Combat Questions

[sloanjh]

This issue in my opinion is less weapons specialization than survey/jump/combat specialization; sensors fall in between.  The problem is that a ship can be in only one place at a time; if it's doing a grav survey it can't be doing a geosurvey or acting as a jump bridge or participating in a defensive (or offensive) fleet.  So if you try to build an all-around ship that can fulfill all 4 of these roles, then 75% of the systems (and the associated engines and armor) are sitting idle at any time, which in turns results in a need for 4x of these all-purpose ships as would be needed for single-role ships.

For combat systems this isn't so bad, since there's not a huge difference between a ship with both offensive and anti-missiles (and/or even beams) and a TG of individual missile and beam ships.  In other words, you don't run into the "I need to be in different locations to fulfill my various roles" issue, since individual ships would still group together into a mixed TF.  There are still drawbacks: you can't detach escorts to form a screen (for greater anti-missile depth) and (more importantly) big ships require bigger SY, longer build times (although the build rate is higher) and (most important) bigger jump drives.

For sensors, the issue isn't needing to be in more than one place at a time to fulfill the various roles, but rather that every ship in a TF doesn't need to have a big honking active (or passive) search sensor; adding such sensors to each combatant in a TG takes away mass from the TG that could be used for weapons systems.  This is where the economic push for dedicated (and unarmed/lightly armored) scouts comes from.

John

[Erik L]

Many many many years ago, I was playing the original Master of Orion with my roomate. He built his ships on the Star Trek philosophy (every ship can perform every role). I built my fleets around a naval doctrine (dedicated escorts, etc). He was unpleasantly surprised the first few times we engaged in battle. His ships were all around larger, but my smaller dedicated ships out-performed his. Of course, mine also died a bit easier, but he had a harder time getting them into a kill range.

*wanders off to go find some MOO disks*

[James Patten]

Something to note with the "Star Trek" method: in Star Trek, they don't need to do gravitational surveys in order to find jump points to get out of the system - they just go to warp.

Secondly, I'm guessing the "Enterprise" type ships are primarily for first contact situations, and only surveys the M-class planets.  Behind the Enterprise there's probably a host of dedicated smaller survey ships which visit the other planets.  Yes, occasionally the Enterprise is also surveying gravitic anomalies.  However when Borg or Dominion enemies invade, the generalist ships end up as wrecks.  That's why DS 9 had the experimental weapon ship (can't think of the name right now).

So in Aurora terms - the Enterprise cruiser would probably jump in alone, look at the large planets, establish first contact, and leave; later a survey fleet comes to refine the surveys.  Or it might jump in with other, smaller ships and these smaller ships do the gravitic surveys.

[Lunaticus (OP)]

Many thanks for all the advice and the very interesting comments on ship construction.  I am still quite new at ship design but am beginning to see there are really deep strategic choices to be made which sounds great. 
 
I tried the combat advice out and together with instantiating some technologies for testing purposes I managed now to set up missile defenses successfully as a test.
 In fact what I did wrong (in addition to just taking on a much too advanced opponent) was to
-> not properly set up the combat screen
-> not build at least one maximum range/size active sensor with resolution 1 to detect missiles as soon as possible
-> not do enough task force training
-> not setting up fleet initiative

The only thing still vexing me is the "auto-fire" option.  The ships (ship classes) where I now manually assing targets do nicely but the ships I set to auto-fire seem not to be doing much.  As I would prefer not to set an enemy missile salvo as target manually but have this done via auto-fire: Is there something to consider for auto-fire to be set up in a good way?

And then I will go back in time, restore my database and try to see if I can take on the enemy without resorting to SM mode. . .

[UnLimiTeD]

Auto-Fire is meant to target enemy ships, like a swarm of FACs.
Theres a tick box and a radio button, I think they do slightly different things.

For Missile Defense, set your Missile FCs to a 2v1 or 3v1 (Depending on your tech/hit rate) Area Defense, and your Beam FCs to Point defense at a range that sounds good to you.
Likely a pretty short range though, you wont get a second shot anyways.

[Steve Walmsley]

Also keep in mind that  your resolution 1 can detect an object of size 1 at 1.9 million kilometer.

But a size 5 missile is not a size 1 object (= 50 tonnes).

When you create your sensor you can see the range of detection for a missile size 6, size 8, and size 12 just below the range of detection for an object size 1.

Missile detection size is equal to 0.05 HS per point of missile size. So a size 10 missile is size 0.5 HS in ship terms, which would be detected at 25% of the max range of a sensor. However for active sensor purposes, nothing is smaller than 0.3 HS (detected at 9% of max sensor range) so missiles smaller than size 6 are treated as size 6 for active sensor detection. There are some lengthy posts on this in Mechanics but it was a while ago.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

So is it impossible to play with the  "Enterprise" method of shipbuilding?

No, its quite possible but your multi-role ships are going to have be large in order to fulfil multiple roles effectively. Look at modern warships. They tend to have primary roles, such as air defence or ASW, and only larger ships are effective in several different roles

Steve