange - and if the sacrificial components are cheap bulk, nothing else is likely to be hit much. If it's explosive enough to be relevant here, it's going to be useless for any legitimate use.
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You can already build civilian damage sinks, but the ability to repair themselves will be greatly enhanced.
Wait. That's what you're worried about? I'd say that the ability to build damage sinks is greatly enhanced by the fact that it's much easier to repair armor now.
If a ship is dirt-cheap for its size, engineering bays will only add a few MSPs. For this kind of ship, Maintenance Storage Bays can get 10 times the density and they're cheap.
Low-power engines aren't that sturdy for their size, but they're sturdy for their cost. Which is what counts when tonnage is no object - heck, we can throw in a habitat and build it in the multiple megaton range for less than a midsized warship.
Now give us efficient MSP storage and access to decent damage control... I see a problem.
I don't. How are you planning to use this thing? Leaving aside any questions about the AI's targeting routines, you can't build a multimegaton habitat for "less than a midsize warship" and have it be able to keep up with the fleet. It will either be nearly stationary or very expensive. Add in that even civilian engines have a non-trivial chance of exploding. This doesn't look so good now.
Also, it's a single-player game. If you want to use exploits, that's your problem. This kind of stuff is rarely broken enough to become a problem. The only example I can think of where it was is the confetti missile thing, and that was ages ago.
Making civil damage control explosive sounds very strange - and if the sacrificial components are cheap bulk, nothing else is likely to be hit much. If it's explosive enough to be relevant here, it's going to be useless for any legitimate use.
That makes no sense. Its legitimate use involves sitting in deep space as part of what is essentially an ARD, and fixing up damaged warships. There's no possibility of damage there, so it can be as explosive as we like, and it won't be a problem in 'legitimate use'. Unless the ARD is being shot at, of course, but if that happens, something has already gone horribly wrong.
What is your problem with this, anyway? I'm honestly baffled with your reaction to it. The hangar maintenance thing made sense, but you're grasping at straws now. If you really don't like it that much, just keep playing 7.1.
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Armour isn't actually a very good damage sink, too expensive per HTK and harder to repair (even if it becomes easier).
But the things I stated were meant more as examples, probably not worth picking apart details of damage sinks here, sorry I went too deeply into specifics.
I'd greatly welcome natural ways of building auxiliaries that are less of a logistics burden, I've often jumped through hoops to do so (e.g. tractors & pods, excessive maintenance life intending to keep it in deep space until scrapping).
the new options are dangerous as they allow us to circumvent fundamental restrictions on warships. At the same time, maybe not open-ended enough (auxiliary carriers, but no armed merchant cruisers).
My problem is that I fear the game may become less of an honest challenge, that players will have to consciously hold back to have an engaging experience. I'll have some fun playing with the new options, but from what I've read so far I'm inclined to believe that the new options will reduce the overall depth of the game. Maybe considerably.
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I'd greatly welcome natural ways of building auxiliaries that are less of a logistics burden, I've often jumped through hoops to do so (e.g. tractors & pods, excessive maintenance life intending to keep it in deep space until scrapping).
the new options are dangerous as they allow us to circumvent fundamental restrictions on warships. At the same time, maybe not open-ended enough (auxiliary carriers, but no armed merchant cruisers).
What fundamental restrictions are we circumventing? Maintenance modules are no cheaper, just a bit easier to use. Commercial magazines and maintenance bays are long overdue. Commercial hangars don't maintain things, and building a big enough ship to fly warships around is going to be expensive. Building enough ships to fly all your warships around will be prohibitively expensive. Don't believe me? Try it. We have the specs of all of the components. I'm going to do an example when I get a bit of time.
My problem is that I fear the game may become less of an honest challenge, that players will have to consciously hold back to have an engaging experience. I'll have some fun playing with the new options, but from what I've read so far I'm inclined to believe that the new options will reduce the overall depth of the game. Maybe considerably.
I have no clue where this is coming from. At all. If anything, I expect that making logistics a bit easier to do will mean more people will take advantage of it.
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Armour isn't actually a very good damage sink, too expensive per HTK and harder to repair (even if it becomes easier).
But the things I stated were meant more as examples, probably not worth picking apart details of damage sinks here, sorry I went too deeply into specifics.
I'd greatly welcome natural ways of building auxiliaries that are less of a logistics burden, I've often jumped through hoops to do so (e.g. tractors & pods, excessive maintenance life intending to keep it in deep space until scrapping).
the new options are dangerous as they allow us to circumvent fundamental restrictions on warships. At the same time, maybe not open-ended enough (auxiliary carriers, but no armed merchant cruisers).
My problem is that I fear the game may become less of an honest challenge, that players will have to consciously hold back to have an engaging experience. I'll have some fun playing with the new options, but from what I've read so far I'm inclined to believe that the new options will reduce the overall depth of the game. Maybe considerably.
As I mentioned, commercial hangars do not provide maintenance so warships are no better off than before. Auxiliary carriers as a replacement for regular carriers won't work because your fighters will blow up through lack of maintenance, although you might use an auxiliary carrier for a short transfer run to a normal carrier.
The changes mean you can have forward-deployed repair ships that don't cost far more than the warships they are intended to repair, which is much more similar to the real world. We don't currently use the USS Nimitz as a repair dock for example.
You can also have maintenance facilities in planetless systems, which adds an extra dimension but doesn't strike me as game breaking.
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Couple of clarification questions. Do civilian hangars reload box launchers? I don't expect that they do, but it does need clearing up.
Also, can you nest things inside hangars? Could I, for instance, build an auxiliary carrier, and then put a bunch of small military hangars inside it, and fill them with fighters?
And the auxiliary carrier could be quite useful in a couple of ways. The first thing that springs to mind is moving FACs and other small, fast, jump drive-less craft around non-tactically. There's no need for maintainence, as they don't normally deploy from the carrier, and it's cheaper in fuel and logistical headaches. Another would be carrying convoy escorts which have military engines and thus can't use civilian jump drives. Even an FAC-carrier might be of some use when paired with a maintainence ship. But over all, I can't see any of these displacing normal fleet units as the way of the future.
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Couple of clarification questions. Do civilian hangars reload box launchers? I don't expect that they do, but it does need clearing up.
Also, can you nest things inside hangars? Could I, for instance, build an auxiliary carrier, and then put a bunch of small military hangars inside it, and fill them with fighters?
And the auxiliary carrier could be quite useful in a couple of ways. The first thing that springs to mind is moving FACs and other small, fast, jump drive-less craft around non-tactically. There's no need for maintainence, as they don't normally deploy from the carrier, and it's cheaper in fuel and logistical headaches. Another would be carrying convoy escorts which have military engines and thus can't use civilian jump drives. Even an FAC-carrier might be of some use when paired with a maintainence ship. But over all, I can't see any of these displacing normal fleet units as the way of the future.
Up to at least 7.1 nesting is at the very least dangerous and sometimes impossible, Aurora really doesn't seem to like the idea of a hanger inside a hanger. If you try to dock a carrier with craft on board to a larger hanger you run the high risk of all the parasite craft of the carrier simply going poof, and being lost to the void. In general you have to move a carrier to a hanger then undock all parasite craft before docking the TG.
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You are still affected by maintenance requirements while in a civilian hangar.
ohh that's the spot, this was a big concern. Otherwise it would be silly considering that we already have the no overhauls and maintenance supplies option.
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Couple of clarification questions. Do civilian hangars reload box launchers? I don't expect that they do, but it does need clearing up.
Also, can you nest things inside hangars? Could I, for instance, build an auxiliary carrier, and then put a bunch of small military hangars inside it, and fill them with fighters?
And the auxiliary carrier could be quite useful in a couple of ways. The first thing that springs to mind is moving FACs and other small, fast, jump drive-less craft around non-tactically. There's no need for maintainence, as they don't normally deploy from the carrier, and it's cheaper in fuel and logistical headaches. Another would be carrying convoy escorts which have military engines and thus can't use civilian jump drives. Even an FAC-carrier might be of some use when paired with a maintainence ship. But over all, I can't see any of these displacing normal fleet units as the way of the future.
You can't reload box launchers in civilian hangars.
Not sure on nesting. I have never written any specific code for carrier in carrier but there are bug reports in this area. I need to do some testing.
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You can't reload box launchers in civilian hangars.
Not sure on nesting. I have never written any specific code for carrier in carrier but there are bug reports in this area. I need to do some testing.
Would it be possible to have them reload at, say, maintenance facility rates? I ask because at the moment it's practically impossible to use box launchers on larger ships because of reload considerations. I admit that my various attempts to do so failed for other reasons, too, but it would be nice to have it as an option.
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Would it be possible to have them reload at, say, maintenance facility rates? I ask because at the moment it's practically impossible to use box launchers on larger ships because of reload considerations. I admit that my various attempts to do so failed for other reasons, too, but it would be nice to have it as an option.
Because of the advantages of large salvo densities, I prefer to leave the logistical constraints of box launchers as they are now. Otherwise it is an easy decision to select box launchers.
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Regarding auxiliary carriers - unless I'm gravely misunderstanding something, there's a world of difference whether the carrier has to worry about maintenance or the fighters do.
If relevant, fighters respond very well to engineering spaces, several years of maintenance life is surprisingly cheap. Instead of overhauls, we can simply exchange fighter complements between a civilian and military hangar.
Regarding box launchers on full-sized ships - they have their limitations but one overwhelming alpha strike followed by beam-based cleanup can work quite well from my experience.
Box and full-size are already my most frequently chosen options.
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As I mentioned, commercial hangars do not provide maintenance so warships are no better off than before. Auxiliary carriers as a replacement for regular carriers won't work because your fighters will blow up through lack of maintenance, although you might use an auxiliary carrier for a short transfer run to a normal carrier.
The changes mean you can have forward-deployed repair ships that don't cost far more than the warships they are intended to repair, which is much more similar to the real world. We don't currently use the USS Nimitz as a repair dock for example.
You can also have maintenance facilities in planetless systems, which adds an extra dimension but doesn't strike me as game breaking.
I cannot see how commercial hangar are going to be useful, say you want to transport 20 fighters 4 systems away and the transport take 2 months to get there, your fighters are aimed at 1 month deployments, and maintenance at a bare minimum. Because you extract speed out of it. The fighter engine or what is going to blow up even get to the destination, after runnign out of parts. Even if you do have a module since fighters have short engineering bays, it be drawing part every a day or 5 day cycle, you run out of parts on your 20 fighter very fast.
Unless Maintenance is stopped the commercial hangars are useless for transport. I would of love to see comm hangars the same as military hangar except you cannot launch fighters unless around colony orbit.
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I cannot see how commercial hangar are going to be useful, say you want to transport 20 fighters 4 systems away and the transport take 2 months to get there, your fighters are aimed at 1 month deployments, and maintenance at a bare minimum. Because you extract speed out of it. The fighter engine or what is going to blow up even get to the destination, after runnign out of parts. Even if you do have a module since fighters have short engineering bays, it be drawing part every a day or 5 day cycle, you run out of parts on your 20 fighter very fast.
Unless Maintenance is stopped the commercial hangars are useless for transport. I would of love to see comm hangars the same as military hangar except you cannot launch fighters unless around colony orbit.
The commercial hangar bay is mainly for repairs. However, I have had fighters sat in orbit for months waiting for a carrier with no maintenance and not had any failures. Although they have no engineering spaces, their chance of failure is very low due to their small size. For example, here is the relevant portion of the US fighter from my current campaign:
F-40 Starfury class Fighter 300 tons 2 Crew 53.4 BP TCS 5.99 TH 42 EM 0
7011 km/s Armour 1-3 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 2.25
Maint Life 0 Years MSP 0 AFR 59% IFR 0.8% 1YR 3 5YR 43 Max Repair 13 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.5 months Spare Berths 0
The class AFR is 59% per year and that is the rate when the fighter has already been in space for a full year (it starts at 0% and will get to 59% after one year of deployment and continue getting higher after that). A fighter with a low deployment clock will have very little chance of failure. A 3 month trip aboard an auxiliary carrier would be very low risk.
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@ ardem:
Or just put an engineering space on your fighters, by the time their maintenance life is a concern they may be obsolescent anyway.
Whether you treat them as disposable or shove them into a PDC hangar after a few years... much less hassle than having to overhaul the carrier.
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Or even just putting 1-3 maintenance modules on the carrier. That would make it so fighters would, you know, not explode when you don't want them to.
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Or even just putting 1-3 maintenance modules on the carrier. That would make it so fighters would, you know, not explode when you don't want them to.
Unfortunately, maintenance modules don't work on fighters :)
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Unfortunately, maintenance modules don't work on fighters :)
Maintenance module, giving maint to a series of "hangar shells" which are ships with no engines or anything, just military hangars, with nested fighters inside?
I'm personally of the opinion that commercial hangars should only be able to transport "mothballed" ships (such that it would be a ship with all ordnance, crew, and fuel removed, and would require industry/shipyard tasks to mothball or de-mothball), but I understand that maybe not everyone shares that opinion.
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The commercial hangar bay is mainly for repairs. However, I have had fighters sat in orbit for months waiting for a carrier with no maintenance and not had any failures. Although they have no engineering spaces, their chance of failure is very low due to their small size. For example, here is the relevant portion of the US fighter from my current campaign:
F-40 Starfury class Fighter 300 tons 2 Crew 53.4 BP TCS 5.99 TH 42 EM 0
7011 km/s Armour 1-3 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 2.25
Maint Life 0 Years MSP 0 AFR 59% IFR 0.8% 1YR 3 5YR 43 Max Repair 13 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.5 months Spare Berths 0
The class AFR is 59% per year and that is the rate when the fighter has already been in space for a full year (it starts at 0% and will get to 59% after one year of deployment and continue getting higher after that). A fighter with a low deployment clock will have very little chance of failure. A 3 month trip aboard an auxiliary carrier would be very low risk.
Thanks for the extra info I would look into that. Right now I have some 1000ton FAC's that are chewing maintenance every five days cause they outside there overhaul allotment, which was 2 years. I not tested fighter to the n degree because I always have a PDC or Carrier for them to be in before I build them
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I'm personally of the opinion that commercial hangars should only be able to transport "mothballed" ships (such that it would be a ship with all ordnance, crew, and fuel removed, and would require industry/shipyard tasks to mothball or de-mothball), but I understand that maybe not everyone shares that opinion.
A maybe easier approach or way to model this would be that commercial hangars can't launch ships when moving and have a 1-day delay enforced on launches after stopping movement. This means that stationary deep space hangars work fine, but prevent you to use them like Carriers.
Or have them re-use the load time delay transport ships have so they need working cargo handling systems to determine time to load/launch military stuff.
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Also, they can be used to repair ships but not to reload them.
I would do it the other way around. For repairs you need the trained military specialist crew; but reloading should be possible (on a second thought, does that not also need a specially trained crew?. Maybe it is best that both cannot be done on the civs).
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I would do it the other way around. For repairs you need the trained military specialist crew; but reloading should be possible (on a second thought, does that not also need a specially trained crew?. Maybe it is best that both cannot be done on the civs).
You do realize that even military ships are built with civilian contracting? So those same civilian contractors should be able to repair what they built. And yes reloading does take trained military personnel, or else the ordinance may go boom.
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I would do it the other way around. For repairs you need the trained military specialist crew; but reloading should be possible (on a second thought, does that not also need a specially trained crew?. Maybe it is best that both cannot be done on the civs).
The metagame reason is that this is intended to let us make proper repair ships, which will need to be civilian. If you let big ships reload their launchers in the field, it might well make box launchers too powerful.
But IRL, almost all warships these days are built at civilian-owned yards, and a lot of refits take place there, too. The USS Cole was repaired in Pascagoula, Mississippi, a civilian yard.
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The metagame reason is that this is intended to let us make proper repair ships, which will need to be civilian. If you let big ships reload their launchers in the field, it might well make box launchers too powerful.
But IRL, almost all warships these days are built at civilian-owned yards, and a lot of refits take place there, too. The USS Cole was repaired in Pascagoula, Mississippi, a civilian yard.
Yep, I see... good point.