questions (on crew, fuel range, etc.)

[Nibelung44 (OP)]

Hey!

A new broadside of questions please  

1. crew rating and efficiency. Is crew rating used for everything and more? Not only in combat but on unload time (so would be of use for civs ships) or extraction speed if a remote mining ship?

2. speaking of these, do I need one commander with a mining bonus for each ship doing remote mining or one in the task group is enough? If I have a task force, will it cumulate with the 1/4 ratio?

3. collapsing display of TG around a planet. I thought this bug was fixed, you know where TGs leave gaps (blank line). How can I clean this display?

4. How to determine the current range of a ship? I can get the nominal range with 100% fuel, but what about actual ships with only a fraction of this fuel?

5. can somebody explain me (or point me on an infos) how to make my 50+ fighters fight almost automatically an enemy task group? I'm a bit lost admittedly... Will the procedure be different if I handled FACs? I stopped building FACs because it was a nightmare to handle for me.

6. Is it possible to build a fighter without fire control that will launch missiles with active sensor?

Thanks a lot.

[sublight]

1) Neither moral nor crew grade appears to influence loading times or extraction rates.

2) Regrettably, each ship uses only the ship commander's bonus rather than sharing the task group commander's bonuses. Commander bonus are applied on top of any task force bonus.

3) 

4) Unlike real life rocketry Aurora fuel use is linear. Thus Range_Remaining = Max_Range x Percent_Fuel.

5) The long answer needs someone with a copy of Aurora running to reference.
The short answer is that only auto-targeting is possible via the auto-target checkbox in the combat assignment window. I'm not aware of any way to automate fighter movement for seek-destroy type work.

6) It is not legitimately possible to build a ship with missile launchers but no fire control. If you did stumble on a bug that allows this then the fighter would only be able to launch guided missiles targetting its own position using the 'launch at' order.

[Nibelung44 (OP)]

2. I misunderstand your sentence sorry. Only the ship commander bonus will apply, or will it apply plus we get 1/4 of the TF bonus, for mining?

3. When you get a list of TG names on a planet (in yellow), there are spaces (missing lines), which are in fact the names of the civs TG. Any possibility to fix that?

4. Yeah ok, but I need to fire my calculator to see my remaining range? There is no indication anywhere?

thanks!

7. can a civ ship harbors fighters in hangars or can a military ship harbors civ ships in hangars? I guess I can find the costly way though.

[ddblackhawk]

2) You get the ship commander bonus.  On top of that you get a percentage of the Task Force bonus.  I'm not sure what this percentage is though.
3) I haven't come across a way of getting rid of the gaps, I am interested in if this is possible.
4) Nope 
7) Not sure if you're asking about civilian ships (used by shipping lines) or commercial ships you build yourself but... Adding a Hanger or Boat Bay to a ship design turns it into a Military design, so you can't have a commercial ship with a hanger.  On the other hand if you have a ship with a Hanger deck if you have enough capacity you can put anything into it.

[Nibelung44 (OP)]

thanks. About 4, you can see the remaining range with the fuel window. Not more handy that using a calc, but its there...

About the fuel window, why it is listing the fuel of civ ships. That's already quite tempting to syphon them from the misc tab of ships btw

Another question: are scientists more prone to get experience where researching? This is what I thought, but now I'm not too sure. My scientists even when not put on a project learn quite a lot. I would prefer the former, it would mean that you have to give a scientist at least one lab...

[MarcAFK]

It lists the fuel of civilian ships so you can check if the civ fuel harvesters are worth getting fuel from, I have to assume that if you steal fuel from any other civ ship you would need to pay for it.but as far as i know civ ships don't even use fuel.

[Paul M]

The civillian fuel is only bought from harvesters and only if you use the "refuel from" order, if you use the misc tab you do infact steal it.

I think that scientists who are project leaders increase their skill rating faster than if they are not doing anything but I am not absolutely certain of this.  I do know that my scientists that were gainfully employed ended up with the highest ratings compared to others not employed when they retired.  I split up my research since I need it all anyway and for refit purposes it is better to have 3 systems ready for a single refit than to do 3 refits of a single system.   

Also I'm not sure if this was sorted out in 6.20 but the range shown in the 6.10 is wrong, I think Steve was applying the wrong fuel use modifier.  There is a panel that will show you how much fuel each ship has and the corresponding range it is the button with fuel drums on it.  That is best used to spot if a ship is getting low in fuel as in 6.10 at least the numbers for remaining range are all garbage.

[Nibelung44 (OP)]

Thanks Paul.

What exactly does 'fleet operation' for a leader?

If I don't play with inexperienced fleet penalties, what are the leader stats that are not relevant?

Is Initiative that important? I'm unsure how it works, is it that for 2 objects of same speed, the one with higher initiative move second? If this is that, then this seems not very significant.

[gharad]

For initiative, I assume that what it means is which fleet moves next within a given increment.  Useful for fleets following each other I believe -- if fleet A is chasing fleet B and fleet B changes course:

If fleet A has a higher initiative, it performs a course change after fleet B's, thus cutting into fleet B's course (and getting closer).

If fleet B has a lower initiative, it performs a course change before fleet B's.

[Hawkeye]

Not only for course changes.

Basicly, Aurora moves fleets in a "I go - you go" manner.

Lets assume you have a beam fleet, that you set to keep a distance of, say 100,000 km, so your ships are in range of the enemy, while the enemies ships, which have a shorter range, will stay out of range and the enemy fleet is set to move to a range of 50,000km, so it can bring _its_ weapons to bear.

If your TG senior officer has a lower Fleet Operation skill than the enemy, then your fleet will move first (in this case, to a distance of 100,000km) and then the enemy fleet will move to 50,000km.

If, on the other hand, your TG senior officer has a higher Fleet Operations skill than the enemie´s, the enemy TG will first close to 50,000km, then your TG will move back to 100,000km again and you can blast the enemy with impunity.

[ddblackhawk]

I've always got initiative confused, but what you're saying is that if your fleet has a higher initiative set then they move last? Is that right?

[Hawkeye]

Correct