Jump engines

[Whitecold (OP)]

Browsing the forum I found that the size of jump engines is there that not every ship has one, but I feel it more means that larger jump engines are not used at all.
All jump capable ships are either jump scouts, survey vessels or tenders, it is very rare to see a true jump capable warship, which is kinda sad. Especially large capital ships should be the one where a jump drive is installed, but there it still uses up a lot of mass. For a proper squadron jump, the drive gets even larger, and much of it unnecessary, if you jump 10k escorts with a 50k battleship.
This all means it is easier to build a gate route for your assaults, which eliminates the need for jump drives completely, and sometimes gate routes already exist.
Jump drives really should make the difference between an offensive and a defensive fleet, and should sometimes even be found on civilian ships.

A few suggestions:

- Jump drives scale with a power law. A technobabble logical solution would be 3/2 (surface area of jump bubble.) Fixing size for a 100HS ship we would get:  Jump Rating=(Drive Size*Drive Tech)^(3/2)*1/10 HS

- Allow more small ships to jump with a large tender. For example a 20k jumpship with squadron 3 rating would have a 60k tonnage cap, with no other ship larger than 20k, and maybe a limit to 3^2 ships. This would make capital jumpships with escort squadrons attractive.

- Eliminate commercial/military flag with a downtime vs jump rating parameter. You can increase the drive rating at the expense of longer periods of vulnerability. A freighter would have no problem waiting an hour to continue.

- Eliminate constructors and gates completely! (maybe they could show up as secret tech to be unlocked) This makes jump ferries and jump bases necessary, which do cost something, unlike jump gates, so you have to think where to plant them, and you can't use those of your enemies and they can be destroyed. It would also make it necessary to think if you want to use ferries, or equip your colony ships/freighters with jump drives instead. In ship design there should be a jump ferry flag, to mark such ships, so they can be used for route planning of civilians and your non-jump ships.

[papent]

- Allow more small ships to jump with a large tender. For example a 20k jumpship with squadron 3 rating would have a 60k tonnage cap, with no other ship larger than 20k, and maybe a limit to 3^2 ships. This would make capital jumpships with escort squadrons attractive.

this idea I really like jumping a certain amount of tonnage would be perfect alternative to the squadron rating. Of course it will be abused like a 20k jump carrier bringing 20 FAC or worse pre-deployed and ready for combat.

[letsdance]

- Eliminate constructors and gates completely!

or make them much more expensive

[alex_brunius]

- Eliminate constructors and gates completely! (maybe they could show up as secret tech to be unlocked) This makes jump ferries and jump bases necessary, which do cost something, unlike jump gates, so you have to think where to plant them, and you can't use those of your enemies and they can be destroyed. It would also make it necessary to think if you want to use ferries, or equip your colony ships/freighters with jump drives instead. In ship design there should be a jump ferry flag, to mark such ships, so they can be used for route planning of civilians and your non-jump ships.

Agree with letsdance.

I would prefer to have gates/construction become a later game technology and have them become structures that can be targeted and destroyed instead.

To add a resource and industrial cost it would also be nice to require you to build a prepackage "gate" on the surface ( that is consumed on construction ) and load it into cargo holds.

[Whitecold (OP)]

Using the exponential formula above a 30k jump generator with jump rating 5 can jump a million ton base. If we add a rating vs jump down time we might want to add another factor 2 to the jump rating, so a 15k jump generator with some habitats slapped on can act as a ferry for million ton constructions, this should be sufficient for most reasonable projects, and else no one stops you from building even larger jump generators.
So this would nicely tie everything together in already existing mechanics than trying to get constructors using resources.

[Haji]

To add a resource and industrial cost it would also be nice to require you to build a prepackage "gate" on the surface ( that is consumed on construction ) and load it into cargo holds.

From what I understand this was actually the case (more or less) in the earlier versions of Aurora (4.x) but was removed. As such it's unlikely it will make it's return. Not sure about the ability to destroy the gates, but I think this was also possible and removed.

As for the changes to jump drives and elimination of the gates, I don't mind the idea per se, but it would completely screw the current economic balance, forcing redesign of many aspects of the game (such as early resources availability), AI (to make use of the new engines and strategic implications of those) and possibly a thousand and one other things I can't even think of. As such I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Even more so, since I'm used enough to the current model to not mind it.

[Erik L]

It used to be you built components and those were used to build the gate. They've never been destructible.