Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[ShadowLop]

A small list of features I would like to see, some might be a repeat of similar things I have said before.


Sensors
I would like for sensor system to become more realistic. As it is it is just to much min/max which is not fair against the AI that often attach active scanners to most of their ships and it is not very realistic. The more scanners the more likely you should be to pick up the correct information in any engagement.

You are expecting an army to arrive some time between now and tomorrow. You don't know exactly where they will show up, but you know it's someplace over "there". Your scouts are 100% identical: Same training, same experience, same brains, same eyes. They act identical, they think identical. So, it doesn't matter if you have one on a hill or 50 on that hill, they won't see it any sooner or later. Having more scanners in a fleet would not yield more information, since all the scanners that could pick it up will, the ones that can't, won't. Speading them out across the entire system would be the only way to do what you're thinking.

1. At least make the Strength of active and passive sensors cover the area and not be a linear function. Aurora is on a 2d map so making them scan in 3d is perhaps a bit too much. So this would make the range fall of much quicker with larger scanning equipment.

Not really sure what you mean here: Do you want sensors to fall off faster? Scan 2D or 3D?

2. Make the detection of object into a random event, it is not realistic to have an automatic barrier where you detect something. It is no more realistic than using the same system for a weapon hitting or missing a target. This would also make it useful to mount active (and passive) sensors on as many platforms as possible or even using several on the same ship for that matter.

A radar will show you the location of every plane that enters its range, as long as it's high enough above the ground (in Aurora, has a cross section large enough) and it can make a full sweep at least once per 5 seconds. Granted, it won't necessarily tell you what the ship is, but then again, neither do sensors in Aurora. At max range, all they tell you is speed and resolution (tonnage is extrapolated from this). It's the Intelligence division that names it. You need the target within range of separate thermal sensors before you can get engine output readings. You also need to get closer and closer to get EM/sensor emissions (if any) along with other information.  Also, the only way to get concrete data on target ships is to shoot them (defences), have them shoot you (weapons) or pick their wreckage for clues/components. Further, I presume that a ship with sensors would have multiple receivers on the hull so it can triangulate with itself. Finally, in terms of targeting with sensors: Missile Guidance systems need to be able to lock on to a target so they can guide the missile in. If your guidance system can't see the target, then it's not going to be able to bring the missile within detonation range. Beam targeting systems have a range they can see the target and a tracking speed that they can calculate the flight path of the target. If the target is too fast, the targeting system isn't going to be able to track it.

3. Passive sensors should not be automatic either, they should initially detect an echo and after a while (the more platforms and the more spread out they are) you will get more robust information about that echo, such as distance/speed and strength. In reality it is not that easy to know these things from a passive emission without an active component.

On Earth, passive sensors need a LOT of filtering to compensate for planetary magnetic fields, environment, other EM emissions, etc. Even then, a simple thermal camera will pick out a plane against a sky, or a tank in some bushes. In space, all you have is the Cosmic Background radiation and that's not very much there. When your engines are spewing several thousand to million units of heat into empty space, that's going to be pretty easy to pick up at impressive range, especially when your camera is several hundred tonnes in size. Same with shields, that's some pretty impressive EM emissions. Passive sensors could easily pick out where the emissions are coming from within a reasonable distance. As for speed? That's High-School maths. You simply monitor it for 5 seconds and you can triangulate speed and bearing, especially if you distribute several sensors across the hull for self-triangulation. You seem to be basing this on something like sonar, which would need some time to determine velocity, but you need to think of it more like a super-high-res thermal camera than sonar: always watching.

4. Once something is detected (either with passive or active) it should be much easier to keep tracking it, but you should be able to loose contact.

Your computers know what your ship is doing, so compensating (figuring out how the contact will move within your active range, or moving the passive cameras to where the contact was last seen) would take all of the time to actually turn the ship, which is <5 seconds. At most, you'd lose the contact for 5 seconds as you make a turn, you'd pick it up almost immediately afterwards, especially since unless the contact is right on top of you or moving at nearly light-speed, it's not going to have moved very far in 5 seconds relative to your starscape. Losing contacts for a substantial amount of time would only really be possible if the contact exceeds your detection range (either flying away or activating cloaks).

5. Each object should be detected individually so when you detect an enemy group you should never be sure of their exact composition and numbers since the detection method is randomized.

Although ships in the same fleet are counted as being in the same spot, they'd be no closer than 2-5km from each other. Easily enough distance for a scanner to focus in once it's picked up one contact and pick out each and every ship in the fleet (provided it's big enough of course). The only thing that I'm not sure about would be if a smaller ship in a fleet with a larger ship would both be picked up, which they shouldn't. If this is the case, then yeah, you can't be sure if that's one large ship on it's own, or if it's accompanied by 500 fighters/FACs.

3. It would be interesting if civilian population would interact with the game a little more in some way and if the government type had something to do with this. Perhaps through some form of event system that could be script based and expanded by the community by adding their own events, triggers and effects.

This would be cool, but I think it's a bit lower on the list compared to actual ship mechanics.

4. Wealth should not be stored in the way we currently does. Wealth that is not used should mainly go back into the economy and just produce happiness for the people that can "endure" a better life. I think that wealth that are distributed back into society should give some form of bonus. Perhaps a small increase in wealth the next year, a small increase in population growth or some other perk. Negative wealth could pretty much be handled as it is now but the effect would be more of a result of how long and how much negative wealth you get each year. Negative wealth should also spawn lower wealth efficiency each year so the negative spiral should increase in speed if you don't take drastic measures in a couple of years.

I believe someone mentioned somewhere that Wealth isn't just money, but the overall military industrial capacity of a civilization: Goods, services, support facilities, etc. Having lots of wealth means your society has the capacity to remunerate the workers to work at your facilities, put them up to live, employing and supplying support staff, etc.

[CheaterEater]

2. Make every lab added to a team have a diminished effect, lets say 5-10% less RP per lab over the first. So if your RP per lab is 100 you get 100 for lab one, 90 for lab two and 81 for lab three and so on. This will represent that increased funding will never yield a linear result in efficiency which is realistic. This will also add the effect that you want to have as many scientists as possible but the skill of them is still very important.

Emphasis mine. I'm sorry but I don't think that's at all true, considering that there are plenty of massive scientific collaborative efforts. Some examples that come to mind are RHIC, CERN/LHC, T2K (and other neutrino experiments), various national laboratories (NIST, Argonne, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos) and space programs like NASA. It seems clear to me that not only does massive funding of single projects make some research faster but also it's the only way they are even possible. Admittedly those are physics examples but considering most of our in-game research revolves around the subject I believe the examples are appropriate.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Emphasis mine. I'm sorry but I don't think that's at all true, considering that there are plenty of massive scientific collaborative efforts. Some examples that come to mind are RHIC, CERN/LHC, T2K (and other neutrino experiments), various national laboratories (NIST, Argonne, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos) and space programs like NASA. It seems clear to me that not only does massive funding of single projects make some research faster but also it's the only way they are even possible. Admittedly those are physics examples but considering most of our in-game research revolves around the subject I believe the examples are appropriate.

In my opinion these are good example on where great project do have diminished capacity for total resources spent. You can't in general just spend twice the amount of resources and expect twice the amount of results, not if you already have the best and brightest working on a project to begin with.

[Jorgen_CAB]

You are expecting an army to arrive some time between now and tomorrow. You don't know exactly where they will show up, but you know it's someplace over "there". Your scouts are 100% identical: Same training, same experience, same brains, same eyes. They act identical, they think identical. So, it doesn't matter if you have one on a hill or 50 on that hill, they won't see it any sooner or later. Having more scanners in a fleet would not yield more information, since all the scanners that could pick it up will, the ones that can't, won't. Speading them out across the entire system would be the only way to do what you're thinking.
Not really sure what you mean here: Do you want sensors to fall off faster? Scan 2D or 3D?
A radar will show you the location of every plane that enters its range, as long as it's high enough above the ground (in Aurora, has a cross section large enough) and it can make a full sweep at least once per 5 seconds. Granted, it won't necessarily tell you what the ship is, but then again, neither do sensors in Aurora. At max range, all they tell you is speed and resolution (tonnage is extrapolated from this). It's the Intelligence division that names it. You need the target within range of separate thermal sensors before you can get engine output readings. You also need to get closer and closer to get EM/sensor emissions (if any) along with other information.  Also, the only way to get concrete data on target ships is to shoot them (defences), have them shoot you (weapons) or pick their wreckage for clues/components. Further, I presume that a ship with sensors would have multiple receivers on the hull so it can triangulate with itself. Finally, in terms of targeting with sensors: Missile Guidance systems need to be able to lock on to a target so they can guide the missile in. If your guidance system can't see the target, then it's not going to be able to bring the missile within detonation range. Beam targeting systems have a range they can see the target and a tracking speed that they can calculate the flight path of the target. If the target is too fast, the targeting system isn't going to be able to track it.
On Earth, passive sensors need a LOT of filtering to compensate for planetary magnetic fields, environment, other EM emissions, etc. Even then, a simple thermal camera will pick out a plane against a sky, or a tank in some bushes. In space, all you have is the Cosmic Background radiation and that's not very much there. When your engines are spewing several thousand to million units of heat into empty space, that's going to be pretty easy to pick up at impressive range, especially when your camera is several hundred tonnes in size. Same with shields, that's some pretty impressive EM emissions. Passive sensors could easily pick out where the emissions are coming from within a reasonable distance. As for speed? That's High-School maths. You simply monitor it for 5 seconds and you can triangulate speed and bearing, especially if you distribute several sensors across the hull for self-triangulation. You seem to be basing this on something like sonar, which would need some time to determine velocity, but you need to think of it more like a super-high-res thermal camera than sonar: always watching.
Your computers know what your ship is doing, so compensating (figuring out how the contact will move within your active range, or moving the passive cameras to where the contact was last seen) would take all of the time to actually turn the ship, which is <5 seconds. At most, you'd lose the contact for 5 seconds as you make a turn, you'd pick it up almost immediately afterwards, especially since unless the contact is right on top of you or moving at nearly light-speed, it's not going to have moved very far in 5 seconds relative to your starscape. Losing contacts for a substantial amount of time would only really be possible if the contact exceeds your detection range (either flying away or activating cloaks).
Although ships in the same fleet are counted as being in the same spot, they'd be no closer than 2-5km from each other. Easily enough distance for a scanner to focus in once it's picked up one contact and pick out each and every ship in the fleet (provided it's big enough of course). The only thing that I'm not sure about would be if a smaller ship in a fleet with a larger ship would both be picked up, which they shouldn't. If this is the case, then yeah, you can't be sure if that's one large ship on it's own, or if it's accompanied by 500 fighters/FACs.
This would be cool, but I think it's a bit lower on the list compared to actual ship mechanics.
I believe someone mentioned somewhere that Wealth isn't just money, but the overall military industrial capacity of a civilization: Goods, services, support facilities, etc. Having lots of wealth means your society has the capacity to remunerate the workers to work at your facilities, put them up to live, employing and supplying support staff, etc.

In regards to passive scanners in space there are quite allot of objects in space that are bright so identifying ships in space might not be as easy as you think. Even things like asteroids have heat signals and can be indistinguishable from a heat signature of a ship engine, depending on your range from that signal and so on. Then you have all the stars and galaxies and so forth... The game work on abstraction and balance things which might not be realistic. But it is definitely not very realistic to use a linear scale for either passive or active scanners.

I'm not sure your premise for scanners picking up or not is true in real life. You pick up the echo of something and you might not know what it is (if anything at all) and the distance you pick it up depends on the current shape and angle that object is in correlation with the radar. Many military targets will have vastly different radar signatures depending on the angle it is detected at, i see no reason why this can't be true in space as well. You also need to identify targets from all the other debris that is out there in space.

I might also add that I have actually worked as a Radar operator in the Military for a year (about 20 years ago though), so I do know a thing or two about how it works.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I believe someone mentioned somewhere that Wealth isn't just money, but the overall military industrial capacity of a civilization: Goods, services, support facilities, etc. Having lots of wealth means your society has the capacity to remunerate the workers to work at your facilities, put them up to live, employing and supplying support staff, etc.

Exactly, it is a resource you can't really save for later, you either produce it and consume it now or you don't. The only thing you can save (more or less) are spare parts, food and clothes. You can't really save services and facilities need maintenance and is a tangible object that are more a drain on your economy than something you can save. Most economies are better of consuming those goods and services when they are there than just wasting them for nothing. Even food and spare parts will eventually be too old and saved food is not really high quality but more a survivability thing. Most of the things you can actually save are disaster equipment, not what I think of when I think of stored wealth.
 
The practical problem in the game is when you start with a relatively big population number in a conventional start. Try that if you haven't done it before. You will generally save huge amount of wealth, in fact so much it will never ever become a problem for you unless you really neglect it later on. Wealth mainly become a non issue.

To me this is a practical problem, not just a theoretical realism problem.

[alex_brunius]

Emphasis mine. I'm sorry but I don't think that's at all true, considering that there are plenty of massive scientific collaborative efforts. Some examples that come to mind are RHIC, CERN/LHC, T2K (and other neutrino experiments), various national laboratories (NIST, Argonne, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos) and space programs like NASA. It seems clear to me that not only does massive funding of single projects make some research faster but also it's the only way they are even possible. Admittedly those are physics examples but considering most of our in-game research revolves around the subject I believe the examples are appropriate.

In my opinion these are good example on where great project do have diminished capacity for total resources spent. You can't in general just spend twice the amount of resources and expect twice the amount of results, not if you already have the best and brightest working on a project to begin with.

The primary reason for this is administration, coordination and overhead.

If you have 2 teams / programmers / scientists working on the same stuff they need to coordinate in order to know what the other is doing and not do the work twice. This costs time and effort and on larger scale increases the needs of managers and administrators that can divide the work.

Just imagine your typical workday at big corporation X. How many hours each day to you spend on internal mailing, talk on the phone and attending meetings? ALL those hours are wasted coordination and would be unnecessary if you were running a one man show. Generally it is always true that the smaller the team the more effective it can be.

If anyone here claims they have solved this problem you should go out and contact any major corporation, because I suspect they would pay millions if not billions of dollars to anyone having solved the holy-grail of management!

[ShadowLop]

In regards to passive scanners in space there are quite allot of objects in space that are bright so identifying ships in space might not be as easy as you think. Even things like asteroids have heat signals and can be indistinguishable from a heat signature of a ship engine, depending on your range from that signal and so on. Then you have all the stars and galaxies and so forth... The game work on abstraction and balance things which might not be realistic. But it is definitely not very realistic to use a linear scale for either passive or active scanners.

I'm not sure your premise for scanners picking up or not is true in real life. You pick up the echo of something and you might not know what it is (if anything at all) and the distance you pick it up depends on the current shape and angle that object is in correlation with the radar. Many military targets will have vastly different radar signatures depending on the angle it is detected at, i see no reason why this can't be true in space as well. You also need to identify targets from all the other debris that is out there in space.

I might also add that I have actually worked as a Radar operator in the Military for a year (about 20 years ago though), so I do know a thing or two about how it works.

Let's say you're at your radar station and you see a ping. You don't really know what it is in the first ping, but the second sweep 5 seconds later shows it's moved 500m. That gives you the speed: 100m/second.
The ping delay says it's 20km away.
The Cross-section says it's 5m across, but you don't know much more than that.
While you've been figuring all this out, your station has turned on a high-power thermal and visual camera and aimed it at the ping.
The visual feed shows you a plane facing you and the thermal camera says it's rear is very very hot.

Would you think it's a flock of birds/clouds/radar ghost? Or would you think it's a plane?

When a contact is picked up you only know cross section (civilian starships may be long, but military ships would be spherical because efficiency, which means TCS would be constant), distance (triangulation off your multiple sensors) and that it most definitely is NOT natural. Intel gives it a name, not necessarily it's real name. It's only in the NEXT 5s that you get the speed, when you see it move. You know nothing else about it's capability until you see it do stuff.

When that plane appears on the radar, you don't know if it's loaded with fuel and passengers or bombs and missiles. If you don't have that particular model in your intel book, you won't know anything more than speed, distance and cross-section until you either shoot it or it shoots you, just like in Aurora.

The Sensors in Aurora wouldn't be just one satellite dish and a transmission pylon either. It would be multiple systems all interlinked together to give gravity/lidar readings as well as visual readings. The thermal sensors would probably use high-power thermal cameras instead of gravity/lidar of the active sensors. Strap all this to a future-tech supercomputer and you have yourself a system that could pick out a very hot and fast ship from the cosmic background with ease. Modern tech could do it, future-tech would definitely be able to.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Let's say you're at your radar station and you see a ping. You don't really know what it is in the first ping, but the second sweep 5 seconds later shows it's moved 500m. That gives you the speed: 100m/second.
The ping delay says it's 20km away.
The Cross-section says it's 5m across, but you don't know much more than that.
While you've been figuring all this out, your station has turned on a high-power thermal and visual camera and aimed it at the ping.
The visual feed shows you a plane facing you and the thermal camera says it's rear is very very hot.

Would you think it's a flock of birds/clouds/radar ghost? Or would you think it's a plane?

When a contact is picked up you only know cross section (civilian starships may be long, but military ships would be spherical because efficiency, which means TCS would be constant), distance (triangulation off your multiple sensors) and that it most definitely is NOT natural. Intel gives it a name, not necessarily it's real name. It's only in the NEXT 5s that you get the speed, when you see it move. You know nothing else about it's capability until you see it do stuff.

When that plane appears on the radar, you don't know if it's loaded with fuel and passengers or bombs and missiles. If you don't have that particular model in your intel book, you won't know anything more than speed, distance and cross-section until you either shoot it or it shoots you, just like in Aurora.

The Sensors in Aurora wouldn't be just one satellite dish and a transmission pylon either. It would be multiple systems all interlinked together to give gravity/lidar readings as well as visual readings. The thermal sensors would probably use high-power thermal cameras instead of gravity/lidar of the active sensors. Strap all this to a future-tech supercomputer and you have yourself a system that could pick out a very hot and fast ship from the cosmic background with ease. Modern tech could do it, future-tech would definitely be able to.

It does not really work like that in real life. You can't just know when you first detect something on radar is the factual maximum distance it could have been detected. It will depend on so many things. In reality you use multiple radar installations for a reason to triangular readings. You use multiple sources of aircraft with radar to increase the chances of detecting something etc... things that is not just a result of the curvature of the earth.

I don't think that Spherical shapes is the most efficient for all intents and purposes (in military application) it all depends on so many other factors where a spherical shaped object is not always the best option. I highly doubt that ships would be truly spherical in space in the future for many different reasons.

We also know very little what type of drive systems that Aurora actually use and how much thermal energy is actually released, so you can't just assume it is easy to detect. Perhaps ships use a Warp type engine where the heat energy is just a fraction of what a regular thrust engine would use.

In my opinion you are over simplifying how this would work.

Anyway any debate on the subject should be in another thread, not here.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Another thing that I personally would like to se is...

Crew & Task-force training

1. I would like for Crew to actually be replaced as time go on, currently crew only accumulates in your pool and people seem to live for ever and in service to their profession. I think this could also be tied in with you academy training level to some extent. Higher educated personnel should stay in service longer. Ships that are deployed for longer time periods (actual time deployed) should also rotate people more quickly. People are only rotated when the ship is at port at a colony with at least 10000 people.
This would make crew management a little more interesting and present another resource that you can actually manage and control. The more you use your ships the more crew you will also need to train. New crew should also mean less experienced crew.
Crew in your pool should also have a hard cap based on your training level and number of academies, this simulates that people will not stay in service for ever.

2. Crew that are on mission should gain slightly more experience than crew at port, if that is not already so. I think that ships in port should get much less training so that experience overall will slowly drop as crew are rotated in and out on the ship. Only ship that is on actual missions should gain experience overall.

3. Likewise Task-force training should not be permanent, it should drop of as ships are at port and as crew are rotated in and out of the ship. It should fall of faster on higher levels so 100% training will rarely last for long and at most you will have between 90-100% for highly coordinated fleets assets.

4. I think that the maintenance cost for ships should somehow increase with age and more based on how long since their last overhaul (based on factors such as average maintenance cycles).

5. Please let ships on task-force training automatically refuel and got to port to rest ships when any of them in the group reached 100% deployment time. It is a nightmare (without cheating) to train ships with very low deployment times such as 0.1 and 0.5 month deployment such as FAC and other gunboats.

In my opinion this would introduce a fairly realistic management (without being complex) of highly trained crew with good task-force coordination versus a high cost in academy training, wealth, resources and fuel costs. You might have a smaller part of your fleet in top notch combat readiness with high task-force training and skilled crew while a larger part act as your reserve with much lower task-force training and skilled crew.

The current model are somewhat static and once crew and ships are trained they just stay that way indefinitely until you dissolve them which if you upgrade carefully will almost never happen.

[ShadowLop]

A discussion on the benefits of the mechanics you suggest, in the thread it was suggested in? Of course it belongs elsewhere. </sarcasm>

It does not really work like that in real life. You can't just know when you first detect something on radar is the factual maximum distance it could have been detected. It will depend on so many things. In reality you use multiple radar installations for a reason to triangular readings. You use multiple sources of aircraft with radar to increase the chances of detecting something etc... things that is not just a result of the curvature of the earth.

Actually, it would. You would detect that object at the maximum distance you could detect that object. If you can't detect it further than that distance, they you didn't detect it while it was further out. Whether it's too small or masking you or your sensors are too crap, you detect it when you detect it and that's the max you could detect it at. Your radar net would detect the same plane at the same time no matter how many times it makes that flight path. Unless it adds/removes shielding or changes it's path, it'll give the same result every time.
Now, detection:
Based on your resolution and sensor strength that you KNOW, using the mathematical equations that your computer KNOWS, you know how far you SHOULD be able to see a ship of X size with each sensor. If that ship is smaller, or is using shielding to make itself seem smaller, then you WON'T pick it up until it's closer. But if something appears on your scanner, you can triangulate it off your own sensors (using multiple receivers on the same ship) or use the parallax of movement, to figure out it's much closer. Based on that, you can figure out how big the ship is (or appears to be) and at least where it is in relation to yourself.
One ship with multiple detection points sufficiently far apart can triangulate with itself, it wouldn't need multiple ships with independent sensors. Remember, these sensors are HUGE. My 80 res, billion km range sensor is 750 tonnes on it's own. The accompanying 129mkm res 1 sensor is another 750tonnes. That's 1500 tonnes of sensor equipment. Assuming that even 40-50% of that is the actual computers, imagine how many antennas you could put using 700 tonnes of light-weight, strong, future-tech materials? I'd put a transmitter for the ping and at least 4-6 antennas (probably on towers too) scattered around the ship. At the distance between ships in a single fleet, it's not enough to give substantial improvement over self-triangulation. The spotter of a sniper team is going to be pretty close to the sniper and they can triangulate fairly well, you don't need to be at crazy angles to triangulate.
What you are describing: using multiple radar stations, would equate to using multiple picket fleets several mkm(or bkm) out to increase coverage, which is a viable tactic. Having multiple ships in the same fleet with scanners would give no benefit unless the scanners are geared differently (AM vs AS).

I also never mentioned anything about curvature of the Earth.

I don't think that Spherical shapes is the most efficient for all intents and purposes (in military application) it all depends on so many other factors where a spherical shaped object is not always the best option. I highly doubt that ships would be truly spherical in space in the future for many different reasons.

A spherical shape doesn't need to worry about breaking along the long axis when making a sharp turn, or having large concentrations of mass swinging wildly during said turn. It also presents the smallest possible TCS at any angle (as opposed to just head-on) and provides maximum volume for mass. A slight elongation along the long axis may be beneficial (Or required to fit specialised equipment), but nothing too extreme otherwise you need to add extra lateral thrust pointing outwards to not snap your ship, which decreases efficiency. Since it has a high surface area to volume ratio, it also means less mass needs to be expended on armoring the same mass ship. It also means that the bridge and critical components have the same amount of armor from any direction, which reduces vulnerabilities. The more spherical, the better. This is ultimately roleplay though as I doubt Steve will ever want to change the code to track TCS from POV of individual objects.

We also know very little what type of drive systems that Aurora actually use and how much thermal energy is actually released, so you can't just assume it is easy to detect. Perhaps ships use a Warp type engine where the heat energy is just a fraction of what a regular thrust engine would use.

It's clearly a non-newtonian drive system (Duh), since the ship stops when it's shut off, but the exact mechanics are irrelevant, since we DO know how much thermal energy is released. Some maths:
My population is 2.6 billion. 4500 various factories, 1.8 million tonne shipyard capacity, various refineries, mines, support structures, etc.
Thermal output is 77500.

My Missile Cruiser has 2x4000EP Internal Confinement Fusion engines, 50% shielded for a total thrust of 8000.
They produce a thermal signature of 4000 units, so 8000 unshielded.
So we can presume that unshielded engines produce 1 thermal per EP.
How visible would my 13,500km/s, 30,000t object be?
5.16% of my colony above, or 10.32% unshielded. At a mass of 0.000000000000005 percent of that same colony.

If you were both sitting still, I suppose you could (maybe) mistake it for a star (If a very odd one). The second one of you moved though, the parallax would show it to be only a few million km away, or the multiple sensors on your hull triangulated between themselves could do the same even without movement.

The fact is, that the sensors as they are work just fine extrapolated from current tech and requiring multiple sensors on multiple ships to get better/more accurate readings is pointless and less realistic than a single ship doing all the work. You're welcome to use multiple fleets to get better coverage of an area, but within the sensor range, the mechanics are just fine as they are.

Unless you can find a new reason for using multiple identical scanners in a fleet, I'm done.

[CheaterEater]

In my opinion these are good example on where great project do have diminished capacity for total resources spent. You can't in general just spend twice the amount of resources and expect twice the amount of results, not if you already have the best and brightest working on a project to begin with.

What diminished capacity? There are zero other examples of some of these labs. There is no way to make them smaller. It's not spending twice the resource and getting twice the results, it's spending twice the resources to get any results. Once you have exhausted low-hanging fruit many fields require massively increased expenditures. The first "big" physics experiments could be done on a tabletop, then they took a building, then acres and now the LHC is several miles across. Projects get bigger, not smaller, and the research requires the increased expenditure. Either you build massive new facilities or upgrade old ones, but you don't create dozens of small facilities and expect big research projects to get completed. Ten 100 GeV accelerators do not equal a single 1 TeV accelerator.

The primary reason for this is administration, coordination and overhead.

If you have 2 teams / programmers / scientists working on the same stuff they need to coordinate in order to know what the other is doing and not do the work twice. This costs time and effort and on larger scale increases the needs of managers and administrators that can divide the work.

Just imagine your typical workday at big corporation X. How many hours each day to you spend on internal mailing, talk on the phone and attending meetings? ALL those hours are wasted coordination and would be unnecessary if you were running a one man show. Generally it is always true that the smaller the team the more effective it can be.

If anyone here claims they have solved this problem you should go out and contact any major corporation, because I suspect they would pay millions if not billions of dollars to anyone having solved the holy-grail of management!

We aren't talking about a small group of scientists here, large projects like RHIC, the LHC and T2K send data to thousands of collaborating scientists and directly employ hundreds (if not thousands) by themselves. If you can think of anyone who can single-handedly replace billions of dollars worth of projects and hundreds of thousands of scientist-hours, please, let me know so I can get them their Nobel Prizes as quickly as possible.

Here's the stat, straight from the game: A single lab employs one million people. Not one scientist, not a small team. Even if 1% of those "employed" are high-level scientists a single lab is roughly equivalent to the LHC project. We are already firmly in the realm of big science. A single laser might weigh in at hundreds of tons, a ship in the thousands or tens of thousands. We are beyond any single scientist. These specific scientists in the game are (I believe) at most directors of large projects that employ hundreds or thousands of scientists and might even represent a small team of scientific management. Why not limit the number of labs per scientist like the first research suggestion? Expensive lab management research could easily represent increased management resources to allow a directing team to control and combine the work of more labs. But reduced effectiveness with multiple "labs" (multiple labs could represent one larger lab)? I don't see any evidence to support that and plenty to refute it.

[sloanjh]

A discussion on the benefits of the mechanics you suggest, in the thread it was suggested in? Of course it belongs elsewhere. </sarcasm>

Steve uses the official suggestion and bug threads as "filing cabinets".  For a detailed/lengthy discussion of a particular suggestion, it's a good idea to move the discussion into a separate thread (that's referred to in the main one) so that other actual suggestions don't get lost in between the discussion posts.

If someone wants this discussion broken out into a new thread, say so and I or another moderator will pull out the appropriate posts....

John

[alex_brunius]

What diminished capacity? There are zero other examples of some of these labs. There is no way to make them smaller. It's not spending twice the resource and getting twice the results, it's spending twice the resources to get any results. Once you have exhausted low-hanging fruit many fields require massively increased expenditures. The first "big" physics experiments could be done on a tabletop, then they took a building, then acres and now the LHC is several miles across. Projects get bigger, not smaller, and the research requires the increased expenditure. Either you build massive new facilities or upgrade old ones, but you don't create dozens of small facilities and expect big research projects to get completed. Ten 100 GeV accelerators do not equal a single 1 TeV accelerator.

We aren't talking about a small group of scientists here, large projects like RHIC, the LHC and T2K send data to thousands of collaborating scientists and directly employ hundreds (if not thousands) by themselves. If you can think of anyone who can single-handedly replace billions of dollars worth of projects and hundreds of thousands of scientist-hours, please, let me know so I can get them their Nobel Prizes as quickly as possible.

Here's the stat, straight from the game: A single lab employs one million people. Not one scientist, not a small team. Even if 1% of those "employed" are high-level scientists a single lab is roughly equivalent to the LHC project. We are already firmly in the realm of big science. A single laser might weigh in at hundreds of tons, a ship in the thousands or tens of thousands. We are beyond any single scientist. These specific scientists in the game are (I believe) at most directors of large projects that employ hundreds or thousands of scientists and might even represent a small team of scientific management. Why not limit the number of labs per scientist like the first research suggestion? Expensive lab management research could easily represent increased management resources to allow a directing team to control and combine the work of more labs. But reduced effectiveness with multiple "labs" (multiple labs could represent one larger lab)? I don't see any evidence to support that and plenty to refute it.

The same rules apply for all businesses, regardless of size. Going from 1 million to 50 million employed will be just as bad as going from 10 to 500 employed.

The more people you have involved the more is lost to inefficiencies and waste. It is an irrefutable fact.

With a team of 100k in the same lab (assuming 90% is support staff) every department can focus on their own task/problem, with 50 labs of 5 million every task/problem need to be divided into 50 smaller tasks/problems that needs coordination between up to 50 labs to solve the problem. Coordination that was in no way present in the previous example with a single lab.

As I wrote, if have a solution to how to increase size of a team/business/project without waste or efficiency loss big business will pay you billions for it, because it would be revolutionary.

[CheaterEater]

The same rules apply for all businesses, regardless of size. Going from 1 million to 50 million employed will be just as bad as going from 10 to 500 employed.

The more people you have involved the more is lost to inefficiencies and waste. It is an irrefutable fact.

With a team of 100k in the same lab (assuming 90% is support staff) every department can focus on their own task/problem, with 50 labs of 5 million every task/problem need to be divided into 50 smaller tasks/problems that needs coordination between up to 50 labs to solve the problem. Coordination that was in no way present in the previous example with a single lab.

As I wrote, if have a solution to how to increase size of a team/business/project without waste or efficiency loss big business will pay you billions for it, because it would be revolutionary.

The point is not that there is inefficiency and waste associated with C3 overhead on larger projects, I readily admit to that. The point is that collaborations lead to specializations and economies of scale that lead to overall increased efficiency beyond what is lost. Here are some very relevant examples:

Factories exist because they are so much more incredibly efficient than single or small groups of workers. Everything like tool sharing, specialized training, task focus and knowledge transfers make them such great producers. Historically, manufacturing moved from single decentralized producers (cottage industry) to massive centralized factories employing hundreds or thousands. If these big factories were not as efficient the small-time artisans would have stayed in business.

Research programs oftentimes involve large collaborations for major projects to allow pooling of resources and specialization. Space programs employ specialists in each area to get things done. One group works on a dust collector, another on the magnetometer boom, a third the imaging equipment. You have engineers to build the rockets, launch control specialists, pilots and researchers (for manned spaceflight) and even janitors to clean up at the end of the day. Other large projects would be simply impossible without pooled resources. You don't build a rocket to go halfway to space and you don't halfway create a new particle. You must pass a minimum threshold that is oftentimes beyond any smaller groups.

Military work has become hugely consolidated. We have slowly moved from tribal warfare to city-states and feudal kingdoms to nation-states battling it out to mass conscription to permanent professional armies. They have become more and more centralized, more directly managed and more specialized. They have also become incredibly efficient and powerful as a result, even beyond technology's effects; compare some third-world warlord to any NATO power. Again, role specialization and economy of scale win out over bureaucracy.

All of these examples contain plenty of waste. But they are still much more efficient than the small groups for reasons beyond that.

[alex_brunius]

The point is not that there is inefficiency and waste associated with C3 overhead on larger projects, I readily admit to that. The point is that collaborations lead to specializations and economies of scale that lead to overall increased efficiency beyond what is lost. Here are some very relevant examples:

Specialization and increased overall efficiency due to improved technology that you are talking about here is handled in Aurora by the techs that improve research efficiency.

If you have the same level of technology, same level of equipment, then having 10 labs working on the same tech instead of 1 should not really be 10 times more effective.

CERN today has around 15000 employed (also including visiting scientists & engineers), compared to 1 million for a single research lab in Aurora. It is hard to imagine any situation where 1 million is not enough for even the largest research projects and experiments needed. Also remember that we already are very specialized due to the nature of Aurora ship building divided into components. Instead of researching an entire Carrier with everything on it you already divide it into dozens of projects. One research project can for example be researching a new missile engine component that will be used inside a missile, inside a launcher, inside a fighter, inside a carrier. It's hard to get more specialized then that.


It also seems you are mixing up alot of concepts here. Economy of Scale and Factory production then sure of course you are right that having one big assembly line instead of 10 small workshops employing the same amount is more effective.

But it doesn't work that way for Research, RnD and Product development. Every day you can see big companies buy up small upstarts with innovative technology and ideas, simply because they can't come up with those ideas themself, no matter if their RnD department is 1000 times larger. In a big company waste and as you put it C3 prevents you from seeing the big picture and making the big science breakthroughs.

If you ever see a big company buy a smaller rural workshop, it is because of their ideas, patents and innovative approaches, not because of their production assets.