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.  

<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 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: "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.

But where would you get the magic beans? *runs for cover*