Semi-Official 6.x Suggestion Thread

[swarm_sadist]

Allowing the player to set a design to use lower tech armor instead of the latest one, without requiring him to clone an earlier tech design and use it as a base. Sure, it would be of very limited use, but there are some issues where it'd be useful.

+1
Even if it's just for flavouring, having cheap antiquated armour for your cargo ships would be nice.

[linkxsc]

A tech that makes ships more efficient in maint, so eventually you dont need hundreds of maint facilities for moderately sized ships.

An extension of this would be a more efficient engineering space tech, affording more msp and AFR reduction in the same space.

[83athom]

A tech that makes ships more efficient in maint, so eventually you dont need hundreds of maint facilities for moderately sized ships.

An extension of this would be a more efficient engineering space tech, affording more msp and AFR reduction in the same space.

This would really just break the game. The maintenance is set up the way it is for a reason, balance. And hundreds actually give you diminishing returns, and I have even seen adding engineering decrease maintenance life.

[Vandermeer]

[...], and I have even seen adding engineering decrease maintenance life.

That is only due to a calculation bug though. If you add some more after that, it goes up again and reveals itself as better. Had ships with 40-60% engineering, and it was always an upgrade.

[linkxsc]

Another minor suggestion

The ability to temporarily disable a listening post, or any planets dsts.

Ran into a problem in a game this morning where i dropped a couple dsts off in a few systems. And now i have a system with 1 npr hostile ship that keeps jumping in and out of system every 2 hours and stopping my time increments. Only reason hes getting picked up is because of the dsts, and my fleet is about 8 days away, slowly trawling towards the system to kill him and make the jumping stop.

[swarm_sadist]

Another minor suggestion

The ability to temporarily disable a listening post, or any planets dsts.

Ran into a problem in a game this morning where i dropped a couple dsts off in a few systems. And now i have a system with 1 npr hostile ship that keeps jumping in and out of system every 2 hours and stopping my time increments. Only reason hes getting picked up is because of the dsts, and my fleet is about 8 days away, slowly trawling towards the system to kill him and make the jumping stop.

Just SM disable all sensors in the system in question. Turn them back on when your fleet gets close.

[83athom]

Radiation weapons can damage/kill/hinder crew. I thought of this on the Laser Warhead topic where I found that you can have enhanced radiation laser missiles, but I was sadly told that radiation does nothing to crew. It would be so cool for you to blast rads at an enemy so their crew melts to goop/dies (from radiation) and it having a residual affect of some of the crew slowly dieing from radiation, also affecting moral. Another part to the affect of rad weapons is that since a part of a ship/station is blasted with so much radiation, crew cannot enter that area to do repairs (based on the rads of said weapon/overall radiation of the ship).

[iceball3]

Last i checked, duranium and it's derivatives were supposed to be rad-proof, which would explain why populations can survive in planetside infrastructure during nuclear winter assuming said infrastructure doesnt get blown up.
Just as well, the armor absorbs pretty much all wavelengths of radiation (which is seen via use of laser weapons), and the only way to effectively contaminate the ship with radiation is to flood atmospherics with polonium, and even then it can be assumed that many ships have countermeasures against this, such as onboard space suits and airlocking.  Covering the outside of the ship in radioactive material isnt going to do anything, and covering the inside requires you to pretty much blow up said insides.  Including space suits, airlocks, etc.  Considering the ship avoids getting vented when a hole is punched in the armor, it would be rather resilient to contaminants.

[83athom]

Just two things wrong with what you said. First of all, you said there is no way radiation could effect the interior of a ship with duranium armor except if its already blown up, but the ships don't all have duranium armor. My ships (right now) are using composite ceramic armor, which isn't rad-proof last I checked, as well as if there are holes in the armor (from battle damages) the radiation can soak through anyway. And I never said anything about radioactive material, I was talking about weaponized radiation weapons (specifically radiation enhanced lasers, which by the definition of laser: light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, with normal lasers in game doing a lot already) which are far more than radioactive materials. Secondly, radiation has nothing to do with atmospherics. What your thinking of is radioactive dust, what I'm talking about is radiation which still exists even in a vacuum (as evident of energy from the sun in the form of light, which is radiation, reaching us). Plus, the current rules of the game in itself are already breaking the laws of physics.
Sorry, got a little rantty there. I just get ticked off at people who don't know what they are talking about but says things anyway like they are a master of that topic (which does include myself at times).

[Ixeziel]

Don't know if this has been suggested before, but when creating new empires, either from a new game or SMing a new one in, to have a random option in the main empire theme and commander theme, so the game will pick a random empire and commander theme.  As I doubt most people use more than a few of themes.

[83athom]

Don't know if this has been suggested before, but when creating new empires, either from a new game or SMing a new one in, to have a random option in the main empire theme and commander theme, so the game will pick a random empire and commander theme.  As I doubt most people use more than a few of themes.

You could always just assign a theme/government to a number and use a random number generator and pick the corresponding theme/government with the number. Or draw a name out of the hat, figuratively.

[iceball3]

Just two things wrong with what you said. First of all, you said there is no way radiation could effect the interior of a ship with duranium armor except if its already blown up, but the ships don't all have duranium armor. My ships (right now) are using composite ceramic armor, which isn't rad-proof last I checked, as well as if there are holes in the armor (from battle damages) the radiation can soak through anyway. And I never said anything about radioactive material, I was talking about weaponized radiation weapons (specifically radiation enhanced lasers, which by the definition of laser: light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, with normal lasers in game doing a lot already) which are far more than radioactive materials. Secondly, radiation has nothing to do with atmospherics. What your thinking of is radioactive dust, what I'm talking about is radiation which still exists even in a vacuum (as evident of energy from the sun in the form of light, which is radiation, reaching us). Plus, the current rules of the game in itself are already breaking the laws of physics.
Sorry, got a little rantty there. I just get ticked off at people who don't know what they are talking about but says things anyway like they are a master of that topic (which does include myself at times).

Pfft.
First off, literally all ship armor is made of duranium. Serioudly, that is part of why ships take so much of the darn stuff. Lore-wise, duranium is a primary ingredient in all ship armors, so it is assumed the ceramic-composite is partially "composed" of duranium. It is that way both lore wise and mechanically. The interior of the ship would be also be made of the same stuff. If you don't believe me, look at how the ship cost changes as you add or remove armor.
Secondly, by the looks of things, the only harmful frequencies the hull doesn't seem to absorb is microwaves, as there are lasers with frequencies from infrared to upwards extreme gamma that are all soaked up by armor. Which would also be soaked up by interior airlocks and such.
So really, the only available frequency that could be proposed while maintaining internal consistency is microwaves, as all other frequencies is either a radio or needs to completely burn the hull off a ship before getting inside. The latter of, which we already have, lasers.
Breaking the laws of physics is fine, but the spirit pf sci-fi tends to be that physics behaves in a relatively self consistent manner in it's fictional context.

[Vandermeer]

Microwaves could be effective, because the sensors that they affect need to be placed on the outer hull.
..But on the general topic whether armor absorbs radiation enough to be save, look at this older topic: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,7362.msg74861.html#msg74861

Practically we found out that even just considerable steel armor would seal ships of of technically all harmful radiation. Lasers might be named 'emission of radiation', but really they only pierce the armor exactly because they get absorbed. So much to be exact, that they start to melt their way through, as iceball pointed out, so in theory the radiation shield hasn't failed, only the material's heat resistance.
Not even need for science-magic duranium here.

// Side information: Duranium armor is 100% on the first two tech levels (up to high density duranium armor), and then switches into composites towards neutronium armor in increments of 10%, until it reaches full neutronium armor on TL12. Can be seen in the armor's cost.

[linkxsc]

^ you guys could think of it that there is a thin layer of armor in between each module on the ship (bulkheads that can be locked down in combat to keep damage from spreading/leaking of air)
That would also be radiation resistant. Heck its all already got to protect the crew from rampant amounts of cosmic radiation.

[83athom]

Pfft.
First off, literally all ship armor is made of duranium. Serioudly, that is part of why ships take so much of the darn stuff.

I beg to differ. While yes, duranium requirements do go up as you increase armor, only 2 of the armors are duranium (tech 2-3). Although you could argue 5 duranium armors (t2-t6), duranium is just used because there are no other resources to fill the needs (ie iron, carbon, crystal, steel, ect), all the armors are not duranium armors, although I do accept the values of duranium in the armor it isn't all duranium. 1) Coventional 2) Duranium 3) HDD 4) Composite 5) Ceramic Composite 6) Laminate Composite 7) Compressed Carbon 8 ) Biphase Carbide 9) Crystalline Composite 10) Superdense 11) Bonded Superdense 12) Coherent Superdense 13) Collapsium

Lore-wise, duranium is a primary ingredient in all ship armors, so it is assumed the ceramic-composite is partially "composed" of duranium. It is that way both lore wise and mechanically. The interior of the ship would be also be made of the same stuff. If you don't believe me, look at how the ship cost changes as you add or remove armor.

Ok, I'll look up "Aurora lore"...... nothing. how about just "lore"...... still nothing. I have no clue how you found the lore when there are literally no posts that even include the word "lore".

Secondly, by the looks of things, the only harmful frequencies the hull doesn't seem to absorb is microwaves, as there are lasers with frequencies from infrared to upwards extreme gamma that are all soaked up by armor. Which would also be soaked up by interior airlocks and such.

Oh My Goood...*sigh*, I just... *sigh*. Steve or Erik or someone who can do this, please add a facepalm emoticon for the forum.

So really, the only available frequency that could be proposed while maintaining internal consistency is microwaves, as all other frequencies is either a radio or needs to completely burn the hull off a ship before getting inside. The latter of, which we already have, lasers.

You literally just contradicted your last phrase.
Look, All I was requesting was for a feature already in the game to do a little bit more. I'm not saying to change the way lasers work, I'm asking for the radiation (with the missiles) to actually be a part of the space combat. It doesn't have to be a laser, you could use and enhanced rad thermonuclear missile for God's sake. For example, the Enhanced Radiation Laser Warhead Missile that I originally suggested this for still does armor damage like a laser, it just also heavily bombards the unlucky organics inside with stupidly high amounts of deadly radiation. It also doesn't have to take affect right away, it could block all radiation except for the actual components that get blasted by the radiation. And yes, if they did have rad shields in the blast doors, the compartments themselves with the rad blasted components will still be rad blasted, thus keeping the crew from working on it (what my original request was).
Edit; I've read that post (thank you Vandermeer) and it said any rad weapon will be useless with greater than 4 layers of armor. You can strip that armor with some BFGs then use the rad weapons in the weak spots to kill the crew (what I was originally thinking when I made this suggestion. why would you think I was meaning to add a supper op cheap weapon, it has drawbacks). How a suggestion work is that it is a suggestion that is to be discussed about further to be decided upon whether or not to include it. The rad weapons (once again referring to enhanced rad missiles/enhanced rad laser missiles) drawbacks would include both the armor thickness/tech, agreeing upon duranium armors being 100% rad proof with diminishing levels per tech (as stated above that % duranium is reduced per tech level) as well as being slightly more expensive (already in the game). Their benefits would include reducing the crew/troops (and/or their moral) of a ship with doing less actual damage to it (to be able to capture it easier after an amount of time has passed because the ship is rad blasted). Can we discuss this more/drop it instead of just saying "noooooo it stupppid".