Origin of fleet doctrines for Aurora

[Vandermeer (OP)]

I have noticed of course for long time already that there is a great consent about how fleets are defined in peoples Aurora games. Most seem to adapt definitions for sizes like 1000 tons for a gunboat, around 7k for a destroyer, 15k as cruiser, and then ranges of 20-60k for different sized carriers. Of course it slightly varies from person to person, but given that the true range of mass definition is completely open and object to individual judgement, I find it rather unbelievable that all this unison has been found by accident. So how or from where did those definitions come from? My guess is that there is some famous tutorial somewhere out there that only foolish me missed. Or maybe it is just that most people learn through asking questions on some forum (not necessarily this one), and through that there is more kind of tradition based tutelage?

I know that those standards make sense, like a 7k destroyer is just big enough to strap on one of the biggest size(/most efficient) engines, so it is the smallest most effective ship that can be built. From that you might size up a bit, because certain modules, like bigger caliber turrets, may need a bit more than a destroyer can offer. So that is why 15k cruisers make sense too. Also keeping sizes low means smaller shipyards (slower build-up of force though) and fewer maintenance facilities needed. Both of those last reasons however kind of become obsolete in advanced game stages when you have enough people and resources to afford ten- and even hundred-folds of that easily.
Anyway, so I can explain those established doctrines with logic, but I still find it rather baffling that anyone so far, and I literally mean anyone besides me of which I read design plans, has indeed found to this structure. You would normally bet that at least some people would just make their own plans, or just not see the advantage on day one or something, but nope. Perfect choir. Where does this come from? (am I just immune to the mind manipulating nano bots that Steve manufactures in his spare time?)

I myself decided against this sense making organization only because on one hand I want to minimize micromanagement ("minimize micromanagement"...sounds like tautology), and also often try to replicate sci-fi ships, which are all bigger than Auroras model. Sometimes by a lot. (Aurora is kind of a dwarf template in the sci-fi universes) But how come no one does this, or something else different?

[Erik L]

Go dig up some of Waresky's ship plans. There was also an exercise is whatifism I'd done building max sized jump capable ships. Carried something like a dozen 7500 ton parasites, 125 battalions (the troop carrier specialization carried more), etc.

Some of the "limits" are imposed by the game. Fighters are 500 tons or smaller, gunboats/facs are 500-1000 tons. Outside of that, ship sizes are player preference really. My survey craft run around 3500-4500 tons. Destroyers are 6000-7500 tons. Cruisers are 2x a destroyer. Battlecruisers 3x, and battleships 4x.

But there is nothing stopping you from calling a 1000 ton ship a dreadnaught either.

[JacenHan]

Check out this thread. Includes 60,000 ton destroyers, 300,000 ton cruisers, and 500,000 ton battleships, as well as 10,000 ton gunboats and 1,000 ton fighters. Ship sizes vastly increase as you play through the game.

Addendum: This is an example of a ridiculously large mobile battle station. Near the bottom of the page is another, bigger version.

[Erik L]

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,1135.30.html

This 8 year old thread is the one I had with the "max" jump hulls. 125,000 tons

[Vandermeer (OP)]

Check out this thread. Includes 60,000 ton destroyers, 300,000 ton cruisers, and 500,000 ton battleships, as well as 10,000 ton gunboats and 1,000 ton fighters. Ship sizes vastly increase as you play through the game.

Addendum: This is an example of a ridiculously large mobile battle station. Near the bottom of the page is another, bigger version.

Haha, yeah, exactly. There is no one else, thanks for emphasizing. Is that the lonely wind of the prairie of solitude I hear?

Go dig up some of Waresky's ship plans. There was also an exercise is whatifism I'd done building max sized jump capable ships. Carried something like a dozen 7500 ton parasites, 125 battalions (the troop carrier specialization carried more), etc.

The 8 year old link is interesting, but those were just theoretical studies right? You wouldn't really play a game with unconventional sizes I mean. Also, I looked Waresky's plans up, but from what I found he is pretty much conventional too. Strange was a cruiser design of only 8kt here, in other reports then typical 14 or 20k, and lastly one single jump cruiser of 44k. Not really outside the box en masse too.


What I find strange about the classical Aurora ship size doctrines is that their sizes are so narrow together that lets say destroyers and supposed to be battleships don't even differ so much. I mean, they may weight 4 times as much, but if you calculate that down to dimensional difference, it still is only like 60% larger in every direction.(you have to use sqrt_3{x} to get the dimensional size difference) Through this, if you put them side by side, you probably wouldn't even guess that one is a mere destroyer "worker" and the other one a mighty capital ship, the centre of fleet probably, because they just don't look so different in size. And this is very contrary to what you see in most sci-fi franchises where capital ships are usually hulking, and every class has a clear size jump between one and the next.

I put together some pictures to emphasize.
This is how the sizes in Aurora really look like (the sizes are accurate - I put them all to the same size first, and then just scaled in % by what the calculator threw at me):

What I found most impressive is that not even a supposed to be miniscule gunship is really all that tiny in comparison. Heck, even a fighter would be rather large still. No wonder they are so deadly.

In comparison two other scales I found (one even from Stargate [partly fanfiction it seems]):


In the Stargate one, take the Prometheus (second from right), which is already some sort of heavy frigate with dozens of fighters, multi-role, yet quite smaller than a Ha'tak. The actual carrier on the left is about 4 times as large in dimensions, which makes it about 60-70 times as heavy.
In the later picture, the second from the right is probably some destroyer, which has about the same factor to the last craft, and maybe x3=~30 the weight to the second to last. The difference between the fifth and the seventh from right is already about what makes the difference between destroyer and battlecruiser in Aurora classic doctrine. ..Doesn't really feel like it.
In Star Wars it is known that an already huge Star Destroyer would barely make an engine of the superdestroyer of the movies.

Or here, where an accurate scale has been given:

Alone the mass difference between a cruiser and a battlecruiser is about factor 5, and 16 to a battleship. Given, maybe they got a bit overboard since the frigates and destroyers really vanish into nonexistence here, but fact is that in sci-fi there are usually hugely differently sized and through that very distinct classes, while in Aurora they kind of blend schmutzy and clunk together.

Why is that so? Probably because Aurora tries to be more realistic, in which case I must agree that the smaller scaling is probably more close to what would actually happen. Maybe a bit larger gaps, and then also non-classed singular huge ones for special purpose probably, but all in all something like that.
But this would just mean that most people here are trying to play really realistic, while it appears no one follows the trail of classical fiction and fantasy, which would lead to the epics lands of healthy gigantism.^^

[Erik L]

Right, I didn't actually play a game with them. The mineral and time requirements were just off the scale.

[JacenHan]

Haha, yeah, exactly. There is no one else, thanks for emphasizing. Is that the lonely wind of the prairie of solitude I hear?

...usually I pay more attention to stuff like that.

[Theodidactus]

I draw pretty detailed schematics of all my ships so this is something I think about a lot.

I'm actually not a very large reader of military science fiction so it's sorta odd that I wandered into this game. I'm also not very literate about water navies after 1700 either so I tend to instead use classes that govern the role of the ship rather than simply its tonnage. As a consequence my cruisers and destroyers usually have similar sizes but different roles (cruisers and battlecruisers can run independent of a larger fleet, destoryers invest less in independence and more in ship hunting and ship killing systems). So I usually use the following terms simply for the kind of roles they evoke in the only sort of navies I know about: really old ones:

- Frigates: Ships that work together in large lines, usually small and short ranged so better suited for jump point or planetary defense. For me "Gunship" is evocative of a helicopter so my "gunships" are actually like 500 tons, not 1,000. Most of my frigates are between 1,000 and 5,000 tons

- Destroyer: Ships designed to pick off and destroy smaller evasive ships on behalf of larger ships, usually they have short ranged torpedoes, long ranged guns, and very long ranged sensors. Currently I have 15,000 ton destroyers

- Cruiser: Ships that can independently operate, usually for harassing missions, ad hoc defense, rescue, or exploration or scouting. Usually they have light weapons but sometimes very long ranged missles. In my current game I have 15,000 ton very fast "Light crusiers" with multipurpose laser turrets and 4 torpedo tubes, so they're extremely versatiles, I also have slower 25,000 ton "Missile cruisers" which lob very long ranged weapons, usually at lone targets in a defensive role.

- "Battlecruiser": my usual jargon for extremely powerful and fast beam warships with tons of arms and tons of armor. The backbone of my fleet are 25,000 ton battlecruisers that run both beam weapons and torpedoes.

- Carrier: Ship that carries fighers. My carriers are invariably the largest ships in my fleet, usually at around 25,000 to 30,000 tons.


This may be as good a time as any to begin a petition to add the "Sloop" class to Aurora. The name is cool and thematic and I want sloops captained by daring space captains that zip around the universe kicking ass.


Practically speaking I don't think I've ever felt the need for a ship of more than 50,000 tons. The logical thing to do seems to be to instead build more, smaller ships.

There's never been a time where I've said: "Rats! If only these three ships had twice as many guns!"
There's been about 50 times I've said" Rats! If only I could protect both these systems at the same time!"

So there's really no need for variance between a 10,000 ton ship and a 100,000 ton ship, at least, for any campaign I've played. 

[Charlie Beeler]

Vandermeer most players appear to stick with a base population of 500m with setting up their player race.  With this size population there is a economic limit to ships sizes that can be realistically supported.

They also normally do not alter the starting shipyards.  Since the starting military yard is normally no larger than 10k people tend to try to fit familiar class designations within this scale.  Yes the yards can scale up, but with such a small starting point that takes a very long time.

The other limiting factor is resources.  Again because of small starting populations the ability to extract sufficient resources to build and maintain large scale ships just isn't practical.  Yes planets with very high quantities of critical minerals are found, but usually with very low accessibility.  The low accessibility requires high numbers of mines to extract the needed quantities.  Then you run into the need to either transport said minerals to your manufacturing centers or move the manufacturing centers to the minerals.  Moving the MC's requires habitable worlds for the support colonies. 

If played with most of the baseline populations statistics untouched it quickly becomes a vicious circle.

[Haji]

This may be as good a time as any to begin a petition to add the "Sloop" class to Aurora. The name is cool and thematic and I want sloops captained by daring space captains that zip around the universe kicking ass.

You can add your own custom class and class acronym by pressing "new hull" in the class design window.

[Vandermeer (OP)]

Right, I didn't actually play a game with them. The mineral and time requirements were just off the scale.

That is not really true. In my current game for example I fielded this (spoiler alert):

Code: [Select]

Ha'tak class Mothership    2,200,000 tons     44395 Crew     1442549.5 BP      TCS 44000  TH 6600  EM 900000
15000 km/s     Armour 24-1506     Shields 30000-300     Sensors 3750/3750/5/10     Damage Control Rating 4029     PPV 3257.72
Maint Life 4.64 Years     MSP 1651270    AFR 9609%    IFR 133.5%    1YR 124979    5YR 1874691    Max Repair 10500 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 36 months    Flight Crew Berths 9013   
Hangar Deck Capacity 232000 tons     Cryo Drop Capacity: 116 Battalions    Magazine 14228    Cargo 75000    Cargo Handling Multiplier 120   
Jump Gate Construction Ship: 20 days
Recreational Facilities
Salvager: 2 module(s) capable of salvaging 5000 tons per day

2500 EP Stealth Photonic Drive (264)    Power 2500    Fuel Use 0.88%    Signature 25    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 150,000,000 Litres    Range 1394.6 billion km   (1076 days at full power)
Ancients Shields (2000)   Total Fuel Cost  30,000 Litres per hour  (720,000 per day)

Gold Pyramidion cal.377-80r-45.24m (1)    Range 1,400,000km     TS: 25000 km/s     Power 377-25     RM 12    ROF 75        377 377 377 377 377 377 377 377 377 377
Tac Defense Network cal.4x6-5r-720k (16x4)    Range 720,000km     TS: 100000 km/s     Power 24-25     RM 12    ROF 5        6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6
Phalanx Turret cal.4x24-5r-2.88m (16x4)    Range 1,400,000km     TS: 50000 km/s     Power 96-100     RM 12    ROF 5        24 24 24 24 24 24 24 24 24 24
Staff Cannon cal.50-25r-1200k (60)    Range 1,200,000km     TS: 25000 km/s     Power 125-25    ROF 25        50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50
Staff Cannon cal.9-5r-1200k (60)    Range 1,200,000km     TS: 25000 km/s     Power 22-25    ROF 5        9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9
Ion Cannon cal.24-5r-1.44m (1)    Range 1,400,000km     TS: 25000 km/s     Power 24-25     RM 144    ROF 5        1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Gravity Shield (30x16)    Range 1000 km     TS: 100000 km/s     ROF 5       Base 50% To Hit
Beam Tactical rated 700k-100kps (3)    Max Range: 1,400,000 km   TS: 100000 km/s     99 99 98 97 96 96 95 94 94 93
Vacuum Energy Power Plant PB-1 (1)     Total Power Output 400    Armour 0    Exp 5%
Vacuum Energy Power Plant PB-1.5 (8)     Total Power Output 4800    Armour 0    Exp 35%

Size 32 Ancients Torpedo Launcher (8)    Missile Size 32    Rate of Fire 80
Naquadah Bomb Sluice (1)    Missile Size 100    Rate of Fire 250
Size 12 Seeker Hatch (1)    Missile Size 12    Rate of Fire 30
Torpedo Tactical rated 5b-res17 (1)     Range 5,009.6m km    Resolution 17
Seeker Tactical rated 65.6m-res8 (1)     Range 63.6m km    Resolution 8
Bomb Guidance CPU rated 2.25m-res1 (1)     Range 2.3m km    Resolution 1
Naquadah Bomb (31)  Speed: 30,000 km/s   End: 11.3m    Range: 20.4m km   WH: 567    Size: 100    TH: 100/60/30
Ancients Seeker Drone (243)  Speed: 250,000 km/s   End: 4.2m    Range: 63m km   WH: 36    Size: 12    TH: 1416/850/425
Plasma Charge (300)  Speed: 250,000 km/s   End: 0.1m    Range: 1.7m km   WH: 171    Size: 12    TH: 1666/1000/500
Ancients Assault Torpedo (144)  Speed: 281,200 km/s   End: 60.5m    Range: 1020.5m km   WH: 225    Size: 32    TH: 1499/899/449

Ancients Missile Scanner rated 6.75b-res1 (1)     GPS 9000     Range 6,750.0m km    MCR 735.1m km    Resolution 1
Ancients Sensor Suite rated 30.187b-res20 (1)     GPS 180000     Range 30,186.9m km    Resolution 20
Ancients Redundant Sensor Orbs rated 3b-res2 (1)     GPS 5760     Range 3,054.7m km    Resolution 2
Thermal Sensor TH50-3750 (1)     Sensitivity 3750     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  3750m km
EM Detection Sensor EM50-3750 (1)     Sensitivity 3750     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  3750m km
Phased Gravitational Sensors (1)   5 Survey Points Per Hour
Phased Geological Sensors (2)   10 Survey Points Per Hour

Compact ECCM-10 (6)         ECM 100
Cost point:

At the time where I built this (approx. 150 years in) that barely made 3% of my pool for Gallicite, and completely irrelevant percentages of everything else. It also took barely a year to manufacture. Since the building time curve flattens the larger a design is, building larger ships actually results in faster build-up of firepower. Like 2 small ships would take longer to build than one x2 sized one. A minor advantage.
The reason I only built this so late is just tech level btw. and not resource shortage. I could have fielded one much earlier without much pain (probably 50 years in), but there was just no need for my mainly mining based passive empire at this age. So expensive about this is just the Gallicite (more due to tech level here again - ..every later ship has this problem) and then also the initial shipyard build-up, which can cost millions of duranium and neutronium. However, once you have one with your largest ship assigned, you can usually use it to built every other ship in your repository as well, so that is when those costs stop.(..and who cares about a one time 2m investment in duranium and neutronium at times where your storage begins to count in multi-millions anyway)
So I could have had a fleet of 20-30 of those, but even that would have been to many ships for me to bother managing by hand.(in single task forces that is..)

Vandermeer most players appear to stick with a base population of 500m with setting up their player race.  With this size population there is a economic limit to ships sizes that can be realistically supported.

They also normally do not alter the starting shipyards.  Since the starting military yard is normally no larger than 10k people tend to try to fit familiar class designations within this scale.  Yes the yards can scale up, but with such a small starting point that takes a very long time.

The other limiting factor is resources.  Again because of small starting populations the ability to extract sufficient resources to build and maintain large scale ships just isn't practical.  Yes planets with very high quantities of critical minerals are found, but usually with very low accessibility.  The low accessibility requires high numbers of mines to extract the needed quantities.  Then you run into the need to either transport said minerals to your manufacturing centers or move the manufacturing centers to the minerals.  Moving the MC's requires habitable worlds for the support colonies. 

If played with most of the baseline populations statistics untouched it quickly becomes a vicious circle.

Aha, you think because I started at 10 billion people in the Warhammer game, that is how I usually do it. No no, just at the time I had just lost my old game to intense slow down, but I wanted to get up quickly to the same grade of development to kind of simulate "continuing" the old game. In my current game I started just like everyone else with 500m people (the world of ancient egypt), conventional even, no tech points, and nothing extra with shipyards too (never did manipulate anything here in any game).
And yes, this is the game where I built the 74m Gallicite fortress mothership. Not saying it was easy to get this, but in 250 years, you just have this kind of resource.(even without really expanding everywhere you could - as I said there, I basically mostly bunkered down and opened mining colonies only on the most viable spots, because I hate having too much administration burden)
If you know how to mine efficiently (0.1 acc. planets are strangely and counter-intuitively the way to go here), there is really nothing stopping you resource or shipyard, or population size wise. You can get into wealth problems if not cautious, but of course that issue can be foreseen countered too.
On other note, my first freighter in this game was actually a huge 50 cargo bay one too. Nothing did stop me from doing this in this very conventional game. My home planet wasn't even that rich, with I think barely more than a million duranium at start, and Sol generally not that heavy. Did not stop gigantism for me, uh no.

...Maybe I should make a documentation thread of an open game to show this of and prove it.



@Theodidactus:
True, there is no real practical reason to build this large, as you can achieve most with larger numbers of smaller craft. Well, there is a difference for civil designs. My 50 cargo hold freighters for example (weighting 2.2-2.4m tons) can usually strap on a gate builder, recreational facilities and around 4 salvagers without really expanding their total tonnage unnecessarily. This has the advantage of indefinite crew deployment, and nice multi role abilities, so I don't need to build some other specialized ships to fulfill this. Came up in my second game, when the 'loss of morale' messages of my freighter trails started to unnerve me.
For military ships however, this is not really needed, unless you want a combination mothership craft like the one above that has those abilities too.(since recreation and gate building is around 100kt each, you would need designs in the millions so this doesn't dominate the design and renders it ultimately uneffective)
But that is not the point. I knew already that it would strictly be more efficient to have military fleets of smallest possible parts. Yet, for once, "most efficient" doesn't mean it is "necessary" to do things so perfect (like I fare pretty fine in the games where I abandoned this), and then at times of extreme resource abundance it also becomes quite bothersome to manage so many little wheels.(it would have been hundreds just to fill the space of one of the Ha'tak above, and I could have had quite a lot of those too...)
Anyway, that is actually not my criticism, nor do I in any way really criticize the procedure. I just find it baffling that no one (out of many) let loose of his creativity and just made what he wanted no matter what would be wise. Like, I saw Aurora posts on three other forums before coming here with either people discussing how things are done, or presenting their games with story and all. Nowhere did one ever differ from the doctrine, like they have all been brainwashed. The reasons to follow these plans are good, but in no way compelling, so by the laws of statistics, this has to be declared a phenomenon.

[Erik L]

That is not really true. In my current game for example I fielded this (spoiler alert):

Don't forget those ships were designed in 4.77 I think.

[Charlie Beeler]

Yes you can have a relatively uneventful game by bunkering.

[Maltay]

I designate classes based on function instead of size.  Of course, function and size often correlate.  When I am home from business travel on Thu I will post my system in this thread.

[Bgreman]

To take things to the other end of the spectrum, in The Coldest War, ships are actually quite small even by Aurora standards.  The Federation rolled out a bunch of meson-armed "corvettes" of 1450 tons.  The UN has a number of ship classes, with "destroyer escorts" being sub-2000 tons, "destroyers" being between 2000-5000 tons, a run of 5100  ton "cruisers," and some 7150 ton "monitors."

The reason for this is that both factions started conventionally, but the arms race that ensued immediately prioritized getting ANY armed ships out ASAP, no matter the size.  Combine this with a relatively slow pace of play (we're only about 12 years in, with the state-of-the-art being ion engines), and you wind up with pretty small, limited-functionality ships compared to the impressive multi-role megavessels posted above.

So not everyone is cleaving hard to the schema in the OP.  I'd wager that not even most people are.  It could just be most people who actually show up here to talk about it.