Aurora 4x
VB6 Aurora => Bureau of Ship Design => Topic started by: AL on August 03, 2015, 07:29:34 AM
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So in my recent game I finally got around to seriously considering fielding some "big" ships after getting a shipyard past the 100kt mark. Now I realise that this does not even compare with some of the multi-megaton ship designs I've seen floating around the forums, but 100kt should still be "big" in most people's books.
Since this is more or less my first design of this magnitude, I am open to whatever advice/constructive criticism you guys can come up with. It would probably be important to note here that maintenance is turned off before anyone comments that my ships would fall apart before seeing any action.
Anatus-A class Cruiser 100 000 tons 2096 Crew 21005 BP TCS 2000 TH 2400 EM 45000
2400 km/s JR 3-50 Armour 6-191 Shields 1500-300 Sensors 90/90/0/0 Damage Control Rating 50 PPV 146
Maint Life 0.12 Years MSP 4313 AFR 8000% IFR 111.1% 1YR 36852 5YR 552775 Max Repair 3466 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 24 months Flight Crew Berths 100
Flag Bridge Hangar Deck Capacity 4000 tons Magazine 5100
Hyperspace Core M-100k Max Ship Size 100000 tons Distance 50k km Squadron Size 3
Prototype MPF Cruiser Sublight Drive (8) Power 600 Fuel Use 12.18% Signature 300 Exp 7%
Fuel Capacity 4 940 000 Litres Range 73.0 billion km (352 days at full power)
Corellis Reactive Armour Mk.II (375) Total Fuel Cost 9 000 Litres per hour (216 000 per day)
Ageis Shield System (10x8) Range 1000 km TS: 20000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
50mm RF Flechette Cannon Mk.II (10x4) Range 40 000km TS: 5000 km/s Power 3-3 RM 4 ROF 5 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
125mm Flechette Cannon (2x4) Range 250 000km TS: 5000 km/s Power 15-4 RM 5 ROF 20 5 5 5 5 5 4 3 3 2 2
Standard Beam Fire Control Mk.II (2) Max Range: 64 000 km TS: 5000 km/s 84 69 53 37 22 6 0 0 0 0
Clayton Long-Range Fire Control (1) Max Range: 320 000 km TS: 5000 km/s 97 94 91 88 84 81 78 75 72 69
Compact SF Reactor Core (1) Total Power Output 30 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Micro SF Reactor Core (1) Total Power Output 12 Armour 0 Exp 5%
150mm Auto-Cannon Mk.II (100) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 5
Cannon Control Centre (5) Range 6.8m km Resolution 20
150mm "Mauler" Shell (4000) Speed: 30 000 km/s End: 3.8m Range: 6.9m km WH: 4 Size: 1 TH: 160/96/48
150mm "Cleanser" Shell (500) Speed: 24 000 km/s End: 13.3m Range: 19.1m km WH: 1 Size: 1 TH: 80/48/24
150mm "Seeker" Shell (600) Speed: 32 000 km/s End: 4.2m Range: 8.2m km WH: 4 Size: 1 TH: 181/108/54
Coleman Missile Detection Sensor (1) GPS 140 Range 25.2m km MCR 2.7m km Resolution 1
King-Lowe Ship Detection Net (1) GPS 28000 Range 504.0m km Resolution 100
King-Lowe Missile Detection Net (1) GPS 280 Range 50.4m km MCR 5.5m km Resolution 1
Thermal Sensor TH5-90 (1) Sensitivity 90 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 90m km
EM Detection Sensor EM5-90 (1) Sensitivity 90 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 90m km
ECCM-2 (1) ECM 20
This was the original design I came up with. As you might notice, and I freely admit, the missile doctrine was ripped off heavily inspired by Vandermeer's Astral Republic game. What I was aiming for was a long-ranged capital ship which could respond to threats on outlying systems either independently or in small groups. The Anatus would probably carry a squadron of fighters/bombers to make use of the large sensor range, for example:
Corsair class Fighter-bomber 250 tons 3 Crew 71 BP TCS 5 TH 80 EM 0
16000 km/s Armour 2-3 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 1.5
Maint Life 0 Years MSP 0 AFR 50% IFR 0.7% 1YR 3 5YR 42 Max Repair 40 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.5 months Spare Berths 3
Magazine 10
Prototype Fighter MPF Sublight Drive (1) Power 80 Fuel Use 484.22% Signature 80 Exp 25%
Fuel Capacity 15 000 Litres Range 2.2 billion km (38 hours at full power)
150mm Single-use Cartridge (10) Missile Size 1 Hangar Reload 7.5 minutes MF Reload 1.2 hours
Cannon Control Centre (1) Range 6.8m km Resolution 20
150mm "Mauler" Shell (10) Speed: 30 000 km/s End: 3.8m Range: 6.9m km WH: 4 Size: 1 TH: 160/96/48
Talbot Fighter Scanner (1) GPS 168 Range 6.8m km Resolution 20
In this case the fighters already have their own onboard actives, but hopefully you get the idea.
I then decided to make a revision of the Anatus, which you will see below:
Anatus-B class Cruiser 100 000 tons 2191 Crew 20683 BP TCS 2000 TH 2400 EM 36000
2400 km/s JR 3-50 Armour 6-191 Shields 1200-300 Sensors 90/90/0/0 Damage Control Rating 50 PPV 196
Maint Life 0.11 Years MSP 4293 AFR 8000% IFR 111.1% 1YR 37449 5YR 561729 Max Repair 3466 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 24 months Flight Crew Berths 100
Flag Bridge Hangar Deck Capacity 4000 tons Magazine 5150
Hyperspace Core M-100k Max Ship Size 100000 tons Distance 50k km Squadron Size 3
Prototype MPF Cruiser Sublight Drive (8) Power 600 Fuel Use 12.18% Signature 300 Exp 7%
Fuel Capacity 5 415 000 Litres Range 80.0 billion km (385 days at full power)
Corellis Reactive Armour Mk.II (300) Total Fuel Cost 7 200 Litres per hour (172 800 per day)
Ageis Shield System (10x8) Range 1000 km TS: 20000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
125mm Flechette Cannon (2x4) Range 250 000km TS: 5000 km/s Power 15-4 RM 5 ROF 20 5 5 5 5 5 4 3 3 2 2
50mm RF Flechette Cannon Mk.II (10x4) Range 40 000km TS: 5000 km/s Power 3-3 RM 4 ROF 5 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
Standard Beam Fire Control Mk.II (2) Max Range: 64 000 km TS: 5000 km/s 84 69 53 37 22 6 0 0 0 0
Clayton Long-Range Fire Control (1) Max Range: 320 000 km TS: 5000 km/s 97 94 91 88 84 81 78 75 72 69
Compact SF Reactor Core (1) Total Power Output 30 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Micro SF Reactor Core (1) Total Power Output 12 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Standard Torpedo Silo (10) Missile Size 10 Rate of Fire 50
150mm Auto-Cannon Mk.II (50) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 5
Cannon Control Centre (5) Range 6.8m km Resolution 20
King-Lowe Torpedo Guidance Centre (2) Range 756.0m km Resolution 100
150mm "Mauler" Shell (3000) Speed: 30 000 km/s End: 3.8m Range: 6.9m km WH: 4 Size: 1 TH: 160/96/48
150mm "Cleanser" Shell (500) Speed: 24 000 km/s End: 13.3m Range: 19.1m km WH: 1 Size: 1 TH: 80/48/24
"Perdiot" Torpedo (100) Speed: 9 600 km/s End: 1315.5m Range: 762.7m km WH: 4 Size: 10 TH: 32/19/9
150mm "Seeker" Shell (650) Speed: 32 000 km/s End: 4.2m Range: 8.2m km WH: 4 Size: 1 TH: 181/108/54
King-Lowe Missile Detection Net (1) GPS 280 Range 50.4m km MCR 5.5m km Resolution 1
Coleman Missile Detection Sensor (1) GPS 140 Range 25.2m km MCR 2.7m km Resolution 1
King-Lowe Ship Detection Net (1) GPS 28000 Range 504.0m km Resolution 100
Thermal Sensor TH5-90 (1) Sensitivity 90 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 90m km
EM Detection Sensor EM5-90 (1) Sensitivity 90 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 90m km
ECCM-2 (1) ECM 20
The main change here was to add in a suite of torpedo launchers, with a bunch of reshuffling of modules to accommodate for their larger size. The torpedo is actually multi-stage, the "warhead" stage is shown below:
Missile Size: 4 MSP (0.2 HS) Warhead: 25 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 21000 km/s Engine Endurance: 5 minutes Range: 6.2m km
Active Sensor Strength: 0.028 Sensitivity Modifier: 180%
Resolution: 100 Maximum Range vs 5000 ton object (or larger): 50 000 km
Cost Per Missile: 7.3451
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 210% 3k km/s 70% 5k km/s 42% 10k km/s 21%
Materials Required: 6.25x Tritanium 0.0171x Boronide 0.028x Uridium 1.05x Gallicite Fuel x137.5
The idea here was to make better use of the large active sensor that is installed on the Anatus, but since the torpedoes now outrange the sensors by 50%, it might be a good idea to carry a complement of scout craft to enable engagements at the full 750mkm range.
Anyway, to bring things together I do have a few specific questions about the designs in case you can't think of anything to suggest.
1. How good of a range is 70-80 bkm? Is it necessary to sacrifice some of the combat capabilities to improve the range? I've had some recent engagements that were 4 or so jumps out from Sol if that gives enough of an indication of what I am after.
2. Is 2400 km/s too slow? I recently made it into magneto-plasma in engine tech, and my fleet speed for smaller ships is around 4000 km/s which I think is more acceptable.
3. Finally, can someone tell me what's going on with the crew in that fighter design? Is it a bug?
(http://i.imgur.com/TZYCtMO.png)
If you recall, the design for this fighter was pasted somewhere above.
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lack of eng. spaces on capitals - with 24 month deployment maint time should be best similar
others
70b km range is a lot
early it is difficult to have both speed and range and still have max combat value / I usually have 25-30b km in magneto era - but in magneto era you rarely operate further than 3-4 jumps from home system and still can grab some tankers with you )
small issues :
1. only 6 armor on 100kt beast ? seems a bit small 1.5kt shield is nice but you may face opponents that will tear it fast and later all hits will be critical
2. by the time you hit 100kt naval slipway you should have far better engines for the ship - 2.4 for magneto era is small / 4-6km/s is better for this era
3. B-type has 10 tubes per 100kt tonnage . In many cases you will not harm anybody as PD will stop this easily. I doubt you will have many of such ships so increasing salvo will be difficult.
I would personaly never go this way. Ships seem damn expensive for a broadside
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I would say your speed is far too low to begin with. You have the advantage here of not using any maintenance and so you should try to stretch it as far as possible. Now at 100k you are hitting a big ship but at the same time it still isn't anywhere near big enough at your tech level to be a do all ship. The design looks like this comes across as a command/font line shock ship, it has the ability to hit hard and punch a large hole in an enemies defences. If this is the intended role then I think you should pack it fuller of things that hurt and allow for a support structure withing the fleet, You could for example reduce the magazine hold and add in more launchers. This would help with the current weakness of having a small salvo strike.
You could also reduce the fuel a little and add in either a more powerful engine or extra ones. While speed isn't a critical part of this design due to the nature of the weapons, they are no good if you are unable to get them in range before the fight is over. I would say that the armour amount is getting paper thin for a ship of this size, while I imagine you do not plan on getting in toe to toe gun battles with this design. There is always the chance that you could get faced with a large group of fighters or a high number of missile salvos, in this case after one or two combat strikes you could find yourself facing internal damage. Since you are unlikely to have lots of this type of design you really want them to be able to survive as long as possible. Perhaps reduce the hanger bay size to allow for more armour?
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I suggest dumping the point defense railguns in favor of more 125mm cannnons. The ship will never be fast enough to make 10cm railguns better than more CIWS for point defense purposes, especially since it only really needs to defend itself and not others. Rough calculation is that the 10 CIWS mass ~2.5 times as much as the 10 railguns, but provide 8 times as much missile defense. Meanwhile, 2 heavy railguns is just not enough firepower - even with all that shielding and armor. The captured NPR "Penetrator"-class Battlecruiser from Steve's Solarian Empires Campaign mounted 36 15-cm lasers, capable of dealing 216 damage per 10 seconds. You don't need that much firepower, but you should at least be able to put up a good fight against a ship like that in beam range. It would suck to have a warship this size be reduced to just those 2 guns if magazines should run dry!
If you intend to use only fighters for the hangar bay, you can trim some hull space by lowering your flight crew berths(/extra crew quarters. You only need 48 for a full complement of the fighters you showed off. I would suggest adding some cryo berths for picking up lifepods.
The range is fine. Allowing for extra fuel reserved for fighters and for a round trip, you probably have a roughly 30bkm combat range. In my current game, with 12 years of exploration, the furthest system from Sol is only 22 bkm. If you want to go further, bring a tanker or establish a forward fueling operation. (You can see this in the Galactic Map by going to Display and checking "Show Distance from Selected System". This displays the distance to each system's primary star. Some 'further' systems will actually be closer to Sol than 'nearer' systems because of the vagaries of jumpgate placement!)
Personally, I'd remove the new missile launchers in favor of additional hangar bays. Or if you want to mount some missile launchers, mount like 20-30 0.25x launchers so you can get some hefty throw weight.
I would say that the armour amount is getting paper thin for a ship of this size, while I imagine you do not plan on getting in toe to toe gun battles with this design. There is always the chance that you could get faced with a large group of fighters or a high number of missile salvos, in this case after one or two combat strikes you could find yourself facing internal damage. Since you are unlikely to have lots of this type of design you really want them to be able to survive as long as possible. Perhaps reduce the hanger bay size to allow for more armour?
I don't agree at all. It takes ~6 layers of armor to get 1200 armor strength, so the rough equivalent in pointage for that design is 12 layers of armor. However, shielding is drastically superior to armor point-for-point, even if you ignore its regenerative capabilities. There's no "Birthday problem" penetrations and no shock damage. If you give even a (very conservative) 50% advantage to shielding point-for point, the ship has the equivalent of 15 layers of armor, which is pretty damn strong. Or to put it another way, 1200 points of Epsilon shielding is 300 hullsize (15000tons), even discounting crew requirements. That plus the existing (presumably Ceramic) 6 layers of armor is about 400HS/20000tons or 20% of the ship devoted to passive defenses! That is an extremely high percentage for any warship, let alone one mounting bulky high-efficiency drives. If that percentage was used for purely armor, you'd end up with 20 armor layers! If anything some of those defenses could stand to be swapped out for more hangar bays or somesuch.
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Thanks for the responses so far.
To be honest, I forgot about the salvo density issue towards the end of the design process. I'm thinking I might try out 50% reduced size launchers for all the size 1's. They were never really intended for anti-missile duties anyway, and the increased salvo density should make up for the ~25s reload time they get instead.
I dont have the save on me at the moment, but earlier I was working on getting the ship up to speed before all else. I slapped on some more engines to get 4000 km/s, but even after cutting fuel, hanger space, magazines and some shielding I was still somewhat over the size budget. It seems I would have to develop some higher power-modifier engines to be able to fit it all in, but I'm concerned it would drop the range too much especially considering I've already dropped about half the fuel capacity. And this is before getting the armour belt up to strength.
Now that I think about it, those point defense railguns do seem somewhat pointless when CIWS is available and the ship is supposed to work independently - this kind of thing is why having other people check the design can be so useful. I'll take them off and see if I have enough room at the end to fit some of the larger caliber guns later.
I do have some 1kt shuttle designs with cyro space for picking up pods, but I guess I'll have to wait for the other design revisions before checking if I have the hangar space available to pack some of those.
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I was thinking going with larger salvos for the size 10 launchers, most everyone goes standard launchers for size 1s - it's better for antimissile purposes and can pump out more missiles in less time than reduced size launchers.
personally i find there are only two speeds that actually matter for warships: faster than the other guy, and not faster than the other guy. "Long range carrier" and "Faster than the other guy" simply don't go together easily. Embrace the efficiency and/or size savings of running with a lower speed. Since this ship carries fighters anyway, it doesnt suffer as badly from the traditional disadvantages of being out-speeded.
You may consider increasing your battle-line speed. 4000 km/s is 'standard' for old style military magnetoplasma engines, but even then many players used increased speeds. The size and speed benefits of using 1.25x and 1.5x speed boost engines are hard to ignore, and you can make up a lot of the fuel efficiency loss by increasing size. The resulting large engines are expensive to research and can explode catastrophically, but the performance gains are hard to argue with.
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I already run the maximum 50hs engines on all my ships as standard (other than FAC/fighters of course...) so no gains there.
I'm thinking I might just rewrite the whole concept here. I started again with a really large capacity carrier, same 100kt size:
Acalle class Carrier 100 000 tons 1585 Crew 15915.8 BP TCS 2000 TH 2400 EM 0
2400 km/s JR 3-50 Armour 10-191 Shields 0-0 Sensors 90/90/0/0 Damage Control Rating 20 PPV 0
Maint Life 0.18 Years MSP 3989 AFR 4000% IFR 55.6% 1YR 22630 5YR 339450 Max Repair 3466 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 24 months Flight Crew Berths 756
Flag Bridge Hangar Deck Capacity 35000 tons Magazine 2500
Hyperspace Core M-100k Max Ship Size 100000 tons Distance 50k km Squadron Size 3
Prototype MPF Cruiser Sublight Drive (8) Power 600 Fuel Use 12.18% Signature 300 Exp 7%
Fuel Capacity 4 150 000 Litres Range 61.3 billion km (295 days at full power)
Ageis Shield System (10x8) Range 1000 km TS: 20000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
King-Lowe Missile Detection Net (1) GPS 280 Range 50.4m km MCR 5.5m km Resolution 1
Thermal Sensor TH5-90 (1) Sensitivity 90 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 90m km
EM Detection Sensor EM5-90 (1) Sensitivity 90 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 90m km
ECM 20
With its offensive capabilities completely offloaded onto its strike-group, I can better take advantage of the low speed, high efficiency engines. Hopefully the CIWS and armour should be sufficient to keep attacks on the carrier at bay long enough for some support to arrive/deal with the threat.
I then moved on to redesigning the cruisers somewhat:
Anatus-A class Cruiser 100 000 tons 1901 Crew 19468.8 BP TCS 2000 TH 4200 EM 45000
4200 km/s Armour 10-191 Shields 1500-300 Sensors 90/90/0/0 Damage Control Rating 50 PPV 180
Maint Life 0.35 Years MSP 4217 AFR 8000% IFR 111.1% 1YR 12061 5YR 180912 Max Repair 337.5 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 24 months Flight Crew Berths 33
Hangar Deck Capacity 2000 tons Magazine 3100
Prototype MPF Cruiser Sublight Drive (14) Power 600 Fuel Use 12.18% Signature 300 Exp 7%
Fuel Capacity 3 900 000 Litres Range 57.6 billion km (158 days at full power)
Corellis Reactive Armour Mk.II (375) Total Fuel Cost 9 000 Litres per hour (216 000 per day)
Ageis Shield System (10x8) Range 1000 km TS: 20000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
125mm Flechette Cannon (10x4) Range 250 000km TS: 5000 km/s Power 15-4 RM 5 ROF 20 5 5 5 5 5 4 3 3 2 2
Clayton Long-Range Fire Control (2) Max Range: 320 000 km TS: 5000 km/s 97 94 91 88 84 81 78 75 72 69
Micro SF Reactor Core (4) Total Power Output 48 Armour 0 Exp 5%
150mm Auto-Cannon Mk.II (100) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 5
Cannon Control Centre (5) Range 6.8m km Resolution 20
150mm "Mauler" Shell (2000) Speed: 30 000 km/s End: 3.8m Range: 6.9m km WH: 4 Size: 1 TH: 160/96/48
150mm "Cleanser" Shell (500) Speed: 24 000 km/s End: 13.3m Range: 19.1m km WH: 1 Size: 1 TH: 80/48/24
150mm "Seeker" Shell (600) Speed: 32 000 km/s End: 4.2m Range: 8.2m km WH: 4 Size: 1 TH: 181/108/54
Coleman Missile Detection Sensor (1) GPS 140 Range 25.2m km MCR 2.7m km Resolution 1
King-Lowe Ship Detection Net (1) GPS 28000 Range 504.0m km Resolution 100
King-Lowe Missile Detection Net (1) GPS 280 Range 50.4m km MCR 5.5m km Resolution 1
Thermal Sensor TH5-90 (1) Sensitivity 90 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 90m km
EM Detection Sensor EM5-90 (1) Sensitivity 90 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 90m km
ECCM-2 (2) ECM 20
The jump drive was peeled off for a fair bit of extra space, and the flag bridge was removed as the dedicated carrier probably is a better fit for it. Hangar space was reduced to just 2000t for a couple shuttles or backup/reserve scouts and the point defense railguns were replaced with the higher caliber anti-ship version as suggested. Speed is now up to 4.2kkm/s and armour boosted to 10 layers. Obviously the cruiser is now reliant on the carrier to transit from system to system, but I figured I may as well make use of the squadron jump size of 3 we get.
I still need to research the reduced size torpedo launchers so no revised B-variant yet, but thoughts on the changes so far?
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4.2km/s is much better , at least you are no longer slowest ship in the area
it is always good idea to try think out of what your designs can do vs similar ships or even trying to figure out how whould look a fight between 2 ships of same class
are your missile offensive potential strong enough to break point defence , can you penetrate shields with your fire and so on
such thinking offer good idea about how offensive and defensive assets are balanced
rest is a matter of overall fleet composition , expected enemies , doctrine and so on
in many of my games 200-250kt is more or less enough tonnage for my main fleet ;) so using 100kt is a bit weird :)
If i remeber correctly 50kt was my biggest ship combat used
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Yeah, to be honest the size has quite a lot to do with flavour and the sheer "cause-I-can" factor than actual combat effectiveness, but even so it doesn't mean it can't be optimised enough to perform well.
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for me 100 kt ship should be able to have at least 80-120 4-6 size missiles broadsiede ;) otherwise I'm not happy
some nasty creatures out there in space simply demends huge broadsides , especialy in early and mid game
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I largely approve of seeing some larger ships for a change of course. :) If some people do it here and there sometimes, that makes up for a healthy sci-fi culture injection I think.
This was the original design I came up with. As you might notice, and I freely admit, the missile doctrine was ripped off heavily inspired by Vandermeer's Astral Republic game.
Good, good. When looking on how you renamed shields to reactive armor, and CIWS to Aegis Shields (typo btw.), I can see you have internalized this "all is symbolic - everything is permitted" sandboxy interpretation understanding. :D This is the road to free fiction.
I will be adapting something from you too , which is the conversion to mm measurement for guns etc. . Can't believe I haven't thought about that yet and left it with game given centimeters. So un-naval.
..Uhm, I have just quickly calculated how long these 150mm "shells" would have to be to weight the 2.5 tons they do btw. .(was curious if that would be a good measure for head kino purposes). The result was somewhat over 15 meters... . I looked up an 155mm howitzer shell (link (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M107_projectile)) which is only 43 kg, so it seems it should be even over 25m. ...I guess that means it should be a higher caliber. ;D Howitzer equivalent would be pretty lame for ship cannons too.(Yamato had 460mm) Then again, having 100 massive cannons isn't really thematic style either.
I guess there is an issue with the data realism of Aurora here then. Launchers seem too small, and the "missiles" seem not to have enough punch for the massive caliber that even the smallest one would have.
Iowa Main Turret (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16%22/50_caliber_Mark_7_gun) weights about 120 tons with 3 barrels and firing about 1.2 ton projectiles (406mm caliber here), so the launcher to ammunition weight ration is 33:1. Aurora is just 20:1 without any launcher reduction, so launchers are indeed somewhat easier to get.
It could be because we are dealing with missile launchers here after all though and not cannons, hmm. Here is one real naval launcher: link (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-116_Rolling_Airframe_Missile) 5777kg as 21 box launchers, and 73.5 kg of the ammunition make for about 25:1 ratio in form of standard (no mini.) launcher. If that is a representable sample, then Aurora launchers come actually pretty close.
...Weird. I know one has to consider layout and all that support tonnage that has to come on top of just the weight of something like the 120t turret, so the real ratio should be higher. However, Aurora is not really devoid of that too, with all the crew quarters, engineering, armor and engines being considered and taking up a lot of hull. Maybe crew quarters are still too small though, because I hear the crew space takes up the most of ships, which isn't really the case in Aurora. ..I think that is worth an investigation sometime in another thread. If it is true, then the deadliness of all weapons would have to scale up as a follow-up to compensate for reduced weapon tonnage.
Well, for now I guess I can accept that Iowa measurement, where one barrel is about 40t when you cut the turret up, so close enough to 50t of Aurora. That makes shells maybe 500mm, and we consider them to be about 66% heavier because of future, space and TN-material and whatnot. To avoid picturing ships with literally 100 main battleship cannon barrels sticking out, I also before in the Astral Republic thread considered the extra tonnage merely to be part of some sort of fast firing mechanism, so you could maybe restrict it to 10-20 barrels in mind, but firing 5-10 times in 5 seconds.(not optimal for the battleship feeling, but something. It was ok for the ships that I made in there, where every 'turret'-fire-control actually represented a real turret on the models that I used as inspiration, but the excess barrels would become part of the reloading mechanism)
Lost in theoretics. Back to the designs: You did designate quite a lot to shields. I know that is the core strength of large ships and you reduced it in the revision already, but it is still about 15% of the hull, so maybe 30% or more of the available mission tonnage. As center ship of a larger fleet I would say it is great, but for a ship of the line combatant I think it is too wasteful. Even the 300kt cruiser which managed to survive that whole big NPR war in my thread unscratched, despite close combat and such, had only 900 shields at the time.(though it should have been a bit more here)
Though I have to agree that no matter if you rebalance or not, the first current layout will most likely be able to conquer all but heavily fortified NPR worlds.(and Invaders ofc.) My first 120kt and partially 180kt ships couldn't shield wise stand against spoiler amm PDCs alone, but I guess that was because of the heavy cuts that maintenance takes when activated.
1. How good of a range is 70-80 bkm? Is it necessary to sacrifice some of the combat capabilities to improve the range? I've had some recent engagements that were 4 or so jumps out from Sol if that gives enough of an indication of what I am after.
You wanted it to be a long-ranged capital ship, but I consider this too little range for that here. Around 80 billion range only gives it an activity radius of around 40 billion kilometers, which is not too much on some maps.(though enough in most cases in early game I guess) Some connections and furthest research or fuel harvest outposts in my still relatively narrow Astral game map already require me to travel 40 billion kilometers out for example. Currently even my response craft destroyers of 1.35 engine power still manage to have more than 80 billion range, even though they are literally just there for out-and-back type mission. If I can manage, I try to give a capital ship a two year constant flight time provision, though I agree it goes a bit overboard, and I rarely use it all in actual exploration.(only fighter operations drain heavy on supplies)
That all falls of course if you seriously play with fuel tankers at the side of your fleet, or just behind the lines. Or maybe you use well placed refueling bases.(just occasional gas giants are too random and therefore not enough for this btw.)
I personally disliked the style in my big ship games, but I have recently made a little test game where I had fleets of smaller ships that really benefit from tanker management. It is just such a diminishment of capital ships, if you have to escort it with an even bigger tanker all the time. It should be the sight that towers it surroundings, thus must have its own fuel that gets it around.(or well organized fuel stations)
2. Is 2400 km/s too slow? I recently made it into magneto-plasma in engine tech, and my fleet speed for smaller ships is around 4000 km/s which I think is more acceptable.
Capital ships are never really fast, because of the range requirement. My swarm game had capital ships with speed of 120km/s, and I still washed two of the spoiler types in my way easily. Usually though I give the capitals 40% engine designation to kind of rebalance at least a bit, but in the end, you will only directly fight beam targets foolish enough to engage you head on (of which there are surprisingly many :D ), which means you must have big weaponry that definitely outranges them.(one of the strengths of big ships anyway, and then you adapted that ultimate ship-vs-ship weapon artillery shell thing, so you are good)
If the enemy consists of missile ships and still somehow has enough PD to block your torpedoes, the plan of choice is always the fighter complement, which you must have noticed in real world operation already. (maybe reduce their thermal btw.? they get spotted before firing range, which was one of my mistakes in the Astral game, yet it is fine for first strikes after fixing it - nothing against active sensors of course)
If the enemy can locate your fighters and counter them with missiles before they do anything, and you don't have escort fighters to shield them from small to medium salvos, then the only tiring thing to do for you is to wait for him to expend all ammunition on your capital ship instead, which should be immune against all natural non-beam ship threats at this stage.
I myself never had problems with the limited speed on capitals in all my games so far. In the Astral one of course I had already TL6 and with the 40% designation thus were faster often enough nonetheless, but even when I was not(against all those remnants), the different options in the arsenal always provided me with an appropriate counter.
This is the true boon of sheer mass dominance. Even while split up in all these multi-role capacities, you're still having enough for any particular job in any case and situation. Only larger fleets of highly specialized composition could crack such a nut in the field, but that doesn't happen in normal Aurora. (otherwise: a really large fleet of any composition can ofc. always be a threat, but I only saw such once and long ago)
One tip for the fighters: You should maybe include at least one fighter with beam weapons. You don't need to consider the escort thing if you don't like it, but just one beam fighter is technically enough to fulfill that desirable civil ship hunting role, where you can just lock the auto-target option and then see the AI shoot them down automatically. Spares a lot of click work.
1. only 6 armor on 100kt beast ? seems a bit small 1.5kt shield is nice but you may face opponents that will tear it fast and later all hits will be critical
The only ones that are able to tear such a shield are Amm PDCs, no other. Well, if you fight invaders with beam maybe, or do really suicidal decisions like taking on a focused beam NPR fleet. I have never seen anything other than Amm break a shield of 800+ though, and this despite playing only big ships since I got the game.
2. by the time you hit 100kt naval slipway you should have far better engines for the ship - 2.4 for magneto era is small / 4-6km/s is better for this era
This is actually accurate timing. In the Astral game I could put out that first 100kt Gemini frigate also exactly at magneto plasma age. I have often read how it takes soo long to build up large yards. ...You people aren't pushing it enough I say! ;D ;)
3. B-type has 10 tubes per 100kt tonnage . In many cases you will not harm anybody as PD will stop this easily. I doubt you will have many of such ships so increasing salvo will be difficult.
I would personaly never go this way. Ships seem damn expensive for a broadside
It is only a tactical asset. You can't count in classical ways like tube/mass ratio. Of course a multitasker will never be cut well in anything here. But since it is so dominating in mass, it will still be powerful enough to engage 1-3 smaller targets successfully nonetheless, which is probably about 90% of the fights in the game. It is a situational weapon for whenever a missile attacker is faster than you. From personal experience I can say that it works out in praxis very well.(the 300kt cruiser of the Astral thread even just had 6 tubes, and it was still enough for said purpose)
20k is also not really expensive. What else would you do with your resources? By the time I had full TL6 in the astral game, I had acquired enough resource to build pretty much exactly 100 of these 300kt cruisers (there was picture proof in another thread to that), and just artificially restricted myself to build not more than two at that time, because I wouldn't like to manage too much. Ship lists become crazily long if you would invest that type of resource fully in just small ships, but I guess most people just stop way before as me too.
The only things that I have really found to be costly in Aurora are massive civil ships, massive pdcs, or constant auto-mine spam.(but the last only through mismanagement of the corundium income)
Meanwhile, 2 heavy railguns is just not enough firepower - even with all that shielding and armor. The captured NPR "Penetrator"-class Battlecruiser from Steve's Solarian Empires Campaign mounted 36 15-cm lasers, capable of dealing 216 damage per 10 seconds. You don't need that much firepower, but you should at least be able to put up a good fight against a ship like that in beam range. It would suck to have a warship this size be reduced to just those 2 guns if magazines should run dry!
You overlooked that the main "beam" weaponry of the ship is actually the unblockable amm-sized(/mini-asm) "shell" spam. These weapons outrange every classical beam ship by far, and manage to get through beam specialist defenses easily still while doing medium damage. They are the superior beam fight weapon.
The new world order goes as this (assuming both sides would know all these ship types):
PD-Beam ships ->counter-> Missile Ships
Artillery(mini-asm) ships ->counter-> All Beam Ships
Missile ships ->counter-> Nothing, they are pathetic against PD and obsolete unless you have mass advantage or box launching ones as 1-hit wonder. Oh, of course they can engage enemy missile ships, which you would do if you can't get the PD-Beams up to speed.
?? ->counter-> Artillery ships. There is nothing effective against these, only other artillery ships will at least fight fair. AMM or Mini-ASMs seem to be the most powerful concentration of firing power and range in the game. The reason that they aren't even weak against Missile ships despite having no beam defense on their own is of course that their ammunition can double as PD too. It is not as good as a PD-Beam ship, and Mini-ASM is less accurate as AMM, but functions well enough to survive an equal enemies' magazines just fine, so if a missile ship isn't faster, it will still end up being the one to fall.
Computer AMM ships can in theory still be reasonably countered by heavily armored tanking hulks, but you won't be able to survive that against the Mini-ASMs who do more than 1 damage per unit.
To be honest, I forgot about the salvo density issue towards the end of the design process. I'm thinking I might try out 50% reduced size launchers for all the size 1's. They were never really intended for anti-missile duties anyway, and the increased salvo density should make up for the ~25s reload time they get instead.
Don't do that. Serious lack of combat experience here. 50 salvo density is far enough to deal with everything out there that isn't a (strong) PDC base, un-dispersed NPR fleet hub or maybe invader. I had 24 on the 300kt cruiser only, and it worked on every spoiler and NPR ship formation I came across, which happened to be lots. Even small groups of ships rarely block more than 8 missiles top. Hmm, maybe at your current missile speed it will be more though. You aren't using x6 power engines? That is one of the requirements of qualifying as a shell! (of course you can do what you want)
Anyway, 50 is still really powerful, and it will get through without having to resort to miniaturization.
I do have some 1kt shuttle designs with cyro space for picking up pods, but I guess I'll have to wait for the other design revisions before checking if I have the hangar space available to pack some of those.
If you are not afraid of exploiting game weaknesses, a tip: Docked craft doesn't lose moral below that of the capital ship it is docked on under any circumstances, meaning you can load a single most miniature rescue shuttle (~120t) full with survivors until it should explode, and it will still be fine while docked.
I still have more, but that is what I found out.
for me 100 kt ship should be able to have at least 80-120 4-6 size missiles broadsiede ;) otherwise I'm not happy
some nasty creatures out there in space simply demends huge broadsides , especialy in early and mid game
What are you thinking of? Invaders maybe ??? Otherwise I have not seen any threat that demanded 80-120 sizable missiles focused onto one at all, except PDC which still will be able to block all of them though.
---back to AL---
The newer, faster, easily exhaustible(both in fuel and ammunition), basically one-trick equipped, and only 2% strike craft capable Anatus-A class cruiser is a treachery to the capital ship concept. ;) Seriously though, it is a dreadnought at this point. Nearly all one big gun type and then rush the enemy with it. Independent capital ships who are literally able to stand on their own and make something of it in any situation, must be a center of many options and possibilities, or the day will come where you don't have the right tool for a job, and have to call for back-up. That is fine if you play a big fleet game, as jobs are shared in those, but it is no capital ship game.
Hmm, I notice though that you never directly said you wanted that other than the note about possible independent operation. Athom was about to make some bigger ships too as he said, but he seemed to be willing to still separate the roles, so I guess people might see a sized up fleet game up there.
Yeah, to be honest the size has quite a lot to do with flavour and the sheer "cause-I-can" factor than actual combat effectiveness, [...]
:(
...You have not understood a thing.
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yes all my points are having invaders as enemy
because with a bit of tactical feel you can beat any npr even with inferior stuff ( that is valid only in early games )
so no matter what you build if you got some experiace you will beat them sooner or later
below invader data below spoiler so read at your own risk ;)
point 1 fleets I faced would tear 3 such capitals apart ( when you face 200+ twin 12cm ultrahightech beams in 1 tf not even counting some heavier beams that is much faster than you you are getting low on options really fast and such defences will be a matter of seconds at point blank range
point 2 I have seen 250 amm every 5sec incoming to me and my 600 str shielded capitals falling off formation despite having lots of level 4 gausses
point 3. some of my games offer me relatively poor mineral abundance in my strating area so mineral cost is and issue at tl6
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Without getting into the size-1 argument - Missiles will always be better than beams, even in beam range. But they are fundamentally limited by ammunition. That makes the inclusion of a strong beam armament advisable.
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yes all my points are having invaders as enemy
because with a bit of tactical feel you can beat any npr even with inferior stuff ( that is valid only in early games )
so no matter what you build if you got some experiace you will beat them sooner or later
below invader data below spoiler so read at your own risk ;)
[...]
Well, I guess we can all agree that Invaders always need some special treatment. :) They are so rare and need such specialization to be beatable on lower tech levels though, that I have personally found it not to be worth to take into general design considerations.
Change plans when you spot them, otherwise, prepare only with exuberant PDC buildup; that has been my strategy so far.
point 3. some of my games offer me relatively poor mineral abundance in my strating area so mineral cost is and issue at tl6
I hear many people having mineral shortages very often, but I have seriously never really experienced it other than in my first two games. From then I adapted the policy to really focus on setting myself economically free by working out an efficient ratio of simultaneous construction factory and auto-mine building, and basically doing nearly exclusively that for a long time.(until I crash my corundium account that is) I go for good corundium sites first, because that guarantees exponential income growth in everything, and once a certain stage has past, military ships are just no bother no matter which magnitude.
But even when not doing that, I wonder how the resources can become so short. I have recently made a side game to test some functions of Aurora, and for fun created a 5mt battleship in year 48 while not even having left Sol, so home resource financing alone. It was costly, but not crushing, and I built a whole 700+ kt escort fleet and many megatons of asteroid mining, PDC hangars, and civil troop transporting too. Now, I think that game started with 10 billion population, so earths home resources were scaled up to that I think, but on the other hand I have only started to tap into the surrounding planets and asteroids, so there is much more to come. You said somewhere before that around 250kt is enough for your main fleet usually, and well, that should be easy to get in comparison.
Another point: I also don't trust civils and have to build a lot of freighting by myself too, which is as said before really expensive and actually the main strain on my resources. But that is a expense most other players don't seem to have, so with the main strain cut out, they should be even richer.
Is it because you spread out your resources over many colonies or something? Because that is one thing I don't like, and which would explain "shortages" even though they would be artificial. Even in games where I still played with many colonies, I would only fly in infrastructure/mines/factories from the main colony, and resources only carefully measured when PDC building was in order.
Without getting into the size-1 argument - Missiles will always be better than beams, even in beam range. But they are fundamentally limited by ammunition. That makes the inclusion of a strong beam armament advisable.
Bear in mind that there is some rebalance with mini-asm ships having also better firing endurance, as greater salvo density is not needed beyond a certain point, I have never really seen the need to deploy strong beam attack ships. PD, of course, but beam attack? If you cannot win a fleet battle with your 80% missile ships, would 20% beam attack ships then really change it, or blow up before the counter fire? If you would have had 100% missile ships, then maybe you would have had enough ammunition to win.
This I think goes into the same line argument that leaves people suspicious of the use of beam-fighters, because they are worthless in an anti-ship role, as they always fall before against the missiles. Beam fighters though still have a use, because their naturally excellent targeting speed makes them work nicely as deployable escort PD-beams, which is something attack beam ships cannot say for themselves.
Some minimum beam attack is always needed ofc. to take down enemies that have already depleted ammunition or otherwise helpless craft, so you can actually safe up on your own ordnance supplies. ..But PD-beam ships or fighters can do that already, so where is the niche for real beam attack?(other than RP of course)
..Maybe in the nebulas.
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Nebulas, the biological spoilers and commerce raiding are good uses for beam ships. And most important for me they need less micromanagement.
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Nebulas, ok, but that is a very special situation, so equipping your main fleet for that is wasteful.
Commerce as said can be done by one ship alone, even a fighter. The fighter is guaranteed to save the micromanagement, as it only has that one weapon and thus can go to auto-fire mode, so you don't even have to retarget by hand.
Biological spoilers, I would say no. Unless your engines are better, which allows you to outrange+outmaneuver them. But in face of such superiority you again would be sufficiently equipped with just one beam attack ship instead of a whole class section of a fleet.(see the beginning of that Astral Republic thread where one tiny ship single-handedly destroyed mothership, supports and massive numbers of facs) ..Otherwise, when you don't hold these advantages, the main counter for beam attack spec. is either missile ship or amm/mini-asm.
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It's not a beam attack ship, it's a multi-role warship equipped with a beam secondary armament.
Size 1 missiles are powerful but if you are forced to expend them as antimissiles you are in trouble if they were also your beam armament.
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Okay, having a powerful spinal laser on every ship I can understand, though it takes a bit away from optimum efficiency.
There are two options I can currently think of for why you could mean choosing missile as beam attack(not pd) replacer gets you into trouble. One is if the enemy is generally a good bit stronger (mass or tech) but then this is no efficiency argument anymore, so it wouldn't matter. The other is that you could think in fleets there are times were all ammunition is spent, and then the beam attack ships would come out and shine. (..but if the enemy still has some missiles, it will actually just end in disaster, and maybe you would have won if those extra beam ships would have been some extra missile ones, or ammunition transports for better logistics...)
Point is if you are really fighting something of identical mass and similar technology, then a size-1 asm specialist can't be overcome.
- A beam attack ship has not nearly enough counter fire to even survive the 4th to 6th salvo.
- A beam pd ship might resist at least a quarter to a third of attacks, but that extends its salvo survive time by maximum 50%, so it goes too.
- Even if you have to expend part of the ammunition as anti-missiles against a equal sized missile ship, you will outlive the enemy missile ship's magazines by shooting down most of all incoming attacks (chose between 1-2 salvos per counter), and then still have a couple salvos left to finish them of thanks to the much greater firing endurance. *
Only when the enemy is faster they would probably get away with both ships short on ammunition, but that only means the setup is either win or stalemate.
* = As a special bonus on top, any missile based anti-missile fire is not so much concerned with enemy salvo density (just launch more in advance), which means launcher miniaturization wont help the enemy unless they spent the saved space in magazines instead of more launchers.
Sure you can't do anything once the magazines are empty, but that only means you have fought an enemy outside of your weight class to begin with, because (as above) you sure had enough to deal with any equal encounter, so it is an admiralty error.
...I think we will need a greater discussion for this to be clear, with example designs, and some fleet composition 1 vs. fleet composition 2 scenarios.
Not that this how it has to be of course, because RP reasons are always stronger, so I myself would compose differently no matter what. But that doesn't take away that this here is really efficient. Only poor ammunition supply lines can break it, but that would also break missile based fleets, and pure beam fleets would simply lose if the AI could handle how to assemble amm ships (or even artillery) into a firing line.(since they don't, 'pure pd-beam' works actually quite well in the practical game though)
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Well, I guess we can all agree that Invaders always need some special treatment. :) They are so rare and need such specialization to be beatable on lower tech levels though, that I have personally found it not to be worth to take into general design considerations.
Not very rare - I have 3 active wormholes within 2 jumps of my colonies since like 2040 and expect opening wh in habitatet system anytime
If only Steve made invaders AI more aggressive like they should be you would find them a bit more often and more dangerous ( I had games where I did not see them at all )
I had situations when surveying chain I got to system previously opened by NPR so WH was really old and consisted like 20 their ships 2/3 combat ones , I also had 500kt Invaders fleet entering Sol relatively early ( I was very very lucky )
it is highest danger and most fun TBH
also
If you design ships able to hunt invaders that means they will do their job vs anything else
(mix of box launchers + some beams + some PD on medium sized ships (20-50kt) anytime in 2050-2100 range) preferable one class with variants for shipyard efficiecies
I usually find comfortable with my designs ( tech wise) around 2060
this is my fleet workhorse -total 15 ( with 2 subvariants in use ) - designed 2072 as 2nd generation of fleet cruiser, built in 2075 , now in 2085 they are shortly ahead of mk3 upgrade ( level 3 ew , better beam FC , next class of gausses)
Myoko - mk2 class Cruiser 18 750 tons 476 Crew 5040.8 BP TCS 375 TH 3000 EM 0
8000 km/s Armour 6-62 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 7 PPV 135.16
Maint Life 1.08 Years MSP 1176 AFR 401% IFR 5.6% 1YR 1012 5YR 15177 Max Repair 750 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Spare Berths 0
Magazine 350
1500 EP Internal Fusion Drive (2) Power 1500 Fuel Use 68.89% Signature 1500 Exp 15%
Fuel Capacity 2 925 000 Litres Range 40.8 billion km (58 days at full power)
30cm C6 Soft X-ray Laser (4) Range 320 000km TS: 8000 km/s Power 24-6 RM 6 ROF 20 24 24 24 24 24 24 20 18 16 14
Triple GC R3-100 Turret (2x9) Range 30 000km TS: 20000 km/s Power 0-0 RM 3 ROF 5 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
pd mk3 Fire Control S03 60-20000 (1) Max Range: 120 000 km TS: 20000 km/s 92 83 75 67 58 50 42 33 25 17
lazor mk3 Fire Control S04 160-10000 (1) Max Range: 320 000 km TS: 10000 km/s 97 94 91 88 84 81 78 75 72 69
p20/2 Magnetic Confinement Fusion Reactor Technology PB-1 (2) Total Power Output 40 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Size 15 Box Launcher (10) Missile Size 15 Hangar Reload 112.5 minutes MF Reload 18.7 hours
Size 5 Box Launcher mk1 (40) Missile Size 5 Hangar Reload 37.5 minutes MF Reload 6.2 hours
Missile Fire Control FC294-R200 (2) Range 294.0m km Resolution 200
Size 15 Torp 47-60-44 (10) Speed: 60 000 km/s End: 12.1m Range: 43.7m km WH: 47 Size: 15 TH: 260/156/78
Size 5 ASM 18-60-44 (40) Speed: 60 000 km/s End: 12.1m Range: 43.7m km WH: 18 Size: 5 TH: 260/156/78
Active Search Sensor MR11-R1 (1) GPS 84 Range 11.8m km MCR 1.3m km Resolution 1
Active Search Sensor MR242-R240 (1) GPS 26880 Range 242.9m km Resolution 240
ECCM-2 (4) ECM 20
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
there are 2 other very similar variant but with generally similar combat abilities
in total 280kt tonnage with 8km/s 600 size 5 and 150 size 15 missles broadside , 30 triple gauss turrets for PD and 53 med beams for finishing cripples
missles lack range but I assume I can survive enemy missle attack and strike as 2nd ,
it is 1st game I mix bigger ASM with smaller ones and I find advantages of such setup so far
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Sorry, I completely intended to reply to you earlier Vandermeer but I must have gotten distracted somewhere, and as usual one thing leads to another... and the draft I started is still lying around collecting dust to this day.
After all the tweaking about, I sort of just decided that I'll wait until reaching 200kt shipyards before making the true do-everything capitals. It seems I'm getting a more diverse spread of opinions regarding design now, so I'll have to see what I can do to reconcile some of these apparently clashing ideals.
In any case, an opportunity for combat trials just popped up - one of my survey flotillas discovered what I believe is a precursor outpost. The battlegroup I sent was composed of one of each of the capital ship designs - the carrier and Anatus A more or less as shown previously (I think), and the B-variant with ~40 reduced size torpedo launchers. Parasites include some passive sensor ships and shuttles, and ~80 fighters divided evenly between 250t box launcher bombers and and 500t laser equipped "escorts".
The first ship I spotted turned tail the moment my caps were detected, but I did come across two AMM PDC's on one of the system's planets. Leaving the carrier behind, I sent the two cruisers (rename to dreadnaughts?) forward to engage. At max launch range, I fired off a salvo of torpedoes to test the waters. The torps were a new MIRV design with 5 of those size-1 shells each, so that broadside put out an effective salvo size of 200 missiles. Aside from providing heavy anti-missile fire, the PDC's also appeared to have a respectable meson point-defense armament. Out of those 200 missiles, I think only around 30 made it through.
I then decided to push forward into the AMM envelope of those bases, thinking to try another torpedo salvo once their magazines are depleted. As of this moment, I have just finished weathering the (first?) AMM storm of ~70 missiles per 10 seconds for quite a few increments (left on auto-turns for a while). Between my CIWS and shields, not a scratch was inflicted on my armour belt (shhh, pretend those escort fighters still docked on the carrier were engaged elsewhere at the time). This was a bit of a relief considering Vandermeer's comment about AMM bases being one of the only entities which could pierce my shielding.
If the next torpedo strike still proves ineffective, then I will close to beam engagement and use the hopefully superior range of my large caliber railguns to obliterate the bases from orbit.
Some design considerations from this scenario:
It seems I have more than enough shielding, so I could try redistributing some weight dedicated to shields to other areas.
I need some bigger passives than the size-5's that my scouts have.
I did try sending a wing of bombers to pursue the fleeing ship at the beginning, but they started taking AMM fire before they could get in range so I recalled them. Should I have sent them with the beam fighters to protect against missile threats, or do I need to invest further into thermal reduction?
The journey out to the system in question left my fleet on around 60% fuel (22bkm from Sol). I'm not too happy with this number so I will be looking into improving the range for the next set of designs.
Re: nebulae - my designs in this game tended to have decent to heavy shielding and feature mostly missile-based offensive armaments, so I may need to design a whole new fleet if I ever encounter a chain of nebula systems and find the need to battle within them. Since this doesn't occur too often, I think it is safe to say the fleet doesn't require any immediate and drastic changes.
Just as a side note, most if not all of my previous games were very beam-heavy, to the point of almost disregarding missiles completely. I'm missing the beam ships almost as much as some of you seem to be, but my energy weapons researcher died/retired a bit back, so I'm waiting for his replacement to train up before I can get some serious beams designed.
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Unless you are using a truely superior # of escort fighters, its unlikely they'll prove effective in abating AMM fire. Thermal reduction won't work either, assuming the active sensor is on. Longer range fire controls are generally the most effective way to keep your bombers safe.
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The actives on the fighters were off the whole time since I was tracking the target via passives, and was planning to activate them only once I got within firing range. My EM's told me the area was clear of hostile actives so I'm not sure how the bombers were detected if not for their thermals, let alone how a target lock was established. I suppose perhaps there were some really low GPS sensors lurking around?
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Yeah, resolution 1 sensors have extremely low GPS. That's the (enemy) active I was referring to, sorry.
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Not very rare - I have 3 active wormholes within 2 jumps of my colonies since like 2040 and expect opening wh in habitatet system anytime
Then it must be that either you are lucky or it is my selective misfortune. I have sadly still only met them once over the years of play, but I had them activated in every main game after the second and also in numerous test games.
it is highest danger and most fun TBH
I am still waiting for this to happen, because my first encounter was over relatively quickly, as it was one of those more test-ish than serious games, where I already had all technology to build some stuff that I wanted. They were fast, but could do nothing against the 30k shields of the mothership I had on explore cruise there. A wasted first experience.
If you design ships able to hunt invaders that means they will do their job vs anything else
Ok, that is a fair point, but on the other hand such a setup turns out to be somewhat uncomfortable in the rest of the game where it isn't needed to that extent. I wonder how you do the box launcher thing; do you have a carrier for 1-2 cruiser sizes behind the lines, or do you actually fly back the ship to rearm on planetary base or something? Anyway, I assume it is quite the click work after every encounter. Against NPR, and all the other threats you could fare a way more leaned back approach that spares all that and still easily be successful.
Nonetheless, the firing power is impressive, and surely much more optimized as long as your logistic skill is good. One of the reasons that makes you play a capital ship game is exactly though, that you don't want bother with too much micromanagement, like too many moving parts that need to be organized.(manually re-arm single units after every shot? horror!) I think I described that before somewhere; the capital ship fleet is the fleet of the lazy admiral.(http://www.greensmilies.com/smile/smiley_emoticons_seb_zunge.gif) All in one and done.
it is 1st game I mix bigger ASM with smaller ones and I find advantages of such setup so far
I puzzled why you did that when the larger missiles even have identical range, but I think I understand now. When you have much oversaturated the enemies PD-capacity already, then indeed you can start to mix in some quota of larger warheads easily to achieve greater penetration + better warhead ratio, as they will likely make it through anyway. Nice idea.
After all the tweaking about, I sort of just decided that I'll wait until reaching 200kt shipyards before making the true do-everything capitals. It seems I'm getting a more diverse spread of opinions regarding design now, so I'll have to see what I can do to reconcile some of these apparently clashing ideals.
The positions here are often presented in form of "it should be this"/"it should be that", but really mostly mean "I would do this/that" and actually just represent a personal favorite of gameplay style rather than a game truth. For example the 'large fuel range or tanker' thing is purely taste matter. I might say it belongs to capital ships to be capable of large independence, including from tankers, but that is an arbitrary definition, and capital ship can mean many different things for someone else.
That is not to say that there aren't some real game mechanical truths that simply work or don't.(sometimes with some cushion realm of personal freedom around to chose from) To figure out your personalized version of the right way, I would summon what Steve recently said in another thread, that you will see what is effective via what works in the true game and battle tests. To achieve a working answer for such a new thing like capital ships, you need to test many things probably, but as long as you stay unbiased or don't start to filter for what you would like to be true, you are bound to realize what really works out eventually.
You can look for good arguments to get a direction and hopefully discover shortcuts, but the best way in truth finding is of course always to test rather than to believe. Testing(/nature) is immune to human errors and follies.
Leaving the carrier behind, I sent the two cruisers (rename to dreadnaughts?)
Class naming conventions are also one of those topics with greatly diverging valid standpoints. The real world standpoint seems to be a mere naming after size mindset ("bigger than destroyer" or something), yet many here (and much fiction, including Star Trek) seem to enjoy to name after mission type instead. I guess cruiser often means something like "a destroyer in gun matters, but also with range /independent capacity", which makes it naturally bigger than destroyers again.
This is also why it seems so destined to be the classical capital ship per se, and so the reason why I said dreadnought before is because it went of that often attributed independency path and now looks very much like a ship that was built as a pure artillery platform, just like the original dreadnoughts.(which I guess is much tighter defined through this)
However, many interpretations exist for the cruiser, and so I've seen players having much smaller cruisers than their destroyers even.
In short: If you want to name it cruiser, it is probably a cruiser.
This was a bit of a relief considering Vandermeer's comment about AMM bases being one of the only entities which could pierce my shielding.
Heyhey, I said they are the only danger to shields up to a size (unless having to go close combat with invaders), but also that your shields were already superior enough to go through all of that.(http://www.greensmilies.com/smile/smiley_emoticons_smilenew.gif)
Here:
You did designate quite a lot to shields. I know that is the core strength of large ships and you reduced it in the revision already, but it is still about 15% of the hull, so maybe 30% or more of the available mission tonnage. As center ship of a larger fleet I would say it is great, but for a ship of the line combatant I think it is too wasteful. Even the 300kt cruiser which managed to survive that whole big NPR war in my thread unscratched, despite close combat and such, had only 900 shields at the time.(though it should have been a bit more here)
Though I have to agree that no matter if you rebalance or not, the first current layout will most likely be able to conquer all but heavily fortified NPR worlds.(and Invaders ofc.) My first 120kt and partially 180kt ships couldn't shield wise stand against spoiler amm PDCs alone, but I guess that was because of the heavy cuts that maintenance takes when activated.
It seems I have more than enough shielding, so I could try redistributing some weight dedicated to shields to other areas.
Yes! See, there is some verification through praxis right there already. :)
I did try sending a wing of bombers to pursue the fleeing ship at the beginning, but they started taking AMM fire before they could get in range so I recalled them. Should I have sent them with the beam fighters to protect against missile threats, or do I need to invest further into thermal reduction?
Yes and no, depending on what you faced. You have 80 fighters to equal proportions beam and bomber you say? That should be easily enough to deal with many small to maybe even mid sized formations and their counter fire.(though your bombers don't have the option to expend main fire to emergency aid in pd as a buffer if needed, so be careful not to overestimate)
I think you also had problems with the thermal reduction here, right? I found that even my 10m+ km range bombers were spotted just before they could fire and received counter missiles, so they had to retreat. That was at a thermal of 250, so for your shell's range you need to get it under 100 I would say to be able to make safe approaches.
..Of course that does nothing if the enemy already has actives on, but often enough they won't (or only activate ship search ones), and it would be a shame to waste those good opportunities.
For reference on the escort fighters: I had a (yet undocumented) NPR war in the Astral game featuring the new heavy cruiser that houses 20 beam fighters and 20 bombers. The fighters and bombers together completely took the enemies fleet apart by themselves, without the capital ship needing to fire or even leave its course to their home planet. This time the enemy was (maybe coincidentally) smart enough to even assemble most of his ships in a tighter protected formation, but the combined fighters and bombers managed to fend the incoming asm's off and systematically destroyed the ships in a couple of runs.(some of which still successful surprise attacks because of thermal reduction btw.)
I had 3 tech levels engine advantage though, which makes enemy missiles relatively puny here.(fighters had far over 100% chance, and even the shells hit over 100% despite only being emergency amm)
On same tech level you can only expect about 50-66% from your fighters. Probing in advance what salvo an enemy is capable of and comparing that to the escort pd expectations might sometimes be crucial to the survival of already flagged bombers.
The journey out to the system in question left my fleet on around 60% fuel (22bkm from Sol). I'm not too happy with this number so I will be looking into improving the range for the next set of designs.
So you did want them to work without tanker or station like I thought? In that case I can recommend either 200-300b as a mark, or the two years flight time provision I mentioned before. Speed grows faster than range though, so maybe the second is not the best measurement in very early or very late game stages.
Unless you are using a truely superior # of escort fighters, its unlikely they'll prove effective in abating AMM fire. Thermal reduction won't work either, assuming the active sensor is on. Longer range fire controls are generally the most effective way to keep your bombers safe.
If you use larger than size-1 missiles (or maybe even 2 or 3), I would fully agree. Rather make the missile range and fire control larger, and you could probably completely give up on the escort fighter concept.(except leaving one for civil ship hunt) If it lies in your tech potential to shoot from outside the enemies (fighter-)sensor range, then you should always go for that.
Otherwise, when using really small missiles for maximum damage per magazine ratios, I have to say escort fighters are effective.
Calculation example: A 30kt missile ship can hold about 24 unreduced size-5 launchers. A fighter on same tech lever hits those with approx. 50-66%, so you need 750t-1kt fighter mass per missile (likely only point blank will do), so with a 50-50 fighter-bomber ratio, you would have 15-20 secure counter shots when you approach with equal mass. This ratio is better than even a specialized PD ship of same size despite that only half the mass was PD for the fighter squadron. ( The combination of naturally amazing targeting speed and the special fighter combat pilot bonus return unparalleled Pd per mass)
Mind you I imagined only meson or laser pd fighters, were actually railgun or gauss would make even better PD weapons.(style choice, but useless unless you can really swarm an enemy with them)
The reason fighters are perceived to be somewhat inferior in pd still, is just caused by that you rarely have an equal mass of them available to face an enemy, and while overwhelmed they will as any other ship of course perform sub-optimal. Technically they are better, and a fully specialized carrier fleet would probably come to see those benefits.(I have not yet tested this in praxis though)
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Vandermeer
box launcher auto reloads on orbits with simple " load ordnance" order for the fleet precisely like standard ones
so there is no more micromanagement - it takes few hours but in 99.8% of cases time doesn't matter after mission
as for other fights and scenarios
sometimes you want small single salvos or less intensive play
you can choose 0-30 missile controls to get this effect ( ofc there is always possibility of reassigning tubes manually up to you needs - flexibility of such design is simply stunning )
as for mixing standard and big missiles - sometimes even such salvo is not enough vs superior deep armor - big missiles offer shock damage - such damage cause often engine damage so ships are falling off enemy formation with lower speed than main group - even if they are not heavily damaged
it is tactical opportunity to use beams in fleet vs separated vessels
that's why range is close - I even tend to shoot them from 10 mil km only - what is right time to manouver and pick enemy one by one
p.s. after clearing last spawn I have even nastier guests next door than I described so far
something I fear may be stronger than my currently shown fleet
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Vandermeer
box launcher auto reloads on orbits with simple " load ordnance" order for the fleet precisely like standard ones
so there is no more micromanagement - it takes few hours but in 99.8% of cases time doesn't matter after mission
That is what I meant with "flying back to planetary base". :) You still have to do all the flying around through who knows how many jump points.., . Oh wait, is it that you have ammo transports close that just dump their ammo on random sites for this to work?
Even if not, that would seem really efficient. Slightly uncomfortable still, but actually worth it for that trade of power. Now I wonder why "TT" even bothered to make carrier cruisers for his box launcher frigates.
p.s. after clearing last spawn I have even nastier guests next door than I described so far
something I fear may be stronger than my currently shown fleet
I really want to know if others see this often too, or if you just encountered a singularity (get it?). I need some statistics, so it must be a poll.
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it is hijacking Al's thread - maybe Eric could cut and move out our conversation to place better suited
but answering you
I can provide some stats - I played like 10-15 games within time frame I can remember
Usually when I hit invaders in game setup from the beginning I see them and very often I see them fast - for this reason I sometimes postopne exploration past SOL to at least 2040
I'd say 2/3to 3/4 chances with such setup or even higher - they also vary a lot in terms of technnology carried
If I decide to turn invaders later in game when I feel more comfortable I see problems with them apearing even in very long games - say 1/3 of all games have them - tough to say as I stopped playing like that - due to not having enemy for my uber fancy designs
so my advice is to have them in game setup from beginning no matter how scary it is
being destroyed by them is the only good ending I know in this game
and yes it happened to me few times when 10-15years in game wormhole opens 1j of sol so you are toasted no matter how good you are
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I also had them on from the start all the time. You would say one third of games have them? Given that I played around 5 serious and many test games to that, that means Aurora owes me around 3-4 Invader encounters. :D Probably much more if time is a beneficial factor.
@Eric: Maybe if you cut that out, could you then directly attach it to the new poll about Invader frequency? That would be fitting.
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if chosen from beginning they were in majority of my games
but ....
I was testing faster game setups
I also had many games without any NPR from start ( but 50-100% of probability of their appearance ) - so the only space systems created were mine in terms of visibility
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I play any game without pre-generated NPR! (http://www.xwaupgrade.com/phpBB3008/images/smilies/icon_xd2.gif) And for the exactly same reason that I want them to go lightning fast, so I don't leave NPR with fleet around to avoid snowball slowdown effect.(higher generation chance for rebalance on my side too)
On the side: I also kill all civils, which is why my games run smooth as at the point of generation even after year 300.
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I guess this is going a bit off-topic, but how do you arrange for your civvies to meet their untimely demise? Add in another player race and SM in a couple "pirates"? I think it would probably be a good idea for my game, there must be hundreds of civilian ships floating around by now...
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The way to do it is to acquire the designer mode password, which allows you to see and delete civil ships in the ships window. You then also have to delete the corresponding task group to avoid clutter, and when everything is done, also the design entry. (if you feel like overkill, you can finally even delete the engine they created, but they will come up with a new one on every spawn...)
Culling the first one or two ships that a new shipping line forms will leave them drained of funds and with no means to make a profit, you have successfully dried out that cancerous spreading slowdown cell. Weirdly every game seems to react differently to that for some reason. In 6.3 I had a game where all I had to do was dry the first line, and then I would never hear from the civil sector again (unless I would subsidize it). Then one game later also in 6.3, new shipping lines just kept forming, and I had to weed out ships and designs every couple years. ..That also happened in 6.4, but in the Astral game weirdly I have again seen near to no civils. I think I am up to 4 or 5 companies by year 250 or so, which is of course nothing.
The thing with this trick is though, that you have to start this as early as they start building (pluck the roots, salt the ground), since it can easily become an unmanageable clicking marathon if you have to delete 300 ships+ and task groups manually. That makes it pretty much all civils or no civils. (but 6.5 promises much improvement on that, so I personally will definitely test them for a possible comeback)
Of course you could use this famous pirate tactic that you mentioned to thin out most of them in advance, but I bet it will still be much. I had someone message me before who tried and then still decided he would go and rather start a new game.
If you are interested in a relatively conclusive guide on how to hold your Aurora game intervals + the menu loadups fast, here is a link where this was discussed: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=7477.msg77459#msg77459 (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=7477.msg77459#msg77459)
There is also a TLDR sum-up version two post below.
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The tractor beam trick might still work. I haven't tried it, but tractoring civvies supposedly brainwashes them.
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Interesting discussion. This approach isn't for everyone(or perhaps even for anyone sane), but ...
I like the civilian operations in Aurora in basic concept, but not how they operate in practice. Since I need more control over them for what I want to do(limiting populations on colonies, etc.) I am currently planning to operate two additional factions. One will be a pirate faction which will simply be SM'd a small number of ships to hunt down civilians immediate after they are built -- to Vandermeer's point, this should keep it from becoming too much of a hassle. The other faction will represent the corporate sector, with a relatively small population but higher income than the main faction. They will essentially 'buy' minerals from the government to use for building my 'civilian' ships, and that way I should be able to control the growth of that sector.
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Just tried out the thing with the tractor beam, and I can confirm that it does indeed still work. I'm not crazy enough to do this for all the civvie ships tho, so I think some pirates would be the best bet at this stage... or I can just let the infestation continue on its course and abandon the game when the new patch comes around.
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Getting back on topic, I finally got around to designing that 200kt ship I mentioned earlier.
Acclamator class Cruiser 200 000 tons 3869 Crew 50038.8 BP TCS 4000 TH 3600 EM 30000
3750 km/s JR 3-50 Armour 10-304 Shields 1000-300 Sensors 180/320/0/0 Damage Control Rating 250 PPV 310
Maint Life 0.14 Years MSP 12819 AFR 6400% IFR 88.9% 1YR 94517 5YR 1417759 Max Repair 12068 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 24 months Flight Crew Berths 284
Flag Bridge Hangar Deck Capacity 10000 tons Troop Capacity: 1 Battalion Magazine 10300
Hyperspace Core M-200k Max Ship Size 200000 tons Distance 50k km Squadron Size 3
Hydrani P-Fusion Cruiser Drive (20) Power 750 Fuel Use 7.31% Signature 180 Exp 7%
Fuel Capacity 17 500 000 Litres Range 215.5 billion km (664 days at full power)
Xantheon Reactive Armour (200) Total Fuel Cost 3 000 Litres per hour (72 000 per day)
Hydrani-Pattern Shield System (20x10) Range 1000 km TS: 32000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
200mm Flechette Cannon (10x4) Range 320 000km TS: 8000 km/s Power 36-6 RM 6 ROF 30 12 12 12 12 12 12 10 9 8 7
Clayton Long-Range Fire Control (2) Max Range: 320 000 km TS: 5000 km/s 97 94 91 88 84 81 78 75 72 69
Tokamak Fusion Core (1) Total Power Output 64 Armour 0 Exp 5%
150mm Auto-Cannon Mk.II (100) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 5
Standard Torpedo Bay (20) Missile Size 10 Rate of Fire 250
Cannon Control Centre Mk.III (5) Range 17.8m km Resolution 15
King-Lowe Torpedo Guidance Centre (2) Range 756.0m km Resolution 100
150mm "Striker" Shell (800) Speed: 28 800 km/s End: 4.8m Range: 8.2m km WH: 1 Size: 1 TH: 297/178/89
150mm "Cleanser" Shell (500) Speed: 24 000 km/s End: 13.3m Range: 19.1m km WH: 1 Size: 1 TH: 80/48/24
"Perdiot" Torpedo (200) Speed: 9 600 km/s End: 1315.5m Range: 762.7m km WH: 4 Size: 10 TH: 32/19/9
"Stalker" Torpedo (200) Speed: 12 800 km/s End: 1007.2m Range: 781.1m km WH: 1 Size: 10 TH: 42/25/12
150mm "Eraser" Shell (5000) Speed: 48 000 km/s End: 5.7m Range: 16.5m km WH: 4 Size: 1 TH: 288/172/86
Savant Inc Missile Detection Net (1) GPS 480 Range 153.6m km MCR 16.7m km Resolution 1
Savant Inc Ship Detection Net (1) GPS 48000 Range 1 536.0m km Resolution 100
Thermal Sensor TH10-180 (1) Sensitivity 180 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 180m km
EM Detection Sensor EM10-320 (1) Sensitivity 320 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 320m km
ECCM-4 (2) ECM 40
Those older generation missiles are thrown in just so I can get rid of my stockpiles on Earth.
Taking on some advice from the previous round and the recent battle, I redistributed some of the weight dedicated to passive defenses to other areas and upped the range to 200bkm, which I am much happier with. Even with the next engine tech, the ship speed is down to 3750km/s, but I think the tradeoff for range is acceptable. This should hopefully be a more "true" capital ship in the multi-purpose sense, especially with the flexibility of changing parasite loadouts to better fit whatever role is required.
I was thinking about implementing infinite deployment time in the next ship size up (400kt?). Since I've been hearing that the recreational modules are somewhat buggy, perhaps I can try adding cargo bays and cyro berths to give "shake n' bake" colony capability. This does rely on having at least partially habitable system bodies available however, so I'm wondering whether this method will be reliable enough. Thoughts?
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well, since you have maintenance failures off, you could try adding a orbital habitat and just making them ship ridiculously insanehuge with 60% of its volume cheapass commercial engines ;)
ship looks fine except the single reactor core being vulnerable to damage.
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I think the main problem with that idea would be the insane-huge (military) shipyard that I would need to have in order to build it...
Anyway, I recall reading somewhere that having a single large reactor is better than multiple. Is that not the case? What is the optimum number of reactors to split energy generation between then?
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I think he was referring to the issue of shock damage, not optimal energy generation.
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Shock Damage is one thing, penetrating hits another. Once the reactor dies you have no power left in the thing. So no 200mm Flechette Cannons.
Taking the massive Shields on that ship into account these are mostly theoretical events, but still something to be considered.
Edit: I forgot Mesons. Those are going to wreck that reactor like no tomorrow. But then again, they wreck anything.
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I think he was referring to the issue of shock damage, not optimal energy generation.
Generators don't get any benefits from being bigger though, so there is no optimization for energy generation. A bigger reactor has more structural points, making it somewhat unlikely to be destroyed by Meson 1 damage attacks. When you have a lot of shields, the shock damage doesn't really matter as Ostia said, so these Mesons and in theory size 1 warheads are the only threat to components for nearly all the game.
However, in the statistics it still comes out the same I think. I can't check the data right now, but I think a double size reactor had exactly double the hull-points, so if you have one at 6 or two at 3 -- still just takes 6 statistical hits to be destroyed. The two reactor version would mathematically be less chaotic and more predictable in the amount of damage they receive (/turns they last on average), while a 6 hp reactor is somewhat more prone to extremely lucky streaks or misfortune.
Given that all components of your ship get hit at random when under fire, you might favor to go with one that resists that one lucky hit more sturdily, but it really doesn't make much difference under longer fire.
(--all this might be wrong if hull-points don't scale linearly like I thought...-- :P )
Anyway, I myself now have shifted to only research reactors that can by themself power a fast firing quad-turret. Usually power 24, and 40, 64 or even wasteful 96-100 on later game stages. (maybe that is why you AL created one at 64 too?) I don't care much about the little difference in research costs it makes, but I try to avoid the discomfort of having too big of a reactor ready, just in case I happen to design a smaller ship for once. (happened with one of those 20k destroyer aids, who needed an extra project for their first version)
I was thinking about implementing infinite deployment time in the next ship size up (400kt?). Since I've been hearing that the recreational modules are somewhat buggy, perhaps I can try adding cargo bays and cyro berths to give "shake n' bake" colony capability. This does rely on having at least partially habitable system bodies available however, so I'm wondering whether this method will be reliable enough. Thoughts?
400k is not enough for that. You have to remember that the recreational facilities are draining from the mission tonnage, so when minimum armor, crew, fuel, engines and engineering already take 50%-60%, you would spent half and up of your mission tonnage just for this infinite deployment thing. Though it would have more armor and hull resistance, such a 400kt ship would in essence turn out to be as strong as your current 200kt ones, which seems like a waste of resources.(not that that would really matter, but for the principle of being economic and design elegantly, it fails)
This is why I normally target the first recreation facility ship to be 1mt (military or not), where it only consumes around 20-25% of mission tonnage. I had a 700kt one in a former game too, but at that time I was still flying with only 25% engine designation on power-factor 1, which was a bad choice for what I wanted it to do.
I don't know what is up with those facilities though. On some ships they work, then on the next identical replica of the same ship they don't. It happens for military and civil ship types alike, so the module itself directly has some code problem. They work often enough to make it feasible, but it always sticks out as annoying when it fails, because you usually have to either rebuild or at least update the design of the failed ship slightly to get another roll.
If I ever figure out what the cause of this issue is, I will promptly make it known on the forum here.
The cruiser looks good now though. Be sure to report positives and negatives you find in operation, because I am curios how others deal with the big ship strategy. :) Only potential issue I see is that your former bombers didn't seem to use the standard ship ammunition, so they won't have refills with what I see there? Or do they now use shells as well?
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There are two lines of arguments that I can think of regarding optimal reactor sizes:
1. many smaller reactors are better after you've taken some damage due to the greater "resolution" of power generation, ie you dont lose 50% of your power when a penetrating hit goes to a reactor if you use several/many ~6 point generators compared to 1 or 2 big ones.
2. Having a single large reactor is better in the event that it does get taken out since you have a 5% chance of explosion (assuming no reactor boosts) compared to n*5% chances of explosion for however many htk equivalent smaller reactors would have been destroyed instead of the single large one.
As for mesons, I think I did incorporate a sort of "gamey" counter in the form of a few hundred size-1, max htk magazines which should hopefully ensure I don't immediately lose all my vitals to meson-fire.
The cruiser looks good now though. Be sure to report positives and negatives you find in operation, because I am curios how others deal with the big ship strategy. :) Only potential issue I see is that your former bombers didn't seem to use the standard ship ammunition, so they won't have refills with what I see there? Or do they now use shells as well?
Will do, although it could be a while before it sees any action. I've been surveying a fair bit and still no sign of any NPR's to conquer...
The bombers have always used shells since they get the same MFC and launcher size as any other missile combatant (except torpedoes which is a different story). It may not have been obvious since I have a fair few ammunition types still floating around, but they really just use whatever the mothership is carrying. Most of these missiles are way obsolete but I just don't have the heart to scrap them...
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I find the big ship strategy works for me. They generally are hard to kill because of its armor (if you have it), high amount of shield potential (my cruisers of around 100kt can take a lot of damage per 5 sec increment without the shields dropping 1 point of its total), multitude of backup systems (if you design like that), it can have a variety of offensive and defensive armaments, and generally have a high HTK from just the amount of systems. Another thing is that even when you try to specify a role for a ship, they can still be general purpose. Instead of the smaller ships mastery of a single role, the big ships can be a jack of all trades, and a master of one. And about getting the "insane-huge (military) shipyard", I find it really is not that much of a problem to get if you have the manpower, can micro the production, and get lucky with not having invasions after the fist couple of years.
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So I put my shipyard on auto-expand, intending to let it do its thing for a couple months to get up to 400kt capacity for my next design... and of course by the time I got around to advancing time a bit I had completely forgotten about that shipyard. About a game year later I remember about that shipyard and find it is now at ~1.3mt. I suppose you might be seeing some truely large designs coming soon then...
During this time I have been doing some aggressive surveying (at least relative to what I normally do). About a dozen new systems have been discovered and surveyed (including one with a col cost 0 planet!) and still no sign of any proper NPR's. I did however find a star swarm infested system, so there's that at least. I dispatched my 200kt cruiser to deal with it after my survey ship got exploded by meson fire. I remember back when I started playing Aurora I marvelled at the huge but slow bulk of the swarm motherships, but looking at it now it seems positively puny compared to the kind of ships I'm fielding.
Long-range torpedo strikes proved ineffective against their beam pd (the mirv torpedoes were not used), so I closed to beam range to determine whether my beam armnament was sufficient to break through their shields. I managed to close to around 70-80kkm before taking any return fire so I was able to sustain about 40*9 damage worth of shots every 30 seconds. Before long, some kind of internal explosion reduced the opposing ship to debris. Note that I restrained from using any of my size-1 launchers - this was purely from those railguns/flechette cannons
Some improvement ideas from the engagement:
Larger beam armnament - even with a theoretical 40*12 damage output per 30 seconds, it still feels a bit low. My energy weapon scientist has more or less finished training up so I might look into getting some large caliber lasers on the next ship.
More fire controls - especially against smaller ships, ie fighters/FAC, having 20 launchers per fire control results in some massive overkill. More beam FC's would be good too to help with mopping up the cripples.
I am rather liking the range of the new cruiser, but I'm thinking of aiming for even more with the next ship.
Since 1mt military jump engines are not possible with my current efficiency tech, I will either have to strap on a jump gate construction module or use a commercial jump drive and engines. Suggestions?
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The point with generators is just that single points of failure are always bad. Even redundant systems can fail with a bit of bad luck, so generally I try to avoid that. (On that note, one nice thing about carriers is that parasite sensors can compensate for active sensor failures.)
I wouldn't worry too much about your beam dps. Swarm carriers are heavily defended. Note, it can be hard to tell from the outside, but it's likely the ship was mission-killed long before you actually killed it.
Since 1mt military jump engines are not possible with my current efficiency tech, I will either have to strap on a jump gate construction module or use a commercial jump drive and engines. Suggestions?
Use a commercial drive. If you really need to assault a jumpgate you can establish a specialized assault force.
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Good point on it being mission-killed, I hadn't thought of that.
I've read a few threads about it, but I'm still somewhat confused - what do you need to make the jump drives work? If you're using commercial jump drives, do you have to be a commercial ship, or only need to use commercial engines?
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Why im AGAINST building uber bricks :
my argument simply comes down to the issue of HS/jump drive
1 - 100kt uber brick uses 20% its HS allotment for its jump drive
5 - 20kt battle cruisers use 5% of their total HS for jump drives
10 - 10kt cruisers use 3% of their total HS for jump drive (assuming you have the required Squad size tech)
if you want you can pack the space saved with armor, 15%HS of armor is 9 extra layers of armor even at ion tech
making each 20kt battle cruiser nearly as tough as your whole 100kt brick :-X
also there is something to be said for being able to load 4-10x as many spinal mount lasers on your boat
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To be completely fair, the only time (military) jump drives are indispensable are in jump point assaults (I have encountered this situation exactly once so far...), and as TDS mentioned you would most likely want to build a specialised fleet regardless for that circumstance. Every other time it is sufficient to use jump tenders or follow jump gate networks - in other words, jump drives on "uber bricks" are more of a convenience/do everything thing. So this means, if you are optimising your ship for battle and battle only then this is nowhere near as big of a concern as you are making it out to be.
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Hmm i was assuming you were putting all of your production capacity to making one big ship rather then mass producing these
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Why im AGAINST building uber bricks :
my argument simply comes down to the issue of HS/jump drive
1 - 100kt uber brick uses 20% its HS allotment for its jump drive
5 - 20kt battle cruisers use 5% of their total HS for jump drives
10 - 10kt cruisers use 3% of their total HS for jump drive (assuming you have the required Squad size tech)
You know you can use jump tenders instead of putting a jump drive on every single ship, right?
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You know you can use jump tenders instead of putting a jump drive on every single ship, right?
yes that's why the 5x20kt has only 5% of its HS used by jump drive
you do realize you need to build a ship of at least the same size so it can be used as a jump tender?
amusing you are like me, you multipurpose that ship as a tanker/maintenance hauler, but it still needs to be able to keep up with the fleet for it to work
also:Hmm i was assuming you were putting all of your production capacity to making one big ship rather then mass producing these
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I will still build other ships like the usual commercial freighters/transports/fuel harvesters as well as military surveys/system defense frigates/fighters/etc, but I generally tend to limit the number of warships I have in service or things start to become a bit too cumbersome to manage.
Anyway, I've thrown together a 1mt design incorporating (hopefully) infinite deployment time via a recreation module, take a look and tell me if I forgot something important...
Vindicator class Cruiser 1 000 000 tons 12977 Crew 104975.5999 BP TCS 20000 TH 75000 EM 60000
3750 km/s JR 2-25(C) Armour 12-890 Shields 2000-300 Sensors 180/320/2/2 Damage Control Rating 300 PPV 1250
Maint Life 0.07 Years MSP 18122 AFR 40000% IFR 555.6% 1YR 250896 5YR 3763442 Max Repair 4457 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months Flight Crew Berths 675
Flag Bridge Hangar Deck Capacity 50000 tons Troop Capacity: 2 Battalions Magazine 30000 Cryogenic Berths 10000 Cargo Handling Multiplier 50
Recreational Facilities
Fuel Harvester: 5 modules producing 250000 litres per annum
Trinity Hyperspace Core C-1.035m Max Ship Size 1035000 tons Distance 25k km Squadron Size 2
Hydrani P-Fusion Commercial Sublight Drive (150) Power 500 Fuel Use 2.65% Signature 500 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 52 520 000 Litres Range 356.7 billion km (1101 days at full power)
Xantheon Reactive Armour (400) Total Fuel Cost 6 000 Litres per hour (144 000 per day)
Hydrani-Pattern Shield System (50x10) Range 1000 km TS: 32000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
200mm Flechette Cannon (50x4) Range 320 000km TS: 8000 km/s Power 36-6 RM 6 ROF 30 12 12 12 12 12 12 10 9 8 7
Clayton Long-Range Fire Control (10) Max Range: 320 000 km TS: 5000 km/s 97 94 91 88 84 81 78 75 72 69
Tokamak Fusion Core (5) Total Power Output 320 Armour 0 Exp 5%
150mm Auto-Cannon Mk.II (200) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 5
Standard Torpedo Bay (100) Missile Size 10 Rate of Fire 250
Cannon Control Centre Mk.III (20) Range 17.8m km Resolution 15
King-Lowe Torpedo Guidance Centre (10) Range 756.0m km Resolution 100
150mm "Striker" Shell (2000) Speed: 28 800 km/s End: 4.8m Range: 8.2m km WH: 1 Size: 1 TH: 297/178/89
"Perdiot" Torpedo (500) Speed: 9 600 km/s End: 1315.5m Range: 762.7m km WH: 4 Size: 10 TH: 32/19/9
"Stalker" Torpedo (500) Speed: 12 800 km/s End: 1007.2m Range: 781.1m km WH: 1 Size: 10 TH: 42/25/12
150mm "Eraser" Shell (18000) Speed: 48 000 km/s End: 5.7m Range: 16.5m km WH: 4 Size: 1 TH: 288/172/86
Savant Inc Ship Detection Sensor (1) GPS 24000 Range 768.0m km Resolution 100
Savant Inc Missile Detection Sensor (1) GPS 240 Range 76.8m km MCR 8.4m km Resolution 1
Talbot SR Scanner Mk.II (1) GPS 48 Range 15.4m km MCR 1.7m km Resolution 1
Savant Inc Missile Detection Net (1) GPS 480 Range 153.6m km MCR 16.7m km Resolution 1
Savant Inc Ship Detection Net (1) GPS 48000 Range 1 536.0m km Resolution 100
Thermal Sensor TH10-180 (1) Sensitivity 180 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 180m km
EM Detection Sensor EM10-320 (1) Sensitivity 320 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 320m km
Improved Gravitational Sensors (1) 2 Survey Points Per Hour
Improved Geological Sensors (1) 2 Survey Points Per Hour
ECCM-4 (10) ECM 40
I'm thinking the hangar space will be used for carrying about 100 fighters and an assortment of auxiliary craft. Again, outdated missiles just to get rid of stockpiles.
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i keep forgetting you have maintenance turned off :P
personally it looks like its a bit light on the armaments section 1100msp worth of firing capacity of a 1million size ship is a bit...
well lets just say 100kt missile ships easily pump out that many missiles and have storage for 10000msp worth of ammo
its probably inductive that this isn't a workable design considering your own shield has a recharge fast enough to withstand everything in your magazines 4x over at the stated fire rates...
Imperator Maximus class Missile Cruiser 100 000 tons 1537 Crew 22779.8 BP TCS 2000 TH 1152 EM 4500
3600 km/s Armour 10-191 Shields 150-300 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 100 PPV 250
Maint Life 1.83 Years MSP 8543 AFR 1333% IFR 18.5% 1YR 3222 5YR 48336 Max Repair 1470 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 9 months Spare Berths 1
Flag Bridge Troop Capacity: 2 Companies Cryo Drop Capacity: 1 Battalion Magazine 11030 Cargo Handling Multiplier 20
720 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (10) Power 720 Fuel Use 19.21% Signature 115.2 Exp 9%
Fuel Capacity 5 000 000 Litres Range 46.9 billion km (150 days at full power)
Epsilon Heavy Shields (50) Total Fuel Cost 750 Litres per hour (18 000 per day)
Size 1 Missile Launcher (25% Reduction) (1000) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 600
Missile Fire Control FC743-R40 (10) Range 743.8m km Resolution 40
2/12SLR Apocalypso (11030) Speed: 12 000 km/s End: 1249.9m Range: 899.9m km WH: 2 Size: 1 TH: 40/24/12
Active Search Sensor MR78-R1 (40%) (1) GPS 560 Range 78.4m km MCR 8.5m km Resolution 1
Active Search Sensor MR910-R60 (40%) (1) GPS 50400 Range 910.9m km Resolution 60
Compact ECCM-2 (10) ECM 30
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
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In terms of missile alpha-strike, I calculated 1800 points worth of damage from a salvo of size-1's and the mirv's from a salvo of torpedoes, which very nearly tears down the entire strength-2000 shield.
In terms of sustained fire, there are 200 size-1's * 4 damage apiece = 800 damage every 5 seconds.
If the engagement moves within beam range, there is also another 50 railguns * 4 shots each * best case 12 damage a shot = 2400 damage every 30 seconds, which is about 400 damage per 5 seconds. All up, expect approximately 1200 damage per 5 seconds on average.
Compare that to the shield recharge rate on the ship: 2000 points recharges every 300 seconds = 6.67 points per second = 33.33 points per 5 second increment. Even if the engagement is completely outside of beam range, that isn't even 5% of the size-1 missile damage output.
I don't see where the problem is?
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the problem is that 0,5% PD of a comparable tonnage of ship will easily tear apart 100+ missiles with just final fire mode AMS systems
your salvo density is simply not enough to harm anything
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You guys need to take it outside and fight, er I mean, go Ingame and do some skirmishes.
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Unless I'm doing something wrong, 0.5% of 1mt is "only" 5000 tons. If this is invested completely in CIWS I expect to lose ~70 of 200 missiles assuming equal tech level, so around 500 points worth of damage still gets through. Good point though, I did forget to take into account pd in my previous calculations.
The issue of salvo density did get brought up before and I think the main response was sure, a highly specialised fleet of equal mass will most likely be superior to my single design. This is the price paid for being a generalist. The design decisions/features were focussed on giving the ship strategic value in the forms of long range, self-jump capability, and infinite deployment time. This consumes around 40-60% of the total mass depending on how you want to count it up. Obviously if you try to compare this to a ship optimised entirely for battle it will not hold up too well. Even so, saying it will not harm anything is going a bit far.
You are also forgetting to take into account the fighter loadout the ship carries. Seeing how salvo density is the issue, suppose I take a 100% bomber loadout. With my current bomber design of 10 launchers on a 250 ton craft I will have a fighter missile strike of 50000/250*10 = 2000 missiles. Further calculations show you need about 20% (200 000 tons) of your 1mt ship/fleet dedicated to CIWS to repel that attack. I'm not sure I've faced more than 2 NPR fleets which total at least 200 000 tons, let alone one with that amount of mass dedicated to pd.
You guys need to take it outside and fight, er I mean, go Ingame and do some skirmishes.
Perhaps I am coming off somewhat argumentative (for lack of a better word), but it is sometimes too easy to have the original intention of a message be misinterpreted over the written medium. Maybe judicious use of emoticons would resolve this, but it's just not my style. amimai, you have my apologies if I seemed way too confrontational about this (there's the word I was looking for!).
In any case, I will take a step back and acknowledge that the number of launchers is actually quite low now that I think about it some more. However, now that I've put everything together on the ship I don't quite want to remove anything to make room for more launchers. Perhaps it is worth trading off some magazine space for the launchers?
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pure theorycrafting , at this stage it is better to actualy go ingame and kill some stuff
1mt non overhauling military ships with fuel harvester is past my imagination ;)
she needs 40 ! ingame years to fill tanks what is possibly on average how long many people have their games running
what is mineral cost + building time ? how long to expand shipyards and with what mineral costs ?
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Oh, I forgot to reply to a point!
I think the main problem with that idea [of using an Orbital Habitat] would be the insane-huge (military) shipyard that I would need to have in order to build it...
Any ship tagged as an Orbital Habitat can be built with planetary industry, regardless if its military or commercial!
No shipyard required, though it does tie up your construction factories something fierce.
Anyhoo, I thought I'd post my largest military design so far. None have actually been built, mostly because I wanted to use shiny new features in newer patches.
Expansion class Command Carrier 128 200 tons 2404 Crew 13743.6 BP TCS 2564 TH 3300 EM 0
1716 km/s JR 2-25(C) Armour 6-226 Shields 0-0 Sensors 80/110/0/0 Damage Control Rating 213 PPV 54
Maint Life 5.03 Years MSP 14272 AFR 617% IFR 8.6% 1YR 942 5YR 14128 Max Repair 315 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 48 months Flight Crew Berths 347
Flag Bridge Hangar Deck Capacity 26000 tons Magazine 1584 Cryogenic Berths 1000 Cargo Handling Multiplier 25
Ispartan Drive XXL Max Ship Size 129000 tons Distance 25k km Squadron Size 2
Mk XIII Military Booster (11) Power 400 Fuel Use 6.19% Signature 300 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 7 000 000 Litres Range 158.8 billion km (1070 days at full power)
Pilum Heavy Laser Turret (6x1) Range 320 000km TS: 6250 km/s Power 16-4 RM 4 ROF 20 16 16 16 16 12 10 9 8 7 6
Gauss Defense Grid (12x6) Range 1000 km TS: 16000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
Dalian M14 Capital Targeter (2) Max Range: 320 000 km TS: 6000 km/s 97 94 91 88 84 81 78 75 72 69
Stellarator Fusion Reactor (4) Total Power Output 24 Armour 0 Exp 5%
T-122 (144) Speed: 32 000 km/s End: 34.7m Range: 66.7m km WH: 9 Size: 6 TH: 117/70/35
K-125 (30) Speed: 32 000 km/s End: 48.2m Range: 92.6m km WH: 25 Size: 24 TH: 117/70/35
Dalian Torpedo Detector X1 (2) GPS 210 Range 23.1m km MCR 2.5m km Resolution 1
Area Search System (1) GPS 50400 Range 438.3m km Resolution 160
Surveillance Telescope (1) Sensitivity 80 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 80m km
Surveillance Grid (2) Sensitivity 110 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 110m km
ECCM-1 (2) ECM 10
Note: The sensors are placeholders, as the new generation sensor systems are currently under development. Effective search range is expected to double given increases in size and improvements in technology.
Expansion-class vessels represent a significant departure from previous command carrier designs as they are built from the ground up as an exploration mothership. The 'Probe'-class variant of the standard command carriers had never been truely satisfactory, being reliant on jumpgates and constant refueling. The Expansion class is 30% larger than the current Obsidian-class battle carrier but costs about the same to manufacture (and is 100% larger than the Probe class). The new high-efficiency engines and most importantly the built-in jumpdrive give it drastically more flexibility and reach. The jump drive is also capable of jumping standard heavy freighter, cryo-vessel, and troop transport designs, so an Expansion class can easily lead a convoy to establish a forward base or small colony.
Although a powerful vessel in its own right, the Expansion's primary asset is its array of parasite warships. Standard complement is projected to be
-1 squadron of 12 Troll-class multirole Strikers (12x480tons. 12x pulse laser, 24x T-115 torpedo)
-1 Ogryn squadron, consisting of 5 Ogryn Marauders and 1 Ogryn-Magi sensor/command Marauder (6x2,000tons. 10x SR pulse laser, 10x K-125 shipkiller)
-1 Ice Hawk dropship, utilizing cryogenic technology to keep 1 Genetic Legionnaire battalion available for deployment (2,000tons)
-1 survey squadron, consisting of a TBD mix of 6 geo- and grav- survey corvettes. (6x1000 tons)
The Ogryn squadron is experimental at this point. Although generally weaker than 2 additional squadrons of strikers, the Ogryn squadron is far more capable of independent operations, up to and including missile defence and target acquisition. I anticipate being able to use them for colonial defence. They have enough maintenance capability to be left on their own for years as long as there is a colony. By the time it becomes a problem, either a carrier should be able to reach them or a maintenance base installed.
FAUX EDIT:
Upon a little thought, I realized the chassis is easily adaptable for utility designs. The high build cost of the command carrier version means that almost any commercial design in the same tonnage range can be built from the same tooling. For example:
Expansion - Copy class Command Carrier 128 150 tons 2069 Crew 8870.4 BP TCS 2563 TH 3300 EM 0
1716 km/s JR 2-25(C) Armour 6-226 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 213 PPV 0
MSP 9215 Max Repair 218 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Spare Berths 1
Cryogenic Berths 1000 Cargo Handling Multiplier 25
Maintenance Modules: 10 module(s) capable of supporting ships of 2000 tons
Ispartan Drive XXL Max Ship Size 129000 tons Distance 25k km Squadron Size 2
Mk XIII Military Booster (11) Power 400 Fuel Use 6.19% Signature 300 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 3 000 000 Litres Range 68.0 billion km (458 days at full power)
Gauss Defense Grid (11x6) Range 1000 km TS: 16000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposesA ready-to-go maintenance base design, capable of supporting the Ogryn-class Marauders :)
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i decided to continue the series:
The Demonslayer class Battlecruiser
it lives to make low the strong and slaughter the weak
32x 12cm PD laser (rof5)
16x 25cm DP laser (rof20)
1x 38cm Primary laser (rof40)
16x Meson Cannon (rof5) (PD/Anti Armor)
5x Microwave cannon (rof5) (Shield Killer/Anti-electronics)
33% internal armor
10x Backup radars (this is another thing you forgot on your massive 1mt floating deathtrap)
Demonslayer class Battlecruiser 100 000 tons 2677 Crew 30848.6 BP TCS 2000 TH 1971.2 EM 6750
6160 km/s Armour 12-191 Shields 225-300 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 96 PPV 446.2
Maint Life 1.19 Years MSP 10894 AFR 1415% IFR 19.7% 1YR 7951 5YR 119266 Max Repair 1008 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 9 months Spare Berths 0
Troop Capacity: 2 Companies Cryo Drop Capacity: 1 Battalion Magazine 440 Cargo Handling Multiplier 20
880 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (14) Power 880 Fuel Use 31.73% Signature 140.8 Exp 11%
Fuel Capacity 10 000 000 Litres Range 56.7 billion km (106 days at full power)
Epsilon Heavy Shields (75) Total Fuel Cost 1 125 Litres per hour (27 000 per day)
Twin 12cm PD Autolaser Turret (16x2) Range 200 000km TS: 20000 km/s Power 8-10 RM 5 ROF 5 4 4 4 4 4 3 2 2 2 2
38cm Primary Laser (1) Range 384 000km TS: 6160 km/s Power 38-5 RM 5 ROF 40 38 38 38 38 38 31 27 23 21 19
Quad Heavy Autolaser Turret (4x4) Range 384 000km TS: 20000 km/s Power 64-20 RM 5 ROF 20 16 16 16 16 16 13 11 10 8 8
Quad R8/C5 Meson Cannon Turret (4x4) Range 80 000km TS: 20000 km/s Power 16-20 RM 8 ROF 5 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0
R8/C5 High Power Microwave (5) Range 80 000km TS: 6160 km/s Power 4-5 RM 8 ROF 5 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0
Meson FCS (2) Max Range: 192 000 km TS: 20000 km/s 95 90 84 79 74 69 64 58 53 48
PD Autolaser Controlls (4) Max Range: 288 000 km TS: 20000 km/s 97 93 90 86 83 79 76 72 69 65
H8 FCS (1) Max Range: 384 000 km TS: 20000 km/s 97 95 92 90 87 84 82 79 77 74
5c Tokamak Fusion Reactor (80) Total Power Output 400 Armour 0 Exp 20%
T9 Fast SRT (100) Speed: 39 700 km/s End: 0.8m Range: 1.9m km WH: 9 Size: 3 TH: 132/79/39
Active Search Sensor MR78-R1 (40%) (1) GPS 560 Range 78.4m km MCR 8.5m km Resolution 1
Backup Sensor (10) GPS 28 Range 3.9m km MCR 427k km Resolution 1
Compact ECCM-2 (7) ECM 30
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pure theorycrafting , at this stage it is better to actualy go ingame and kill some stuff
1mt non overhauling military ships with fuel harvester is past my imagination ;)
she needs 40 ! ingame years to fill tanks what is possibly on average how long many people have their games running
what is mineral cost + building time ? how long to expand shipyards and with what mineral costs ?
A year's worth of fuel harvesting gives enough to limp around a range of 1.7bkm... I suppose it really isn't all that impressive, but since I did add the infinite deployment time with the recreational facilities, it would give it something useful to do while keeping station on the fringes of known space. It's all part of the "do-everything" package.
I'm not exactly sure how long the shipyard took to get up to size, but I did mention I left it on auto-expand for a few months to a year. As for mineral costs, what else am I to do with 20 million units worth of minerals stockpiled on Earth? And there's another 500 million waiting to be exploited in Alpha Centauri...
Any ship tagged as an Orbital Habitat can be built with planetary industry, regardless if its military or commercial!
I did not know that, but those modules are absolutely huge... I think I would have to get up to 4mt or so before I could consider putting one of those on a ship.
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I did not know that, but those modules are absolutely huge... I think I would have to get up to 4mt or so before I could consider putting one of those on a ship.
One of my favorite book series is the Spinward Fringe books. SPOILER ALERT;One ship that the main characters get in one of the books is the Triton and is is an Assault Carrier. And at the very core of this pretty large ship (only dwarfed by the big battleships and supercarriers) is the equivalent of the Orbital Habitat module. It has homes, stores, and entertainment plenty for the family of the crew of not only the ship but the whole fleet, because it is meant to be away from home for a very very long time. That area is also the most heavily armored area of the ship (by quite a bit), but my no means is the rest of the ship weak in armor. But the ship itself is nowhere near the multimillion ton mark. So I wouldn't necessarily say that putting Orbital habitats on a massive warship is cheesing it, but it does make building large vessels a lot easier. However it also has its drawbacks.
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I was thinking that what he is building is closer to a lighthugger rather then a combat carrier
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Lighthugger?
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Lighthugger?
3km-4km long "colony" ship that can travel just under the speed of light (99.999.....%).
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I googled it, the series is very interesting.
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So I made this monstrosity for a space opera campaign:
Atropos-class Heavy Titan (Assault)
50 size-2 launchers (1000 rds)
1 52cm spinal laser
20 35cm lasers
60 15cm lasers
20 35cm mesons
60 15cm mesons
40 gauss-5
plus 2kt hangar space
Atropos class Heavy Titan 240,000 tons 8369 Crew 78920.4 BP TCS 4800 TH 40000 EM 36000
8333 km/s Armour 25-344 Shields 1200-300 Sensors 1/120/0/0 Damage Control Rating 335 PPV 1317
Maint Life 4.49 Years MSP 68914 AFR 1374% IFR 19.1% 1YR 5529 5YR 82937 Max Repair 1264 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 18 months Flight Crew Berths 10
Flag Bridge Hangar Deck Capacity 2000 tons Troop Capacity: 1 Battalion Magazine 2020 Cargo Handling Multiplier 40 Tractor Beam
2000 EP Magnetic Fusion Drive (20) Power 2000 Fuel Use 48.57% Signature 2000 Exp 16%
Fuel Capacity 25,000,000 Litres Range 38.6 billion km (53 days at full power)
Ablative Energy Sink (240) Total Fuel Cost 3,600 Litres per hour (86,400 per day)
Spinal CRE Pulser (1) Range 480,000km TS: 8333 km/s Power 71-8 RM 7 ROF 45 71 71 71 71 71 71 71 62 55 49
Quad Small CRE Beamer (10x4) Range 420,000km TS: 8333 km/s Power 24-32 RM 7 ROF 5 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 5 4 4
Quad Small CRE Beamer Turret (5x4) Range 420,000km TS: 16000 km/s Power 24-32 RM 7 ROF 5 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 5 4 4
Quad Medium CRE Pulser (5x4) Range 480,000km TS: 8333 km/s Power 128-32 RM 7 ROF 20 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 27 24 22
Quad Small Kaon Projector (10x4) Range 210,000km TS: 8333 km/s Power 24-32 RM 21 ROF 5 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Quad Small Kaon Projector Turret (5x4) Range 210,000km TS: 16000 km/s Power 24-32 RM 21 ROF 5 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Quad Medium Kaon Projector (5x4) Range 480,000km TS: 8333 km/s Power 128-32 RM 112 ROF 20 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Quad RMPA PD Turret (10x20) Range 50,000km TS: 32200 km/s Power 0-0 RM 5 ROF 5 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
Escort Beam Fire Control (5) Max Range: 480,000 km TS: 16000 km/s 98 96 94 92 90 88 85 83 81 79
Spinal CRE Pulser FC (1) Max Range: 480,000 km TS: 10000 km/s 98 96 94 92 90 88 85 83 81 79
Secondary BFC (5) Max Range: 480,000 km TS: 10000 km/s 98 96 94 92 90 88 85 83 81 79
RMPA PD FC (5) Max Range: 120,000 km TS: 32000 km/s 92 83 75 67 58 50 42 33 25 17
Medium MC Fusor (20) Total Power Output 2000 Armour 0 Exp 5%
SRAM Launcher (50) Missile Size 2 Rate of Fire 10
SRAM FC (10) Range 4.9m km Resolution 2
Mag-Conf SRAM (1000) Speed: 74,200 km/s End: 0.5m Range: 2.2m km WH: 10 Size: 2 TH: 247/148/74
Anti-Missile Search Sensor MR18-R1 (2) GPS 77 Range 18.4m km MCR 2.0m km Resolution 1
EM Detection Sensor EM5-120 (1) Sensitivity 120 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 120m km
ECCM-5 (1) Compact ECCM-4 (10) ECM 50
Strike Group
1x Flyswatter Module Speed: 1 km/s Size: 10
1x AECM Module Speed: 1 km/s Size: 10
2x SRAM Module Speed: 1 km/s Size: 10
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
"Strike group" is two box launcher pods, one pod with a single missile FC for auto-killing attack craft, and a HPM pod, all 500t.
I'm using this as a "Precursor" flagship. Can the SM gift spoilers ships and have them work? I thought their AI might break so I turned 'em off and am running a couple very familiar races myself :P This one's not deployed yet though so tell me if I forgot something (besides the fact that I should switch to 25cm mesons to save some space. I just noticed that while typing this).
Also, I finally figured out how to make a fake fixed battery. Apparently you can set a turret's tracking speed to 0 km/s and it will use the ship's max speed instead (or your empire's best turret tracking rate, idk). This is great for me because I prefer big ships with lots of puny fixed guns, and assigning said guns to FCs while scrolling the window every new selection gets old pretty quick.
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Its been a while now, but my new computer has finally arrived so I'm back in business. Good news is my old hard drive is still fine so I managed to recover the save for this game.
@rcj33: looks pretty solid, although personally I do prefer a fair bit more range on the bigger ships.
Somewhat inspired by your design, I'm thinking my next ship might feature energy weapons almost exclusively as the main armament, although I'll have to wait a bit for my tech to get up to scratch in that area.
In a recent NPR encounter, I attempted to engage some relatively fast ~8000 ton craft going at ~12000km/s using my 2-stage torpedo designs. For some reason, the submunitions kept running out of endurance before reaching the targets even though I'm almost certain I left a few mkm margin between seperation distance and submunition endurance to ensure this wouldn't happen. To make things worse, the targets were steaming straight towards the missiles too, which makes their apparent lack of endurance even more inexplicable. What is going on?
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Its been a while now, but my new computer has finally arrived so I'm back in business. Good news is my old hard drive is still fine so I managed to recover the save for this game.
@rcj33: looks pretty solid, although personally I do prefer a fair bit more range on the bigger ships.
Somewhat inspired by your design, I'm thinking my next ship might feature energy weapons almost exclusively as the main armament, although I'll have to wait a bit for my tech to get up to scratch in that area.
In a recent NPR encounter, I attempted to engage some relatively fast ~8000 ton craft going at ~12000km/s using my 2-stage torpedo designs. For some reason, the submunitions kept running out of endurance before reaching the targets even though I'm almost certain I left a few mkm margin between seperation distance and submunition endurance to ensure this wouldn't happen. To make things worse, the targets were steaming straight towards the missiles too, which makes their apparent lack of endurance even more inexplicable. What is going on?
Post the designs, both carrier and submunition. I'm sure we can figure it out.
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How do you get the designs for missiles you've already created? The best I can think of is either making do with the stats listed in the tech report or using past design allocation on the missile design screen. The problem with the latter is that tech advancement means that the values listed don't actually correspond with the missile's stats, and as far as I can tell it doesn't load data about separation distance of any missile stages (which is kind of important here).
Edit: things just got weirder... I'm engaging some more enemy ships with the same torpedoes as last time. The enemy ships are fleeing from my missiles in this situation, and so logically the submunitions have enough endurance and actually land on target (or would have if it weren't for combined AMM/beam PD).
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Someone else reported the same problem recently (and then wrote it up in their AAR) but I can't seem to find either post. IIRC, they pegged the cause as probably some unexpected interaction with the new missile interception code, because the separation seemed to occur at the specified distance from the point at which the first stage was predicted to intercept the target. So yeah, assuming the second stage is faster than the first, it's going to reach the target in a stern chase but not a head-on intercept.
EDIT: Took another look, turned it up here (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=7012.msg80325#msg80325), not quite as recent as I remembered.