Jump Engine & squadron restriction

[Nibelung44 (OP)]

Something I did not knew and learned the painful way: a jump ship can only allow the jump of a ship that is lighter than her, even if her jump engine would allow  theoretically the other ship to jump... I guess it is WAD and not a bug by the way.


i.e my 19.000 tons ship with a 48.000 ton jump engine would only allow the jump of 19.000 or lighter ships, not 48.000 ships.

[Brian Neumann]

The idea is that the mass of the jump ship is as much a limiter as the jump engine capacity.  If you want to make a ship bigger without costing much put things like hanger bays, cargo holds ect on the ship.  These don't cost much compared to their size so they help bulk a ship up quickly.

Brian

[Nibelung44 (OP)]

good idea.

[shireknight]

Last night I designed my first jump engine, I designed it so it was a perfect match for my explorer craft however when I came to fit the engine I must have boo booed somewhere because I had to replace both main engines with lighter ones and remove one of the ships two sensors just to get rid of the jump drive caution that popped up lol.

I assume that the jumpdrive does not take into account it's own weight when telling you at the research stage how much tonnage it is capable of powering.

[smokeyser]

Correct.   And they get really heavy!

[welchbloke]

Early game jump drives are REALLY heavy and you will find it difficult to fit much else into a design other than engines.  The Jump Drive Efficiency research line reduces the mass required for any given size of jump drive.

[Brian Neumann]

I assume that the jumpdrive does not take into account it's own weight when telling you at the research stage how much tonnage it is capable of powering.

The jump drive only says how much mass it can handle, the total ship mass is going to be affected by the jump engine itself.  As several people have said the early tech jump engines are huge, and you probably will not be able to make a true combat jump ship at these tech levels.  As your jump engine tech gets better not only does the engine size go down for a given size ship, but the cost also goes down allowing you to have bigger ships at the same time.  I generally don't even bother to build a jump engine untill I have jump engine efficiency 4 or 5.  At this point the jump engine is replacing most of the weapons on a military ship and I usually just pull the rest for better sensors.  This gives me a second sensor ship in a fleet incase my primary scout is out of position/destroyed.

Brian

[sloanjh]

Also, when you put the jump drive into the ship design, it will increase the mass by more than the mass of the jump drive.  This is because of armor - the ship is bigger, so it takes more armor to cover it to the specified depth.  This is important to think about if the jump drive isn't yet researched (and so doesn't show up on the F5 screen).  For example, if you want to end up with a 120 HS (hull space) ship and your jump drive will be 30 HS, you should not design a 90 HS ship and assume it will be 120 HS after adding the jump engine.  Instead, you should add 30 HS of "junk" (fuel tanks, extra engines, etc) to the design while you're experimenting to substitute for the 30 HS the jump drive will take up.

John

[jseah]

I use SM mode to instant research designed techs, then put together the completed design. 

Once the design is finalized, I use the production screen to un-research the components I had to add then research them before beginning retooling. 

Obviously, this does not apply to commercial ships since civs will build it before, for example, the new commercial engines get researched.