Aurora 4x
VB6 Aurora => Newtonian Aurora => Topic started by: PTTG on December 02, 2011, 03:33:47 PM
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Current hyperjump mechanics:
Ship sets course and speed towards destination star. This achieved, and once outside of hyper limit, the ship engages drive, accelerating to at very least 2500 times the speed it had at the moment of activation and departing the physical universe.
When the ship reappears at its destination, it produces a drive flare (detectable by EM sensors), and may suffer brief "sensor blindness", with the worst performing drives causing this effect for 36 hours, although compromising some efficiency for stealth is quite easy- military drives can make much smaller flares and avoid sensor blindness.
What I don't like is sensor blindness. While certainly effective at balancing massive civilian ships with small military ones, it seems a bit off.
While the jump flare makes sense, why not have a much shorter "power drain" state instead of the blindness, where a ship takes somewhere between a few seconds and several minutes (depending on the crew, and the type of engine) to simply get all systems back to full power after the draining conditions of the jump. Additionally, before a jump can occur, the ships must charge the drive, consuming fuel and taking some time before the jump can be made. A civilian ship might take a day or two to fully charge, then take ten minutes to reactivate the maneuvering thrusters, sensors, ect, on the other side. A military drive could ready for a jump in hours or less, and only take a second or two to get the lights on.
The options this would give just for some tactical potentials- ordering your ships to charge jump drives immediately, or have them stay discharged to save fuel, for example. Also, it means that you can't simply fly straight through a series of lined-up systems with nearly no fuel usage- every jump requires some amount of fuel beyond merely correcting the course and maintaining speed.
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Being unable to jump for a couple of days isn't much of penalty for a couple of reasons. Firstly, this isn't like Standard Aurora where you have to go through a chain of systems. If you want to go to a system on the far side of the galaxy, you can go just go straight there. You don't need to travel through the intervening systems. Therefore if you re-enter normal space you are very likely going to be staying for a while. An exception may be some sort of long range scouting expedition without stopping to survey but the chances are that nearby stars are not likely to be neatly lined up so you will have to spend quite a lot of time changing course. Secondly, being unable to 'escape' for two days isn't a major disadvantage. Partly because it will likely take any defending forces more than two days to reach you, unless you appear on top of them, and partly because it will take a while to decelerate and reverse course or alter course to another system before you can jump anyway.
However, on the other hand I am not a great fan of the sensor blindness idea either. It was just the best I could come up with at the time.
Your post has suggested a couple of options though. Perhaps the 'no jump until recharge' might work anyway but with longer timescales. Perhaps one day for the 'military FTL drive' end of the spectrum and ten days or longer for the commercial FTL drive, although the disadvantage there is that it would make it difficult for commercial ships to support military operations. Or the power drain idea, but with longer effects. The main engines are offline for an extended period after a jump - a few minutes for military up to several hours or even a couple of days for the engines of commercial ships to be available. They will be on a ballistic trajectory until they recover but again the issue is the ability of commercial ships to work with military ones.
Something else I have been considering is the 'Lost in Space' option. The chance of catastrophic failure in hyperspace could be based on the size multiplier of the FTL Drive. Maybe 0.1% or lower for one extreme and 3-5% for the other extreme. I doubt most players would risk military ships on the latter range of chance, but something like a terraformer or harvester that didn't jump very often, or a less expensive ship like a freighter would be an acceptable risk. It would also serve as a way of pruning back commercial shipping lines as civilian ships would be lost over time. In fact, maybe the age of a ship or the number of previous jumps or the time since overhaul, would affect the chance of being lost in hyperspace.
Steve
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That would make the game very similar to Warhammer 40.000. Which is an incredibly good thing, I must add! The only thing we miss is the ability for a ship to arrive before leaving. ;D
I don't really think even a ten-day penalty would matter at all. Even in Standard Aurora, my commercial ships sometimes only make a jump every 15-20 days depending on the size of the system. Now imagine everything being slower and even having to decelerate, and you have much longer times now.
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I'd just like to add my two cents about a 'Lost in (hyper)Space' mechanic. I'm a bit leery of the idea because the possibility of losing a ship wholesale to what is pretty much random chance just doesn't sit well with me. This may be a bit knee-jerk - after all, bad luck may cause a slow ship to jump into a black hole system or straight into a jump point blockade in the current Aurora. Still, though, this leads to the possibility of ships being lost on completely routine travel between systems which just feels like a sort of irritating tax on resources.
That said, I do love the idea in a narrative fashion - tales of ships lost to unknown circumstances in an unpredictable travel medium is neato, and the WH40k vibe is hard not to love. In fact, it might be sort of interesting to have the chance lead to a handful of different occurrences - maybe the ship somehow arrives back in the system it left from, or a random system (probably in some relation to the departure or destination system) or something like that.
It also strikes me that it'd be really cool - though likely too much trouble with the code base - to have another 'monster' race (ala Precursor/Swarm/Invader) that interdicts ships in hyperspace, dragging them back into real space somewhere between stars (creating a temporary system with no celestial bodies in it; or heck, maybe a system (or chance thereof) that contains a brown dwarf or rogue planet?). They then proceed to munch (or attempt to munch) whatever they interdicted. That'd potentially add some gameplay to the phenomenon.
In either case, it might be nice to make it an option like the overhauls and gates on jump points and such.
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So how about a compromise? You have a small chance to get "lost in space" when you jump to unfamiliar systems that decreases with successive trips as safe hyperspace routes are mapped?
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I'd love to have NPR Ghost Ships :D
Given the way Aurora plays though I'm not a big fan of random ship losses in travel. Mainly, it can take a lot of time and effort organizing military fleets or building asteroid harvesters and then you get screwed randomly. It can be really hard to recover from that in some situations.
I'm not sure sensor blindness or recharge or any other mechanism will matter much given the difficult defenders will have in 'pouncing' on any arrivals. I think the tightness of the random distribution on arrival is a much better differentiation between military and civilian drives. Is it really a big deal that commercial ships cant operate well with military ones anyway? I mean that's kind of the point.
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Arrival accuracy is a big concern for military vessels. In fact, it seems reasonable that inaccurate drives could be dangerous for military groups that want to arrive in close formation.
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Arrival accuracy is a big concern for military vessels. In fact, it seems reasonable that inaccurate drives could be dangerous for military groups that want to arrive in close formation.
A squadron will always arrive together as that is the idea of the squadron size tech line. Different squadrons could be widely scattered depending on the survey status of the destination system
Steve
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I'm not sure sensor blindness or recharge or any other mechanism will matter much given the difficult defenders will have in 'pouncing' on any arrivals. I think the tightness of the random distribution on arrival is a much better differentiation between military and civilian drives. Is it really a big deal that commercial ships cant operate well with military ones anyway? I mean that's kind of the point.
I agree with regard to the difficulty of finding a mechanic that will penalise a ship or squadron on arrival. Unlike jump points where a couple of minutes of downtime can be fatal, it is likely to take several days for defenders to intercept new arrivals, that is why I was considering some form of in-transit penalty.
In terms of commercial operating with military, it is true that taking commercial ships into battle is not generally a good idea. However, especially in the type of long range ops that will be necessary with the FTL model, it is likely that commercial ships such as tankers and supply ships may be operating with a military force. On the other hand, I guess the FTL model also means those commercial ships would likely be in a different squadron and may well arrive a long distance from any military squadrons so they whether they have compatible penalties may be moot anyway.
Steve
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I'd just like to add my two cents about a 'Lost in (hyper)Space' mechanic. I'm a bit leery of the idea because the possibility of losing a ship wholesale to what is pretty much random chance just doesn't sit well with me. This may be a bit knee-jerk - after all, bad luck may cause a slow ship to jump into a black hole system or straight into a jump point blockade in the current Aurora. Still, though, this leads to the possibility of ships being lost on completely routine travel between systems which just feels like a sort of irritating tax on resources.
That said, I do love the idea in a narrative fashion - tales of ships lost to unknown circumstances in an unpredictable travel medium is neato, and the WH40k vibe is hard not to love. In fact, it might be sort of interesting to have the chance lead to a handful of different occurrences - maybe the ship somehow arrives back in the system it left from, or a random system (probably in some relation to the departure or destination system) or something like that.
It also strikes me that it'd be really cool - though likely too much trouble with the code base - to have another 'monster' race (ala Precursor/Swarm/Invader) that interdicts ships in hyperspace, dragging them back into real space somewhere between stars (creating a temporary system with no celestial bodies in it; or heck, maybe a system (or chance thereof) that contains a brown dwarf or rogue planet?). They then proceed to munch (or attempt to munch) whatever they interdicted. That'd potentially add some gameplay to the phenomenon.
I like the idea of a powerful monster race in hyperspace (which is very WH40k :)). Perhaps the penalty for the drive would be that the size multiplier is used as a chance of being intercepted by the 'hyperspace race'. Large multipliers means the hyperdrive is cutting design corners and has a much larger signature in hyperspace, acting as a beacon to the hyperspace race. This interception could take several forms.
1) An amount of damage from an unknown source hits the ship and is assessed on exit into normal space
2) Same as 1) except that the ship appears in normal space midway between the start and destination. I would place them at the appropriate distance from the nearest star system. They would be on one of the existing system maps but just a LONG way from the primary.
3) Same as 1) except the ship appears in normal space in another nearby system within a reasonable distance of the primary
4) The ship is boarded in hyperspace and has to fight off the invading force or be destroyed. Not sure how I would handle this given the lack of player information on hyperpscae so maybe the ship would fall into normal space as well.
5) The crew is driven insane by whatever they encounter is hyperspace and the ship refuses to obey orders. In effect it becomes a renegade.
6) In all the above cases, there is a chance that one or more ships of the hyperspace race will follow the affected ship into our dimension.
7) Whatever else I can come up with :)
In fact, rather than a new race. A redesigned Invader could be the hyperspace race and that is how they enter our dimension rather than via wormholes. That way, the probable number of Invaders would be based on the amount of hyperspace travel. Once they arrive in our dimension, their mission is to kill everyone and destroy everything. I could still have limits on ship size so more powerful Invaders appears later in the game
In either case, it might be nice to make it an option like the overhauls and gates on jump points and such.
It can't really be an option if that is the only penalty for oversized jump drives. Otherwise, no one would ever design anything but jump drives with the maximum multiplier. Although maybe the hyperspace race could be an option, just like the current invaders, and they have nothing to do with FTL drives. I could find a different mechanic for FTL drives and the optional hyperspace race would have a tiny chance to intercept any FTL jump.
Steve
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Well actually i like option 1 and more then that i would like it if we could exit hyperspace at a specified galactic map coordinate. I mean its just a patch of (mostlikely) empty space anyway so its not that hard on the database. An hyperspace-interdictor tech (only obtainable from invader wrecks?) would be interresting for this and would lend itself to pirating.
Another idea would be using the "jumpflare" a bit different. Instead of having it happen on system-reentry it could be triggered on the jump and then [technobable] propagate along the route a bit faster then the ship, its strength diminishing over time respective distance[/technobable]. If the jump-engine has bigger modiefers the flare would be considerable faster and stronger meaning that the Player or NPR would be warned that something is jumping into the system in a week or so.
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How about making civilian drives more susceptible to speed and location error on jump exit when there has been a lack of grav surveys complete. This could be 2x error rate when only one system has been survey and four times when neither. This would reflect the expectation that civilian ships are generally only expected to operate in "secure" used systems.
Another more harsh option may be to limit civ drives to only working in surveyed systems. That way they could jump out along with military ships to another system but would need that system to have been surveyed before jumping back. Would also still allow commercial exploration ships but prevent them from being able to jump back out of a hostile system anytime soon.
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This is a really interesting puzzle. I must admit that I don't like the idea of the monsters randomly eating ships, and particularly not eating mostly commercial ships.
At the same time, there are other options. I have several that I favor. First, I like the idea of drive flare, and would want to have that included. Second, scattering makes a lot of sense. A smaller drive will almost certainly be less precise. Third, I think that ships with higher multipliers should probably be somewhat slower. Not a lot, but enough that you see some effect. The total range of variance might only be 25-50%.
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This is a really interesting puzzle. I must admit that I don't like the idea of the monsters randomly eating ships, and particularly not eating mostly commercial ships.
At the same time, there are other options. I have several that I favor. First, I like the idea of drive flare, and would want to have that included. Second, scattering makes a lot of sense. A smaller drive will almost certainly be less precise. Third, I think that ships with higher multipliers should probably be somewhat slower. Not a lot, but enough that you see some effect. The total range of variance might only be 25-50%.
A few observations:
1) I'm a little confused about whether the overall discussion (not just the quoted post) is about "civie" jump drive vs. military, or whether the discussion is about researching better and better jump drive technology. If it's the latter, then I don't really see a need from a gameplay point of view to have any penalty (other than maybe cost). Why should jump drive tech be any different from armor tech, for example - the higher the tech, the better it is.
2) If the discussion is about civie vs. military drives, then I would recommend simply having a significant speed difference - say 2x reduction for every 10x level (where level is in the "commercial vs. military vs. fighter vs. drone vs. ... sense). This would give the flavor of slow, (strategically) lumbering big ships.
3) Another option (on the civie vs. military front) is to have no penalty at all, i.e. only have one type of hyperdrive. This would especially work if the cost of a particular drive was linear in the drive size as opposed to quadratic (as IIRC it is in standard Aurora) - a hyperdrive would simply cost a fixed percentage of the ship. I see two potentially good potential effects here:
a) It would encourage big ships, rather than a swarm of small ships, since there wouldn't be a quadratic penalty for jump drive size. This was one of the original goals of Aurora.
b) I had thought it might discourage "battle-rider" designs (relative to the civie penalty option), where a big jump ship (with a commercial drive) has a swarm of parasites, but I realized while typing this that that's probably a lost cause - there's going to be a large incentive to produce battle-rider designs to avoid having dead jump-drive mass slowing down combatants. At least with linear cost there won't be an incentive to produce lots of little mother ships, but instead produce a great big one. I think the effect more likely to discourage battle-riders is the tactical badness of having to make rendevouz after an engagement. Hmmm - maybe the cost should even be less than linear for hyperdrive size (same as armor) - a (drive cost) = sqrt(hull size) curve would REALLY encourage large motherships. Have you thought of the same idea for normal drive costs (some technobabble about economies of scale for a single large drive vs. many small drives)? This would encourage large multi-role, non-battle-rider designs as opposed to swarms of battle-rider specialists....
Sorry if some of the comments aren't relevant - I haven't been following this thread closely.
John
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I like the idea of the "battle riders" actually, I feel that it would be a nice option. Also, if I am interpreting the Rules post right, you could have either: large, unstealthy or very expensive jump ships carrying smaller warships, or groups of more expensive but stealthier warships that don't rely on jumpships. Or the current, warships flying with jump warships.
About the hyperspace dwellers, intercepting ships randomly in hyperspace seems like it would be very annoying without adding much to gameplay. I propose that they would have a very small chance of coming out of hyperspace on top of other ships that are doing so with 0 velocity, and that chance would be increased by the size of the ship and the recent hyperspace activity in that system. This would cause their attacks to scale with game time and to be less likely to attack minor worlds, and encourage the player to find a balance between centralised trade routes and direct paths. I also think they should not replace the Invaders: if they were that powerful, the random encounters would be far too powerful early game, and they would be unlikely to attack in large enough numbers to replace the massive challenge of the Invaders. Also interesting would be if instead of blindly attacking, they would coordinate with other of their ships in our dimension/wait for enough to come in to be an effective force.
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Hmm, getting lost in space sounds an interesting mechanic yeah, but I am worried about routine travel, as mentioned.
One thing I would like to mention is my support for Jump Gates, though in Newtonian Aurora it would be more like Hyperspace Mass Drivers. They don't launch as fast as ships with hyperspace drives, but you do save some fuel through using them. You still have to build them outside the hyperspace limit however.
They are expensive and have to be built in pairs, but once created they allow even hyperspace drive-less ships to travel between the stars, with a tight known exit for all ships. To balance with ships with drives, they might be slower, but reliable and efficient for inter-colony trade. It is however also a liability in combat, since it allows gate camping, as well the fact that if the receiving gate is destroyed all ships in transit will be lost in space. It might even be possible for an enemy to use them, which would allow enemy ships to travel inbetween your systems without needing to scout and scan them first.
As with current Aurora, you'll still need drives on your scout and military ships, where space is scary, but for transport ships and trade which is boringly routine, you no longer have to worry about it.
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Hmmn just thinking that another way of stopping people just using honking big civ jump drives on their military ships would be to stick in a maintenance penalty where you had a civi drive mixed with military components.
Maybe something to do with civ drives not built for the rigours of military use so failure rate goes up significantly and because they are big they consume large amounts of supplies to repair. This would mean a military ship with a commercial jump could become crippled from a lack of maintenance supplies pretty quickly.
Not sure what the list of items are that turn a civ ship into a military ship but expect you would want to include hanger bays on this option and maybe combat drop modules as well.
I like the idea of lost in space as well. Perhaps an extension to my previous suggestion is that when ships land and the error in speed and location is checked - if this is too high the ship bounces back into hyperspace or whatever. The 2x and 4x multiplier on jump errors than start to become a more significant issue.
Finally a question for Steve on on mechanics - I assume ships will continue to check for maintenance failure when in hyperspace. Will you block notifications of the use of supplies whilst they are travelling so you would only know if they had an issue when they come out into real space. Also what happens if your jump ship has a jump drive failure when in hyperspace? - ok if you can fix (a bigger issue per the above) but loss of both the ship and any ship jumping with it if can't repair?
Edit: I'm assuming in this that Steve continues to make the distinction between civ and military ships in terms of civ ships being maintenance free and this will be driven by component types other than engines now. Forgot jump drives have no distinction as with normal engines so back to the drawing board I guess!
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Well, there won't actually be a selection- civilian and military drives will all be just "drives". The thing is, we want to be able to have large ships that aren't suitable for combat, and small ships that are. Ideally, we'll be able to have a slider.
Something someone suggested about internal bulkheads gave me an idea, though.
What if you can simply change the hull density/internal bulkheads/structural integrity value of a ship which changes the actual density of the ship, but increases the HTK of all internal items, possibly increasing the maximum acceleration the ship can take.
Civilian vessels would want to be as light as possible for increased engine and hyperdrive efficiency. Military vessels would need a much greater level of reinforcement, to improve maneuverability and survivability. Thus, military vessels and civilian vessels would have much more similar masses.
This may or may not tie in to other balancing elements. If civilians were slower accelerators, and infrequent jumpers, and had big flares, and were made of spun glass origami, then the larger volumes might be balanced, or perhaps everyone will make military-class freighters.
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Perhaps there could be maximum 'safe' jump distances based on your tech, and beyond that you run the risk of getting Lost In Space or Eaten By Monsters.
You could also pull from WH40k and have hyperspace beacon structures that improve accuracy / safety of journeys between two systems. Naturally, these beacons would have enormous passive signatures.
In fact, rather than a new race. A redesigned Invader could be the hyperspace race and that is how they enter our dimension rather than via wormholes. That way, the probable number of Invaders would be based on the amount of hyperspace travel. Once they arrive in our dimension, their mission is to kill everyone and destroy everything. I could still have limits on ship size so more powerful Invaders appears later in the game
Shivans!
I think that is a good mechanic. You could also give them some unique 'masters of hyperspace' techs. :)
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A quick clarification. In standard Aurora there are Military Jump Drives and Civilian Jump Drives. In Newtonian Aurora there is just one type of FTL Drive but there is a multiplier you can use to increase the size of the drive (without affecting cost/crew) which ranges from 1x to 10x. The 'penalty' for larger multipliers was intended to create the same military vs civilian dynamic with a range in-between. The whole point of the Military/Civilian distinction in Standard Aurora was to prevent cheap large jump drives for huge military ships while allowing them for lower cost civilian vessels and I carried that principle into Newtonian Aurora. I also transferred the principle that jump drive cost is based on the square of the hull size, so 2x size = 4x cost (actually Size^1.75 for Newtonian Aurora rather than Size^2).
After reading John's comments, I looked again at my base assumptions. Newtonian Aurora is a very different game where FTL travel is essential and there is no easily available jump gate alternative for very large ships. Which means the small military vs large civilian FTL drive concept is no longer valid and therefore I don't really need the multiplier. I could just allow players to build larger jump drives based on a linear cost increase, regardless of whether the ship is military of civilian. However, civilian ships tend to be much larger than military ships of similar cost because the ratio of cost vs size of the components involved in civilian ships tends to be much lower. This means that jump drives for civilian ships would likely be a much greater proportion of their total cost, which isn't a good thing. Therefore John's second suggestion, which is to lower the cost of jump drives on a per ton basis as they get larger, would work well. Yes, this would allow very large military ships to have a much cheaper jump drive as a proportion of their total cost than in Standard Aurora, but very large military ships are expensive anyway so an Empire would be spending a lot of money to take advantage of this 'cheaper' option.
So lets look at some new numbers for calculating jump drive size and cost. Firstly, lets remove the whole concept of the multiplier. Secondly, the base cost can be calculated using square roots. After some playing around, I am considering:
FTL Drive Cost = (Sqrt(FTL Drive Size) * Sqrt(FTL Speed Multiplier) * Sqrt(FTL Squadron Size)) / 50
A few examples, using generally level 4 tech, which is FTL Drive Efficiency 8, Minimum Drive Size 500 tons, Speed Multiplier 10,000 and Squadron Sizes up to 7. The crew requirement is based on sqrt(Size)
Survey Ship Drive
Max Ship Size: 4,000 tons Max Squadron Size: 4 FTL Speed Multiplier: 10,000x
Jump Engine Size: 500 tons Efficiency: 8 Jump Engine HTK: 2
Cost: 89 Crew: 22
Materials Required: 17.8x Duranium 71.2x Sorium
Development Cost for Project: 890RP
Destroyer Drive
Max Ship Size: 8,000 tons Max Squadron Size: 4 FTL Speed Multiplier: 10,000x
Jump Engine Size: 1,000 tons Efficiency: 8 Jump Engine HTK: 4
Cost: 126 Crew: 32
Materials Required: 25.2x Duranium 100.8x Sorium
Development Cost for Project: 1260RP
The next two examples are the same size drive but with squadron sizes of four and seven respectively
Cruiser Drive
Max Ship Size: 16,000 tons Max Squadron Size: 4 FTL Speed Multiplier: 10,000x
Jump Engine Size: 2,000 tons Efficiency: 8 Jump Engine HTK: 8
Cost: 179 Crew: 45
Materials Required: 35.8x Duranium 143.2x Sorium
Development Cost for Project: 1790RP
Command Cruiser Drive
Max Ship Size: 16,000 tons Max Squadron Size: 7 FTL Speed Multiplier: 10,000x
Jump Engine Size: 2,600 tons Efficiency: 8 Jump Engine HTK: 10
Cost: 270 Crew: 51
Materials Required: 54x Duranium 216x Sorium
Development Cost for Project: 2700RP
Next is a drive for a colony ship plus the same size drive with the minimum speed multiplier. I think the latter would probably only be worth it for journeys that involved relatively long in-system time and short FTL trips.
Colony Ship Drive
Max Ship Size: 20,000 tons Max Squadron Size: 4 FTL Speed Multiplier: 10,000x
Jump Engine Size: 2,500 tons Efficiency: 8 Jump Engine HTK: 10
Cost: 200 Crew: 50
Materials Required: 40x Duranium 160x Sorium
Development Cost for Project: 2000RP
Slow Colony Ship Drive
Max Ship Size: 20,000 tons Max Squadron Size: 4 FTL Speed Multiplier: 2,500x
Jump Engine Size: 2,500 tons Efficiency: 8 Jump Engine HTK: 10
Cost: 100 Crew: 50
Materials Required: 20x Duranium 80x Sorium
Development Cost for Project: 1000RP
Now progressively larger drives.
Battleship or Freighter Drive
Max Ship Size: 40,000 tons Max Squadron Size: 4 FTL Speed Multiplier: 10,000x
Jump Engine Size: 5,000 tons Efficiency: 8 Jump Engine HTK: 20
Cost: 283 Crew: 71
Materials Required: 56.6x Duranium 226.4x Sorium
Development Cost for Project: 2830RP
Large Freighter Drive
Max Ship Size: 80,000 tons Max Squadron Size: 4 FTL Speed Multiplier: 10,000x
Jump Engine Size: 10,000 tons Efficiency: 8 Jump Engine HTK: 40
Cost: 400 Crew: 100
Materials Required: 80x Duranium 320x Sorium
Development Cost for Project: 4000RP
Huge Freighter Drive
Max Ship Size: 160,000 tons Max Squadron Size: 4 FTL Speed Multiplier: 10,000x
Jump Engine Size: 20,000 tons Efficiency: 8 Jump Engine HTK: 80
Cost: 566 Crew: 141
Materials Required: 113.2x Duranium 452.8x Sorium
Development Cost for Project: 5660RP
The above costing system will support the concept that really large freighters and colony ships will be more economical, whereas in Standard Aurora the advantage of building ultra-large commercial ships isn't very great. Commercial ships will generally become more expensive but this is a very different game with longer timescales for the building up of distant colonies so I don't think that is a significant problem.
Steve
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Steve would it be possible to give the civies the ability to do groupjumps? I would like to see small tradegroups once my civies have enough ships.
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This looks better, although chrislocke raises a good point. Will civilian ships now need maintainence? That would be very annoying.
The only thing I can think to add is something that increases scatter, but makes the drive cheaper.
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@ Steve - IMO you're still running into one of the biggest barriers to creating those big drives, the research cost. I mean the Sqrt method helps a lot! But you're still looking at higher research costs to go with the big shipyards and high tooling costs.
Thought: A modification that makes a drive self only and reduces the RP cost, but has no effect on the engine otherwise.
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Steve would it be possible to give the civies the ability to do groupjumps? I would like to see small tradegroups once my civies have enough ships.
Possibly. The NPRs can do group jumps so I will look at extending that code to shipping lines. I'll look at their construction strategy as well so they build jump ships when they need them and non-jump ships when they don't. In fact, I may look at shipping lines designing their own ships using recent player technology.
Steve
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This looks better, although chrislocke raises a good point. Will civilian ships now need maintainence? That would be very annoying.
The only thing I can think to add is something that increases scatter, but makes the drive cheaper.
No, civilian/commercial ships won't need maintenance. No maintenance requirement is pretty much the definition of a commercial ship. Jump drives aren't military systems.
Steve
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Possibly. The NPRs can do group jumps so I will look at extending that code to shipping lines. I'll look at their construction strategy as well so they build jump ships when they need them and non-jump ships when they don't. In fact, I may look at shipping lines designing their own ships using recent player technology.
Steve
You should probably limit civilians to what is transferable via tech osmosis. I'm fairly certain the gov't doesn't give the private sector top line tech. ;)
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@ Steve - IMO you're still running into one of the biggest barriers to creating those big drives, the research cost. I mean the Sqrt method helps a lot! But you're still looking at higher research costs to go with the big shipyards and high tooling costs.
Thought: A modification that makes a drive self only and reduces the RP cost, but has no effect on the engine otherwise.
The costs of FTL drives and associated research costs are generally much lower than in Standard Aurora, especially for the larger drives.
Steve
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You should probably limit civilians to what is transferable via tech osmosis. I'm fairly certain the gov't doesn't give the private sector top line tech. ;)
I agree. I'll probably use the tech level below what the military has for any key systems such as sensors or engine. I may allow a limited shield capacity as 'civilian' as well. I am likely to have some type of particle impacts in nebula systems and maybe some 'normal' systems so some type of 'particle shield' will be allowed.
Steve
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The overall reduced costs look good but as mentioned losses some of the distinction in build approaches between military and commercial ships.
As a possible solution to this perhaps you could keep the revised material costs and size evolution but then have a more progressive increase in RP costs for larger engines. Married to this would be the reverse of the engine size multiplier - ie an RP cost reducer with the level of RP cost reduction impacting jump scatter in unsurveyed systems as I mentioned beforehand.
Basic thinking behind this is that military drives need a lot closer design to work in unsurveyed systems with unpredictable grav systems and hence rapidly increasing RP to deal with these issues as the engine size increases. Civilian ships on the other hand are expected to largely operate in known systems and hence don't need that level of careful design.
This means from a build perspective the more regular use of jump ships is not going to be a significant increase in cost per ship but if you want that huge jump capable war ship you are going to need to make a decent investment in RP whilst civies can churn out less well engineered systems to meet their requirements.
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One other thought that just came to mind was in-system jumps. Will these be possible outside of the normal jump limits in a system ie to allow a ship to move to another star that is 30bn k away etc?
If this is the case it could mean that the drive flare penalty etc becomes a realistic one again as defending forces could position fleets outside of the jump boundry ready to make an in-system jump to the drive flare location which by default will also be outside of the jump boundry? With a system of errors in exit location, speed and direction this could lead to some very interesting encounters! It might also be a capability that you select when designing the engine with respective increases in costs / research requirements?
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Following this (and the other Newtonian Aurora-Posts) for quite a while, I'd like to throw a partly-stolen idea in.
1. Drive Flare
As proposed by Heph at the first page, I'd like to see a flare at departure, propagating faster-than-vessel onto the target system. However, I'd like to have it additionally to the in-system-flare. Therefore, you'd have two flares: The first one arrives before the ships (let's say at double the speed) and tells you "a vessel with a jump drive this capable is coming", and the second one from the arrival, which tells you where exactly the ship/squadron emerged.
The multiplier could then be used to reduce both of the flares, with the departure-flare reduced most. Therefore, the "civilian"-used drives would create a departure-flare which could be detected even by a fairly normal-sized EM-sensor, while a "military"-used drive's departure-flare could only be seen by an extensive deep-space-tracking-system. Of course, the departure-flare would be reduced as a normal signature by distance, giving you an interesting decision: Do you want to be seen surely, however arriving shortly after? Jump to a nearby system, and then towards your target. Do you want to avoid (probably) being seen until you're in the system, but your fleet may be on it's way for a month or so, without any possibility to abort?
2. Accuracy
Also already proposed by a variety of people, my idea would be the following:
The accuracy can be changed, and changes the multiplier. As it's already said, jumping in an unsurveyed system isn't very accurate, and even jumping into a surveyed one isn't perfectly accurate. Simply introduce a multiplier into that, so that the "civilian"-grade drives aren't gonna hit anything, but can bring much bigger payloads.
And, additionally, why not introduce a "Jump Buoy"? I'd like to see it as a (civilian) component, so that you could build one station per system, which gives ships the option to jump to that station, and arrive at a great accuracy. The "signal" this station sends off can be said to by encrypted, therefore only giving you and your allies access.
You could even build a jump capable jump buoy ship (although I'd make that system quite big, this being more of a late-game-technique), which jumps in first, and then directs everybody much, much closer.
As an alternative, the proposed "slingshot" gates. Each one can only be targeted at one other, but allows ships without jump drive to jump to that target system. The problem could be that the departure-flare is readable even with standard-size EM-Sensors, making it quite unsuitable for military assaults.
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Just to throw in my two cents.
I think it would be a 'neat' dynamic to allow jumps only from surveyed systems. Going to a surveyed system will be fairly accurate. The jump to one you haven't surveyed is pretty inaccurate. But you can't synchronize the drive for a jump from an unsurveyed system.
It would make the survey much more important.
You also wouldn't lead with pure warships. They might never get home.
For the defenders, hunting down the survey ships takes on a huge meaning. If you can keep the 'alien' race from surveying the system then the 'alien' will be faced with a choice. Jump in more supply ships and survey ships, or cut the loses and let the ships there 'die on the vine.'
For the traveller, it is a real conundrum. Send escorts to hopefully protect them and burn resources doing so. Or don't, and hope no one is there to meet them.
(In an RP setting it would be great. Home may not realize for months after that something happened to the survey ships at all. Until they failed to return. Do you send more ships to attempt a rescue when you don't know what happened. It could be real fun in a community game where the SM runs it and the player really doesn't know what happened....)
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I would like to encourage the investigation of the design and effects distiguishing between Commercial and Military:
- Size of jump group. Allow smaller groups to be selected in the design tool, even if larger groups have been researched. This would allow for a drive design that can support 7 small ships, or a cheaper drive that can jump a single (larger?) ship. I could imagine giving all of my colony and frieghters individual jump drives as I dont want to manage them as groups, but using groups for military where I want to maximise speed, armour and ordinance in the non jump drive ships.
- Size of jump flare. If this formed part of the design tool, then cheaper drives can have large flares.
- Duration of sensor blindness. Cheaper drives have longer sensor blindness.
- Accuracy of jump drive. Cheaper drives have worse accuracy. Perhaps when jumping to any system, even an unsurveyed one, we can chose a target position to jump to with polar co-ordinates: distance from main star and orientation. Then the accuracy can come into play as another design parameter to distinguish commercial from military. Although I suspect it might interesting to make it so that it is not always cost effective to always have the most accurate drives in terms of delta-V. Commercial freighters might accept a poor accuracy and carry more fuel to make course corrections, whereas military ships might want to optimise their attacking jump positions. A frieghter might want a low initial velocity prior to jump, but high Jump Drive multiplier, so that it arrives in system with low speed to minimise course correction if it is facing away from its destination. Orientation and distance from star could be seperate accuracy variables, as you might not mind which orientation you are in, as long as you are in the centre of the system?
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I'm not so sure I like the idea of a departure flare. For one thing, I don't like the idea of the attackers knowing a long time ahead that something is coming. A few hours warning, at most, might make sense. Secondly, it doesn't help that much. Yes, something is coming there. But how far away is it coming from, and when will it be here?
I also don't like the "no jump out without survey" idea. I can see lack of survey slowing you down a lot (10x sounds about right), but not stopping you completely.
One thing that might be nice is an "own jump only" drive. A lot of ships don't travel in groups, and while it might be useless for military operations, it might help with things like couriers. A size/cost of around .75 is what I would recommend.
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Did anyone play Freespace?
A race of ancient destroyers that track races by their use of "Subspace", and can just vanish into that medium in system and appear somewhere else?^^
As for research, if civ's get less tech, there certainly should be a small random chance of them developing their own.^^
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If a distinction between military and civilian jump drives most be made, maybe a "Military" jump drive has the ability to safely jump to systems that have not been surveyed yet (or at least visited) and "Commercial" jump drives do not.
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No distinction should be made, it's the design parameters of size and cost efficiency that should dictate it.
Mabye including a slider of how reliable it needs to be, in turn increasing the chance of unforeseen breakdowns.
I like the idea of hindrance of jumping from non-surveyed systems.
Essentially, one could use the same parameters as jumping to them, again; maybe with a time penalty.
So, if you jump from an unsurveyed system, you have less total range (assuming the failure chance suggested here (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,4444.msg44263.html#msg44263)), by being up to 30% slower (shouldn't be allowed to be faster in this case), with additional time cost to charge jump drives.
Maybe even a small inaccuracy of, say, a few degrees, so if you jump so far that theres multiple systems in that angle, within a few LY of the target, you might end up in the wrong system.
Hopefully got some fuel left^^
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I also agree with the removal of Civ and Mil Jump Drive distinction. In fact I'd like a removal of that distinction for engines as well, modelled perhaps with a power/reliability/size/fuel efficiency tradeoff, with slow and very reliable and efficient engines being larger and not need any maintenance supplies and doesn't age while smaller and more powerful engines needing more maintenance supplies. Missiles being a logical extreme of this, being unserviceable but that being okay since its single-use anyway.
Whether a ship will age will depend on it being below the maintenance limit for engines and any weapons or other military equipment. Similiar maint limits will exist for sensors and shields that is a tech level or two below current allowing you to equip civ ships with actual sensors and defenses, even if they are a tad older. Or maybe a civ spec check mark you can tick that allows almost any item cept weapons to be zero-maint at the cost of tonnage and maybe reduced effectiveness? With Anarchy or military based civilizations, perhaps even civ-spec weapons for your transports?
Potentially this allows some reduced maint mil-spec ships, like tankers with zero-maint engines, but top of the line armor, shields and CIWS, so it will age but less dramatically.
On the flip-side, this increases the computation that needs to be done if any ship has a potential maintenance timer. One of the reasons given for zero-maint civilians is the processing cost.
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They could just be checked in 30 day intervals, for weapons components and the like, and have anything every ship needs, like life support, but including engines, just slowly use up a small amount of maintenance.
That should reduce the load.
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I also agree with the removal of Civ and Mil Jump Drive distinction. In fact I'd like a removal of that distinction for engines as well,
Steve has already removed the distinction of civ and military engines, clasification of a ship as a civilian will, I believe, now just be dependent on the types of other modules you stick on it.
Thinking a bit more about in system jumps I guess you would need to make these fairly limited to stop people just jumping away from incoming missiles etc. Couple of thoughts on this:
- As discussed previously give the jump engines a spooling up requirement. I thought this could be done the same way as lasers etc are dealt with. Give the engine a whopping big power requirement for use and then require the jump ship to run generators to charge it up. The energy requirement should be substantially more than weapons so its not feasible to store this in homopoloar (spelling??) reserves and would be in the order of hours to charge. You could also make it a "use it or loose it" approach so ships can't just leave their jump engines spooled up - too much energy to contain (hey your are ripping your way into another dimension aren't you!), so once you hit spool up you are committed to the jump or you risk explosive damage to the ship as you try to dump the engergy build up.
- Secondly you could perhaps give a minimum time in hyperspace to give a minimum jump distance so you can't make small precise jumps to easily get into position of an enemy fleet
Regarding the deep range attacks, I would also think a range limit on jump distance would be a good thing to have as then requires a bit more island hoping and could leave some systems as strategic points if they are stepping stones into other areas of the galaxy. I think just an extension of the jump in variation would achieve this. Ie up to a certain distance no additional variation (based on a researchable tech level) then exponetially increasing errors after that with a corresponding risk of "missing" the target and getting lost in hyperspace or just being so off track and direction when landing you will burn your fuel up without being able to achieve the mission. - I like the idea of sending ships "beyond the red line" in an emergency!
Finally I would add my disagreement to the idea of a jump signal that warns you of incomming ships but I do like the idea of perhaps a reseachable tech - based on recovery of components from say invaders that does allow detection of ships in hyperspace to a limited range and without identifying whgoose ships and type etc they actually are.
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Honestly, hyperspace sensors sound like a great idea. You could even make them planetside-only (perhaps ships in hyperspace produce a bow wave of neutrinos, and the best way to detect that is a massive shielded tank of water deep underground), so you can relatively easily get a warning before ships arrive in systems you securely control, but your fleets may be susceptible to ambush.
Naturally, smaller, more efficient jump drives produce smaller waves which can be far more difficult to detect.
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I like the charging time stuff before jumping from Antagonist.
I posted a beacon idea on the Island Hopping thread for the long deep jumps.
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Thinking a bit more about in system jumps I guess you would need to make these fairly limited to stop people just jumping away from incoming missiles etc.
I had intentionally not mentioned that. So much for my strategy to universal dominion.... :P
I had really liked the idea of 'jump-fighters' that would move at the last minute away from incoming ordinance and then reappear beside the target to rain rail gun projectiles on it.
Oh well. Back to the drawing board..... :)
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What I would really like is an In-system Hyperdrive like we currently have in normal Aurora; A system that boosts the movement speed at the cost of acceleration and ship Functions.
Sure, you could theoretically just jump into the system you come from, and then appear somewhere else. but whats the point?
The following is basically my noteblock for developing that idea, and no, I do NOT expect anything like this to go in, it's contradictive to what Steve is trying to achieve.
Now that I wrote it down, it actually looks pretty smegty. I'll work on it.
Example:
Tech Lines:
- Hyper-Thrusters (requires Hyperjump tech of equal level, Level 8 max)
- Size Efficiency
- Charge up Time
Working Mechanic:
Acceleration/2+LvL , Speed is multiplied by 1+0.5*LvL
This is under the assumption that the speed gain is immediately multiplied, so on level 8, it'd be 10% acceleration, but the gain is immediately multiplied by 5, resulting in 50% acceleration.
10% of the increased speed is emitted as EM signature, or Hyper-signature if that kind of sensor exists, and no firing or sensor use is possible while boosting.
The size formula could be [(Ship Size/200)^1.2]*20
This means:
200 ton ship = 20 ton (10%)
500 ton ship = 60 tons (12%)
1250 ton ship = 180 tons (14.4%)
5000 ton ship = 952 tons
20000 ton ship = 5024 tons
As you can see, this system penalizes large ships, a Thruster array is not worth it above 10k tons as the system eats up above 20% of the ships total displacement.
The Size Efficiency Tech line would decrease the system size by 5% for each level, while the Thruster level will increase it by an equal amount; the latter tech is obviously more expensive and has less total levels.
Size efficiency would also increase the cost by 10%/ton/level, but as the size decreases this is counteracted.
So, the final size formula could be:
{[(Ship Size/200)^(1.2-S-lvl/200)]*(20-S-lvl)}*(0.95+Hpr-lvl/20)
As such, a size efficiency 4 lvl 3 Hyper Thruster for a 500 ton ship would be 52 Tons, and for a 20k ton Ship it's be 4032 tons.
As you can see, on higher levels, it will become more efficient for Bigger units.
If you build a thruster with level 2, size level 7, a 20k ton ship would have it below 3000 tons,
and at level 10 size, a 50k ton battlecruiser with a 2x speed thruster would only require 6009 tons for the thruster, roughly as much % wise as a 500 ton ship without size efficiency.
Charge Time
Charge time would be 2*(sqrt(Ship Size)/Charge-lvl)+5
An alternative would be to increase the charge time and decrease the effect on larger ships, instead of making the system prohibitively large.
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Interesting idea, but pure handwavium. For one thing, your system has ships possibly exceeding C. Steve altered the engines to avoid exhaust velocities above C. Also, how does this interact with missiles? What if you used this to get up to a really high speed and launched?
I don't see it as a good idea. Hyperdrives are nice in current Aurora, but this isn't current Aurora.
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As said, I already admitted it's not a good concept.
This would essentially be like a Hyperjump from the system to the same system, with more control, but possibility of being shot at.
Functioning like current hyperdrives, you wouldn't be able to fire, you have no sensors, and you can't take the speedbonus to Inter-system jumps.
It's mainly because; why can I jump to another system but not on the other side of the same dual star system?
Edit: Also, because everyone and their close relatives ask for a use for small craft. Not that I would.
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That's... actually a good question.
If the two hyper limits touch, of course, then the most efficient way to move between stars would be to go straight. If they don't, then it might make sense to simply use the regular hyper drives with a special "in-system jump" order.
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One other thought that just came to mind was in-system jumps. Will these be possible outside of the normal jump limits in a system ie to allow a ship to move to another star that is 30bn k away etc?
If this is the case it could mean that the drive flare penalty etc becomes a realistic one again as defending forces could position fleets outside of the jump boundry ready to make an in-system jump to the drive flare location which by default will also be outside of the jump boundry? With a system of errors in exit location, speed and direction this could lead to some very interesting encounters! It might also be a capability that you select when designing the engine with respective increases in costs / research requirements?
At the moment I am assuming no in-system jumps. Bear in mind that you will be able to build ships capable of attaining much higher in-system speeds than in Standard Aurora, even though on average speeds will be lower. With very fuel efficient engines you will be able to reach a considerable speed, even if the rate of acceleration isn't very high.
Steve
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Yes, but it will still take you forever if that binary has a distance of 120 AU.
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Yes, but it will still take you forever if that binary has a distance of 120 AU.
Not really, because in Standard Aurora hyper drive allowed 10x speed outside the hyper limit. Now you can go faster than that without hyper engines and within the hyper limit
Steve
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Not really, because in Standard Aurora hyper drive allowed 10x speed outside the hyper limit. Now you can go faster than that without hyper engines and within the hyper limit
Steve
Actually thinking more about it, this may not be the case after the exhaust velocity change. Even so, if you get a freighter up to 10,000 km/s for example, it would only take about three weeks to cover 120 AU.
Steve
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That's... actually a good question.
If the two hyper limits touch, of course, then the most efficient way to move between stars would be to go straight. If they don't, then it might make sense to simply use the regular hyper drives with a special "in-system jump" order.
The more I think about this, the more I am considering changing my mind. The isn't really a good reason not to allow "in-system" FTL jumps, apart from a little extra complexity. I would still restrict it to jumping from one star to another though, rather than jumps around the periphery of a system. I guess I should also allow a jump straight to a B component from another system. Although there is then a question of whether B components need their own survey locations. Hmm!
Steve
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You could make it so that if two stars are more than ~120 Au apart, they are in fact separate "systems". If they're much less than that distance, then jumping between them is pointless.
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I was thinking (and this is probably a less that stella idea) you could make hyper tunnels between close stars. From what i understand the hyperlimit is caused by the interfearence of the stars gravity, two or more stars could cause a reduced disterbance zone between them and a safe(ish) path between them that can only be accessed close to the star (jump near star, sucked down path, spat out at other star) this would give an easyish (programming method) to travel to binary ect. stars with hyperdrives, while alowing/ forcing the choice of direct travel over indirect but posibly faster method (the quickest path is not always a stright line).
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I was thinking (and this is probably a less that stella idea) you could make hyper tunnels between close stars. From what i understand the hyperlimit is caused by the interfearence of the stars gravity, two or more stars could cause a reduced disterbance zone between them and a safe(ish) path between them that can only be accessed close to the star (jump near star, sucked down path, spat out at other star) this would give an easyish (programming method) to travel to binary ect. stars with hyperdrives, while alowing/ forcing the choice of direct travel over indirect but posibly faster method (the quickest path is not always a stright line).
Actually you may be able to do a similar methodology to deter people from making really far jumps, if there was some sort of "link" between closer stars that increased the speed multiplier in that pathway, so that traveling to a star 10x farther away took 30x longer or something like that.
Another thing you could do is introduce hyperspace drag. Have the ship start out at it's initial speed X multiplier, and then constantly slow down, maybe to zero, or maybe down to some minimum like 10x the speed of light or something that would be useless for combat fleets, but would let you send One-Way probes or something like that.
The problem with that is the fuel situation, when you arrived at your destination would you be going your original speed, or if you slowed down 20% in hyperspace would your real-space speed be 20% less as well? I guess that doesn't matter all that much though, if you are moving through the system that would be annoying, since you'd have to spend fuel and speed up again, however most of the time you are actually probably going to a system to stay there, so you'd want to slow down upon entry anyways.
And actually, slowing down incoming fleets has the benefit of partially dissuading a drive-by genocide... if you know (and you would, because it would be distance based, and you know where the target star is, so when you set up the jump it would tell you your ETA and in-system speed on arrival) that you are going to slow down 20% in hyperspace and you want to make a (say) 5000 km/s attack run, you either have to accelerate up to 6250 km/s in the previous system, or make the jump at 5000 km/s, arrive at 4000 km/s and accelerate up to 5000 km/s in system. That costs 250 km/s less in delta-V, but the in system acceleration makes it more likely that the enemy will see you. Lastly you can just accept the slower 4000 km/s attack run, which gives the enemy more time to prepare after you show up on sensors, and makes all of your mass-based weaponry less dangerous.
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If maintenance failures are checked on all drives that are actively jumping, then there would be a definite, if soft, cap on the maximum distance you could jump. The largest side effect would be that civilian jump vessels would need to have enough maintenance supplies to keep operating.
Of course failures of the drive could result in everything from safely arriving in whatever system you're closest to at the time to getting torn to sub-molecular shreds by an uncontrolled drop from jump. Don't worry, you'll hardly have time to feel the extraordinary pain.
It may be that short jumps are more likely to be completed successfully without permanent drive damage. Note that it would be odd for MS to be shared in a task group while jumping, so onboard supplies would make sense.
I do like the concept of jumping to vastly distant star systems as a last-ditch effort, so perhaps this combined with a certain amount of deviation from course, perhaps even with TGs getting split up and arriving in multiple nearby star systems.
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Actually you may be able to do a similar methodology to deter people from making really far jumps, if there was some sort of "link" between closer stars that increased the speed multiplier in that pathway, so that traveling to a star 10x farther away took 30x longer or something like that.
Instead of changing speed, could you handle that by using a "bearing fluctuation" factor. For instance, any move through hyperspace cause a ship bearing to drift randomly (smaller amounts of angular drift could be bought through research). For very long jumps, this could cause a ship to arrive light years from its intended target, at full speed. Not something you'd loook forward to.
This might help solve the "holocaust drive by" problem. Even over small distances, getting out of hyperspace (far away from the system) aligned with a specific planet (the drive by target) would be almost impossible.
Francois
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At the moment I am assuming no in-system jumps. Bear in mind that you will be able to build ships capable of attaining much higher in-system speeds than in Standard Aurora, even though on average speeds will be lower. With very fuel efficient engines you will be able to reach a considerable speed, even if the rate of acceleration isn't very high.
Perhaps to limit in system jumps you could place a minimum time in hyperspace. Just do this with the 'prep' time. It may take 24 (or perhaps way more) hours to prep for a jump, and the same amount of time to prep the drive for the 'drop out' of hyperspace.
You would also likely need a minimum initial velocity to even make the jump into hyperspace (which would also limit the 'mini' jumps), and this could make preparing for the jump take even longer. This would definitely limit the 'jump away' from combat syndrome. You would need to make sure that you are lined up with where you want to go or your jump away from combat will likely take you to the middle of nowhere.
EDIT
Of course this raises the question of 'can you jump to the middle of nowhere, and then jump again from that point' to gain a specific orientation to your 'attack run.'
I would rather see jumps limited to 'star to star'. Only gravity wells allow the use of the hyperdrive or some such justification.
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Only gravity wells allow the use of the hyperdrive or some such justification.
The justification could be that while hyperdrive engines allow you to enter hyperspace, they don't let you leave hyperspace, only the gravity field of a star can pull you out. This was actually the mechanic that I was assuming in most of my discussions, so that if you missed a star from doing a risky jump you'd have to keep on going until you hit the next system. In real 3D space this would be a huge deal, but in 2D space you're bound to hit another system reasonably soon.
Doing this sort of system would also damp down on some of the longer range jumps, depending on the density of the map, because you wouldn't be able to jump through another system on the way to a farther system.
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That'll work.
Having minimum jump times is impractical, as on high tech levels it forces you to do really slow jumps compared to what you're actually capable of.
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I'm rather looking forward to focusing research largely on jump dimension, sacrificing such things as jump accuracy or safety, and gaining in return the ability to make very rapid jumps over very long distances.
As for the repeated jumping, that's one thing I like about having to "spool up" the drive. In most normal situations, when you jump someplace you'll want to stay there for a day or two, or more, before your next jump. Even when you're just stopping over in a system, you'll need to change course to aim at the next star. If you have to spend two or three days spooling up a military drive, then you won't waste the charge by jumping in combat unless you really need to.
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That'll work.
Having minimum jump times is impractical, as on high tech levels it forces you to do really slow jumps compared to what you're actually capable of.
I don't see slow jumps as impractical, but to each their own. If we are doing the hyperdrive as a multiplier of the ship's base speed, the slow jump uses less of your 'real space' fuel leaving more for maneuver when you arrive.
I'm rather looking forward to focusing research largely on jump dimension, sacrificing such things as jump accuracy or safety, and gaining in return the ability to make very rapid jumps over very long distances.
As for the repeated jumping, that's one thing I like about having to "spool up" the drive. In most normal situations, when you jump someplace you'll want to stay there for a day or two, or more, before your next jump. Even when you're just stopping over in a system, you'll need to change course to aim at the next star. If you have to spend two or three days spooling up a military drive, then you won't waste the charge by jumping in combat unless you really need to.
My worry is still the jump to deep out system. If you can reset the jump drive fairly quickly, there is no reason to hang around and fight. Jump in at a mid range speed. Release self guided missiles towards distant targets. Brake and reorient at best acceleration for the 'return to home' jump - and leave. Let the missiles coast in system and take out the targets before enemy ordinance can even reach you.
Unless the enemy has much better sensors than you or gets lucky and has units near where you arrive at, he may have a hard time seeing you in time to do anything about it.
If he doesn't know where you come from, you can just keep doing this until you finally get lucky.
In real life, you would need to have a 'follow on' ship to find out the results. It may be a good thing to have the system not report results of weapons in a system that has no ships/populations.
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Just a quick thought.
What would people think of the drop out of hyperspace being associated with a sensor flash. It has already been talked about as a way to guard against the 'drive by nuking'.
Perhaps a hyperspace sensor tech, but add one thing. Make the flash also carry the 'signature' of the system the ship came from.
Now the need to create forward bases becomes paramount. Otherwise your jumps will tell your opponent exactly where your HOME is at. They will trace the forward base instead. When they get there, they will have to catch a ship jumping into the system to know your next system up the chain.
If you have jumps coming in from several systems, now they have to guess and prioritize their next move. Secure the system and survey, or try to hit the next link up and maybe get too far to make it back.
Thoughts anyone....
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I'd like that.
Would allow for a cloak system that turns tcs and thermal into a hyperspace signature as well.
However, I think giving the system is unnecessary; it would totally be enough to get a bearing, +- a few degrees, given that the jumps themselves aren't perfectly accurate.
Well, though that would obviously require to have an option to check bearings on the star maps, so maybe it's ok to just have the system.
It should require a partial gravitational survey, though.
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I'd like that.
Would allow for a cloak system that turns tcs and thermal into a hyperspace signature as well.
However, I think giving the system is unnecessary; it would totally be enough to get a bearing, +- a few degrees, given that the jumps themselves aren't perfectly accurate.
Well, though that would obviously require to have an option to check bearings on the star maps, so maybe it's ok to just have the system.
It should require a partial gravitational survey, though.
The bearing would be ok, unless you can do that 'jump to the middle of nowhere, and then jump again thing.' So long as you have to jump from near a star it should work.
Someone will still probably survey a few systems to jump from and then leave them empty to give no clues, but it will cost them in fuel and time.
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The duration of jump recharge can vary a great deal (and in fact it might also be a tech). Actually, that works really well. At low tech levels, when it might take weeks to move from deep space into combat range, then any kind of tactical ship will take weeks to fully charge. At high tech levels, you might be able to make a small ship that can charge and jump in hours... and of course, civilian-style drives might be incredibly huge, but get a bonus to recharge times.
Still, I'm not married to the idea, and I like the concept of complex jump flare data. It encourages you to expand you colonies so that you are more likely to detect incoming enemies before they reach the home world.
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Not sure this would be viable, but I´d like to throw in how the Renegade Legion RPG handled FTL detection.
There, a ship/fleet moving through hyperspace crates a "wave" in real-space, that could be detectd by specialized sensors. The larger and faster the ship/fleet, the larger the wave. An armada at full speed could be spotted by a sensor dozens of light years away from the fleets path, while a small scout, sneaking around would have to literaly pass over the sensor to be noticed.
That wave would also extend in front of a ship/fleet, giving some warning to the target system (not enough to call in reinforcements from other systems, but at least you wouldn´t be cought with your pants around your ancles, just around your knees).
Oh, and there _was_ a bright sensor flash on emerging from hyperspace.
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Not sure this would be viable, but I´d like to throw in how the Renegade Legion RPG handled FTL detection.
There, a ship/fleet moving through hyperspace crates a "wave" in real-space, that could be detectd by specialized sensors.
When you say that it moved in real-space, do you mean that it moved at the speed of light? Such a system would be fairly useless.
Timothy Zahn's Conqueror trilogy did have a similar idea though, but the signature wave propagated through hyperspace instantaneously (the ships themselves did not move instantaneously, only the basic information about the ships). This gave any systems about... 12-36 hours of warning I believe.
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I like the Renegade Legion thing, although IIRC the fluff was that the wave propogated through HyperSpace but was detectable by a specialised sensor based on something in RealSpace, usually a planet or VLCA - but I think that some major ships (eg flagships, comms ships) had a more limited capability.
I would agree that the player should be given the originating system, if they have previously identified it by survey or similar. If the havent it would merely report "unknown system" until such time as they obtain the survey data to uniquely ID the system signature - it can be assumed that the signature is made up of various measurements that can be obtained from the wave - i don't really see a need to specify exactly what these are.
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I like the Renegade Legion thing, although IIRC the fluff was that the wave propogated through HyperSpace but was detectable by a specialised sensor based on something in RealSpace, usually a planet or VLCA - but I think that some major ships (eg flagships, comms ships) had a more limited capability.
You remember the system better than me :)
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Make it be a neutrino shower. You need tons of water or ice to detect it.
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Perhaps to limit in system jumps you could place a minimum time in hyperspace. Just do this with the 'prep' time. It may take 24 (or perhaps way more) hours to prep for a jump, and the same amount of time to prep the drive for the 'drop out' of hyperspace.
You would also likely need a minimum initial velocity to even make the jump into hyperspace (which would also limit the 'mini' jumps), and this could make preparing for the jump take even longer. This would definitely limit the 'jump away' from combat syndrome. You would need to make sure that you are lined up with where you want to go or your jump away from combat will likely take you to the middle of nowhere.
EDIT
Of course this raises the question of 'can you jump to the middle of nowhere, and then jump again from that point' to gain a specific orientation to your 'attack run.'
I would rather see jumps limited to 'star to star'. Only gravity wells allow the use of the hyperdrive or some such justification.
There is a minimum velocity requirement of 200 km/s for hyperspace entry and you can only jump when you are lined up on another star.
Steve
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I don't see slow jumps as impractical, but to each their own. If we are doing the hyperdrive as a multiplier of the ship's base speed, the slow jump uses less of your 'real space' fuel leaving more for maneuver when you arrive.
My worry is still the jump to deep out system. If you can reset the jump drive fairly quickly, there is no reason to hang around and fight. Jump in at a mid range speed. Release self guided missiles towards distant targets. Brake and reorient at best acceleration for the 'return to home' jump - and leave. Let the missiles coast in system and take out the targets before enemy ordinance can even reach you.
Unless the enemy has much better sensors than you or gets lucky and has units near where you arrive at, he may have a hard time seeing you in time to do anything about it.
If he doesn't know where you come from, you can just keep doing this until you finally get lucky.
In real life, you would need to have a 'follow on' ship to find out the results. It may be a good thing to have the system not report results of weapons in a system that has no ships/populations.
If the destination system is unsurveyed you will end up at a distance from the star somewhere between 100% and 170% of the hyper limit and in a random direction from the star. Your arrival heading will be consistent with your point of origin. So you could arrive on the far side of the star heading away from it. In fact, for an unsurveyed system it is highly unlikely you would arrive on an suitable attack heading.
Steve
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Just a quick thought.
What would people think of the drop out of hyperspace being associated with a sensor flash. It has already been talked about as a way to guard against the 'drive by nuking'.
Perhaps a hyperspace sensor tech, but add one thing. Make the flash also carry the 'signature' of the system the ship came from.
Now the need to create forward bases becomes paramount. Otherwise your jumps will tell your opponent exactly where your HOME is at. They will trace the forward base instead. When they get there, they will have to catch a ship jumping into the system to know your next system up the chain.
If you have jumps coming in from several systems, now they have to guess and prioritize their next move. Secure the system and survey, or try to hit the next link up and maybe get too far to make it back.
Thoughts anyone....
I like the idea of knowing the direction from which the ship originated. However I end up handling detection of ships entering the system, I'll include an estimate of the system of origin - based on heading.
Steve
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Sweet.
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If the destination system is unsurveyed you will end up at a distance from the star somewhere between 100% and 170% of the hyper limit and in a random direction from the star. Your arrival heading will be consistent with your point of origin. So you could arrive on the far side of the star heading away from it. In fact, for an unsurveyed system it is highly unlikely you would arrive on an suitable attack heading.
Steve
I like this. It suggests that rough-and-ready prospectors will be able to operate in the frontier, and even guerrilla military forces, while making them far less efficient than regular navies.
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There is a minimum velocity requirement of 200 km/s for hyperspace entry and you can only jump when you are lined up on another star.
I probably missed it in all the reading. My apologies. Nice to know someone is solving the problems faster than I can think of them.
I like the idea of knowing the direction from which the ship originated. However I end up handling detection of ships entering the system, I'll include an estimate of the system of origin - based on heading.
Cool.
If the destination system is unsurveyed you will end up at a distance from the star somewhere between 100% and 170% of the hyper limit and in a random direction from the star. Your arrival heading will be consistent with your point of origin. So you could arrive on the far side of the star heading away from it. In fact, for an unsurveyed system it is highly unlikely you would arrive on an suitable attack heading.
No arguement. I would just jump in at a 'low' speed as far out as I could. Adjust course toward the primary and them release the ordinance. Then turn toward where I want to go and jump out. The ordinance won't need any fuel to get in system. Picking targets will be a problem...but no plan is perfect. The first run might just be missiles with sensors to find the targets.
As a thought, would it be a bad thing to fudge the 'unsurveyed jump' %s both up and down from 100%. Perhaps 30 - 170% (although making sure it didn't end up in something might be a coding nightmare -don't know). If I had to miss I want to end a long way from the folks who might be shooting at me. Jumping farther out just gives me more time to adjust for what I find. If I accidentally end up in the middle of the system, in the midst of the 'natives' defenses - well, that could be a little embarassing....
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Or you might end up right next to your target, and survive barely long enough to empty your box launcher of tactical nukes on the planet.
Goes both ways. :-\
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Perhaps 30 - 170% (although making sure it didn't end up in something might be a coding nightmare -don't know). If I had to miss I want to end a long way from the folks who might be shooting at me. Jumping farther out just gives me more time to adjust for what I find. If I accidentally end up in the middle of the system, in the midst of the 'natives' defenses - well, that could be a little embarrassing....
Jumping too close with a system of taking damage as a result of exiting in too strong a gravity field is how I was thinking of this. Landing next too your enemies with your fire controls in need of repair could be even more embarrassing...
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While busy researching something for a game of my own, I came across a thought I think I'll share:
Apparently dwarf stars are MASSIVELY underrepresented in our star catalogs simply because of limitations to how far we can detect them. If you add dead stars to this mass, it becomes possible that these could explain a quantity of dark matter as not being actual dark matter, but rather undetectable real matter.
Now if you have drives that operate by navigating using gravity wells, this potentially significant and constantly-changing interstellar debris could prove a significant navigational problem if it can pull ships out of hyperspace. Any actual collision is unlikely, since space is BIG... but scouts and explorers would likely travel to another star by jumping from gravity-pocket to gravity-pocket, staying in real-space only long enough to survey the debris and its gravitational effect, recalculate, then jump again.
This process would of course make interstellar travels much longer and more hazardous, possibly explaining lost ships. Once mapped however you should be able to bypass all this debris and simply jump directly to the target star.
Such a system would make interdiction and interception possible, as well as introduce a 'survey upkeep' (the debris don't stand still after all) and make long jumps expensive and risky versus shorter jumps.
Any thoughts?
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The debris is moving at stellar speeds. While fast in a cosmic sense, even over a few hundred years we probably won't see anything notable. Still, reminds me of some science fiction story where a rouge planet was tearing along at most of the speed of light through the galaxy. When explorers finally find it and reach it, they almost land before realizing it's from a different region of the universe- one dominated by antimatter. They actually find that the leading face of the planet has been radiated and eroded by constant impacts with interstellar hydrogen. There's apparently a civilization on the falling edge, although how it functions without a sun worries me. Perhaps they collect matter from the horizon area and have a neutralization-based biology.
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A quick two cents here....more distance = more error...so you pop out every couple of systems to take a star sighting basically like the good old days of sail, so you know, you end up somewhat near your target. Considering the shear amount of SLOW in-system drives have over the whoosh there we go power of jumping around you could literally shave days of in-system travel off by stopping on the way so you end up somewhere near and close in to your target instead way out in BFE. I read all, missed most, I'm going to sleep....as an excuse if this was already brought up. More like...wassat...er...david drakes books? Commander leary, thassit...