Official Suggestion Thread for 5.20 or later

[CheaterEater]

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.

I would be leery of assigning numbers too closely to how work is done. The in-game numbers might include significant portions of the rest of the supply/research chain, such as a copper refiner which gets copper to a superconductor manufacturer which gets superconducting elements to the engineers who actually build and set up everything. I don't know the source of your number but I doubt it accounts for such things, while the in-game workforce very well could (and reasonably so, considering you can pick them up and move it around it has to be mostly self-contained).

In any case, I would be especially hesitant to try and predict the future sizes of large research collaborations. I doubt anyone can predict future research project sizes now (although we are rapidly approaching Aurora's default start date), much less once we throw in trans-newtonian materials, jump technology or alien artifacts. Can anyone guess how many people it would to support a long-term manned expedition to study jump points, including planet-bound support staff, ship manufacturers, probe constructors, launch facilities, upkeep and researcher training? That's just to collect the data, much less analyze and utilize it. For comparison, the Apollo program employed about 400,000 people at its peak according to NASA, and that was in the 60s/70s without new TN materials involved.

If research is so much better with small firms, why do DuPont and 3M exist? Why is NIST around, or Argonne, or CERN? I don't think these monolithic companies/labs grow large and then completely ossify, feeding themselves solely through acquisitions? You should check out Bell Labs especially, a longtime research area owned by various companies, responsible for such modern items as transistors and CCDs plus fundamental physics like the fractional quantum Hall effect. It's a shame Alcatel-Lucent shut down their fundamental research division considering how much came out of there. There are plenty of other examples if you would like more.

Research is not a zero-sum game. The fact that companies acquire others does not mean the big company failed, only that they saw something they needed in the smaller lab. I have never stated that a small lab could not produce useful research. I merely stated that large labs are at least as good as small labs on average. I think there is a wealth of evidence and specific examples to support that assertion, including many projects that would be outright impossible without large teams of researchers.

*edit* I should add that it might be best to split a research discussion off so as not to clog the suggestion thread, especially if we keep up the debate.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Ok, for the sake of sanity and keeping this thread clean I started a new thread on this topic here...  

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,6948.0.html

[NihilRex]

Any chance Binaries can get their own Grav survey slots, and chance at having a JP link to the primary?

I know LPs help with this, but I have a system with none, and the travel distance to the planets at the binary one way is 1312days at 2k speed.

This would also make binary and trinary systems more valuable in general, since they'd have more JPs in them...

I guess the hook here would be to make Survey location generation tied to stars, and not to systems...

[waresky]

Mineral Query like as "Geologycal Report" windows BUT for Mineral STOCK up the Planetary Surface (>Colony or Mining Colony obviously only) LIST :

Example ? : "how damned SORIUM ive been Mined in my Imperium and WHERE is for send a stupid Cargo Group and back home???"...

Ive been missed those infos...for years..

[Haji]

I'd love an option to subsidize a planet. When a planet has been subsidized it has more money to pay for transport of infrastructure and colonists, making shipping lines more willing to move to said planet, no matter the distance. That would allow a certain measure of control (one that is not free however) as to which planet is developed the most by shipping lines. Right now they are mostly concentrating on the nearest target with only very sporadic, and single ships moving to other colonies.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I would like the option to create "fake" bodies on the map so we can place space stations in the middle of nowhere. This body would be like a stationary planet where you can not have any population and can be used to place maintenance/recreational bases and you can drop some mineral there. They could be restricted to drop minerals on them, but I don't think it is so important, abusing them would just be weird.

In essence they would act as if they were a planet but they are not, just a point in space intended to be used for the purpose of building a space station. This would purely be for role-play and if someone abuse it to create ammo/fuel/mineral dumps in space without ships or bases its their problem.

They could also be used to create mineral ore bases where your cargo haulers can come and drop of and pick up minerals as if it was a planet, you just place a station there with a large cargo hold to act as a midway station. You can now have a hub in  system from where you distribute all the ore and are not relying on a planet or asteroid.

I just want to be able to finally build real space stations and I think this could be a simple solution to that problem.

[Alfapiomega]

I would like the option to create "fake" bodies on the map so we can place space stations in the middle of nowhere. This body would be like a stationary planet where you can not have any population and can be used to place maintenance/recreational bases and you can drop some mineral there. They could be restricted to drop minerals on them, but I don't think it is so important, abusing them would just be weird.

In essence they would act as if they were a planet but they are not, just a point in space intended to be used for the purpose of building a space station. This would purely be for role-play and if someone abuse it to create ammo/fuel/mineral dumps in space without ships or bases its their problem.

They could also be used to create mineral ore bases where your cargo haulers can come and drop of and pick up minerals as if it was a planet, you just place a station there with a large cargo hold to act as a midway station. You can now have a hub in  system from where you distribute all the ore and are not relying on a planet or asteroid.

I just want to be able to finally build real space stations and I think this could be a simple solution to that problem.

I strongly support this post.

[Paul M]

This is minor request.  The little check box for "auto turns" gets a fair bit of use when the NPRs fight...I set the game for 5 min and let it auto advance.  I can see when the step hits 5 min that the NPR battle is done with.  The trick at that point is to click on the box to remove the checkmark...while the mouse curser is now a rotating circle with no obvious "point" to click with.   Could this be turned into something more aimable to the rotating circle like button or even just a bigger check box?

[alex_brunius]

This is minor request.  The little check box for "auto turns" gets a fair bit of use when the NPRs fight...I set the game for 5 min and let it auto advance.  I can see when the step hits 5 min that the NPR battle is done with.  The trick at that point is to click on the box to remove the checkmark...while the mouse curser is now a rotating circle with no obvious "point" to click with.   Could this be turned into something more aimable to the rotating circle like button or even just a bigger check box?

Why not instead have a similar autoturn function that automatically stops when the maximum selected time increment is being applied once or twice?

[Paul M]

Why not instead have a similar autoturn function that automatically stops when the maximum selected time increment is being applied once or twice?

That would also be good...I'd love for something other than clicking, waiting and hoping the click was in the right place.  I don't know about other people but the 5 min trick is how I get through NPR battles with minimal hassle.  Looking at it you have enough space for a button.  You could replace the Auto Turns text with it and move the text for the fixed interval to below the box.

[Jorgen_CAB]

If possible could you please take a look at how ground combat can be improved between allied factions. Currently this does not work at all and it is a pain in the a$$ to manage in multiple-nation earth scenarios with swapping ground forces between allies to engage an enemy and so on.

I would simply give two allied faction some efficiency modifier and combine their forces for both offence and defence, say they operate with 80% efficiency when fighting together in an alliance. There perhaps should be a diplomatic option for ground operation agreement in addition to the normal ally agreement.

[joeclark77]

Feature request: miles instead of kilometers.
Give us a toggle to choose whether we want ship speeds and distance measures in miles or kilometers.

[swarm_sadist]

Feature request: miles instead of kilometers.
Give us a toggle to choose whether we want ship speeds and distance measures in miles or kilometers.

While I hate the Imperial system of measurement, it does make sense considering there is an option in the System View (F9) to convert escape velocity, temperature, diametre and distance into Imperial. It just needs to expand outside that window.

It would probably be impossible to do entirely, considering how much is hard-coded in metric. Steve (a Brit) would have to change everything from the design window, to the system map, all to appease the American consumers of his free game.

[Norseman4]

This is especially obvious in the game setup and game info entry forms, but seems to be present in all data entry forms.

Tab-stops are way out of order.

For instance on the Create New Game form, put the cursor in the Game Name textbox then hit tab, and follow the bouncing cursor.

I'm not sure about the language or the IDE that this was developed in, but Visual Studio (VS2010+ I think) gives a simple way to alter a form's tab-stops.  Open a form with controls on it in VS, Then click on View / Tab Order.  At this point, every control with a tab-stop has the tab-ID in blue, now just click on the controls in the order that the cursor should proceed to when you press tab.  When they are in the order that you want, click on View / Tab Order again.

[22367rh]

This is especially obvious in the game setup and game info entry forms, but seems to be present in all data entry forms. 

Tab-stops are way out of order. 

For instance on the Create New Game form, put the cursor in the Game Name textbox then hit tab, and follow the bouncing cursor. 

I'm not sure about the language or the IDE that this was developed in, but Visual Studio (VS2010+ I think) gives a simple way to alter a form's tab-stops.   Open a form with controls on it in VS, Then click on View / Tab Order.   At this point, every control with a tab-stop has the tab-ID in blue, now just click on the controls in the order that the cursor should proceed to when you press tab.   When they are in the order that you want, click on View / Tab Order again.

There is no easy way of doing this in the VB6 IDE from what I remember from my VB6 years. 
He'd have to manually assign the order one by one for each control.

This would eat up a reasonable amount of time and am sure Steve has plenty of bugs & features that players would prefer time being spent on.