Jump tender refuses to obey

[VariousArtist (OP)]

Hello!

My designed Jump Tender refuses to carry my ship. Afaik the jumper should be able to jump with ships up to 6ktons but it refuses the survey ship with 5.7ktons.
The event window says somthing about that a ship is maybe above the weight of the jumpship. (sry, cant look up the correct spelling from here)
Whats wrong?

thx

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Naval Jump Tender class Jump Tender 4950 tons     452 Crew     692.8 BP      TCS 99  TH 120  EM 0

1616 km/s    JR 3-50     Armour 1-25     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control 2     PPV 0

Annual Failure Rate: 18%    IFR: 0.3%    Maintenance Capacity 1175 MSP

J6000(3-50) Military Jump Drive     Max Ship Size 6000 tons    Distance 50k km     Squadron Size 3

ENJ1 - Nuclear Pulse Engine E8 (4)    Power 40    Fuel Use 80%    Armour 0    Exp 5%    Hyper Capable

Fuel Capacity 200,000 Litres    Range 90.9 billion km   (651 days at full power)

This design is classed as a military vessel for maintenance purposes


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FarReach class Gravitational Survey Vessel 5700 tons     547 Crew     795.2 BP      TCS 114  TH 240  EM 0

2807 km/s     Armour 1-28     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/3/0     Damage Control 2     PPV 0

Annual Failure Rate: 174%    IFR: 2.4%    Maintenance Capacity 174 MSP



ENJ1 - Nuclear Pulse Engine E8 (8)    Power 40    Fuel Use 80%    Armour 0    Exp 5%    Hyper Capable

Fuel Capacity 200,000 Litres    Range 78.9 billion km   (325 days at full power)



LR Active Search Sensor S48-R3 (1)     GPS 144     Range 1m km     Resolution 3

Gravitational Survey Sensors (3)   3 Survey Points



This design is classed as a military vessel for maintenance purposes





[Charlie Beeler]

This is one of those very common questions that a little searching would answer.  

Short answer, the mass of the ship mounting the jump engine determines the maximum mass of all hulls it can escort through a jump point not the rating of the jump engine.

[Father Tim]

Hello!

My designed Jump Tender refuses to carry my ship. Afaik the jumper should be able to jump with ships up to 6ktons but it refuses the survey ship with 5.7ktons.

Naval Jump Tender class Jump Tender    *4950 tons*     452 Crew     692.8 BP      TCS 99  TH 120  EM 0

The size of 'hole' made by a jump engine is limited to the smaller of the mounting ship's size, or the jump engine's rated size - so your Jump Tender will not be able to move any ship larger than 4950 tons.  I suggest adding fuel tanks, and maybe maintenance storage, to get the size up to 6000 tons.

N.B.:  If your Jump Tender ends up 6050 tons, it won't be able to move itself, so be prepared for a bit of fiddling to get it exactly 120 hull spaces.

[VariousArtist (OP)]

Thanks Tim! I havent had the time to do a trial and error about this and the ships stats stated that it can jump up to 6k (Jump Drive - Max Ship Size 6000 tons) which is really confusing for me! So back to redesign!

I guess in case of low jump tech its more useful to mount the mil. ships with their own Jumpdrives instead of using Jump tenders?

@Charlie: I can assure you that I wouldnt have posted this when I had found a solution on the forum. Granted, that I might have missed it. Thanks for the welcome anyway!

[Hawkeye]

I guess in case of low jump tech its more useful to mount the mil. ships with their own Jumpdrives instead of using Jump tenders?
 

Well, you can do this. Of course, at low jump tech, the jumpengine will also take up a large part of the ship, leaving that much less for arms and armor. Personally, I work go along this line:
Jump Engine Efficiency 3 --> build a couple of 3000t jumpships, to move survey squadrons around.
Jump Engine Efficiency 4 --> If very urgent, build Jumpdestroyer of 6.000 to 7.000t to move destroyer squadrons around
Jump Engine Efficiency 5 + Max Jump Squadron Size 4 --> start building 12.000 to 15.000t Jumpcruiser and start warfaring in earnest

[sloanjh]

I guess in case of low jump tech its more useful to mount the mil. ships with their own Jumpdrives instead of using Jump tenders?
 

Well, you can do this. Of course, at low jump tech, the jumpengine will also take up a large part of the ship, leaving that much less for arms and armor. Personally

Seconded.  Especially at low tech (because the efficiencies are so much worse), Aurora pushes you in the direction of specialized ship designs.  The reason is that, in the abstract, the cost of a ship can be broken into "payload" (useful stuff like sensors, missile weapons, jump engine, etc. that accomplish a job) and "support systems" (non-task-accomplishing stuff like armor, engines, bridge, etc.).  At a particular tech level and level of capability (armor level/speed), the ratio of support systems to payload will tend to be about the same, independent of the payload.  In Apollo terms, the payload can be thought of as the mission modules at the top, while the "support systems" can be thought of as the Saturn V - as you can see, in this case there's a huge overhead of support costs for every ton of payload.

The problem with a general purpose ship is that you can usually use only one type of payload at a time.  Jump engines only work at jump points.  GeoSurvey modules only work at bodies.  GravSurvey modules only work at grav survey points.  So if you cram all three of these into the same ship, you'll be paying the same support burden as if they were in three separate ships, but the payload will only be 1/3 as effective because only one part of it can function at a time.

So if you put jump engines into a military ship, then the "jump engine" payload isn't doing anything while the ship is fighting a battle, and your overall fleet is less powerful than if you'd split the functions.

John

[mrwigggles]

Shouldn't there be something to be said about logistical issue that arise with having jump tender ships and jump enable ships though?

I have a 2k jump survey ship with grav and geo sensors, with a future version that going to mount a hangar to carry two fighters with an active sensor. I think this design has become more feasible because jump ships no longer have a minimum size.

I also think its cheaper for the grav geo ship to be built then a grav and a geo ship, and less logistical headache.

[sloanjh]

I also think its cheaper for the grav geo ship to be built then a grav and a geo ship, and less logistical headache.

It might be a little bit cheaper, but is it twice as cheap?  The issue is that cost doesn't mean anything in isolation; it's cost per unit work that is the measure of efficiency.  Let's say that, at whatever speed your ship uses, it takes it on average a month to do the grav survey of a system and a month to do the geo survey.  Let's say you get a cost savings of 10% by building one big ship with both sensors, rather than two ships (of the same speed) with one sensor each.  The 2-ship fleet can survey the same system in 1 month.  So the cost to survey 100 systems using pairs of specialized ships is only ~55% the cost to survey the same 100 systems using single, dual-purpose ships in the same amount of time - you only need 1/2 as many specialized ships, each pair costing 10% more than a dual-purpose ship.

On the other hand, you're right about it being easier to manage a single ship.

On the gripping hand, one person's logistical headache is another's tactical flexibility.

John

[sloanjh]

Shouldn't there be something to be said about logistical issue that arise with having jump tender ships and jump enable ships though?

I have a 2k jump survey ship with grav and geo sensors, with a future version that going to mount a hangar to carry two fighters with an active sensor. I think this design has become more feasible because jump ships no longer have a minimum size.

BTW, I've completely changed my survey doctrine since I started playing conventional starts.  I used to build dual-purpose jump-capable grav survey ships (6000 tons), and smaller non-jump geo-survey.  That way I could trickle the jump ships to a system and have them start surveying as soon as they arrived.  If they got into trouble, having multiple jump ships in the system meant that it was likely that one would escape to carry the news back.  A year or so ago, I couldn't afford big jump-capable geo-survey ships, so I started making smaller ships with ~3500 ton jump ships.  The jump ships would act as a mobile jump gates to systems I was interested in, and would act as a communications relay hanging back at the jump point in case the survey ships uncovered anything nasty.  More recently, I've dropped down to 2-engine/1-sensor survey ships that are less than 1000 tons (I did this by sacrificing the passive sensors I used to have my survey ships).  Looking back, it looks like I'm being driven towards smaller and smaller ships.  Actually, I think it's that I'm being driven more single purpose ships, which can then be made smaller.

One disadvantage of this that you point out is that it's a lot harder to keep the right mix of ships in the right places at the right times.  But that seems to be overcome by the efficiency benefits.

John

[mrwigggles]

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Enterprise Mk2 class Deep Space Survey Ship    2600 tons     227 Crew     517 BP      TCS 52  TH 80  EM 0
1538 km/s    JR 1-50     Armour 1-16     Shields 0-0     Sensors 8/1/2/2     Damage Control Rating 3     PPV 0
Annual Failure Rate: 18%    IFR: 0.3%    Maint Capacity 1373 MSP    Max Repair 150 MSP    Est Time: 9.58 Years

J2600(1-50) Military Jump Drive     Max Ship Size 2600 tons    Distance 50k km     Squadron Size 1
Nuclear Pulse Engine E8 (2)    Power 40    Fuel Use 80%    Signature 40    Armour 0    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 200,000 Litres    Range 173.0 billion km   (1302 days at full power)

Thermal Sensor TH1-8 (1)     Sensitivity 8     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  8m km
Improved Gravitational Sensors (1)   2 Survey Points Per Hour
Improved Geological Sensors (1)   2 Survey Points Per Hour

This design is classed as a military vessel for maintenance purposes
This ship is only 2600 tons. Decent speed, failure rate, fuel and its not to up their on the tech scale really.

Next generation will incorporate the magneto plasma drive and the added fuel efficiency and the next step on sensors. I am toying with giving it a hangar bay and two fighter escort and active sensors.

I don't know how long it takes for one of these to go through a system. I had a large number of them, surveying the home system, then they were equally divinded in the found JP and are now just starting to explore total systems on their own.

You could probably get through the system faster, and when I loose one of these ships, it about loosing 1.5 ships or so.

Do you still have your plans for your six ton survey ship? I think if I add the fighter bay, mine will probably be heavier then that one.

[Paul]

I had plans to make a 10,000 or so ton combat capable scout ship equipped with jump drive, strong PD (missile and beam), very powerful sensors, and a hangar bay.

It would be a multi-purpose ship - in my battle fleets it would haul beam fighters equipped with mesons and use the onboard sensors, using the jump drive to escort a small fleet of destroyers and its PD systems to help in combat. I've used it in this role, and it works well.

The second role was going to be solitary scoutship carrying two fighters, one equipped with a grav sensor and the other with a geo sensor. It would enter a system and release the fighters to scout the system while it keeps an eye on things from the jump point. The fighters had nothing but an engine and a sensor, so if they got into trouble they could return to the mothership and jump out quickly - and even losing them wouldn't cost that much. This role quickly fell apart once I realized just how much fuel those fighters use when flying long distances - even with 170,000 liters of fuel and pretty good fuel efficiency tech they only had 15 days of travel time. It could still work if I flew the mothership around and launched them just to survey, but that would be way too much micro-management. Oh well

Too bad there isn't some kind of efficient small engine to be used on small unarmed scout ships that could be docked in hangar bays.

[mrwigggles]

I had plans to make a 10,000 or so ton combat capable scout ship equipped with jump drive, strong PD (missile and beam), very powerful sensors, and a hangar bay.

It would be a multi-purpose ship - in my battle fleets it would haul beam fighters equipped with mesons and use the onboard sensors, using the jump drive to escort a small fleet of destroyers and its PD systems to help in combat. I've used it in this role, and it works well.

The second role was going to be solitary scoutship carrying two fighters, one equipped with a grav sensor and the other with a geo sensor. It would enter a system and release the fighters to scout the system while it keeps an eye on things from the jump point. The fighters had nothing but an engine and a sensor, so if they got into trouble they could return to the mothership and jump out quickly - and even losing them wouldn't cost that much. This role quickly fell apart once I realized just how much fuel those fighters use when flying long distances - even with 170,000 liters of fuel and pretty good fuel efficiency tech they only had 15 days of travel time. It could still work if I flew the mothership around and launched them just to survey, but that would be way too much micro-management. Oh well

Too bad there isn't some kind of efficient small engine to be used on small unarmed scout ships that could be docked in hangar bays.

Hrm, I dont have any plans to arming the survey ship itself directly. The fighters are going to be throw aways really, and I'll probably use the same model for planet defense.

I am thinking of equipping them with meson weapons for lolz.

[sloanjh]

This role quickly fell apart once I realized just how much fuel those fighters use when flying long distances - even with 170,000 liters of fuel and pretty good fuel efficiency tech they only had 15 days of travel time. It could still work if I flew the mothership around and launched them just to survey, but that would be way too much micro-management. Oh well

Too bad there isn't some kind of efficient small engine to be used on small unarmed scout ships that could be docked in hangar bays.

Have you considered using Gunboat engines?  They are in between military engines and fighter engines on the power vs. fuel consumption curve.  I think a lot of people do this.

You can also use regular military engines in a small (1kton or less) ship.  That's very fuel efficient, plus it has the added benefit of not requiring a tender to truck it around (since its engines are just as efficient as the tender's), unless you want to put civie engines on the tender.  In other words, the main reason to have a tender with a hanger bay is if the tender's engines are more fuel efficient than the parasite's (which motivates turning the parasite's engines off while the tender hauls it around).  If they have the same efficiency, then it makes more sense to have the parasite fly next to the jump ship, rather than parking it inside the jump ship and forcing the jump ship to build bigger jump and normal engines.

John

[mrwigggles]

Buts its cool.

[sloanjh]

Do you still have your plans for your six ton survey ship? I think if I add the fighter bay, mine will probably be heavier then that one.

No, but I remember the essentials:

120 HS.

12 (I think) MHD engines gave it a speed of 6000
size-30, efficiency 4 jump engine
2 grav sensors.
Both Thermal and EM sensors - I think I used size 5 for both, but might have used size 3 for one or both.
~8 fuel - it doubled as a tanker, which is common for jump ships which need mass padding.

That's most of the components.  One of the things that pushed me off my standard designs was that Aurora slowly evolved to require more and more sensors.  It wasn't as bad for the 6kton ship, but the 3kton geo survey ships kept creeping up in size.

Of course that's nothing like real life

John