Towing Asteroids to use as OWP

[alex_brunius]

We're used to the dichotomy between a harbor/naval base and a ship.  Harbors are fundamentally different than ships, but space stations are just ships without engines. But we have inertia cancellation and artificial gravity (presumably).  We can put engines on a space station without even worrying about structural factors.

You're right though that we can't really build what people want, which is giant space military space stations to guard jump points.  It's just not practical with maintenance rules

Various interpretations of self-maintenance modules have been proposed, I assume it's something on Steve's long term 'look at' list.

I mostly agree. But a space station is built to be deployed for much more extended times and also possible to keep building and adding modules while deployed, and while the station does have engines it's more for minor adjustments to keep a "stationary" orbit.

I think these are some of the most important properties that sets it appart from a spaceship.

[Thundercraft]

...I think these are some of the most important properties that sets it appart from a spaceship.

I agree. Modularity is important. And as long as maintenance is still a big issue, building ship "space stations" is impractical.

To be realistic, space stations should have some maintenance requirements. But I'm thinking they should not require quite as much or as regular maintenance as starships, what with the latter having huge engines and powerplants to move around at high speeds, traversing through jump points, etc. Starships would be much more complicated and go through a lot of extreme stresses on a regular basis.

Also, I'd really like to see small, un-manned weapons platforms. You know, like "Star-Wars" type space-based weapons systems. It seems downright silly to build something like the Jump Gate Defence "Base":

Imagine the crew of 15 sat there for years on end, waiting for their one chance to fire their 4 missiles and then probably perish. . .   

[Conscript Gary]

One could argue that a sufficiently-large buoy would count as such, though with less of the targeting finesse

[alex_brunius]

The same thing can be said about designing a 5 crew fighter with low speed and long range that can cruise for months and years. It is allowed to design such a craft today in Aurora as long as you have enough crew space.

Perhaps also there needs to be a cap on maximum allowed deploy time aswell for small crews, sitting isolated in a small space alone or with 5 others for years has proven to be mentally demanding driving people crazy.

It could for example scale of amount of crew so your allowed to set a maximum of 1 month deployment time per crew member (for both ships and space stations). Some examples:

10 crew = 10 months
100 crew =  8.3 years maximum allowed deploy time.
1000 crew = 83 years maximum allowed deploy time.

Another cool option would be if we could research AI/Computer techs and instead of crew add automated computer systems to smaller craft/drones fulfilling such roles as jumpgate guards.