Hi all.
I have only played this game for a few weekso, so I am a total noob. One of the things I find very, very difficult is weaponizing all my theoretical research, ie. designing good warships. The forum and the wiki is a great help, almost all the information is there, and lots of examples, but unfortunately the information is spread all over the place, and the examples only show the final specifications of a craft, so you will have to reverse engineer to find the specs for all the individual components. Which may be no problem for experienced players, but it is a pain for noobs like me. So I decided to gather all the releveant information in one place, so that I myself and other new users might find it a little easier to design their first missile ship in the future.
This is really intended for the wiki, but I post it here as a quality control measure. So please let me know if I have made any mistakes, or if there are better ways to organize the design process than those I suggest. My focus is on the design process, what to do in what order, and a little on what parameters that are important for making a working design. In no way do I claim that I have designed a very good ship. But she floats!
English is not my first language, so feel free to comment on spelling and such. Here it comes:
Basic Missile Ship Design walkthrough.
When you design warships in Aurora 4x, you go through several distinct phases:
0. Basic Research phase (general)
1. Basic decision phase
1a. Ship role
1b. Weapon system
2. Component design phase
3. Component research phase
4. Ship design phase
5. Component building phase
6. Ship build phase.
Generally these phases are dealt with successively, we design components before we design ships. But because there are some many sub-designs in the overall design of a ship, we will at any one time in the proces find ourselves involved in several designs and sub-designs, each in its own, separate phase of design. It can be very easy to completely loose track of what is going on; I have found it a great help to be very careful with my naming practises, always including range or other relevant information in the name, and generally to write notes and keep checklists. Every ship design consists of a finite number of individual components, who all needs three checks: Are they designed as an objective idea? Check. Is there a blueprint? Check. When all blueprints are ready, we can proceed to design our ship. Then, when we have designed our ship, there is a final checklist: Are all the individual components in stock?
I will elaborate a little on this, as it was what made things "click" for me.
All this confusion because all designs must be researched, and this interrupts the design proces. All researched designs must then be built, before we can build our ship, (not true, we can just design and build our ship at will, but without readymade components it will take forever). So every design must go through three modes of existence: from (a) objective idea to (b) blueprint to (c) stock item.
Here, what I call an objective idea (a) is what you get when you push the "create" button in the design window. Now your subjective dream of a monster weapon has got a name and its own existence. You can find it in the scientists' to-do list, and it will stay there, even if you forget about it, unless you hire a scientist to make it go away (or you can delete it, or use SM mode). Work through your list of ship components, design them and tick them off on your list as "design done".
A blueprint (b) is what the scientists get out of your idea. It has still got the same name, but now your idea has been refined to another order of existence, now it is something that also industrialists can understand. Something that is ready for production. It can now be found in the industrial view, hidden away in the ship components dropdown.
But more important for our purposes is the fact, that component blueprints can also be found in the ship design window. We need blueprints for (almost) everything we want to put on our ships. So again, go through your checklist and make sure they all get a tick for "blueprint done".
Our first attempt of putting together a prototype will show us if we got the components right. If not, back to the drawing board routine: make a new design of the offending component, research it, and try again later.
When we are satisfied that our ship is as good as it gets, we fortunately don't need scientific quality control, we just go directly to the shipyards and order our ships. But as already mentioned, it may be a good idea to manufacture the components in advance.
So the Stock item (c) checklist is like the other two, but with the difference, that now we need to know not only the type but also the number of individual components. We only need to design the engine once, but we may need 8 modules in each vessel, so if we plan to build a squadron of 5, we will need to build 40 engines.
In the following I will try to analyze this design process further, by designing my first missile ship.
0 Basic Research phase (general)
Basic research is all the research you have been doing from game start, like researching more powerful engines and longer ranging sensors etc.
1. Basic decision phase (specific)
The basic decision phase is where you decide what specific kind of vessel you want to build, ie. what role it is intended to play in the overall design of your fleet. In this example I have decided to focus on a point defence vessel. Its role is basically to protect the other ships in my fleet from enemy missile fire.
My current combat fleet consists of 2 destroyer squadrons with ASM capability, plus an assault carrier with 4 marine companies in drop pods and an escort carrier with 9 attack fighters and a squadron leader fighter with active sensors. Operating with the fleet is a jump-ship utilizing a 6000t jump drive, so this is the upper limit for any new design. A tender and several tankers are at hand, and a collier is planned. The slowest combat vessel in the fleet runs 3900 km/s, so this is my fleets cruising speed. The new design should be faster than this, so that it can reposition itself relatively to the mother fleet without slowing her down.
I can choose between two weapon system types, beam weapons or AMM, and for this example I have chosen missiles.
Next I must decide what components are needed for this kind of vessel. In addition to the basic life support and engineering modules, the hull should carry:
- powerful engines
- an adequate amount of fuel
- passive sensors
- active sensors
- missile fire control (MFC)
- missile launchers
- magazines
- missiles
One big engine is more fuel efficient than several small engines, but engine failure can be fatal, if you only got one. Therefore I find it better to use several smaller engines on my warships. It can be very expensive to research a big engine, so there is also a better research economy in designing smaller engines. And it will make the coming ship design phase far easier to deal with, more on that in its proper place.
Given the engines, the fuel tank is what decides the range of the vessel. But as we don't know yet how much fuel our engine pack will use, we don't decide anything now.
We don't really need passive sensors on this kind of ship, but I always include a thermal sensor in my designs, on principle. (All my ships, even commercial ships, carry a thermal sensor).
An active sensor is a must, as our missile fire control needs something to tell it where the enemy missiles are. So what we need is an active sensor with roughly the same specs as the missile fire control. We don't want to waste space on adding a long range, low resolution sensor, because the ships we are supposed to protect will provide this kind of coverage. We could do totally without active sensors, and rely on a dedicated sensor ship, but the redundancy in having one on each ship makes us less vulnerable overall.
The missile fire control should be able to target the smallest missiles, which is size 1, so the resolution of the MFC should be 1. The range should match that of the missiles, which we haven't designed yet.
To shoot down an ASM, all we need is to get a hit with a warhead strength of 1. Therefore, AMM's are, as a general rule, always size 1. So the missile launchers should be size 1.
And now the crucial part: The missiles.
2. Component design phase
Missiles part 1: Missile engines
We saw in the decision phase, that quite a lot of the specifications of the other components are relative to the missile we intend to use. So let us design this first. To get a working missile, we shall basically run through the same checklist as in ship development.
An AMM can never be too fast. The difference between the target speed and the speed of the AMM directly influences the to hit chances, so faster AMMs are always better. So we need a powerful missile engine. Fuel economy is not really an issue here, as point defence weapons only need to have a very short range. So we will want to boost our missile engines, even if it means it will eat a lot of fuel.
First we decide what we want: A super fast, short-range missile. To get that, we need an engine and a warhead. The warhead is given with the research level, in this case we have already researched warhead strength 5.
In the project design window we choose missile engines. In this case we've got Magneto-Plasma Drive Technology. The default engine is size 1, which is too much, as we want a size 1 missile. So we lower the engine size to 0.7 MSP, leaving room for fuel and the warhead. We need a strong engine, so we give it a boost of x2.5 EP, leaving the fuel consumption variable untouched. We could boost it even more, but as long as we don't really know what we are doing, we leave it at 2.5 and see where it takes us. We can change the name, fx. to "1.4 EP MP Drive". To create this drive, we push the "Create" button.
We now go to the research window (F3) and assign some scientist to our newly-designed drive. Hopefully it should only take a few weeks to work out the blueprints. In the meantime we could design some missile launchers.
Missile launchers and magazines.
AMMs are size 1, so we go to the design window and create a missile launcher with the best reload rate we have got. In this case it is rate 2, i.e. 15 seconds, which is way too slow, but that is what we've got. Push Create and assign a scientist (F3).
To be able to shoot more than one salvo, we need magazines. Again we go to the design window and create a magazine with the best feed system available. A 1 HS magazine contains 16 missiles, and we want a lot more, so we design a module size 3, containing 48 missiles. Push Create and assign a scientist. (F3).
Missiles pt. 2: The missile
When research on the missile engine is done, we go to the missile design window. In the center panel we see our new engine, "1.4 EP MP Drive". In the left panel we change the MSP for Warhead Strength until the value is 1. This is an AMM, so WP 1 is what we want. With our current technology this costs 0.2 MSP, which leaves 0.1 MSP for fuel and agility.
With 0.1 Fuel Capacity, we have a range of 190m km. This is way too much, we only need a tenth of that range, and even this may be too much. So we change the fuel to 0.01 MSP, which gives us a range of 20 m km. We put the last 0.09 MSP into agility.
We can now change the fuel/agility ratio further, to try to get a higher to hit chance. I find that a setting of 0.05 fuel and 0.95 agility gives good to hit chances. This brings the range down to 10m km, which in my mind is very, very close. But other AMM designs I have seen have had even shorter ranges. So 10 m km is what I decide on.
We could also change the whole engine/missile ratio, to get an even faster missile, and we only gave it a boost of 2.5 without getting any fuel/range problems, so there should be room for designing a more powerful engine. But then we would have to design this new and more expensive engine, and again wait for the scientits, and 28.000.000 km/s is okay for a trial version.
So for now we leave it as it is with a range of 10 m km. We can name the missile "S1 AMM" if we want, before we push "Create".
And again we will have to wait for the scientists in the F3 window. But now we know some more about our system: The missiles needs guidance to a distance of 19m km.
Fire control and active sensors.
In the design window we choose missile fire control and change the resolution to 1. To get a range of 10m we need to create a big FC: 100 tons or 2 HP. Call it FC10-R1 and research it.
Fire controls need an active sensor to actually see the target for them, so we design a resolution 1 active search sensor with a range of 10m km, by flipping the lower dropdown from Fire Control to Active Sensor, call it MR10-R1 and research it.
When all this is done, we can proceed to designing the ship.
If we are very, very sure of our own designs, we can now proceed to the industrial window and order all the components to be built. Then, when the ship design is ready and the components on stock, we can build our first ship of this line.
3. Ship design phase
In the F4 "Class Design" window we put all our new toys together. First we create a new design, choose a hull and give it a name like "Skjold", and then we proceed to the design tab.
Intended deployment time and armor
The ship is supposed always to work with a larger fleet, so deployment time should match that of the bigger fleet. Here we set it to 9 months. These ships will be positioned in front of the other ships of the fleet, to shoot down incoming missiles, so we can expect them to be occasionally hit. Therefore we give them 6 armor levels, initially. Which is probably not enough, but the ship already weighs 1000 tons now.
Weapon system
We add 12 size 1 missile launchers, 2 FC10-R1 missile fire controls and 1 MR10-R1 active sensor. The combined weight of these devices and the life support of their crews brings the total weight up to 2600 t. We want to be able to shoot more than one salvo, so we add 2 Capacity 48 magazines. This gives us 8 reloads. In the Ordnance/Fighters tab, we then load 108 AAMs (Which we have built by now, to load the missiles in the design window, they must be present in the stockpile). The ship is now 2950 tons.
Propulsion
Many small, powerful drives are in many ways superior to one big monster engine, so we use an all-purpose Magneto-Plasma 80 EP military engine (that is already on stock) as the basic module. Five of those provide us with a max speed of 4444 km/s. But we also need a lot of fuel, if we expect a tour to last nine months. Six 80 EP Drives supported by one very large and one large fuel tank lets the vessel fly with a speed of 4324km/s, almost 10% faster than the mother fleet. Unfortunately, max repair is now higher than our current MSP, so we have to add another engineering space, a tiny one is enough. The ship is now 5600t, speed 4285.
Last decisions
6000t tons is max size, because this is what our standard military jump ships can handle. So we could still add two layers of armor, bringing the total up to 8 armor layers. But our speed will suffer, it will only be 4000 km/s.
Or we could add an active sensor with a longer range. Right now we are blind as moles: Anything beyond 10m km is invisible to us. But a sensor with a decent range is very heavy, even a 400t sensor will probably not have a range that is worth the speed reduction, especially not when we consider that there are ships in the mother fleet with this kind of sensors.
Or we could leave the armor at 6 and add another fire control. It only weighs 100t and it provides us with some flexibility: With two FCs per 12 launchers, salvos would typically be 6 or 12 shots, which probably is a waste against small salvos and one-shots. With three launchers, salvos would typically be 4, 8 or 12. And it would be feasible to keep 4 or 8 launchers on automatic fire, while still manually controlling one FC with 4 launchers. (Or any number that is convenient in the situation).
So this is my next-to-last decision: I bring up the weight from 5600t to 5750t by adding a FC, thereby reducing the speed from 4285 km/s to 4173 km/s. The extra 50t is life support for the crew, added to the design automagically.
The last decision is that I add three gamma shields making the final weight 5900t, thereby slowing the ship down to 4067 km/s. These shields are a bit of an afterthought, I have been a bit dissapointed with shield performance so far, they absorb the first shot, and that's it. Recharging takes so long, that the battle is over before they can shield anything again. But if these new ships are any good, only very few missiles will get through to score a hit. So the value of the shields is far higher in this situation; if we can expect to be hit by only two shots, the shields provide a deflection rate of 50, if only one shot, the deflection rate is 100%. But perhaps I am too optimistic. Experience will show. Anyway, a ship named Skjold should have a shield.
As she now stands, Skjold is quite a bit slower than expected, but still faster than her mother fleet, so that she can deploy to forward positions without slowing the fleet down. Her refueling cycle on 190 days falls short of the intended 9 months deployment period. However, most ships using military drives are a bit on the low side in this respect, so tankers are needed anyway.
4. Component building phase
All we need to do know is to make sure that all the components are being built (checklist (c)) and made ready in the stockpile, and then retool one of our shipyards to the new design, preferably one with five slipways.
5. Ship building phase
When all is ready, we order the ships at the shipyard. When they are finished they should come with a full load of missiles, but we better make sure they are. If they are not, because we didn't build enough missiles (five ships of this type will need 540 missiles for a full load), then we have plenty of time to replenish the stocks, while the ships are training.
We will probably need a lot of missiles, the whole idea of this kind of defence is to throw so many missiles after whatever the enemy throws after us, that nothing gets through to hurt us. One broadside from a squadron of five of this vessel is 60 AMM, and after the first salvo they can deliver four broadsides every minute for two minutes. Theoretically, one broadside with a to hit chance around 40% should take out around or less than 24 enemy missiles, provided that fleet training is 100% and the enemy missiles are slow. So if he throws 100 fast missiles at us we can expect to spend more than half our load. The enemies I have encountered so far have never launched more than around 30 missiles against me in a single engagement. So I guess this loadout is adequate. Anyway, my next project is designing a collier.
But first we must train. After a year or so of training, we can try to locate some enemies, and persuade them to throw some missiles after us. Then we shall see if our design is any good, and if we have brought enough missiles.
This is how she looks:
Skjold class Destroyer Escort 5,900 tons 111 Crew 957.9 BP TCS 118 TH 480 EM 180
4067 km/s Armour 6-29 Shields 6-300 Sensors 8/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 12
Maint Life 1.04 Years MSP 127 AFR 222% IFR 3.1% 1YR 118 5YR 1765 Max Repair 126 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 9 months Spare Berths 1
Magazine 108
80 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (6) Power 80 Fuel Use 57% Signature 80 Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 1,250,000 Litres Range 66.9 billion km (190 days at full power)
Gamma R300/14 Shields (3) Total Fuel Cost 42 Litres per day
Size 1 Missile Launcher (12) Missile Size 1 Rate of Fire 15
Missile Fire Control FC10-R1 (3) Range 10.1m km Resolution 1
Size 1 AMM (108) Speed: 28,000 km/s End: 5.7m Range: 9.5m km WH: 1 Size: 1 TH: 121 / 72 / 36
Active Search Sensor MR10-R1 (1) GPS 126 Range 10.1m km Resolution 1
Thermal Sensor TH1-8 (1) Sensitivity 8 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 8m km
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
