Posted by: vergeraiders
« on: March 20, 2008, 10:43:06 AM »yep 99.9% of the time it would not matter. Its those pesky .1% that drive programmers mad
Could you keep your ships parked in orbit on the far side of the moon and acheive the same result - out of line of site scanner detection.
Of course with 2.6 missile targeting I guess they could still be missile targets if anything can track them.
Interesting idea for a campaign, Steve. I apologize for just getting around to reading it now, I've been struggling with a serious addiction to Hearts of Iron II - Doomsday/Armageddon, which has affected my own campaign for the worse. All I can say is that I think I've gotten past it, and I'll be posting more write-ups in the near future.
Now - I've got so say that given my recent experience with active sensor's ability to gather tech data I understand your government's desire to get their ships away from Earth, but doesn't that invalidate their very reason for existence? Once posted away from Earth, they can no longer affect events there, except after the fact. This is a catch 22, in a way.
The WW II fleet train was the basis for my original suggestion. One option for rationale for a "yard" "ship" being able to maintain more than any other would be a limit that it can do nothing else. Being towed in sections by tugs was how the AFDLs all got around (SLOWLY). Then an AR provided shops, and assorted AF brought parts and subsystems. Crew (both ship in overhaul and "yard" stayed ashore, or in a nearby AP or special barge converted to house 300+, with kitchen.
I note that in the last few edtions of Starfire, yard required NO maintenance (though the hull spaces mounting them did).
<snip>
Oceania?s military power increased considerably on May 12th with the completion of the Ark Royal class carriers Illustrious and Yorktown. Both ships left orbit almost as soon as they cleared the slipways. Although Titan Base could still not handle ships greater than 4000 tons, Vice Admiral Ryan did not want any of their technology being scanned by Eastasian or Eurasian ships and was prepared to handle the eventual overhaul costs to maintain security. The two Sao Paulo class jump tenders were launched ten days later. Both ships also headed for Titan from where they would move to investigate the closest two jumps points to Earth, located either side of Saturn?s orbit. A direct course to the jump points was avoided in case it raised suspicion among the other powers that Oceania might have completed a gravitational survey. The eventful month of May concluded with Apache, Zulu and the Melbourne class gravitational survey ships Port Phillip, Sullivan Bay and Dandedong arriving at the alien jump gate.
Steve
One option is to allow any space vehicle that has a maintenance facility automatically maintains itself. It makes sense since the facilities and personnel are all there.
One issue to be handled though is how such a structure would itself be maintained. Currently one maintenance facility is sufficient to handle a ship of 200 tons As a space-going maintenance facility would likely be larger than that, the structure would not be able to maintain itself so I would need to come up with a reasonable method of handling that.
Quote from: "Kurt"I like the concept. My original idea for infrastructure, when back when Steve and I were discussing some basic game concepts, was large things like planetary transportation networks, beanstalks, orbital industry, gas giant scoop miners, solar collection mirrors, and so on. This all got subsumed into generic infrastructure, and the game moved on.That still would be a possibility. As mentioned above by Haegan, the Space Elevator providing a bonus to ship construction speed would be a very good example. Something like a planetary transportation network could add a bonus to wealth, solar collection mirrors might provide a boost to industrial production, etc. Maybe I should start a new thread on possible "Wonders"
It would be nice to see some large construction projects, like bean-stalks, that would provide different bonuses to the civilization that invested in them.
One other thing I considered including was the power to run a population, so you would have to build the solar collectors you mentioned, or build nuclear power stations, etc. I am not sure how much that would add though to game play though.
Steve
Quote from: "rmcrowe"It appears that Oceana definitely needs to develop a new technology similar to the mobile (floating, in WW II) docks, so as to be able to reset maintence clocks in remote orbit. Obviously, supplies (parts, raw materials, workmen, etc.) would have to be drawn from a colony somewhere, but your average Asian (East or Otherwise) would have to work REAL hard to figure that THIS freighter was going somewhere important. A by-product would be orbital habitats with hydroponic/soil gardens and living quarters.I have been wondering how to handle this while keeping to my internal consistency mantra. It occured to me though that a few functions of populations are already handled by ship-based systems. For example, terraforming modules, fuel harvesters or asteroid mining modules. These tend to be smaller but more expensive than their ground-based equivalents and of course they have to maintained which adds a long-term overhead. Therefore the easiest way to handle an orbital habitat or space station would be to handle it as a very large ship, using the existing rules plus I would add additional systems such as a maintenance facility type module. Of course, this is still going to be fairly large so any structure that includes enough to be an effective space-going floating dock is going to be huge.
In game terms, the problem for the player would be building such a huge structure in the first place. So perhaps the way to handle it is to allow non-mobile structures to be built in pieces and assembled in space. In principle, you would build smaller parts of the whole (which would still be valid classes in their own right) and then tow them to the location and join them to the main structure, in a similar way to the creation of the International Space Station. The two or more pieces would become one new class generated by Aurora using all the combined component of the pieces.
I like the concept. My original idea for infrastructure, when back when Steve and I were discussing some basic game concepts, was large things like planetary transportation networks, beanstalks, orbital industry, gas giant scoop miners, solar collection mirrors, and so on. This all got subsumed into generic infrastructure, and the game moved on.
It would be nice to see some large construction projects, like bean-stalks, that would provide different bonuses to the civilization that invested in them.
But where would you get the magic beans? *runs for cover*
It appears that Oceana definitely needs to develop a new technology similar to the mobile (floating, in WW II) docks, so as to be able to reset maintence clocks in remote orbit. Obviously, supplies (parts, raw materials, workmen, etc.) would have to be drawn from a colony somewhere, but your average Asian (East or Otherwise) would have to work REAL hard to figure that THIS freighter was going somewhere important. A by-product would be orbital habitats with hydroponic/soil gardens and living quarters.