Cockpit component and gunboats

[Brian Neumann]

Currently there is still the possiblility of using missle weapons with the parasite ships.  If you do want that possiblility then you probably need a small magazine.  Say 1hs and 50 point capacity.  This is just big enough for one or two reloads of missles, assuming that the parasite uses the really small, slow firing option for it's missle launchers that you have already coded.  This would allow for a "torpedo" boat with four or five missles to fire and a very long reload time.

Brian

[Pete_Keller]

Sorry guys, this is a long rambling post.

Another idea is some type of mobile maintenance facility for ships of up to a certain size. However, MF use minerals/weath so the mobile facility would have to have access to minerals as well (from a cargo hold perhaps) but then you would need to specify what minerals to reload on a regular basis and that could get messy.

There is nothing to prevent very large parasites being carried so anything I come up with that works for parasites would have to work for all ships. I am open to ideas.

Steve

I like the idea of mobile maintenance facilities.  

Are all spaceships able to land on planets?  

If so, you make the MMF land on a planet, take a week or so to "setup", become active and perform maintenance, and take a week or so to "tear down".  If they have to "bug out" in an emergency, they can take off after ~24 hours. but they lose all the MMF specific capabilities until they get refitted back.  You (Steve) create two tech items, that are the same size, one is MMF, the other is "broken MMF" (need a better name than that).  If you bug out, the bugout code changes MMF to "Broken MMF" and the only way to fix it is to refit the tender.

If you cannot land spaceships on planets, you will need to code in some way of transferring cargo from ship to ship to keep the MMF resupplied with minerals.

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Another thing is size of the MMF.  To transport 1 MF (200 Tons capability/4 hull spaces maintenance capability) it takes 50 Hull Spaces.  

The Tender should be able to use the MMF to keep it's clock from rolling forward at too great of a pace even if the MMF does not have the hull space capacity to maintain the tender.  (if the MMF is active the tender's clock should roll forward at a reduced pace since the MMF is able to produce parts to fix most tender issues)

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What do we want the MMF to be able to do?  Should it do major refits, minor refits, Repairs?

Pete

[Þórgrímr]

If you want to simulate something like the AGP Tenders from WW2, then I would suggest that at first, all they could do was keep the clock from going forward to the attached parasites and minor overhauls, then with tech increases add components that eventually add major overhauls and repairs.

From what I have been reading refits to another class of PT was still done at major naval bases or repair yards like Ulithi. So I would keep refits at SY's.

That's just my .02$  



Cheers,

[SteveAlt]

One request on the launch bit. Stick the launched parasites into a separate TF.

That was my initial idea. However, you could end up with a lot of small TFs if you start launching some but not all parasites when you might want all those in one TF. So I thought if I put them in the same TF as the motherships, then players would be able to use all the various detachment options on the Fleet Moves window to organise their smaller shps and I wouldn't have to replicate that functionality. For example, if you wanted to use corvettes size ships as escorts, with seperate TFs you could end up launching them, adding them back to the main body and then detaching them again as escorts so you can save the formation. Equally, if you wanted them in specific groups it would be easier to detach them from one main fleet than try and sort out all the smaller TFs.

Steve

[SteveAlt]

1) Each ship can have one Assigned Mothership, which is set using a dropdown on the Ship window. If you tell this ship to Land it will attempt to land on its Assigned Mothership if it is in the same location. On landing, it will automatically refuel from the mothership's fuel capacity. While a ship is docked, it can be assigned a different mothership so that next time it launches, it will land on a different ship. The Ship window shows the Actual Mothership (if it is docked) and the Assigned Mothership (which is the ship on which it will attempt to land if given a land command). These may be different.

What might be an idea, is to allow the mothership to be changed if the parasite has been launched - otherwise you could end up with the situation where a launched parasite cannot land, as it's assigned motherships has been destroyed (and the parasite cannot be re-assigned a new mothership).

Sorry I didn't explain that very well. A parasite can be assigned a mothership at any time. I was making the point above about assigning inside motherships to show it could be done as well as when the ship was in space, but ended up making it seem as if that was the only time it could be done.

Steve

[SteveAlt]

For keeping the engines out of larger ships, how about this:

Because these engines are very precisely tuned, there is energy expensive interference the more of them you have.

And it goes up proportional to the number of engine interactions you can have.  If E is the number of engines, then multiply fuel consumption rate by 1.01 x E!.  That is, E factorial.

So 1 engine, not a problem.  +1% fuel consumption.  3 engines, +6%.
6 engines is 6*5*4*3*2 interaction issues, or +720% fuel consumption.

The technobabble I have used in my current campaign is as follows:

"Scientists on Alexandria have completed their research into increasing our rate of wealth production. They now turn their attention to a new proposal by Governor Sorokin. She believes she can use a series of electro-magnets to create a boosted engine with twice its normal power. The drawbacks to this engine would include extremely high fuel use, probably ten times normal, and a propensity to explode when hit. In addition, the magnetic field would destabilise in proximity to another field of the same type, so only one of these highly boosted engines would be possible on a ship. While these drawbacks are significant, Captain 2nd Sorokin believes the engine could enable us to create small, fast ships with limited range that would be ideal for system defence. Given her past successes in the propulsion field, Star Marshal Alexeyev has given her permission to proceed."

The weapons these things are armed with will have to be pretty short ranged, because you won't be able to fit a tracking system for long ranged stuff.

I agree, although you could make them a little slower with longer ranged weapons by increasing their size

Maybe have some kind of energy storage system instead of a generator so that it can fire a number of full power shots and then have to wait a while before firing again.  So if you need a size 2 generator to keep up with a given energy load, perhaps a size 1 energy bank could power 60 seconds worth of fire.

Unfortunately, that gets in to energy budget stuff and complaints from big ship owners about unfired weapons still drawing power, etc...

The way to handle this would be to create slow firing weapons and use a small reactor. Although small, fast-firing weapons might give better overall damage.

Steve

[SteveAlt]

Currently there is still the possiblility of using missle weapons with the parasite ships.  If you do want that possiblility then you probably need a small magazine.  Say 1hs and 50 point capacity.  This is just big enough for one or two reloads of missles, assuming that the parasite uses the really small, slow firing option for it's missle launchers that you have already coded.  This would allow for a "torpedo" boat with four or five missles to fire and a very long reload time.

Last night I added a 1 HS magazine with 60 storage

Steve

[Brian Neumann]

Last night I added a 1 HS magazine with 60 storage  

Steve

Thanks,
Brian

[SteveAlt]

I like the idea of mobile maintenance facilities.  

Are all spaceships able to land on planets?  

No, they just move into orbit.

If so, you make the MMF land on a planet, take a week or so to "setup", become active and perform maintenance, and take a week or so to "tear down".  If they have to "bug out" in an emergency, they can take off after ~24 hours. but they lose all the MMF specific capabilities until they get refitted back.  You (Steve) create two tech items, that are the same size, one is MMF, the other is "broken MMF" (need a better name than that).  If you bug out, the bugout code changes MMF to "Broken MMF" and the only way to fix it is to refit the tender.

If you cannot land spaceships on planets, you will need to code in some way of transferring cargo from ship to ship to keep the MMF resupplied with minerals.

Another thing is size of the MMF.  To transport 1 MF (200 Tons capability/4 hull spaces maintenance capability) it takes 50 Hull Spaces.  

The Tender should be able to use the MMF to keep it's clock from rolling forward at too great of a pace even if the MMF does not have the hull space capacity to maintain the tender.  (if the MMF is active the tender's clock should roll forward at a reduced pace since the MMF is able to produce parts to fix most tender issues)

I have been pondering this overnight to try and create a realistic way of handling it. It occurred to me that if a ship with maintenance facilities was restricted to working on ships within its internal hangar bay, then its maintenance facilities would be a lot less powerful than planet-based maintenance facilities that can work on many ships concurrently. As things stand, ships inside a hangar do not advance their maintenance clock anyway so maybe ship-based maintenance facilities could simply replace spare parts but could not perform the equivalent of a major overhaul.

Therefore, how about a maintenance bay using the same modular approach as the ground based facilities but that is a little more compact. It can only work on ships inside the hangar bay and only up the size of the maintenance facility. For example a ship with a 5000 ton hangar but only 1000 ton facilities could work on several 1000 ton ships but not a 5000 ton ship (which is the same approach as the ground-based facilities). This would allow the creation of tenders for several small ships  or a larger slower mothership with 5000 ton maintenance facilities that could work on several small ships or one large ship at a time.

The problem would still be the minerals though as the mothership would need to carry many different types. However, an option might be to have all spares produced by maintenance ships to be based solely on Duranium which they could carry in a cargo hold. Its a slight fudge but probably an acceptable one and its makes the maintenance ship feasible.

Steve

[SteveAlt]

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[Pete_Keller]

The problem would still be the minerals though as the mothership would need to carry many different types. However, an option might be to have all spares produced by maintenance ships to be based solely on Duranium which they could carry in a cargo hold. Its a slight fudge but probably an acceptable one and its makes the maintenance ship feasible.

Steve

Or, since the ships have to be internal to the docking  bay to be repaired, allow transfer of minerals and colonists inside the docking bay.

This is starting to sound like the mobile repair facility in Once a Hero by Elizabeth Moon -- ISBN-10: 0671878719, ISBN-13: 978-0671878719

Good book.

Pete

[Þórgrímr]

LOL that is very similar to the post I just made before reading this. I think freezing the clock and minor overhauls only would be the way to go (and only for ships inside the bay equal to or less than to the size of the ship-board maintenance facilities).

Steve

Steve, the only problem I see in not allwoing tenders to eventually do major overhauls and repairs is that eventually you will be clogging up your other SY's doing major overhauls and repairs on the Gunboats.

Imagine this, you have a squadron of six PT's in Ulithi under repair and you get six destroyers who need the SY time. now won't that be irritating to say the least?  



Cheers,

[SteveAlt]

[quote="

[Þórgrímr]

That's not a problem in v2.3 as shipyards no longer handle overhauls. They are all done by maintenance facilities.

Steve

But the repairs, if I read your post correctly, will still have to be done in SY's. And if a player literally has dozens of these squadrons that is going to fill his SY's real fast with repairs on those bad boys.  



Cheers,

[SteveAlt]

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