About a year ago there was a discussion on the forum about how to move troops to the ground from transports. My final thoughts at that time were as follows:
Troop Transport Bays will be similar to before, except there are now three sizes (small, standard, large), which are: 100 ton (2 HS), 1000 tons (20 HS) and 5000 tons (100 HS). This is a commercial system and functions in the same way as in VB6 Aurora.
Troop Transport Bays - Drop Ship Equipped is a new module which can function as a normal troop transport bay or quickly deliver troops from orbit using abstract drop ships. If the fast orbital delivery is chosen, there will be two options for the drop - Normal and Abandon. A normal drop will include waiting for the drop ships to return to the bays, which will require two minutes without additional research. A new tech line will reduce drop ship return times, starting with 90 seconds for 2000 RP and ending with 20 seconds for 64,000 RP. In an Abandon drop, the drop ships make a one way trip, allowing the ship to leave orbit immediately after the drop. In this case the bay is damaged (to simulate the loss of the drop ships) and can only be repaired at a shipyard. A ship with intact drop ships can also pick up troops from a planet, although this requires double the normal return trip time (as it is faster to unload than load). In all cases, the ship may only carry out landing or recovery operations if it starts the movement phase in the same location as the planet. For example, in an Abandon drop, the troop ship will arrive at the planet, take any fire for that turn, then launch drop ships and move away in the following turn. There are drop ship equivalents for the three normal bays. They have the same capacities but are 20% larger, 150% more expensive and a military system.
Troop Transport Bays - Boarding Equipped is a new type which can function as normal troop transport bays or launch infantry units in a boarding attack against a hostile ship (in a similar way to VB6 Aurora). There are equivalents for the Small and Standard normal bays. They have the same capacities but are 10% larger, 50% more expensive and a military system.
There are no longer any short-duration troop transport modules, as the 'landing craft' are now the abstract drop ships. This is partly to reduce micromanagement and the number of different ground-related orders, but also to create a real flavour of an opposed landing and to require investment in 'amphibious' operations. Any STO weapons on the surface will be able to target the landing ships on the way in and out of the drop zone. The player has a few options in terms of the troop ships. For example, large and heavily armoured dropping large formations, small and fast with small formations or raiding parties, or bare bones and expendable. Of course, additional ships can accompany the troop ships in an attempt to distract or suppress the defences.
One year on and with more code in place, I am considering making a couple of adjustments and I would be interested in comments, especially on the second part.
1) All the bays will be commercial, not military. This is mainly because now that I see how many military forces would have to be involved in a major planetary assault, building sufficient large military vessels is probably prohibitive due to the shipyard and maintenance requirements. I still expect the boarding-focused troops ship to be military because they will need the military engines and some large troop ships may be military because other systems are needed in the design.
2) I am tempted to abstract the drop ships completely and not require their 'replacement' by requiring the troop ship to repair the bays after an 'abandon' order. I think it is too much micromanagement and the game play benefit isn't enough to compensate, plus given the number of supply runs likely to be required to support a major conflict, the 'repair' element would get tedious fast. In this case, the Normal and Abandon versions of the drop would become a single 'Drop' order. All drops and pickups would be instant for a ship equipped with drop bays, apart from the existing requirement to end an increment in orbit.
The problem is that I am not sure the instant drop passes the 'giggle test'. In effect, it would mean drop ships moving incredibly fast to and from the planet. Or perhaps dropping while the troop ship moving away and catching up later (which begs the question of why the troop ship doesn't remain safe while the drop ships approach from a greater distance).
If I am being over-concerned about 'reality' here, let me know. Otherwise, I do have a couple of alternative ideas that might fit the desired mechanics. The first is that rather than using 'drop ships', the special troop transport bay (20% larger and 3x more expensive than an equal capacity 'normal bay') uses clusters of small tractor beams to drop and pick up troops during a close pass of the planet. This solves both the speed to drop/pickup and the reason to be in orbit. The special bay would have tractors as a prerequisite. The same technology could theoretically be used for cargo holds but the extra cost would make it difficult to justify - I could add the 'tractor cargo bay' though.
The second option is that all ground forces are equipped as standard with some form of anti-grav 'parachute', which allows fast deployment on to planets. In this case, the special bays are designed to allow this type of speedy, mass deployment. However, loading ground forces would require the same cargo shuttles that are needed for normal transport bays (or suitable facilities on the ground). The upside is that this has no impact on other (non-ground-related) mechanics but the downside of this approach is that evacuating a force in trouble would be almost impossible against serious ground defences. Maybe that is actually realistic when considering planetary assault.
Anyway, in summary, I need mechanics/justification to allow a 'special' bay to have instant drop (and perhaps instant pickup) from orbit without micromanagement or tracking of small landing craft. BTW the reason I don't want to have to track small landing craft is that given the huge variety in units sizes (5 tons to 500 tons) and great variety in potential formation sizes, that would be a micromanagement nightmare.
All comments welcome.