Joining the big leagues

[AL (OP)]

pure theorycrafting , at this stage it is better to actualy go ingame and kill some stuff
1mt non overhauling military ships with fuel harvester is past my imagination
she needs 40 ! ingame years to fill tanks what is possibly on average how long many people have their games running
what is mineral cost + building time ? how long to expand shipyards and with what mineral costs ?

A year's worth of fuel harvesting gives enough to limp around a range of 1.7bkm... I suppose it really isn't all that impressive, but since I did add the infinite deployment time with the recreational facilities, it would give it something useful to do while keeping station on the fringes of known space. It's all part of the "do-everything" package.
I'm not exactly sure how long the shipyard took to get up to size, but I did mention I left it on auto-expand for a few months to a year. As for mineral costs, what else am I to do with 20 million units worth of minerals stockpiled on Earth? And there's another 500 million waiting to be exploited in Alpha Centauri...

Any ship tagged as an Orbital Habitat can be built with planetary industry, regardless if its military or commercial!

I did not know that, but those modules are absolutely huge... I think I would have to get up to 4mt or so before I could consider putting one of those on a ship.

[83athom]

I did not know that, but those modules are absolutely huge... I think I would have to get up to 4mt or so before I could consider putting one of those on a ship.

One of my favorite book series is the Spinward Fringe books. SPOILER ALERT;One ship that the main characters get in one of the books is the Triton and is is an Assault Carrier. And at the very core of this pretty large ship (only dwarfed by the big battleships and supercarriers) is the equivalent of the Orbital Habitat module. It has homes, stores, and entertainment plenty for the family of the crew of not only the ship but the whole fleet, because it is meant to be away from home for a very very long time. That area is also the most heavily armored area of the ship (by quite a bit), but my no means is the rest of the ship weak in armor. But the ship itself is nowhere near the multimillion ton mark. So I wouldn't necessarily say that putting Orbital habitats on a massive warship is cheesing it, but it does make building large vessels a lot easier. However it also has its drawbacks.

[amimai]

I was thinking that what he is building is closer to a lighthugger rather then a combat carrier

[MarcAFK]

Lighthugger?

[83athom]

Lighthugger?

3km-4km long "colony" ship that can travel just under the speed of light (99.999.....%).

[MarcAFK]

I googled it, the series is very interesting.

[rcj33]

So I made this monstrosity for a space opera campaign:

Atropos-class Heavy Titan (Assault)
50 size-2 launchers (1000 rds)
1 52cm spinal laser
20 35cm lasers
60 15cm lasers
20 35cm mesons
60 15cm mesons
40 gauss-5
plus 2kt hangar space

Code: [Select]

Atropos class Heavy Titan    240,000 tons     8369 Crew     78920.4 BP      TCS 4800  TH 40000  EM 36000
8333 km/s     Armour 25-344     Shields 1200-300     Sensors 1/120/0/0     Damage Control Rating 335     PPV 1317
Maint Life 4.49 Years     MSP 68914    AFR 1374%    IFR 19.1%    1YR 5529    5YR 82937    Max Repair 1264 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 18 months    Flight Crew Berths 10   
Flag Bridge    Hangar Deck Capacity 2000 tons     Troop Capacity: 1 Battalion    Magazine 2020    Cargo Handling Multiplier 40    Tractor Beam     

2000 EP Magnetic Fusion Drive (20)    Power 2000    Fuel Use 48.57%    Signature 2000    Exp 16%
Fuel Capacity 25,000,000 Litres    Range 38.6 billion km   (53 days at full power)
Ablative Energy Sink (240)   Total Fuel Cost  3,600 Litres per hour  (86,400 per day)

Spinal CRE Pulser (1)    Range 480,000km     TS: 8333 km/s     Power 71-8     RM 7    ROF 45        71 71 71 71 71 71 71 62 55 49
Quad Small CRE Beamer (10x4)    Range 420,000km     TS: 8333 km/s     Power 24-32     RM 7    ROF 5        6 6 6 6 6 6 6 5 4 4
Quad Small CRE Beamer Turret (5x4)    Range 420,000km     TS: 16000 km/s     Power 24-32     RM 7    ROF 5        6 6 6 6 6 6 6 5 4 4
Quad Medium CRE Pulser (5x4)    Range 480,000km     TS: 8333 km/s     Power 128-32     RM 7    ROF 20        32 32 32 32 32 32 32 27 24 22
Quad Small Kaon Projector (10x4)    Range 210,000km     TS: 8333 km/s     Power 24-32     RM 21    ROF 5        1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Quad Small Kaon Projector Turret (5x4)    Range 210,000km     TS: 16000 km/s     Power 24-32     RM 21    ROF 5        1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Quad Medium Kaon Projector (5x4)    Range 480,000km     TS: 8333 km/s     Power 128-32     RM 112    ROF 20        1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Quad RMPA PD Turret (10x20)    Range 50,000km     TS: 32200 km/s     Power 0-0     RM 5    ROF 5        1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
Escort Beam Fire Control (5)    Max Range: 480,000 km   TS: 16000 km/s     98 96 94 92 90 88 85 83 81 79
Spinal CRE Pulser FC (1)    Max Range: 480,000 km   TS: 10000 km/s     98 96 94 92 90 88 85 83 81 79
Secondary BFC (5)    Max Range: 480,000 km   TS: 10000 km/s     98 96 94 92 90 88 85 83 81 79
RMPA PD FC (5)    Max Range: 120,000 km   TS: 32000 km/s     92 83 75 67 58 50 42 33 25 17
Medium MC Fusor (20)     Total Power Output 2000    Armour 0    Exp 5%

SRAM Launcher (50)    Missile Size 2    Rate of Fire 10
SRAM FC (10)     Range 4.9m km    Resolution 2
Mag-Conf SRAM (1000)  Speed: 74,200 km/s   End: 0.5m    Range: 2.2m km   WH: 10    Size: 2    TH: 247/148/74

Anti-Missile Search Sensor MR18-R1 (2)     GPS 77     Range 18.4m km    MCR 2.0m km    Resolution 1
EM Detection Sensor EM5-120 (1)     Sensitivity 120     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  120m km

ECCM-5 (1)     Compact ECCM-4 (10)         ECM 50

Strike Group
1x Flyswatter Module   Speed: 1 km/s    Size: 10
1x AECM Module   Speed: 1 km/s    Size: 10
2x SRAM Module   Speed: 1 km/s    Size: 10

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
"Strike group" is two box launcher pods, one pod with a single missile FC for auto-killing attack craft, and a HPM pod, all 500t.

I'm using this as a "Precursor" flagship. Can the SM gift spoilers ships and have them work? I thought their AI might break so I turned 'em off and am running a couple very familiar races myself This one's not deployed yet though so tell me if I forgot something (besides the fact that I should switch to 25cm mesons to save some space. I just noticed that while typing this).

Also, I finally figured out how to make a fake fixed battery. Apparently you can set a turret's tracking speed to 0 km/s and it will use the ship's max speed instead (or your empire's best turret tracking rate, idk). This is great for me because I prefer big ships with lots of puny fixed guns, and assigning said guns to FCs while scrolling the  window every new selection gets old pretty quick.

[AL (OP)]

Its been a while now, but my new computer has finally arrived so I'm back in business. Good news is my old hard drive is still fine so I managed to recover the save for this game.

@rcj33: looks pretty solid, although personally I do prefer a fair bit more range on the bigger ships.
Somewhat inspired by your design, I'm thinking my next ship might feature energy weapons almost exclusively as the main armament, although I'll have to wait a bit for my tech to get up to scratch in that area.

In a recent NPR encounter, I attempted to engage some relatively fast ~8000 ton craft going at ~12000km/s using  my 2-stage torpedo designs. For some reason, the submunitions kept running out of endurance before reaching the targets even though I'm almost certain I left a few mkm margin between seperation distance and submunition endurance to ensure this wouldn't happen. To make things worse, the targets were steaming straight towards the missiles too, which makes their apparent lack of endurance even more inexplicable. What is going on?

[Erik L]

Its been a while now, but my new computer has finally arrived so I'm back in business. Good news is my old hard drive is still fine so I managed to recover the save for this game.

@rcj33: looks pretty solid, although personally I do prefer a fair bit more range on the bigger ships.
Somewhat inspired by your design, I'm thinking my next ship might feature energy weapons almost exclusively as the main armament, although I'll have to wait a bit for my tech to get up to scratch in that area.

In a recent NPR encounter, I attempted to engage some relatively fast ~8000 ton craft going at ~12000km/s using  my 2-stage torpedo designs. For some reason, the submunitions kept running out of endurance before reaching the targets even though I'm almost certain I left a few mkm margin between seperation distance and submunition endurance to ensure this wouldn't happen. To make things worse, the targets were steaming straight towards the missiles too, which makes their apparent lack of endurance even more inexplicable. What is going on?

Post the designs, both carrier and submunition. I'm sure we can figure it out.

[AL (OP)]

How do you get the designs for missiles you've already created? The best I can think of is either making do with the stats listed in the tech report or using past design allocation on the missile design screen. The problem with the latter is that tech advancement means that the values listed don't actually correspond with the missile's stats, and as far as I can tell it doesn't load data about separation distance of any missile stages (which is kind of important here).

Edit: things just got weirder... I'm engaging some more enemy ships with the same torpedoes as last time. The enemy ships are fleeing from my missiles in this situation, and so logically the submunitions have enough endurance and actually land on target (or would have if it weren't for combined AMM/beam PD).

[DIT_grue]

Someone else reported the same problem recently (and then wrote it up in their AAR) but I can't seem to find either post. IIRC, they pegged the cause as probably some unexpected interaction with the new missile interception code, because the separation seemed to occur at the specified distance from the point at which the first stage was predicted to intercept the target. So yeah, assuming the second stage is faster than the first, it's going to reach the target in a stern chase but not a head-on intercept.

EDIT: Took another look, turned it up here, not quite as recent as I remembered.