In the new system, being smaller than expected seems a much bigger problem for the enemy than being larger and more capable than expected, where it's currently more symmetrical. Gaining a range advantage with larger ships hinges on getting things exactly right, and may be near-impossible with a small tech disadvantage.  Add cost considerations (which may translate into number of variants with different sensor configurations) and I see a race to the smallest practical craft. Stealth tech etc. will be an additional trump card eventually, but the game remains the same.

I'll have fun poking at things, looking for ways to defend against small craft without resorting to smaller craft will be an interesting challenge.
But things brought up as problematic in VB6 Aurora, like max-size fine-grained sensors, look less dominant and tend to be comparatively expensive in some way or other.

To be honest this is going to be more difficult and complex than it sounds. Sure... it is more expensive to build and research a bigger sensor but where do you put the boundary of too big and how small can you make them not to be detected by something bigger at longer range for a reasonable price. A really small fighter with a large res sensor can be detected at fairly long range now even with a sensor with quite a bit lower res than the size of that craft. If you have decent sized res 1 and say res 2, 6, 18, 80 sensors on say 750-1000t crafts then really small crafts can have trouble. You also can have 500t crafts easily outrange 150t scouts for a very cheap price.

So... where is the border and what is deemed too expensive, quality can be very important sometimes.

The point is to be cheap enough... then we also have passive sensors which also favours slightly bigger ships as well now with smaller signatures being easier to pick up.

Missile ranges is also going to be shorter.

This probably means that making your scouts too small can be dangerous so you might want to hedge with several types of scouting crafts of different shapes and sizes and base sensor resolutions on known enemy ship classes as much as possible.

Obviously keeping sensor system small means you can optimise them against enemy crafts more easily but that also has a price not only in resources but time to produce the ships and parts as well. If you need the system yesterday you need to use what you have. I think that keeping sensors at around 300-400t range should be affordable from a maintainability purpose and good enough to be competitive in most situations. But investing in some who are a bit larger could probably pay of as well. This would make mostly decently large fighters or FAC the best options for competitive scouting forces. It would not be prohibitively expensive to build and research a few 4-500t fighter classes with a wide array of resolutions.

This is also where my conversation on protecting scouts comes in. A small group of destroyers with hangars to house some different small scout crafts and good enough offensive fire-power can become very important. You will not scout with active sensors since they are easily detected with passives much further away than what they detect something. So once a scout is detected if you then have easy access to fire-power close by you can clear them out and withdraw the destroyers to a safe place, they might sometimes not even have been detected properly either, depends on the scout or scouts found I guess.

I really like having more unknowns to work with, the intent behind the changes and the intelligence gathering aspect of it sound great.
Thanks for responding to my concerns, Steve - and I really hope I'm wrong. But the tables you linked are what caused my concern in the first place. From a thread I made about this:

Current sensor system:
Assuming equal tech, a 250t scout fighter and a 1000t scout FAC devoting the same percentage to a resolution-10 sensor (the geometric mean of their respective sizes) will  detect one another at the same range.
The FAC will have 4x the sensor range against the designed 500t target.
If the size of opposing scout craft is known and the ideal sensor resolution is chosen instead, the FAC will detect the fighter from twice the range (at 4x the expense).

C# sensor system:
If both craft devote the same percentage to a resolution10-sensor, the 250t fighter will pick up the 1000t FAC at twice the range it's detected itself.
The FAC will have twice the sensor range against the designed 500t target.
If the size of opposing scout craft is known and the ideal resolution is chosen instead, the FAC will detect the fighter at 25% longer range (at 4x the expense).

In the new system, being smaller than expected seems a much bigger problem for the enemy than being larger and more capable than expected, where it's currently more symmetrical. Gaining a range advantage with larger ships hinges on getting things exactly right, and may be near-impossible with a small tech disadvantage.  Add cost considerations (which may translate into number of variants with different sensor configurations) and I see a race to the smallest practical craft. Stealth tech etc. will be an additional trump card eventually, but the game remains the same.

I'll have fun poking at things, looking for ways to defend against small craft without resorting to smaller craft will be an interesting challenge.
But things brought up as problematic in VB6 Aurora, like max-size fine-grained sensors, look less dominant and tend to be comparatively expensive in some way or other.

I'm kind of curious if a new optimum 'meta' will pop up around disabling the enemy's engines and then keeping the ship around for ELINT to go over.

Probably not, because at that point a more effective solution would be Marines. But it might be funny.

I have to say trying to shadow an enemy ship for 100 odd days in order to get the ELINT module to work is certainly going to be "interesting". I assume that for a lot of engagements you simply won't know the capabilities of the enemy sensors.

Does the intelligence on a sensor attach to the sensor or the ship contact? 

Very much looking forward to reading the next campaign update to see all of this in action.

On the plus side, the new system should support all sorts of interesting hide-and-seek games between humans if diverse fleets are a given.
On the minus side, it seems less robust. A few things, most notably tiny fighters, will be shooting fish in a barrel unless facing exact and technologically sophisticated counters with absolutely no room for error.

It is easier to detect small fighters in C# than VB6. It is also easier for small fighters to have reasonable sensors, so it will depend on the balance. One other major factor I have already run into in my current campaign is that you no longer know the range of hostile sensors - only their total output for detection by EM. To know range and resolution you will need to study them with ELINT. Until then, you are sending in fighters and hoping the enemy can't detect them. I aborted a strike because I was concerned about that exact problem.

New Active Sensor Model: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg102701#msg102701
New Passive Sensor Model: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg103085#msg103085

Yeah and that's what seems to be happening with C# - it's no longer crucial to keep all ships together. Scouts are much more important and powerful since it'll be far more difficult to have a single sensor ship with all-powerful active/passive sensors that can see most of the system. It'll be easier to spot and destroy incoming missiles. And perhaps most importantly, the new GUI will make it so much easier and quicker to detach elements of your fleet than what we're used to.

Yes... the point in general is scouting and how that works. Since you need to detach scouting forces you also need to protect said scouting forces. It you don't then the one that does will likely win the scouting war in the end. This also means splitting forces up in tactical operations.

This does not diminish the importance of concentration of force in any way, just change some aspects of it.

So even if it is more important to have ships in one spot so they can benefit from shared point defence it is better of you can avoid being hit in the first place by proper scouting and strike the opponent without retaliation.

This is obviously where carriers have a big advantage over say regular missile ships. Carriers can still coordinate joint strikes against an enemy force with relative ease even if they are a fair distance apart from each other in more than one task-force.

The main avantage of big fleets in one spot is shared defense against missiles, reduce that and you will have more small formations.

Quote from: Jorgen_CAB on August 06, 2019, 08:07:46 PM

Quote from: Desdinova on August 06, 2019, 06:57:27 PM

Being able to operate separate task forces was a luxury made possible by American numerical superiority. And ships operated in separate groups/squadrons because before computers, an admiral commanded a battle from the bridge - if you depend on being able to look out and see what's going on in order to give orders, there's a limit to how many ships you can command effectively. If you want a real world example of how splitting your force can backfire spectacularly, look at what happened to the Japanese at the battle of Leyte gulf.

Another thing, that no one mentioned yet, is that wars in Aurora are highly linear. It seems like there's usually only one jump point in or out of enemy territory; once you know the jump point route to the enemy, the most effective defense is to concentrate everything you have on that jump point. If you want to make things like separate task groups and diversionary attacks viable, the number of interconnections between systems needs to be boosted again so the Galaxy map is less linear.

Everyone did this in WW2, not just the Americans. Also, the Japanese did not loose the battle of Layette Gulf because they had many battle groups (as did the Americans too), they simply were outmatched to begin with.

They were never going to win, but they didn't do themselves any favors by sending all their carriers off to die alone as a diversion, and splitting their battleships and basically throwing two of them away.

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Fleets operate like this today as well and computers have very little to do with it, real world political and military goals and needs does. The real world are way more complex than any game can even hope to simulate. You could try a game like Command modern Air/Naval combat to understand how modern fleets actually operate and why they deploy in task-forces.

I've played it. I also have real-world military experience.

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I do agree in some sense that jump points can make wars quite linear as there are only one possible approach. But that might certainly not be true if you play with a multi-faction Earth start though. You can also have potential enemies in more than one front and you never know when and if these enemies work together or not.

In any way... no one would ever be in their right mind in the real world to pool all their ships in a fleet in one giant fleet and head out to sea, there are many reason for why this is a bad idea.

Except that this was standard practice from ancient times, through the age of sail, into the Russo-Japanese War and World War I. Ships of the line, all the way into the dreadnought era, would operate in the largest formations possible whenever possible, with frigates and eventually cruisers delegated for colonial defense, commerce raiding and protection, screening the battleline, and scouting duties.

The only good reasons to divide your forces are: you're fighting on multiple fronts; something (like a supply depot or jump point) absolutely must be defended; some of your ships are too slow or obsolete to operate with the main force; some of your ships are unready due to training/maintenance/fuel/ordnance levels.

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If the game can make more realistic strategies viable with changes to some of the mechanics this is a good thing and carriers certainly will play an important roll in this. Or basically any ship with a hangar... you don't need dedicated carriers to use fighters and FAC effectively.

The game doesn't represent reality, but a hypothetical simulation of superscience space warfare. An effective strategy within the game is by default "realistic" in the sense that, if somehow the laws of physics changed to match trans-Newtonian physics as depicted in Aurora, the same strategies would emerge, because people do what works. You're not asking for more "realistic" tactics, but more "interesting" tactics.

If Leyete had played out differently then the Japanese tactics would have been praised as bold and innovative... ...we look at things from a different perspective and have all the facts, they never did when it happened. The US almost bought the Japanese feint manoeuvre but they could not capitalise on it.

As communication and weapon lethality have advanced so have the deployment of military assets both tactically and strategically become more dispersed as information is key to successful military operations. The one who have the information advantage is at a huge advantage over the one that doesn't. This is somewhat how the new sensor model will be changed from the old one. Before you only needed basically two size 50 active sensor one res 1 and one larger resolution, that will no longer be very effective from a research or practical perspective unless you are allot more advanced than an opponent.

Unless you talk about small nations in ancient or medieval times then fleets have almost never been focused into one giant fleet of doom. Sure, large fleet battles require allot of ships and sometimes had the majority of some nations ships in them, that does not mean that fleets was structured and used like this in wartime most of the time. These battles are rather the exception not the rule. In real life there are no do overs and trial and error tactics can be harsh learned experiences. In real life there is logistical nightmares as well as keeping information about troop/fleet movement hidden as big problems.
If you look at ancient and historic events then logistics is what sets high constraint on huge fleets or concentration of forces. These forces require huge investment in resources and good management so often are time caped. So unless you can use them to good effect in a certain time frame it is wasted time and resources. This is one good reason for why large concentration of forces are more the exception than the rule, even historically. Just look at the Roman operational campaigns in ancient times and the Romans had the most advanced logistical and available resources the world had ever seen. Most of the historical battles we read about in history are the exception to the rule, not the norm.

In C# Aurora you are not going to be able to station an infinite number of 10.000t ships at a specific place just because you have 10.000t maintenance capacity. This will force you to have many fleet bases if you have a big sprawling empire. If you play a multi-faction game then dispersed forces might be a must, just as in real life. Against the AI and regular NPR things obviously are more black and white and simplistic.