Major Changes to Crew Accomodation in v5.70 and Introduction of Crew Morale

[Five]

Or have some form of transport ship to rotate crew out with...for bases/ warp point def and such to avoid a crew penalty.

Also it would be nice if leaders did affect crew morale too.

Alot of great changes, this next installment may be more of a 6.0 via a 5.7...lol

[chrislocke2000]

Have to say that this is looking great. Previously I've waiting until I've exhausted a current campaign before installing the new version but in this case I think I will be dropping it like a hot brick.

Tracking morale opens up a host of further possibilities for consideration. Much as you have with ground units at the moment you could allow for a morale rating to move above 100%:

- Quality of officers on ship
- Presence of central command and control in a system.

This could then be adversely affected by current events:

- Duration of tour / over crowding etc as already covered
- Loss of officers on ship
- Loss of the bridge (could have a new secondary bridge component)
- Loss of ships in TG / system
- Other casualties on board

As a result, well trained and experienced crews will be able to take a certain level of problems without it affecting their performance whilst less well trained / lead crews will more rapidly lose effectiveness.

[chrislocke2000]

For commercial ships and bases maybe a more arbitrary solution could be used. Create a new planet based structure called something like commercial support facility. This structure represents facilities for the rotation of crew, transport shuttles etc and is rated at number of crew supported. You build multiple ones of these to support you commercial vessels. As long as they are adequate then no need to check for morale issues etc. These could work on a sector by sector basis for testing sufficiency.

In order to differentiate between freighters etc and those towed stations you could have a check box in vessel design that sets that vessel to rely on the commercial facilities, this option would not however be available for non commercial ships and might not be available to ships with engines included in the design.

[Cocyte]

A orbital habitat should help with that its anyway damn big so a cryo-unit for 10k people will be no big issue.

The OH is a good solution in the case of terraformers and asteroid miners, but it won't work 'as it' for the sorium harvesters (impossible to set a gas giant as a colony, so the OH will not be taken into account).
You can still put the OH in orbit of one of the moon of the gas giant and rotate the harvesting ships sometime.

[wilddog5]

What about a large recreational facility 5K tons or bigger in size that reduces the rate of morale loss eg 5K module reduces it by 10% (for recreation ships as part of the fleet train or civilian ships) to 25K which reduces by 95% (for gas giant refinerys/other stations) with verations inbetween that can be researched?

fleets using these have to have the ships in the fleet for them to opperate and they cause a increace in order action time (simulates transfer from rec ships to combat units)

(figures are arbertary and may or may not be used (just like the sugestion itself really  ))

[Garfunkel]

Just make it like maintenance - crew morale is not affecting Commercial designs. That way almost all the problems go away.

Awesome changes, can't wait for 5.70 to come out!

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Personally I would up the shore leave minimum to 50,000 or 100,000... thats about what you need for a modern town with decent nightlife in my experience.  ++Just as importantly, that's a very orbitally habitable number. ^_^

[xeryon]

As an offshoot, Orbitals with proper crew rec areas shouldn't suffer from deployment morale issues.  The staff is enough quantity itself to support myriad recreational activities without needing shore leave.  The orbital itself would be a shore leave destination for ship crew.

[Lav]

Personally I would up the shore leave minimum to 50,000 or 100,000. . .  thats about what you need for a modern town with decent nightlife in my experience.   ++Just as importantly, that's a very orbitally habitable number.  ^_^

I'd agree - you need larger populations for the anonymity necessary for brothels, illegal drug trade, rows of bars lining the docks waiting for sailors. . .  I suppose historically any land leave was welcome once you were stuck on a boat in the ocean for half a year or more, though!

[sloanjh]

Just make it like maintenance - crew morale is not affecting Commercial designs. That way almost all the problems go away.

Awesome changes, can't wait for 5.70 to come out!

I REALLY like this idea - I've been worried about the micromanagement that would need to be associated with my small WP picket stations.  The "realistic" way to manage it would be to allow crew rotation through the "CFN", but since that's not representable in Aurora mechanics it's easier just to ignore crewing for commercials.  NOTE: In order to avoid exploits, you should probably require something like 3 month's worth of berthing space in order for a design to be classified as commercial (and avoid the morale degradations).

John

[HaliRyan]

I'd kind of like to see an option to automate your ships, removing a need for crew at all so that we could design true automated weapons platforms in addition to the minefields we can already make. Maybe something like double the space requirement or 10x cost on all modules to support their complete automation and self-repair ability?

[Girlinhat]

Supercomputers could definitely do the job.  It would have to have reasonably sized drawbacks though, I think that would mainly be the cost of the exotic components used to build the computer, the size of the coolers needed to keep it running - and by extension the slightly larger thermal signature, and the inability or very low ability to repair damage.  This would allow for certain things while discouraging other things.  For instance, you could mount guns on a platform to deploy as semi-permanent defense around asteroids being mined, or produce some very low-upkeep freighters.  But, at the same time a true combat ship would work better with a traditional crew and large scale projects would need to be almost entirely crewed.

The fun would come in the mixtures, of course.  If the computers counted towards crew while not requiring life support, then you could, for instance, put a large passive sensor buoy out in orbit of Pluto, with enough automation to keep itself running but also with one human occupant with supplies to last 10+ years, with the purpose of maintaining small breakdowns that the computer can't fix.  Or, on the other side, have computer-assisted manned warships, bolstering their human crew with some computer aid.

[bean]

Supercomputers could definitely do the job.  It would have to have reasonably sized drawbacks though, I think that would mainly be the cost of the exotic components used to build the computer, the size of the coolers needed to keep it running - and by extension the slightly larger thermal signature, and the inability or very low ability to repair damage.  This would allow for certain things while discouraging other things.  For instance, you could mount guns on a platform to deploy as semi-permanent defense around asteroids being mined, or produce some very low-upkeep freighters.  But, at the same time a true combat ship would work better with a traditional crew and large scale projects would need to be almost entirely crewed.

The fun would come in the mixtures, of course.  If the computers counted towards crew while not requiring life support, then you could, for instance, put a large passive sensor buoy out in orbit of Pluto, with enough automation to keep itself running but also with one human occupant with supplies to last 10+ years, with the purpose of maintaining small breakdowns that the computer can't fix.  Or, on the other side, have computer-assisted manned warships, bolstering their human crew with some computer aid.

Increase the thermal signature?  Over that of keeping a human-habitable volume warm?  No way.
Actually, automation is very easy.  A ship is fly-by-wire anyway, so remote control is not a big deal.  Damage control is a legitimate issue, of course.
Though I really doubt that a single person will be very happy after 10 years alone.  Also, the life support system is likely the most failure-prone part.

That said, I definitely support automation, and am also looking forward to 5.7.  And this may have been answered above, but what about troops?  Or prisoners?

[Eseraith]

Instead of Computerized automation I would rather see the introduction of organic technologies that allow for the construction of living parts that would not require maintenance or crew but would require the presence of "brains" organic components that control any living parts of the ship.
At low levels this would lead to hybrid ships that are mostly Human crewed but contain a few organic components
At high levels a race could move to having entirely organic ships that essentially become new species of organisms that serve what ever race created them.

In ether case however whether automation is gained from computerization or from organic technology I feel that it would be most if the only way to gain the technologies required was to capture and dismissible the relevant spoiler ships starswarm for organic technology and percursers which are entirely robotic ships

[Sloshmonger]

So, what happens to crews if you stop at foreign colonies of over 10,000? I'm assuming that hostile NPRs will greet all shore leave with heavy weapons, but friendly and possibly neutral populations may be receptive.