Semi-Official 7.x Suggestion Thread

[TheDeadlyShoe]

if you're talking about in the Class Design screen, you can sort by hull name, size, or cost as well as the default alphabetical.

radio buttons on the bottom rite

Another trick is to use prefixes.  For a while I would name all civilian ships using X Y or Z prefixes, like the "X200 Hauler"

[db48x]

if you're talking about in the Class Design screen, you can sort by hull name, size, or cost as well as the default alphabetical.

radio buttons on the bottom rite

Another trick is to use prefixes.  For a while I would name all civilian ships using X Y or Z prefixes, like the "X200 Hauler"

True. I do occasionally use these, but it'd be more helpful to see at a glance which ships are in which class. When you want to compare all the ships in a class you can sort by class name, but then you still probably have to hunt around in the list to find them.

[Havan_IronOak]

Three suggestions regarding colonies...

1) The order in which "Other Colonies" are listed appears to be kinda random. Couldn't this be alphabetical or some other order that makes sense?

2) Abandoning Colonies requires a double confirmation. I appreciate that to a degree but couldn't the logic check to see if anything is in danger of being abandoned and then ask only if the check turned up anything of value?

I recently tested the results of geo-survey teams and left the colonies on my list as a way to keep track of just how many I'd done.
BTW... the results returned were 8 increases for 400 surveys.
I'm now abandoning the colonies that are complete dry wells and I've only myself to blame for the multiple confirms on deletes.
But I'm also seeing that the bottom 5 colonies on the list seem to change in a weird way when I abandon one.
You can see this thread for details
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8309.msg86902#msg86902

3) How about a Sg, Mg  or even a different single value in the first column of the System Overview (F9) in order to make it easy to keep track of which bodies have had ground based surveys?

[TMaekler]

In SM Mode it is not possible to just unsurvey a single system body, only the whole star system. Would love to see the single object option as well 

[iceball3]

I've seen some suggestions people have made about commercial ships holding military space and a lot of people contesting it and whatnot, so I'll toss in some two-cents:
How about a ship module that is individually design-able, considered a "commercial" design, but is designed from Class-design and researched? Call it a Mission-module, and have it work like such;

-A mission module can consist of military weaponry, power plants, etc, though it cannot hold any engines, shields, armor, crew quarters, spinally mounted weaponry, or many large civilian components (cargo holds, orbital habitats, etc). It's components are considered "internal" to the parent ship.

-A portion of the module's tonnage (either static based on tech level, or a percentage) is "attachement tonnage", just overhead for this strange piece of hardware.

-A mission module has to be assigned it's own engineering spaces separate from the parent ship, as well as crew and the likes. It uses the parent ship's deployment time and shares maintenance supplies with such, but has it's own isolated maintenance clock and component failures, much like a naval ship. The failures do not affect the commercial components, though.

-A mission module can be independently targeted from it's parent ship, and sensor data will report it's tonnage within the ship, while still being detectable at the same active range bands of the overall ship. All damage is applied to the parent ship's armor, then either randomly or specifically to the module, depending on whether the whole ship or just the module was targeted. All internal explosions propagate randomly and indiscriminately between the two.

-A mission module has it's own independent "destroy condition" similar to how larger ships roll for destruction. When a mission module is destroyed, all of it's internal components are considered destroyed, though the commercial ship stays intact for this particular check. If damage is dealt to a destroyed mission module internal-component, it rerolls to another random component in the module or the entire ship, depending on targeting. If the whole module is destroyed when it's components are checked, the entire ship is rolled instead. The HTK "20 failed rolls" ship death check will still apply if the module is hit by a ship-encompassing roll.


Anyhow, that's all the ideas I have for now. Wouldn't say they're great, but at least interesting. What do you think, Steve?

[TheDeadlyShoe]

you can already do that with tractor beams ^____^

[iceball3]

you can already do that with tractor beams ^____^

Oof, I was worried they'd seem a bit similar!
I guess the main difference I was looking for was stuff not getting knocked off the parent ship when the tractor was broken. That and shared armor. I do suppose they are a bit awfully similar though... Might be easier to just implement a "sturdy" tractor beam that is larger but can take more abuse before tractor is broken.

[Sheb]

Actually, that's a nice idea: allow tractor beam to be armoured like magazines can be.

[bean]

When you think about it carefully, mines don't make much sense.  Why is it that a mine on a world with two Accessibility 1 minerals produces twice as much overall as a mine on a world with one Accessibility 1 mineral?  If each mine represents a certain amount of mining equipment, then it should be able to extract a certain amount of Accessibility 1 minerals over a given time period, regardless of how many individual minerals are involved.
To give the smallest change from the current system, we can assign each mine 11 'points'.  These points are to be split evenly between each mineral on a body, and the mining rate is equal to the current one, multiplied by how many points are assigned to each mineral.  This would make mining bodies with one or two minerals much more economical.  If this seems like it would solve the mineral shortage problems too well, set the rate as the square root of points assigned instead. 

[drejr]

NPRs should build escort fighters or at the very least equip their fighters with sensors so fighter vs. fighter combat isn't a complete turkey shoot.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

When you think about it carefully, mines don't make much sense.  Why is it that a mine on a world with two Accessibility 1 minerals produces twice as much overall as a mine on a world with one Accessibility 1 mineral?

i think its to avoid a situation where say a planet with 1.0 duranium and 1.0 neutronium is worse for producing Duranium than a 0.7 Duranium planet....  without having to fiddle with assigning mines to specific resources.

[bean]

i think its to avoid a situation where say a planet with 1.0 duranium and 1.0 neutronium is worse for producing Duranium than a 0.7 Duranium planet....  without having to fiddle with assigning mines to specific resources.

But why shouldn't it work that way?  You're also getting neutronium in that case.  It's not even that weird.  For the sake of simplicity, the mine expends equal effort on all resources on the body, which is less weird than the current situation, where the mine appears to be able to clone itself if and only if there are other minerals about.  Or maybe each mineral has its own special extraction equipment/process, and there's no crossover between them.  But in that case, why does the number of workers stay the same regardless of the number of minerals being produced?  I can't come up with a good in-universe explanation for the current mine rules.
Note that in no circumstance does this proposed rule make the amount of minerals being produced go down relative to the current rules.  And you're getting more total minerals from each mine on the planet with higher accessibility.  If Duranium is all you're after, then it looks a tiny bit weird, but less so than the current situation.

[iceball3]

But why shouldn't it work that way?  You're also getting neutronium in that case.  It's not even that weird.  For the sake of simplicity, the mine expends equal effort on all resources on the body, which is less weird than the current situation, where the mine appears to be able to clone itself if and only if there are other minerals about.  Or maybe each mineral has its own special extraction equipment/process, and there's no crossover between them.  But in that case, why does the number of workers stay the same regardless of the number of minerals being produced?  I can't come up with a good in-universe explanation for the current mine rules.
Note that in no circumstance does this proposed rule make the amount of minerals being produced go down relative to the current rules.  And you're getting more total minerals from each mine on the planet with higher accessibility.  If Duranium is all you're after, then it looks a tiny bit weird, but less so than the current situation.

Maybe it could be assumed that the material in which you're extracting trans-newtonian materials is all the same stuff, and the main differences between the mineral stores of planets is what ratio of this strata actually contains the minerals, on top of difficulty in accessing due to depth, etc. So the same amount of mines will harvest the same amount of material, but the percentage of that material being useful depends on how much of it is the trans newtonian stuff, capped out at the extreme instance a planet having all accessibility: 1 minerals available.

[bean]

Maybe it could be assumed that the material in which you're extracting trans-newtonian materials is all the same stuff, and the main differences between the mineral stores of planets is what ratio of this strata actually contains the minerals, on top of difficulty in accessing due to depth, etc. So the same amount of mines will harvest the same amount of material, but the percentage of that material being useful depends on how much of it is the trans newtonian stuff, capped out at the extreme instance a planet having all accessibility: 1 minerals available.

I did think about that, but even that's not very logical.  If we assume that there's a giant cylinder of TN minerals that they eat from the top down, why the cap of accessibility 1?  That means the maximum concentration possible for any mineral is at most 9%, or at least 9% of the maximum possible concentration of TN minerals.  Why?  It makes very little physical sense, and even less when you consider how minerals run out at different rates.  If I have 100,000 tons of Accessibility 1 Gallicite and 10,000,000 tons of Accessibility 0.5 Duranium, it's awfully convenient that all of the Gallicite is concentrated in the top 0.5% of the column that's mostly Duranium.  If some sort of overall accessibility cap was implemented, and accessibility either couldn't sum to greater than 1 or could go above 1 and had to sum to less than 11, I would have less problem with this.  Also, I'm pretty sure this explanation doesn't resemble actual geology. 

[Nyvis]

I would really like to see a "wait until shore leave is completed" order. Right now, sending my explorer ships back for shore leave means either removing their auto-order or being interrupted every time, wait for shore leave to finish, and then remember to put the order back on. It would be very helpful to have an order making them stay here until morale is back up.