C# Aurora Changes Discussion

[iceball3]

Hey Steve, are you planning to permit the C# Aurora to have a toggle to "black text on Windows XP Luna" color scheme for it's UI? It's an aesthetic i very strongly associate with Aurora at this point, and one I've grown very fond of, and additionally feels a bit more readable than the aurora progress report screenshot colors we've been seeing.

[Garfunkel]

On the other side should a conventional missile - as started with in a non-tn-start and with silos - be a equivalent of today's atomic intercontinental missiles with more than 100 megaton each... so 100-200 should be plenty to destroy 98% of earths industry in a single strike and make the planet lifeless...

I think you made a little typo there, meaning to write kilotons instead of megatons. Otherwise, as Scandinavian already posted, you're badly mistaken regarding modern nukes. And while 100 ICBMs launched simultaneously in Aurora are enough to make Earth lifeless - for a short while - that isn't true in real life at all, and it's not clear from your post which case you're talking about.

[Whitecold]

Frankly, the numbers for orbital bombardment seem off. I guess the intention seems to be nukes are quick and dirty, energy is clean but requires many breakdowns.

However, if you take the 8 dmg warhead, it generates 8 dust. To do the equivalent amount of damage, you need 5 times more shots for chance to hit, 15 times more for missing attacks, 10 times more for missing subattacks (against infantry),
for a total of 750! shots which generates 37.5 dust, something like 4.5 times more.
Am I missing something, or energy weapons are just all around worse than nukes?

[Steve Walmsley]

Hey Steve, are you planning to permit the C# Aurora to have a toggle to "black text on Windows XP Luna" color scheme for it's UI? It's an aesthetic i very strongly associate with Aurora at this point, and one I've grown very fond of, and additionally feels a bit more readable than the aurora progress report screenshot colors we've been seeing.

I will add some different colour options at some point. Here are screenshots of an early attempt:

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8455.msg94287#msg94287

[Scandinavian]

Frankly, the numbers for orbital bombardment seem off. I guess the intention seems to be nukes are quick and dirty, energy is clean but requires many breakdowns.

However, if you take the 8 dmg warhead, it generates 8 dust. To do the equivalent amount of damage, you need 5 times more shots for chance to hit, 15 times more for missing attacks, 10 times more for missing subattacks (against infantry),
for a total of 750! shots which generates 37.5 dust, something like 4.5 times more.
Am I missing something, or energy weapons are just all around worse than nukes?

Energy weapons do not cause radiation, so the environmental impact is less long-term. And energy weapons can be used for ground support fire, which has much lower collateral damage per kill and which it is my understanding that missiles cannot participate in. Also, you're assuming that we're killing very basic infantry. Once the infantry's armor rating gets a few tech upgrades, the number of effective missile attacks cuts down from 15 to 7-9 (because the 1 damage attacks tend to bounce off). If you're shooting at infantry with anti-vehicle weapons or crew-served anti-infantry, the nuke's 10 sub-attacks becomes more like 2 or 3. And if you're shooting at even light vehicles with a few tech upgrades to their armor, the nuke starts kicking up more dust than the beam per actual kill.

Undirected energy weapons fire at basic riflemen should be highly use-impaired. You're blind-firing 10-50 cm lasers at largely civilian areas, hoping to hit individual soldiers. If you are going to try to kill those forces without committing ground troops, you will need to get into the genocide for fun and profit business, whether you do so with nukes or with enough direct-fire weapons that the locals will not realize they weren't actually nuked.

[Coleslaw]

So, on average, about how big is an NPR's ground army going to be? Are we talking maybe a couple dozen battalions/brigades/divisions?

[Steve Walmsley]

So, on average, about how big is an NPR's ground army going to be? Are we talking maybe a couple dozen battalions/brigades/divisions?

Potentially, fairly big.

(from another thread) The NPR in my test game is currently defending its home world with 48x turret-mounted twin 10cm lasers and 84x 25cm lasers, plus 24,000 infantry (plus supporting CAP, AT, etc.), 800 medium tanks, 800 Light AA Teams, 200 AA tanks, 360 towed artillery, etc.. The total transport size of the current home world ground forces is 555,000 tons (111 large transport bays). It has deployed formations each with 14x 25cm lasers and 8x twin turrets to two minor colony worlds, plus more supporting ground forces. It is also currently building more STO units than it has already deployed.

[Bremen]

So, on average, about how big is an NPR's ground army going to be? Are we talking maybe a couple dozen battalions/brigades/divisions?

Potentially, fairly big.

(from another thread) The NPR in my test game is currently defending its home world with 48x turret-mounted twin 10cm lasers and 84x 25cm lasers, plus 24,000 infantry (plus supporting CAP, AT, etc.), 800 medium tanks, 800 Light AA Teams, 200 AA tanks, 360 towed artillery, etc.. The total transport size of the current home world ground forces is 555,000 tons (111 large transport bays). It has deployed formations each with 14x 25cm lasers and 8x twin turrets to two minor colony worlds, plus more supporting ground forces. It is also currently building more STO units than it has already deployed.

Yeah, I don't think that's going down without a massive tech disparity or glassing it with missiles.

[Scandinavian]

So, on average, about how big is an NPR's ground army going to be? Are we talking maybe a couple dozen battalions/brigades/divisions?

Potentially, fairly big.

(from another thread) The NPR in my test game is currently defending its home world with 48x turret-mounted twin 10cm lasers and 84x 25cm lasers, plus 24,000 infantry (plus supporting CAP, AT, etc.), 800 medium tanks, 800 Light AA Teams, 200 AA tanks, 360 towed artillery, etc.. The total transport size of the current home world ground forces is 555,000 tons (111 large transport bays). It has deployed formations each with 14x 25cm lasers and 8x twin turrets to two minor colony worlds, plus more supporting ground forces. It is also currently building more STO units than it has already deployed.

Yeah, I don't think that's going down without a massive tech disparity or glassing it with missiles.

It sounds doable. Once you've eliminated their deep space fleet, you need to contend with about 200 laser beams of varying sizes. To have parity in weight of fire, you need somewhere between fifty and a hundred 5,000 ton laser destroyers. (You'll have lower to-hit chance due to terrain and fortification, but each hit will kill a STO platform, while they will need a dozen or so hits to kill one of your destroyers. So you should come out ahead, though you'll want more than the minimum number of ships to keep losses at an acceptable level.) Assuming the enemy production rate is on the order of years to double the size of their ground forces, not months, you'd need maybe 20 transports with two large troop bays each (200 thousand tons of troop lift) and a million or two tons of ground forces that you can spare for an invasion, provided their home system have local system bodies within a few days' burn that you can use as staging areas.

None of those numbers seem prima facie impossible to me. Expensive, yes, but considering that you will essentially double your empire's production capacity once this homeworld is fully integrated in your greater co-prosperity sphere, it probably should be.

[mtm84]

So the question is, how long would it take to build up such a force in the first place?

[Zincat]

So the question is, how long would it take to build up such a force in the first place?

But that is the entire point, right?

In VB6 aurora conquering planets was a non-issue. In reality, conquering a homeworlds should be extraordinarily hard. So, either you bomb the planet into nothingness, losing all infrastructure and population, or you actually gear up for a costly invasion. And note that the bombing will require a HUGE amountof missiles too, due to PD. Once again, costly.

Conquering a homeworld of some other race, with all the benefit it gives you, from the population to the infrastructure, SHOULD be a monumental task.

[Conscript Gary]

Still a pertinent question to ask- if a homeworld can produce such prodigious defenses that's fine and dandy, but how does that stack up in comparison to other military assets? If you can train and equip a hundred ground-based lasers in half the time it takes to build an orbital defense platform that carries ten, the numbers may need some tweaking.

[Steve Walmsley]

It sounds doable. Once you've eliminated their deep space fleet, you need to contend with about 200 laser beams of varying sizes. To have parity in weight of fire, you need somewhere between fifty and a hundred 5,000 ton laser destroyers. (You'll have lower to-hit chance due to terrain and fortification, but each hit will kill a STO platform, while they will need a dozen or so hits to kill one of your destroyers. So you should come out ahead, though you'll want more than the minimum number of ships to keep losses at an acceptable level.) Assuming the enemy production rate is on the order of years to double the size of their ground forces, not months, you'd need maybe 20 transports with two large troop bays each (200 thousand tons of troop lift) and a million or two tons of ground forces that you can spare for an invasion, provided their home system have local system bodies within a few days' burn that you can use as staging areas.

None of those numbers seem prima facie impossible to me. Expensive, yes, but considering that you will essentially double your empire's production capacity once this homeworld is fully integrated in your greater co-prosperity sphere, it probably should be.

Rather than fighting the STOs, I suspect it is probably easier to accept some losses to land a large invasion force that will take out the STOs on the ground. The Empire Strikes Back scenario.

[Steve Walmsley]

Still a pertinent question to ask- if a homeworld can produce such prodigious defenses that's fine and dandy, but how does that stack up in comparison to other military assets? If you can train and equip a hundred ground-based lasers in half the time it takes to build an orbital defense platform that carries ten, the numbers may need some tweaking.

There are currently six orbital bases with a total of 45 twin laser turrets (about the same as on the ground) and 87 AMM launchers. Total cost of bases was 12,000 BP + missiles. Total cost of STOs was 14,400 BP.

With current construction rates, the bases take about 2 years on average while each 'planetary defence regiment' of 14 25cm lasers, 8 twin 10cm lasers plus supporting infantry and AA will take about 7 years to build (faster if ground construction tech improves). the NPR has 12 ground construction complexes and is currently building nine new planetary defence regiments (2520 BP), one armoured regiment (1086 BP) and two infantry regiments (373 BP). The concentration on the defence regiments is because the NPR has founded quite a few colonies and wants the PDRs for garrisons, although it can create seven infantry regiments in the same time as one PDR.

[Hazard]

One of the future considerations for ground invasions will be what sort of unit you want to deploy in the first wave.

While partially dependent on the defending forces, the main issue to me appears to be whether you want to deploy in large numbers to soak incoming fire, or with much armour to shed it.