My apologies for the lack of updates but the pre-Christmas rush was a little worse than I expected. Unfortunately I do not bring good news, as I decided to abandon the campaign. While I think I could technically finish it the sheer amount of time and effort needed for that could be much better spend elsewhere. I will likely be posting one last update, as I have some new material, but that will be it. I'm also attaching the Commune map to this post for those interested. The Republican map is largely irrelevant (as they haven't expanded) and the Hegemony map is mostly up to date, not counting some systems in the Commune space they have found recently. If you have any questions about the campaign, what was going behind the scenes or something like that, ask away. Please note in such situations I won't be using spoiler tags any more.
It's an unfortunate property of the VB6 version of aurora. Steve has indicated that there are massive performance gains for C#, so maybe you could roughly recreate the scenario when that comes out using SM and continue on from there, detailing any significant changes? Otherwise, starting a new campaign in C# would be the way to go.
Unfortunately I won't be trying to recreate the campaign in the new Aurora. I'm sure some reasons are obvious (technology will be changing significantly and I can't custom-build systems so there would be significant differences) but the biggest issue is that it's too much work.
Truth be told I tried to create a large scale campaign many times before but the amount of work required to set it up was simply too great. The closest I ever got was a two hundred system map that was about half done and the front was only five jumps from Sol on it's shallowest point, so it wasn't really that large scale. It took me a couple of weeks to get that far and the initial setup information (and notes to myself) were eighty pages long, or about one fifth as long as the entire From the Ashes write-up. Even so and despite sinking so much time and effort I just couldn't force myself to continue, as setting up the game is in many ways the most boring and frustrating part of the game.
Having said that I will almost certainly start a new campaign when the new Aurora comes, although it's very likely any write ups won't come out immediately. I'm very much looking forward to the changes to colonisation, such as much cheaper space habitats, low-grav infrastructure and population caps. Even more importantly, From the Ashes and other campaigns have given me a lot of experience with long (100 years+) games and I'm eager to put that into practice.
At the same time it will be some time before the new version comes out and I won't post anything until I'm sure the campaign is interesting and properly set up, which is usually something not readily apparent and becomes evident only after certain amount of play, at least for me.
Reading the Hegemony write up, I really enjoyed the Big Battleship battles. Something occurred to me about the Unicorn missile ships.
If you are firing missiles exclusively at point blank range, you can use very small missile fire controls. Antimissile defenses based on long ranged missile fire presume also that the missile fire controls are larger and more expensive.
But if you can hit your target with a .1 HS missile fire control, you could have a fire control for each launcher. Conceivably, you could overwhelm the defensive fire controls at a slightly longer range.
Of course, a missile heavier strategy runs into even greater logistical limitations for the Kingdom.
While it is possible to set initial conditions, especially in terms of existing shipyard sizes, to favor big battleship vs big battleship fights, in the longer term I do not think that it is stable.
As for the fire control things it wouldn't have happened for two reasons. First setting up two hundred fire controls would be too much of a pain. Second I'm trying to role-play my campaigns rather than play them, not only to make it more fit for my tastes, but also because, frankly, Aurora sucks as a game and can be easily exploited. As such using single-missile salvoes wouldn't happen because it's too gamey for my taste
As for sustainability of large ships in purely technical terms you are correct, but I would try very hard to make it work - by setting up new house rules or RP reasons for them to exist. The purpose of this was less due to interesting battles (it was a nice bonus) but more because I wanted for every single ship to matter. Much as I love From the Ashes, the battles are usually so large I can't even afford to post the names of dead ships as it would take too much time. This is especially annoying when I've spent hours upon hours trying to come up for a thousand ship names. But in the Hegemony campaign I would be able to describe what happened to each and every ship while having large scale, interstellar campaign. It also meant building a single capital ship was an important event as it required me to stockpile tens of thousands of TN elements - which takes time and effort to mine. This made every single ship a very precious resource, which was the whole point of the campaign in the first place.
Of course it's possible I would fail to properly justify existence of such large ships, but we'll never know, unless I try to resurrect the campaign, which I currently have no intention of doing.