Pulsar 4X Ideas

[Nathan_]

A ferry system ala SC or by tg towing are the two things I have in mind.

[sublight]

I was in the process of mapping out Newtonian Combat mechanics when I noticed an unforeseen limiting factor on railgun range: weapon jitter.

The hit-chance for any weapon will likely be [Weapon_Footprint / Uncertainty]^2

Weapon_Footprint = ProximityRadius + TargetRadius.
Uncertainty = WeaponDrift + TargetDrift.

WeaponDrift = sin(Weapon_Jitter) * Max( Ballistic_Distance, Closing_Velocity * 1second)

For missiles, the equation looks reasonable.

Consider a 2,500 ton patrol boat playing target, with a radius of about 20m.

Consider also a missile programed to close at 100 km/s, with fuel held in reserve for course correction. Steve's base nuclear-laser jitter was 0.1 degrees, or 6 arc-minutes. The missile is under power the entire way for course corrections up to the next-to-last second.

WeaponDrift = sin(0.1) * 100,000 meters = 175m.

If the missile is Kinetic Kill Vehicle still massing 2 tons and the target isn't maneuvering it has a 1.3% chance to hit with 10 TJ of impact energy. Thats a low probability shot for a 1-hit kill, or rather a 1-hit debris field.

If the missile instead carries 100kTon nuclear warhead set for 150m proximity, then there is a 94% chance that the patrol craft is going to eat 6 GJ/m^2, for a total of 240 GJ of hot nuclear fire. That probably is also going to 1-shot our patrol craft target, but the target had instead been a heavily armored and shielded orbital monitor then survival is hypothetically possible.


Now lets consider the terrifying newtonian rail-gun.
My first thought was to give starting rail-guns 60x the accuracy of missile with a rather steady 6 arc-seconds of jitter. This is comparable to a sniper hitting an apple from 1km away. I thought it was rather respectable for a turret on a moving starship at starting tech.

Let's consider point-blank aurora ranges of 10k km.
uncertainty = 10k km * sin(6/3600) = 291m.

That's a 0.5% chance to hit a stationary starship!
With that precision the odds of shooting down an incoming missile or or hitting a freighter at 10m km is 'No.'


Clearly, a turret weapon jitter of even 1 arc-second isn't going to be playable if our rail gun is firing single shots.

Newtonian Aurora will require either (A) gatling rail-guns firing volleys of dozens or hundreds of smaller projectiles  -and/or- (B) much smaller, or eliminated, weapon jitter for ship-weapons.

Thoughts anyone?

[interstellarshadow]

Hi, I have been lurking for a bit, and saw an opportunity to put in my 2 cents.   

When it comes to the weapon jitter question, I think that Kinetic Weapon engagement ranges are just going to be plain shorter.  Missiles will only really be limited by drive distance and closing methods (along with tracking systems etc. ), but I do not see long-range kinetic bombardment against ships being feasible.  Lets look at an example:

A ship with a rail-gun sits at point A.  This rail gun will be 100% accurate and fire a round at about 100 kps (I am pulling a number out of a hat here).   

That ship's target is stationary at point B 10k km, and has a radius of 20 m.  Let's say this is your patrol boat, and it has a maximum accel of about . 2 g or 2 m/s^2.   

After firing the railgun, a very energy intensive process that is detected immediately, the patrol boat begins evasive manoeuvres at maximum accel.  It, in the ensuing 100 seconds before the railgun round reaches is, can dodge it by moving 2. 5 km (ending at rest) away from the the point where it was sitting.  Even if the accel was only 1/1000 of a standard earth gravity, it would be able to dodge it (while not ending at rest, but it can then slow down if it wanted to).   

A railgun with a 2 kg round (again, numbers out of a hat), would require about 10 GJ to fire at that speed, and thus would impart the same energy into the target (which would do some damage to the patrol boat, but not necessarily kill it).    It would also, if it hit, propel the boat at about 90 m/s in the direction opposite the hit.  Not an insignificant amount of damage, but still very significant travel times.  For a speed 10k km/s, a 10 GJ hit would use a 200 mg (less than 1/100th the mass of a . 50 calibre bullet).  It would be silly to use something this small in a weapon, as, weighing just over the mass of two large grains of sand, it would act like one when trying to load your railgun.   

[OJsDad]

Hello,

   I'm a newb to Aurora, though I've been playing around with it over the last few years.   I stumbled across your Pulsar project yesterday.   I've toyed around with the idea of developing a 4x game for several years now, but never got beyond a few ideas on paper.   I like what  you seem to be doing with this project and would like to throw out some ideas.   So, here we go.

1.   Industries vs factories.   Don't simply build a factory, but establish industries.   Instead of building a factory,  you would establish an electronics industry on a planet.   Some of this may make more sense in a bit.

2.   Industries need inputs.   Example, a weapons industry is going to require both certain natural resources along with electronics and metals to build weapons.   Missing a needed resource or not enough, and your output is limited.   Think Victoria or SimCountry

3.   Industries require various levels or trained workforce.   Have your population divided by education levels, say 0 - 25.   0 is no education and 25 is your highest educated.   Each industry is going to need a blend of people from different education levels to function.   No enough workers of a certain level, then production is going to be effected.

4.  I had also thought of dividing planets into regions.   I had also thought of setting a base starting population density for each region type.   This is how many people could like in a region at infrastructure level 0.   You could exceed this, but at the cost of pollution.

   Just to, maybe, make this easier to understand.   I live in NW Ohio in a rural area.   Less than 50 people living on my 1 square mile block.   Our infrastructure consists of power lines, phone lines, a road just wide enough for two cars to pass and that's it.   Our water comes from wells and sewage goes to sceptic system.   Now, take that same area of land in New York City, where you could have 10's of thousands living and working, and you need wider roads, sidewalks, water and sewage systems, higher power requirements, etc.     Without that more advanced infrastructure and NYC would be abandoned in less than a year.   

   A regions population could be increased with increased infrastructure levels.   It also gives you something else to research.   

5.   Fresh water/polluted water.   An ocean planet is worthless is the water is not drinkable.   People and industry require freshwater and leave polluted water behind.   Again, forces some infrastructure to make water fresh and clean polluted water.

6.   Pollution.   Use pollution to force infrastructure investment and research into cleaner tech.   If you don't you could make a region or entire planet uninhabitable.

7.   While designing, building ships and assigning them to Task Groups in the beginning is fun, as your empire grows, trying to run around building ships and then organizing them can get old.   Allow a player to design Task Groups based on existing designs.   You can then assign one or more shipyards to build said TG.   

[Nightstar]

The obvious comment right now is that you can split each ship into its own TG manually. This means the salvo rules are just an interface pain. Even if that came with PD penalties, I expect most ships will be unloading their ordnance long before they start getting hit.

There will be a binary difference in TG size: Big enough to nuke all large incoming salvos, and not big enough to nuke all incoming salvos.

Absolutely everything that's intended to go into combat will need enough PD to swat a few nukes. Interesting, as this means all combat ships will have dangerous weapons up close.

It looks like one of the better tactics will be detonating a debris field in front of the TG and dedicating everything to combat maneuvering. Such a particle shield would stop most missiles farther away than they can hit anything, leaving the rest of the mass of the TG to PD and guns.

The only effective defense against the non instakill missiles is a lot of armor/shields. Boring.

GRASERs will have to have really crappy damage compared to lasers, given that they have more range AND penetration.

Single kinetic slugs vs. scattershot: Scattershot will only be useful if you can't have enough guns to reliably hit the target, due to lesser damage. This means kinetic slugs will be instakills most of the time?

Random thoughts ^^

[sublight]

@OJsDad: I'll put this down as 'Request to make Trade Goods Meaningful'
I'm afraid we won't be doing much planet-side until Pulsar is functioning in space so it might be a few years before we get around to filling in regional detail.

@Nightstar: That... is a good point. About Salvos and task groups. I was trying to reduce micromanaging, not create it. There are probably much better ways to adjust the missile beam balance. So..

Hmm.

Ok, as a revision maybe we'll trash those salvo rules, and while we're at it we'll trash all salvo rules and preconceptions. A 'salvo' is now only a human-level distinction to un-clutter the system map display.

There will be no weapon turrets. Or rather, all direct weapons include the turret to achieve their low jitter.

Rather than try to impose balance, lets go for constancy and use the same fire control rules for both missiles and direct weapons.

Fire_Control_Range = size * squareRoot( activeTech * passiveTech * resolution / #_missiles) * 10,000 km.

If Resolution is >=1, then the control system is a Missile Fire Control. #_missiles is the maximum number of out-going guided missiles that the fire control can direct. If a missile fire control changes targets, all controlled missiles will attempt to use their remaining fuel to change direction toward the new target.

If Resolution is < 1, then the control system is a Beam Fire Control. #_missiles is the maximum number of incoming missiles that the fire control can track and attempt to engage when used in point defense mode. If a beam fire control resolution is greater than the weapon jitter, then the weapon system will use the beam fire control resolution in place of their own jitter value.


Does this sound any better?



I think the tactical variation will be more interesting than you fear. There should be many viable tactics, and the most effective counter to one may not be effective against a second.

While bomb-pumped-laser missiles may be unstoppable by final-defense fire (1k km), the defender is free to use anti-missiles, or extend the final-defense range at the cost of accuracy. Of course, a pumped-laser might detonate at an even greater distance to strike with even less accuracy and damage, and so on. At some point in the arms race the attack will switch back to armored high-speed proximity nukes, or the defender will either switch to anti-missiles: else choose to ignore the puny beams of sunshine.

Swatting an unarmored missile with 100% reliability will require ~ 2.5 MJ/ton, same as a generic internal component. By comparison, the starting Duranium ship armor will ignore anything that does less than 50 MJ/sq-meter. As a result, a ship that relies on batteries of small weapons for point defense might not be particularly dangerous to another ship.

At a given tech level GRASERs will have less damage and less range than a generic laser. It's the maximum capped GRASER range that will be higher, making those a high-tech weapon that performs below-average in the early game and above-average in the late game.

Kinetic slug damage is highly dependent on ship speeds. At the Nuclear Thermal and Nuclear Pulse propulsion levels a single kinetic slug is unlikely to do more than maim, but once either the defender or attacker reach the Magneto-Plasma tech stage single-shot kill firing solutions will become a simple matter of careful advanced planning.

Scatter shot is useful because I intend to rig the hit-chance calculations to make Golden-BB shots impossible. If I didn't, I would have to make rail-guns use maintenance supplies or have ammunition lockers to prevent unlimited railgun ammunition from breaking the game. So yes, not only can you not have enough guns to reliably hit the target, you can also have situations were a solid slug could never hit the target while a scatter shot fragment might.

[Erik L]

My first thought on the scatter shot is point defense. Fill space around the ship with lots of bits of metal to prematurely detonate missiles.

[chrislocke2000]

This is all looking really good and can't wait to see some of the results.

Regarding some of the recent posts on engines and slowing the ship speeds down to make them less game breaking is a great idea however this introduces some major issues in its own right:

Firstly the extended build times now make the loss of any ship substantially more severe and also challenges against what we can achieve today - going from 1.5 years to build a frigate to six years just feels wrong to me. It also means that any engagements with NPRs are likely to be win / loose overall as once one side has lost a slug of ships its going to be almost impossible for them to come back from that loss before the opposition invades et.

Secondly the required mission duration of ships is going to be hugely extended, I may now need to plan on keeping ships out from the docks for 6 years at a time rather than 18 months just to address the extended travel times - that’s a lot more maintenance and crew quarters to say the least!

What I would really like to see is the build speed remain as is, the relative engagement speeds to be low enough so as not to be instantly deadly / game breaking against planets and finally for travel times between planets and systems to be in line with current Aurora. No easy task at all!

My view on how to address this is through the wider use of jump drives combined with the suggested further restrictions in fuel efficiency, max delta V and acceleration rates of ships. In this case each body would have a gravity well in which jump engines would not work, ships would use conventional engines to move in and out of the gravity well and then use a jump drive to jump relatively close to the destination body (this could be instant or involve transit time in its own right) and then return to the use of conventional engines to slow down. Higher rated engines would be capable of jumps between systems as with Steve’s current Newtonian Aurora and you could perhaps distinguish between civ and military grade engines through recharge rates / proximity tolerances to jump and damage tolerances.

This would keep ships relatively slow whilst still allowing for a reasonable pace on the exploration and exploitation of space. It could also make ship combat an interesting game of chess as you commit ships to jumping into weapons range (balance with time to charge jump engines and time to actually align and jump) etc.

On reactionless drives I must admit I’m not a big fan of the idea. I think however an anti-grav drive could be interesting. Ie something that “reacts” with the gravity of planets and other bodies such that it is very effective close into large gravity wells but rapidly becomes totally ineffective outside of them. It might therefore work well in system but be useless for wider exploration / interception.

[Nightstar]

New fire controls sound cool. Very cool.

Anti missile doctrine looks like nuke any big salvo, intercept the first salvo as far away as is near 100% kill in case it's nukes, adjust to range of standoff missiles. I'll grant that that there's some design choice in how good you make your firecontrols. 100% hit rate at 1000m may not be so good when you need to hit missiles detonating 5000m away.

Range advantage is going to be more interesting with newtonian mechanics. Kiting will be more difficult. There will be choice in engagement speeds. Railguns want to close very fast, long range lasers as slow as possible.

Railguns may not be able to one shot ships... Missiles should be easier. Very obvious use for scattershot I missed.

[3_14159]

Another time for a round of ideas I had, this time for weapons.

Basically, the idea is to let nearly every aspect of weapon systems be changeable. What this means in particular? Well, let's look at some weapons:

Missile Launchers
Parameters:

• Calibre (No research)
• Speed imparted on launch (Research: Railgun Maximum MJ Per Ton)
• Internal Magazine Capacity
• Fire rate from internal magazine (The higher this is, the more space a missile takes up when in the internal mag, reducable by research)
• Transfer rate from magazine to internal magazine (the actual rate being the worse of magazine transfer rate and this; improvable by research)
• Fire in order or the missile can be chosen. (Chosable missiles results in more space required for the internal launchers)

So, what design possibilities does that leave us?
No-Bells FAC launcher
Calibre whatever it is, without much speed imparted to save weight, six missiles, fire rate of two seconds per missile, no transfer rate and not choosable missiles.
The launcher can shoot the missiles in twelve seconds in order. No bells and whistles, just close to the target, fire the missiles and burn as hard as possible to get out of enemy range.
Revolver FAC launcher
Calibre whatever it is, without much speed imparted to save weight, six missiles, fire rate of two seconds per missile, no transfer rate and choosable missiles.
The launcher can shoot the missiles in twelve seconds, and can choose the missile to actually shoot on-the-fly. That allows it to, for example, take four ASMs, one anti-FAC missile and one EW missile.
Capital Ship Launcher
Calibre whatever it is, much speed imparted, no missiles in internal magazine, fire rate of p.ex. ten seconds per missile, transfer rate of ten seconds per missile and separately fired missiles.
This launcher is more single-purpose: Deliver the most punch you can as fast as you can, and be able to launch all available ordinance as fast as you can. It requires special magazines to keep up the firing rate (which will require more tonnage per missile), but that can well be worth it.

Energy Weapons
This only looks at energy weapons from their similarities, of course, Railguns and Lasers and... will have additional design aspects.

• Fire rate (Can be increased by tech, or mass invested)
• Internal Capacitor storage (Can be increased by tech and mass invested)
• Capacitor reload rate (Can be increased by tech and mass invested)

So, the tonnage is didived in the weapon itself, the capacitors, the connections from capacitor to weapon and the connections from reactor to capacitor. One question remaining is whether the fire rate can be set under one second (Either all shots at once, or p.ex. 0.5 = two shots per second). The rest assumes the second case.
Let's chose lasers as an example.
PD Laser
Fire rate as small as possible, 0.2 seconds (five shots per second); internal capacitor storage for ten shots, capacitor reload rate small, maybe completely full after ten seconds. Very, very small calibre.
The final fire laser cluster. Equipped to deal with big salvoes it can lose ten shots in two seconds, allowing it to destroy up to ten missiles nearly at once. After being drained it can fire either one shot per second, or wait ten seconds to be full again and any variation.
FAC Laser
Fire rate one second; internal capacitor storage for ten shots; Capacitor reload rate very small, maybe a minute per shot.
This laser is designed as main armament for a FAC class ship. It is able to fire a high-calibre weapon ten times, within ten seconds, hopefully shattering the oponent. After the attack, the FAC has to break off and reload for ten minutes from undersized power plants. The tactics probably would be to attack from the front, accelerate as hard as possible, shoot ten times during the fly-by and then deccelerate again and accelerate in the other direction to attack again.
Capital Ship Laser
Fire rate is two seconds; internal capacitor storage for one shot; capacitor reload rate two seconds.
Feeding directly from the power plant, this massive laser is thought for capital ships that can be sure that the opponent can survive several shots. Sustained fire is possible, and the power plant needs to be equipped for this.

Anyway, that's my thoughts on that. Basically, Newtonian Aurora and Pulsar especially are for me "Give the player as much possibility to change parameters as possible." Thanks for reading.

Edit: And forgot: I may crunch some numbers for better examples, some time next week or so.

[doomsought]

If you want to keep Newtonian mechanics on mind, inertial compensators will be an important gateway tech for late game combat.  Without them not only would high accelerations be unattainable without a crew, but any possible shield generators will be knocked off their moorings by high momentum impacts.

By the natures of their intended effect, spreading the impulse of forces through the entire volume of an object, they should be in the gravity tech/science tree.   I hope you guys like the idea.  For extra fun, not only should it be possible for shield generators to be knocked off their moorings and likely do internal damage, but ships with powerful inertial compensators and shields should be able to bounce off each-other and projectiles.

That also brings to mind that one possible defense system would be an inertial compensator that simple spreads the force of armor impacts over the ship.  It won't do much about thermal effects but would take the edge off some attacks.

[alex_brunius]

I really love the Conventional Start in Aurora, so I'll confess right here, my dream game is something akin a newtonian Aurora, but starting at today's tech with a detailed research and resource path up towards TN tech.

I'm talking Rocketry (fossil) -> Nuclear (fission) -> Fusion -> TN.


While you may say that it's useless to try to model spacetravel using rockets I disagree. Is it ineffective? Yes.

But consider that it was possible to put a man on the moon, using almost 50 year old technology. And consider that today the US Military budget is around 50 times larger then that of NASA. Or for an International approach by taking 1% of the global GDP and devoting it to space exploration we would end up with around 50 times NASAs budget again.

If not for (cold) war, greed and general lack of interest I am convinced we technically could have been a good way into colonizing the inner Sol system by now using mostly rockets.

Another early propulsion system that I think would prove very useful and effective (once hauled into orbit) is the Orion nuclear pulse drive. This propulsion is well within our technological means and vastly more effective then rockets, but it's usage is banned due to nuclear space treaties, so it has not seen much further study.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion



The thing I am after is a more natural expansion into Sol before venturing further, just colonies on 1-2 planets/moons with resources and auto-mines on a few comets, or even the option to skip it entirely does not feel natural to me. Sol system should be to the brim full of colonies and lively traffic before you can consider (or even have resources needed for) venturing further, if for no other reason for that of the difference in distances involved.

[Rod-Serling]

HEAT.

Mass Effect lore is pretty great.  One of the things they brought up that I had never really considered before is heat during ship combat.

Basically, Beam Weapons of the kinds of power we're talking about would generate significant amounts of heat.  Additionally, shields could also generate heat during use.  Engines and Powerplants could be additional (albiet, much lower) sources of heat.

Here's a telling quote from Mass Effect's Codex

Space Combat: Combat Endurance Edit

Heat limits the length and intensity of ship-to-ship combat.  Starships generate enormous heat when they fire high-energy weapons, perform maneuvering burns, and run on-board combat electronics.

In combat, warships produce heat more quickly than they can disperse it.  As heat builds within a vessel, the crewed spaces become increasingly uncomfortable.  Before the heat reaches lethal levels, a ship must win or retreat by entering FTL.  After an FTL run, the ships halts, shuts down non-essential systems, and activates the heat radiation gear.

Combat endurance varies by ship design and by the battle's location.  Battles in the deep cold of interstellar space can go on for some time.  Engagements close to a star are brief.  Since habitable worlds are usually close to a star, battles over them are usually more frantic. 

This could be used to balance shields.  If heat can't be dumped while shields are up, and taking shield damage generates heat as shields get used, then ships with large, quickly recharging shields with tanker support can no longer tank indefinitely.  As heat builds up, components could fail, crew could die, etc.

[iceball3]

HEAT.

Mass Effect lore is pretty great.  One of the things they brought up that I had never really considered before is heat during ship combat.

Basically, Beam Weapons of the kinds of power we're talking about would generate significant amounts of heat.  Additionally, shields could also generate heat during use.  Engines and Powerplants could be additional (albiet, much lower) sources of heat.

Here's a telling quote from Mass Effect's Codex

This could be used to balance shields.  If heat can't be dumped while shields are up, and taking shield damage generates heat as shields get used, then ships with large, quickly recharging shields with tanker support can no longer tank indefinitely.  As heat builds up, components could fail, crew could die, etc.

Wouldn't being close to a planetary body you control (or perhaps one you don't...) provide a decent location for dumping heat? I can also imagine certain vessels having compartment for heatsink material, anything from crappy-yet-cold rock and dust you picked up on a nearby asteroid to some deeply cooled heatsinking liquid that may potentially take slight resources to make. All of which would/could be dumped into space once it has expired it's purpose. An overheated vessel may likewise begin to emit thermal signatures, as well as utilize it's armor as a heatsink. As it is though, crew spaces should be the last system to fail due to overheating, due to atmospherics requirement to keep the living spaces safely temperatured or die trying.
PDCs should not get penalties for overheating except for on planets which are both blisteringly hot and tectonically active, such that it does not have a particular amount of existing unused infrastructure.

[misora]

Maybe, there could be different types of beam weapons, and if you add the heat creation maybe they could also generate different amounts of heat.

What I am thinking of is instead of just a particle beam like Aurora has maybe there could be different subsets that could be researched that do slightly different things, IE a plasma beam vs a particle beam.