Buglet or misunderstood feature:
If I set the speed of my fleet to 350 km/s (nominal speed 1066), then it seems to work; as in, if I bring the dialog box up again, it shows 350, but the next move impulse shows it's still moving at 1066 km/s.

Also, another one, but it might just be it's for non-fighters only. I have a fighter tender with 3 fighters, if I ask to split all 'ships' at arrival, it does nothing. I guess here 'ships' are 1000+ tons objects?

Yeah, Steve worked on it for a while and came to the conclusion that, as much fun as Newtonian mechanics are for space nerds, it didn't add anything to the whole 4X space strategy game thing Aurora is all about besides extra micromanagement. Despite the level of detail, Aurora has never been meant as a hard sci-fi simulator although it's a damn sight closer to realism than, say, Star Trek or something.

That being said, I will say that once you do get into Aurora, you don't really miss the hard sci-fi mechanics as much as you might think. The real meat of the game is in the strategic, operational, logistics, doctrinal, etc. and the tactical parts while quite detailed are really a small part of the whole.

Quote from: nuclearslurpee on April 06, 2024, 10:26:54 PM

Quote from: Ulzgoroth on April 06, 2024, 06:21:28 PM

In Aurora's technology, there isn't really such a thing as being stealthy at close range. A sneaky ship is one you see fewer millions of kilometers out...

Would it be possible to cross-deck troops from a non-military transport to a specialized assault ship reasonably quickly in space? That seems like it might let you use cheap transports for the bulk but also use high-performance craft for the under-fire step.

I think it's possible, though I'm not sure how it's done mechanically, but there's not really an advantage to doing this. Either way, you still have to get all of the ships involved into the area of operations - so you might as well just transport the troops with the assault ships anyways.

In VB6, drop-capable ships used to work this way since ground units which stayed inside them for more than a few days suffered morale losses, so transferring troops from bulk transports to specialized dropships was more or less a requirement. This feature did not make it into C# and I imagine that was because the extra micro involved did not translate to any interesting gameplay decisions, so it was just needless busy-work and added costs in practice.

You need to get all the ships involved into the area, but if you can use a far smaller number of expensive militarized dropships to land the army, how is that not advantageous? (The idea of course being that the non-militarized transports will stay outside STO range, while the dropships with all the trimmings shuttle between the 'offshore' group and the drop zone.)

It might not be an improvement on using an entire flotilla of technically-commercial heavily armored assault ships, but if one wants higher-performance military assault ships, being able to use much less tonnage of those than you would need to transport the entire force seems helpful?

• The dropships will take damage from STOs on each run, so you may end up losing the dropships before you finish landing the troops. One advantage of a large number of dropships is that the STO fie will be dispersed between them, or at least that if a few get destroyed a larger proportion of the troops will make planetfall.
• Transferring troops between ships is not an instantaneous operation (unlike in VB6). I think, based on the loading times I've seen for both cargo shuttle bays and picking up troops from captured ships with boarding-capable bays, that the time required to make the transfer would exceed the 8-hour ground combat increment or at least would be comparable in magnitude. Which means that the first troops of the much smaller wave will take very heavy damage and perhaps even be annihilated (depending on relative force sizes) before the next wave lands.

In Aurora's technology, there isn't really such a thing as being stealthy at close range. A sneaky ship is one you see fewer millions of kilometers out...

Would it be possible to cross-deck troops from a non-military transport to a specialized assault ship reasonably quickly in space? That seems like it might let you use cheap transports for the bulk but also use high-performance craft for the under-fire step.