Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: February 08, 2019, 02:50:59 PM »Allot of good insights in this thread...
Since I do allot of conventional starts I build allot of early ship designs. The "problems" that I face is that ships of this size is nearly impossible to sustain at this technology level. You rarely have the economical or scientific strength to support them. Just research and build a jump ship to support such a large ship will be very expensive.
When it comes to a ships range, maintenance and such this have to be completely based on what role the ship serve. How far from the home base is it suppose to operate and how long to you expect their missions to take. Again at these technology levels you are probably not going to operate very far from your home system with any military vessels in general, you simply don't have the economy for that.
It is also completely impossible to analyse how good a particular weapon system is in isolation so in my opinion you can't really value how useful they are. However I might agree that pure beam warships should not be extreme long range cruiser like vessels, you need a beam ships to be relatively fast and/or have decently long range weapons. Really good beam warships tend to have low mission range unless you have a considerable technological advantage over your enemy.
I usually keep combat warships in the range of 6-12 month deployment range, that is quite realistic for a human crews. More than this I usually only give to science and/or intelligence gathering vessels.
When it comes to Maintenance there are two things I look at. Having at least two times the MSP versus max repair and having a maintenance cycle of roughly 2-3 times the deployment range.
I always consider the exact reason for building and designing a specific ship and how I intend to potentially upgrade it in the future. How many ships do I think I will need to fulfill it's duties and how will that impact my economy going forward. It is also important to figure out how components on this ship can be used in other ship designs. It is often more efficient in the long run to make some compromises in competent design if you can use them successfully in other designs as well. If every ship needs specifically designed component your general research will become severely hampered.
My general advice is to build a fleet of much smaller ships at this general tech level and then dynamically increase the size of future generation ships and upgrade your earlier ships as second class escort vessels, eventually you scrap them for resources. In general you will not need excessive range on early ships, often not more than 5-15 million km. You should instead have some auxiliary ships brought along with more fuel, supplies and ammunition. Jump ships are good as auxiliary tankers for example.
I also think that you need to have at least some active scanner on any ship with a weapon system. A beam ship should have at least a small resolution 1 active scanner, it does not have to be large, just large enough to see incoming missiles at a 10 second range (roughly).
Since I do allot of conventional starts I build allot of early ship designs. The "problems" that I face is that ships of this size is nearly impossible to sustain at this technology level. You rarely have the economical or scientific strength to support them. Just research and build a jump ship to support such a large ship will be very expensive.
When it comes to a ships range, maintenance and such this have to be completely based on what role the ship serve. How far from the home base is it suppose to operate and how long to you expect their missions to take. Again at these technology levels you are probably not going to operate very far from your home system with any military vessels in general, you simply don't have the economy for that.
It is also completely impossible to analyse how good a particular weapon system is in isolation so in my opinion you can't really value how useful they are. However I might agree that pure beam warships should not be extreme long range cruiser like vessels, you need a beam ships to be relatively fast and/or have decently long range weapons. Really good beam warships tend to have low mission range unless you have a considerable technological advantage over your enemy.
I usually keep combat warships in the range of 6-12 month deployment range, that is quite realistic for a human crews. More than this I usually only give to science and/or intelligence gathering vessels.
When it comes to Maintenance there are two things I look at. Having at least two times the MSP versus max repair and having a maintenance cycle of roughly 2-3 times the deployment range.
I always consider the exact reason for building and designing a specific ship and how I intend to potentially upgrade it in the future. How many ships do I think I will need to fulfill it's duties and how will that impact my economy going forward. It is also important to figure out how components on this ship can be used in other ship designs. It is often more efficient in the long run to make some compromises in competent design if you can use them successfully in other designs as well. If every ship needs specifically designed component your general research will become severely hampered.
My general advice is to build a fleet of much smaller ships at this general tech level and then dynamically increase the size of future generation ships and upgrade your earlier ships as second class escort vessels, eventually you scrap them for resources. In general you will not need excessive range on early ships, often not more than 5-15 million km. You should instead have some auxiliary ships brought along with more fuel, supplies and ammunition. Jump ships are good as auxiliary tankers for example.
I also think that you need to have at least some active scanner on any ship with a weapon system. A beam ship should have at least a small resolution 1 active scanner, it does not have to be large, just large enough to see incoming missiles at a 10 second range (roughly).