Author Topic: Change Log for v7.2 Discussion  (Read 135677 times)

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Offline steili

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Re: Change Log for v7.2 Discussion
« Reply #210 on: March 05, 2016, 07:06:35 AM »
Would it make sense to add a new ship component for short range transportation of colonists? The component would be significantly smaller than the cryo beds and have less loading time, but it would have a maximum transit duration before life support systems started to fail, and the on-board colonist would start to perish. 

The reason why I suggest this is that it imo.  doesn't make much sense RP wise  to put colonists in cryo beds if they're only transiting for say 0-30 days. 
 

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Re: Change Log for v7.2 Discussion
« Reply #211 on: March 05, 2016, 07:20:53 AM »
That would make no sense. For short trips, cryo stasis is a weightsaving measure because you can stack them like sardines.
Cryo transport needs only 250kg per colonist.
 

Offline illrede

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Re: Change Log for v7.2 Discussion
« Reply #212 on: March 05, 2016, 12:12:23 PM »
Beam fire controls being cheaper will be interesting; the expense did influence my design choices- unless the roll was so important that cost was no object whatsoever I simply did not build anything less than a battleship with a "capable" beam fire control; "sniper" destroyers kept ballooning to battleship size in the design screen.
 

Offline alex_brunius

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Re: Change Log for v7.2 Discussion
« Reply #213 on: March 05, 2016, 09:08:56 PM »
That would make no sense. For short trips, cryo stasis is a weightsaving measure because you can stack them like sardines.
Cryo transport needs only 250kg per colonist.

And a modern Jumbo jet (with maximum travel times of 18 hours ) has an empty weight of 325 kg per passenger (maximum density seating) including propulsion, lift and other support systems.
Without using any TN materials. If you look at the weight of only the passenger accommodations isolated it's probably less then 250kg.

The point is that for travels below a month in time it would probably cheaper to not use cryo stasis, and much faster to load/unload, but for longer trips the savings in food and other stuff probably makes cryo more worthwhile.


It's mostly for RP as written. How much sense does it make to have colonists enter cryo stasis for a trip to the moon ( 77 seconds travel time @ 5000km/s )? That's like the travel time between two stops at your average subway!
 

Offline Mor

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Re: Change Log for v7.2 Discussion
« Reply #214 on: March 05, 2016, 09:52:25 PM »
You want to create passenger shuttle, with a Luxury Passenger Accommodation, that would resemble airplane flight of up to 12hour trips. (can we please have mini bars?!)

Personally, I don't see the utility in that and since we don't have a away to simulate deployment times except with military crews, can't you use your imagination instead?
« Last Edit: March 06, 2016, 12:42:49 AM by Mor »
 

Offline QuakeIV

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Re: Change Log for v7.2 Discussion
« Reply #215 on: March 06, 2016, 12:34:04 AM »
Seems like a not-that-great increase in complexity imo.  I'd rather the colony ships stay at the 'load people on board and they are now cargo' level of abstraction.  This game is microey enough as it is, without bloody colonists dying in droves because I used the wrong type of storage bay and didn't notice because I didn't want to go through fifty menus to confirm the kinds of bays they had.
 

Offline steili

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Re: Change Log for v7.2 Discussion
« Reply #216 on: March 06, 2016, 08:10:27 AM »
Quote from: Mor link=topic=8152. msg87685#msg87685 date=1457236345
(. . . ), can't you use your imagination instead?

Come on, every suggestion can be met by this argument.  If you have enough imagination you could just play Aurora in MS Excel.   
 

Offline bean

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Re: Change Log for v7.2 Discussion
« Reply #217 on: March 06, 2016, 11:27:27 AM »
And a modern Jumbo jet (with maximum travel times of 18 hours ) has an empty weight of 325 kg per passenger (maximum density seating) including propulsion, lift and other support systems.
Without using any TN materials. If you look at the weight of only the passenger accommodations isolated it's probably less then 250kg.

The point is that for travels below a month in time it would probably cheaper to not use cryo stasis, and much faster to load/unload, but for longer trips the savings in food and other stuff probably makes cryo more worthwhile.
A month?  Seriously?  Have you ever been in maximum-density seating on a jet?  Normally, they only use those kind of seats for trips of an hour or two.  Trying to put people in them for a month would be a complete non-starter.
As for 'isolated passenger accommodations', airliners aren't that simple.  Are we looking at the weight of the seats (and lavatories and such) themselves, independent of the structure?  The best way to find that number would probably be to compare empty weights of freighter and passenger versions, but even then, it's not really the point.  In Aurora, that 250 kg is going to include a lot of things which would count against the structures group in an airliner.  (Also, the passenger himself.)

Come on, every suggestion can be met by this argument.  If you have enough imagination you could just play Aurora in MS Excel.   
But you're proposing a system that only works in very specific conditions.  A system to cover Earth-Moon runs only, which can't be used for others, seems pointless and unnecessarily complicated.  Sure, it would be nice if we could get an Earth-Moon subway, but the scale of the game (a normal cryo module holds 10,000 people, and limitations on commercial engines mean you couldn't build these on the 1000-passenger scale) mean you couldn't materially improve the loading time.  Also, there's the fact that it would be a perfect newbie trap, and we'd get loads of threads about 'all my colonists just died, why?'.
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Offline alex_brunius

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Re: Change Log for v7.2 Discussion
« Reply #218 on: March 06, 2016, 07:25:54 PM »
But you're proposing a system that only works in very specific conditions.  A system to cover Earth-Moon runs only, which can't be used for others, seems pointless and unnecessarily complicated.  Sure, it would be nice if we could get an Earth-Moon subway, but the scale of the game (a normal cryo module holds 10,000 people, and limitations on commercial engines mean you couldn't build these on the 1000-passenger scale) mean you couldn't materially improve the loading time.  Also, there's the fact that it would be a perfect newbie trap, and we'd get loads of threads about 'all my colonists just died, why?'.

5000km/s*18 hours = 324 million km, gets you a little bit further then "Earth-moon runs only", doesn't it?

Anyways, the way to do it ( if it should be done ), is to have a second type of colony ships which load/unload many times faster and has a limited range of 1 or a few days travel time above which it won't be used (for civilian runs).

It would also be much cheaper and give you much greater capacity over shorter colony runs + require no extra tech research. ( which is the main reasons to implement something like this ).


For example in the current fiction in Colonial Wars just mass evacuating everyone from Earth to for example Mars could be an option to consider if this kind of modules were available.



Lack of capacity/loading times isn't really a realistic argument against this either IMO seeing how we have airports with our non TN tech today that handles 50-100 million PAX per year = an entire sizable Aurora colony.
« Last Edit: March 06, 2016, 07:32:25 PM by alex_brunius »
 

Offline TheDeadlyShoe

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Re: Change Log for v7.2 Discussion
« Reply #219 on: March 06, 2016, 07:31:09 PM »
Well...just my 2c but the relative ease+profit of colonizing mars/luna right now (and all the mechanics wrapped up with that) is probably my least favorite part of Aurora.  I'm not for something that makes short range colonization even more amazing.

 

Offline alex_brunius

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Re: Change Log for v7.2 Discussion
« Reply #220 on: March 06, 2016, 07:35:57 PM »
Well...just my 2c but the relative ease+profit of colonizing mars/luna right now (and all the mechanics wrapped up with that) is probably my least favorite part of Aurora.  I'm not for something that makes short range colonization even more amazing.

Then the game should have realistic systems in place like most kind of nations not being allowed to force move population, and civilian colony ships working by demand and supply meaning unless you supply jobs and accommodations on mars/luna no one is interested in moving there.

My point is the difficult/expensive part of the equation should not be moving people, but moving their houses and jobs  ;D
 

Offline Mor

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Re: Change Log for v7.2 Discussion
« Reply #221 on: March 06, 2016, 08:22:01 PM »
Anyways, the way to do it ( if it should be done ), is to have a second type of colony ships which load/unload many times faster and has a limited range of 1 or a few days travel time above which it won't be used (for civilian runs).

Once colonization effort and space industry advanced enough, such shuttles should be a mundane thing. However, if we start simulating every shuttle the game will grind to a halt. We already upped the size of civilian designs and added other means to restrict them. So, unless you want to abstract this, you'd have to imagine that such things are handled by civs and those colony ships, represent colony fleets (I do something similar with factory -> industry).

EDIT:
With that in-mind, does the ability to track each civilian ship add anything to your gameplay? What if they were replaced with trade-lines? performance wise  it would be better, economically it should be at least the same, as the only time you'd actually generated civics is if you or an enemy threatens the tradeline (based its prosperity, and who\what runs on it).. Although that transition might not be simple to implement with turns ..
« Last Edit: March 06, 2016, 08:31:49 PM by Mor »
 

Offline bean

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Re: Change Log for v7.2 Discussion
« Reply #222 on: March 06, 2016, 10:20:56 PM »
5000km/s*18 hours = 324 million km, gets you a little bit further then "Earth-moon runs only", doesn't it?
5000 km/s is quite fast for the sort of early-game situations where you're going to be looking at short-range colonization.  In the sort of case where you're seriously colonizing Mars (as opposed to doing it for free money), it's going to be days away. 

Quote
It would also be much cheaper and give you much greater capacity over shorter colony runs + require no extra tech research. ( which is the main reasons to implement something like this ).
I will agree that it might be nice for Conventional starts to have something that's between the Luxury Passenger module and the Cryo module.

Quote
For example in the current fiction in Colonial Wars just mass evacuating everyone from Earth to for example Mars could be an option to consider if this kind of modules were available.
Infrastructure would bottleneck that very quickly.  Actually, you'd be better off shipping 25 million to Mars, then taking the infrastructure the lines haul there back to Earth. 

Quote
Lack of capacity/loading times isn't really a realistic argument against this either IMO seeing how we have airports with our non TN tech today that handles 50-100 million PAX per year = an entire sizable Aurora colony.
A big airliner carries ~400 people.  An Aurora cryo module starts at 10,000.  I can't see a ship with less than, say, 40,000 being efficient.  So that's 100 times the size of an airliner, which takes at least half an hour to load and unload.  TN tech isn't really going to help without adding lots of complexity.  Sure, we could divide up into ~400 passenger sections, but this is where the square-cube law bites you.  I can't see getting good access to more than about 4 wide-body equivalents on a section, maybe 6 at the outside.  Past that, you're going to start interfering with each other.  So either it has to be 18 times as long as an airliner and only 3 times as wide (which is absurdly skinny), or you can't unload at airliner speeds, or you can't keep it as simple as you want it to be. 
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Offline Mor

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Re: Change Log for v7.2 Discussion
« Reply #223 on: March 07, 2016, 12:28:37 AM »
An Aurora cryo module starts at 10,000.  I can't see a ship with less than, say, 40,000 being efficient. [/b]

Numbers from the hat! There is no logical reason for that on several minutes up to half day commercial trips, even within the game rules that would be excessive.  The real reason is the game focus on military aspects, hence there is no way to enforce "cargo expiration", and those Cryo components average use is much longer than that.
 

Offline drejr

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Re: Change Log for v7.2 Discussion
« Reply #224 on: March 07, 2016, 01:53:48 AM »
Maybe the passengers just sit unfrozen in their cryo coffins for short trips.