Author Topic: Advanced Warship Tutorial  (Read 3268 times)

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Offline Whitecold (OP)

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Advanced Warship Tutorial
« on: August 27, 2014, 10:58:57 AM »
Designing an effective warship in Aurora is a tricky thing. There are many different components and weapons that can be combined to build anything from fast, nimble scout fighters to ponderous, near-invincible battleships. However the large number of effective designs is dwarfed by the enormous number of possible creations that are an ineffective waste of resources. The game itself does only the most rudimentary sanity checking, so it is up to you to make a sensible design.
This article aims at helping to design any kind of warship, it is however by no means the only way.

Mission Profile

No ship can be good at everything, thus you first have to decide what kind of missions your ship should handle. Is it designed as escort, as scout, as main combatant, carrier, or for light rear area protection? Does it operate close to its home base, or is it designed to project power? Does the ship operate alone, or in a task force, and if yes, with what other ships?
Once you know what you want, look at any existing designs you might have, and check if any of them can already fulfill that mission, and if yes, if it is significantly outdated. Retooling and Component Research is not free, so you might be better with building additional ships of older designs.

Concept

Once you know the mission, you need to fix the tonnage of the ship. Fighters and FAC's have built in tonnage limits of 500t, 1kt respectively. 5-10kt are usual sizes for escorts or smaller ships.
You can pick any size you like and have the yards and maintenance facilities for, but it is important that you set one. You can always make a ship larger, but this easily leads to a size creep as you cram in more and more.
When you have your size fixed, decide on what type of weapons and sensors you want to mount to fulfill the intended mission. Keep the number of different systems low, each weapon has different strengths, if you select too many, you end up being mediocre everywhere.

Armor

Add a the armor thickness you want from the start. This is easy to forget, and it is annoying to have to redesign your already balanced ship because it still has paper thin armor.
This is also the time to set the deployment time. A fighter only needs some days, a system defense craft some months, while a ship designed for missions in other systems should have a decent time it can stay on station.
If your ship should incorporate shields, add them as well.

Engines

Knowing how heavy your ship will be, you can now decide on how fast your ship should get. If your ship will be operating alone or only with sister ships of the same class, you just need to balance the size of the engines with fuel consumption and the resulting speed, however a ship operating in a fleet is restricted to the slowest vessel.
To not waste fuel and space, it is advisable to standardize your fleet to the same speed. This can be done by committing a certain percentage to engines with given power multiplier, for example 20% with 1.2 engine power, resulting in one 8HS engine per 2000t of ship size.
If your ship should be jump capable, add the jump drive.

Sensors / Fire Controls

Add now the sensors and fire controls you want on your design. Larger ships will need some redundancy in fire control. To fire on a target, an active sensor contact is needed, it does not need to be on the same ship but, it is still a good idea to include some active capability on larger ships as backup.
The active sensor you employ should have more range than your fire controls. Missile Fire Controls should match the range of your missiles, else you either waste fuel or HS for your FCs. Excess MFC range can be useful if you expect enemy ECM and/or improved, longer ranged missiles. Beam Fire Controls are more flexible in range, and lasers often cannot be matched by the range of the BFC. However excess range means increased damage over the effective range.
BFC however should match the tracking speed of the weapon. The minimum of weapon tracking speed, and the rating of the BFC is used, so they should be matched for optimal performance.

Engineering & Fuel

Add some more engineering spaces and fuel until the range and maintenance lifetime are higher than what you want in the end, they don't need to be balanced yet, this is simply to hold space free for them.

Weapons

Now it is time to add weapons. Fill your ship up with weapons and appropriate power plants respectively magazines until you hit your set tonnage. Weapons are the fanciest and most exciting part, but there is a thing as 'too many guns'. Armor, Engineering Spaces, Engines and Fuel are dull, but as important for an effective fighting unit.
Hangars can also be added here, they are the 'weapon' of a carrier. If you use hangers, you need to check the 'Keep excess Q' flag, and add additional spare berths for the crew of your parasites. Else the ship suffers from overcrowding, and life support will eventually fail, killing your crew.

Fine Tuning

Now it is time to balance your design. Your Maintenance lifetime should be larger than your deployment time, which should be larger than your days on max power. There is a value 'Max Repair Cost', which is the amount of MSP needed to fix the single most expensive component, your ship should be able to store more MSP than this value, if you want your ship to be able to repair itself.
Also check you have enough power, and look if you are satisfied by the number of missiles you can load. In the ordnance tab (next one to design) you can add a default load out of missiles. Divide the number of missiles by the number of launchers to get your salvo number.
Weight the number of Fire Controls against the number of weapon mounts.
It is a good idea to check the percentage of space different components take up, to see if your ship is balanced.
Try to hit your set goal exactly, you can always tweak a bit and shave off 1 HS or add one.

Finishing Touches

Last you can decide on the minimum rank required to command your ship, and set a list of ship names from which your ships will be named. The latter is a matter of convenience, you can also manually name all your ships. Officer rank is important especially in the beginning where you might not have enough senior officers to command your constructions, so you want to lower the rank requirement.

Notes Different Classes:
While it sounds very cool to have Destroyers, Light and Heavy Cruisers, Frigates, Battleships, Battlecruisers, Carriers with Bombers and Fighters all together, don't try it. Their functionality will overlap, a few classes are enough.

Notes Fighter:
Fighter design is a bit special, as you only have 10 HS to work with, and you might want to use even less, while a single 10cm beam weapon already takes up 3 HS. Together with the weight of the single layer of armor it can be impossible to design an effective fighter early in the game.

Notes Research:
By the time the lead ship of the class leaves the yard, you probably will have researched some base tech that would allow some slightly improved version of some component. This is inevitable, don't try to include that, your ship is still okay without it. Wait until the improvements accumulate, and then make a new design, or refit.
« Last Edit: August 29, 2014, 07:40:03 AM by Whitecold »
 

Offline ComradeMicha

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Re: Advanced Warship Tutorial
« Reply #1 on: August 27, 2014, 12:48:51 PM »
Great idea, thank you!

I think this is quite good for starters, however I would add the little thing "max repair" vs. MSP. This disabled my first set of ships right before my first combat... :p
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Offline alex_brunius

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Re: Advanced Warship Tutorial
« Reply #2 on: August 27, 2014, 02:23:37 PM »
I would also include the information about matching ranges and tracking-speeds of fire-controls and weapons, as well as resolutions on sensors and fire-controls.
 

Offline Erik L

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Re: Advanced Warship Tutorial
« Reply #3 on: August 27, 2014, 02:55:11 PM »
I'd mention that not being able to see your target with actives means you can't shoot at it.

Offline Whitecold (OP)

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Re: Advanced Warship Tutorial
« Reply #4 on: August 28, 2014, 06:03:39 AM »
So, I updated it with your suggestions.
 

Offline ComradeMicha

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Re: Advanced Warship Tutorial
« Reply #5 on: August 28, 2014, 06:39:59 AM »
Great! Also, many new players forget about these:

1. Ordnance Loadout (assignment of missiles and fighters during design)
2. officer rank needed for this ship (especially a problem in the early game when realistic promotions are enabled)
3. tanker / collier checkboxes which enable certain orders like "unload 90% fuel to base"
4. keep excess crew quarters for carriers
5. magazine space vs. actual number of missiles (depending on missile size!!!)
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Offline SteelChicken

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Re: Advanced Warship Tutorial
« Reply #6 on: August 28, 2014, 01:08:19 PM »
Nice!

One suggestion;

" Missile Fire Controls should match the range of your missiles"

Nope.  MFC should exceed missile range.  Why?  To counter ECM, and to also allow missile upgrades without refitting your ships.
 

Offline Whitecold (OP)

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Re: Advanced Warship Tutorial
« Reply #7 on: August 29, 2014, 07:44:10 AM »
So, I updated it again.
 

Offline AL

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Re: Advanced Warship Tutorial
« Reply #8 on: August 30, 2014, 04:40:13 AM »
I would also mention checking the "exact class size" field along the left.  The tonnage given in the summary display rounds up to the nearest 50 when you exceed fighter-sized craft, so you could conceivably squeeze in an extra small fuel tank or two without going over your tonnage limit.
 

Offline Whitecold (OP)

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Re: Advanced Warship Tutorial
« Reply #9 on: September 02, 2014, 11:49:23 AM »
Added that, and I put the tutorial on the wiki.
 

Offline ComradeMicha

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Re: Advanced Warship Tutorial
« Reply #10 on: September 02, 2014, 11:57:26 AM »
Great! Also, many new players forget about these:

1. Ordnance Loadout (assignment of missiles and fighters during design)
[...]
3. tanker / collier checkboxes which enable certain orders like "unload 90% fuel to base"
[...]
So, I updated it again.

Sorry, maybe I am blind, but I can't find your mention of the points above (in bold).  ???
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Offline Whitecold (OP)

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Re: Advanced Warship Tutorial
« Reply #11 on: September 02, 2014, 12:36:23 PM »
They are interface points, there are other tutorials for the actual interface, as they only peripherally touch on the topic of warship design, I'd rather go over those and put it in there.
 

Offline Ninetails

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Re: Advanced Warship Tutorial
« Reply #12 on: September 10, 2014, 12:02:15 PM »
I might not have designed a lot of warships in Aurora yet, but here are some things that from a theoretical point are quite usefull to think about.

First of all, I tend to describe my military ships in terms of a mission systems and the package.  The package is composed of elements such as engines, fuel, basic crew quarters (for crew for the package components), engeneering for package components and possibly armor and jump engines.  The main reason for this, is that the package is best designed in terms of % of total mass (size) of the ship.  This is due to the effect of most of these components scales either linearly or close to linearly with the % of the ship dedicated to this.  For instance, any ship with the same power/efficiency+tech settings, but of different size, will always have the same speed of the same procentage of the total mass is dedicated to engines.  The same is true for fuel and cruising range, assuming the engines have the same fuel efficiency modifier (which can change a bit with size).

To help with the math, I have found 2 interesting facts:
1) The game seems to have some sort of standard speed for each engine tech, which is 25% of the HS as engine power - in pratice equivalent to 25% of the ships mass with 100% power engines.  This standard can be seen, by noticing that the speeds generated by this are exactly equal to the tracking speeds of beam fire controls of the same tier.  This means that any ships slower than this can be considered slow of its tech level, and those faster, well fast for its tech level.  It also leads to interesting facts and about probabilities to hit with missiles and to intercept them, which are independent of the actual tech level, such as a missile with max engine power and 50% engines will only be hit 1 out of 3 times by a intercepting beam weapon.
2) Range of a craft is only dependent on fuel efficiency of engines and the percentage of the craft dedicated to fuel.  It comes out to be, that for 10% of a craft with 100% fuel efficiency, it will have a range of 18 billion km (or 18 Tm = 1. 8*10^13 m).

Since these things mainly depend on percentages, you can plan for them long before you even start researching the components.  If you are planning to use your warship in a group, it would be quite advisable to design the package once and for all, and use it for all the ships classes you intent to use together, since this will ensure that their ranges and speeds will match.  You will ofcause have to change armor/jump engines from ship to ship.  If we take a fairly standard ship, it is not unreasonable to say that 25% would be dedicated to engines, 10% to fuel and somewhere between 5-25% to basic crew+engineering and armor, giving about 40-60% of the ships mass/size to the package.  You can then get a much better idea about how much mission equitment you will be able to fill unto a ship, and it also becomes quite clear why using jump engines with less than 4-5 jump efficiency is quite bad (since a 4 jump efficiency on a 50% package ship, would take half the mission size and put it into the package, and 5 still takes 40% of the mission size).

These concepts are quite handy to keep around, and makes it much easier to evaluate such aspects of a ship and easily come up with a sensible design without too much trial and error.  They are somewhat less usefull for commercial ships, since they tend to use other kinds of optimization paths for ship design.
 

Offline linkxsc

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Re: Advanced Warship Tutorial
« Reply #13 on: September 15, 2014, 10:25:41 AM »
I have a little addition that might be nice.   A note that if designing a carrier for fighters or FACs, checking that "Keep Excess Q" in the upper right while designing is quite helpful (I built myself a pair of carriers, only to find out that they can't keep excess fighter crews alive for more than a month. 
« Last Edit: September 15, 2014, 07:09:42 PM by linkxsc »
 

Offline boggo2300

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Re: Advanced Warship Tutorial
« Reply #14 on: September 16, 2014, 04:57:35 PM »
Rightly so!

Don't mollycoddle the fighter jocks!

Matt
The boggosity of the universe tends towards maximum.