Crusade - Comments Thread

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Please post comments in this thread

[nukeLEAR]

Loving those 40k ship designs, I think you did a great job translating them into Aurora

Now we just gotta see them in action 

[Father Tim]

Constuction rate 12, Production +15%
Mining rate 10, Mining +5%

And no one researching Mining Rate 12.  I foresee a mineral crunch in the Imperium's future.

[Hazard]

This can be covered by building more mines.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Constuction rate 12, Production +15%
Mining rate 10, Mining +5%

And no one researching Mining Rate 12.  I foresee a mineral crunch in the Imperium's future.

Yes, I was very tight on research points, even with double normal. However, I should have had mining 12

I'll research that after jump stabilisation.

EDIT: I checked and I have researched Mining 12 pre-game

[Father Tim]

Hmm. . .  the Mining Modifiers table of the Mining Tab of the Economics window doesn't show it, but I assume that will fix itself after time advances. . . or after a production cycle, at the very latest.  Likewise, the mineral data table doesn't show the +5% bonus of the planetary governor, but it does include the '12 tons per mine' technology.  Again, I have confidence everything will dispay corectly after a production cycle.

[Panopticon]

You have a lot of confidence in this pre-alpha build of the game!

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Hmm. . .  the Mining Modifiers table of the Mining Tab of the Economics window doesn't show it, but I assume that will fix itself after time advances. . . or after a production cycle, at the very latest.  Likewise, the mineral data table doesn't show the +5% bonus of the planetary governor, but it does include the '12 tons per mine' technology.  Again, I have confidence everything will dispay corectly after a production cycle.

Thanks for the spot. I'll check it tonight. I think I probably did the mining screenshot before I appointed the colony governor.

[Rabid_Cog]

And before you pushed the population up to 1.25 bil from 1 bil.

[Garfunkel]

Looking forward to seeing this unfold!

[Jovus]

I like this!

Personally, I'd argue your ships should be a lot bigger - about twice the size. First, because you're intentionally going with sometimes-terrible designs against the aliens, so you need a little more tonnage to compensate. Second, and much more important, these are WH40K ships.

According to this chart a Galaxy-class starship from Star Trek is about 6500 tonnes. (I'm going with low estimates here not to blow everything up.) Further, let's assume it's roughly rectangular, in the same ratios as an Imperial WH40K ship. This is wildly untrue, but it drops the tonnage estimates of the Imperium considerably, so it's a very favourable assumption.

Finally, a Galaxy-class is 642 meters. Let's bump up to 650 for ease of math; that means that for every meter of starship you add to the beam, keeping the other dimensions constant, you add 10 tonnes. If we assume a 1:1:6 ratio of width:height:length for these starships (a figure I arrive at by holding my fingers up against a picture of a Dauntless), and we assume constant density (and, of course, that the Federation and the Imperium follow identical materials engineering practices), then we can get comparative tonnages based purely on the beam length, which is our available information.

The Dauntless is 4500 meters, which weighs in at a little higher than 950,000 tonnes.

Clearly that would be absurd to try to replicate in Aurora, and I don't mean I think you should give yourself that much more tonnage. But I also think it would be really cool to see how really big ships (100kt and higher) act in C# what with the changes to shock damage and so forth.

[Garfunkel]

Though I agree it would be cool to see really big ships, the downside of that is that the shipyards would take immense amounts of population to run and the ships themselves would take several years to construct.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Though I agree it would be cool to see really big ships, the downside of that is that the shipyards would take immense amounts of population to run and the ships themselves would take several years to construct.

One 10.000t shipyard with 10 slipways will take the same amount of workers in C# as one 100.000t shipyard. The 10.000t yard would build ships roughly 30% quicker in regards to tonnage built though but will also require more time to retool due to how slipways work in general. The difference in construction time is not that large since a 100.000t ship only take roughly 30% more time to build than a similar technology 10.000t ship.

You can then also look at the general development of ships and cost. Larger ships tend to cost less in total than the same tonnage of smaller ships, they also tend to be able to upgrade for less since they have more varied components that are upgraded in iterations. Large ships have many defensive benefits to many smaller ships too etc...

The small ships have many benefits too. They are generally quicker to build completely new variants of, they build quicker in general, can be specialised more efficiently and are stealthier, tend to use less research intensive components.

Both small and large ships respectively have advantages and disadvantages... to be frank I think a combination of ship types will always be the best. Some large really powerful ships backed up with smaller more efficient specialised ships. They tick different important boxes in an overall strategy.

[Hazard]

Also, you generally need to provide some degree of PPV, and while you can do that with ground forces, ground forces are not as mobile. Smaller ships are actually very suited to the system garrison duty because they don't tie as many resources down to the system and waste less combat power on garrison duty, while if you are pressed you can field them and replace them after a battle relatively easily because you'll be building them in larger numbers and slightly faster anyway.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Also, you generally need to provide some degree of PPV, and while you can do that with ground forces, ground forces are not as mobile. Smaller ships are actually very suited to the system garrison duty because they don't tie as many resources down to the system and waste less combat power on garrison duty, while if you are pressed you can field them and replace them after a battle relatively easily because you'll be building them in larger numbers and slightly faster anyway.

One important aspect in C# is that we can no longer can support an infinite number of 3000t ships at a specific maintenance site. This will limit the amount of ships we station as garrison duty and also makes high quality ships more important in general. This, I think, will mean that we want those garrison ships to actually matter more than before and not just generate PPV as cheaply as possible.

I probably would always use a healthy mix of ground defences and ships in space to provide security in most places. It obviously also depends on where the colonies are, their strategic value, population size and how close they are to any potential threats.