Another newbie...

[Captain_Goatse (OP)]

Hello everyone.  Another newbie here with questions:

Is there any way to extend development time for a ship? I am getting bored with all the scouts having to come back home every three months. . .

Speaking of scouting, I have scouted a good part of the inner solar system.  AFAIK the idea is to place a mass driver and about ten automated mines on every body with something solid available.  Right?

Colonization: the only place that looks even remotely colonizable is Mars, and I have sent 200 infrastructure and half a million colonists in there, even if there are no minerals.  I want to send some scouts to the other systems, but I have no clue on how to use the jumpdrive.  Can anyone help?

My cargo ships are like that:

Et Nunc Et Semper class Freighter    31650 tons     95 Crew     321. 4 BP      TCS 633  TH 320  EM 0
505 km/s     Armour 1-89     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control 1     PPV 0
Maintenance Capacity 6 MSP
Cargo 25000   Spare Berths 3    Cargo Handling Multiplier 20   

80 EP Commercial Nuclear Pulse Engine (4)    Power 80    Fuel Use 7. 59%    Armour 0    Exp 4%
Fuel Capacity 250 000 Litres    Range 18. 7 billion km   (428 days at full power)


This ship is classed as a commercial vessel for maintenance purposes


They take one year to build and run through the solar system quite nicely.  Can you suggest a better design, or do you think that they are fine just like this?

Sorium Miners.  I guess that Sorium will become scarce as soon as I start building Dreadnoughts.  How can I use the Sorium miner module?

Jumpdrive and Jumpgate.  I guess that sending a jumpdrive scout first is the safest idea, followed by a jumpgate constructor.  Can somebody tell me how to do that, maybe explaining the difference between small and large jumpgate modules? One takes 180 days to build, the other 360 days. . .


I wish to thank the makers of this game.  Aurora has already tickled my OCD and autism disorders, and I still have not managed to look at the military side!

[Erik L]

Your questions have answers already on the boards

Mission life. Upper left corner is a box that has a 3 in it. That is the number of months your ship can be deployed. You can change that number. I don't recall the exact wording on the label.

The mass driver is one option. Another is frequent cargo ship runs.

Did you do a grav survey of your system? If you have, you should have at least 1 jump point. Navigate to it and execute a jump order. Then survey the next system. Rinse. Repeat.

Other than being painfully slow, it's a decent entry-level freighter.

Build a ship, add a sorium harvester module. Make sure you have some spare room in your tanks. Park at a gas giant with sorium. Harvest the glorious fuel.

Jumpgates... They work for the bad guys too. Use with caution. The time to build is the time for the module to build a gate.

[Erik L]

This should also be in the Academy.

[83athom]

Can somebody tell me how to do that, maybe explaining the difference between small and large jumpgate modules? One takes 180 days to build, the other 360 days. . .

The small one builds in 360 days and is 25k tons. The future modules are 50k tons but build much faster.

[Captain_Goatse (OP)]

Thanks for the answers!

So, what do you mean with "painfully slow"? What's a decent speed for a cargo, for you?

Can you elaborate on the jumpdrive? Should I add a jumpdrive to every ship that must use  the jump point? Can I make a jump ship to carry the scouts over the jump? I've seen that the smaller jumpdrives on the research project are "self jump only". . .

I will try to build a bigger geoscout with more dev time and the smaller jumpdrive, send it on the other side and hope.  Wish me luck. . .

BTW, can somebody explain to me the matter with civilian supply and demand contract? I have no clue. . .

[Erik L]

Thanks for the answers!

So, what do you mean with "painfully slow"? What's a decent speed for a cargo, for you?

Can you elaborate on the jumpdrive? Should I add a jumpdrive to every ship that must use  the jump point? Can I make a jump ship to carry the scouts over the jump? I've seen that the smaller jumpdrives on the research project are "self jump only". . .

I will try to build a bigger geoscout with more dev time and the smaller jumpdrive, send it on the other side and hope.  Wish me luck. . .

BTW, can somebody explain to me the matter with civilian supply and demand contract? I have no clue. . .

You might check the wiki for some example ships, or the Bureau of Ship Design forum.

Ships you expect to operate singly should have a jump drive. Other ships you can build a dedicated jump tender. Look at the Squadron Size attribute of the Jump Drive. That's how many ships it may ferry (including itself). Now as a jump takes no time, you can jump a fleet of 10 ships with 1 tender rated at 3 ships per jump. The issue comes up when you want to combat jump to get as many ships as you can on the other side of the JP as fast as you can. Then you need more tenders. The self-only engines are just that. They can only ferry themselves.

There is an option, bottom center of the game setup that lets the game generate the ships for you. You might start a game with that enabled to see how the ships are built. NOTE: These are not the most effective ships. And you will get some weird things, but it is a good place to see how things are put together.

Another thing to do is read some of the fiction. Most of them have ship designs for that particular game.

[83athom]

So, what do you mean with "painfully slow"? What's a decent speed for a cargo, for you?

Around 2000km/s

Can you elaborate on the jumpdrive? Should I add a jumpdrive to every ship that must use  the jump point? Can I make a jump ship to carry the scouts over the jump? I've seen that the smaller jumpdrives on the research project are "self jump only". . .

It depends on your doctrine and how you want your ships to be able to jump. Either way works fine, just make sure the ship is matched to the jump drive (ie Military drives for military ships). You can research smaller drives that aren't self-jump.

BTW, can somebody explain to me the matter with civilian supply and demand contract? I have no clue. . .

A planet "supplies" a building/material and gives it to a planet that "demands" it by means of civilian shipping lines. They start up after you have colonists on a second colony.

[JacenHan]

Thanks for the answers!

So, what do you mean with "painfully slow"? What's a decent speed for a cargo, for you?

Can you elaborate on the jumpdrive? Should I add a jumpdrive to every ship that must use  the jump point? Can I make a jump ship to carry the scouts over the jump? I've seen that the smaller jumpdrives on the research project are "self jump only". . .

I will try to build a bigger geoscout with more dev time and the smaller jumpdrive, send it on the other side and hope.  Wish me luck. . .

BTW, can somebody explain to me the matter with civilian supply and demand contract? I have no clue. . .

I generally set cargo ship speed at half the "standard speed" of whatever engines I'm using. "Standard speed" is the speed of a ship with 25% space dedicated to engines without a changed power modifier. For nuclear pulse the standard speed would be 2000 km/s, so cargo ships would be about 1000 km/s.

A ship with a jump drive can use it's jump drive to send any other ship that is the same or smaller size than itself through a jump point. Putting jump drives on every ship is expensive, so it's recommended to put them only on ships you need to to constantly go through jump points without support (such as survery ships). For other ships, you might consider building a specialized jump ship to ferry them through jump points.

[Panopticon]

Bah, as with so many things in Aurora it is a matter of taste, I usually make bare bones cargo ships and at NP tech they don't go much faster than your 500kps, If they are going really long distances you might want to either make faster ones or have a ton in transit all the time, but for anything Jupiter and closer to Earth I wouldn't bother, and usually if they are staying in Sol I let them be slow, there is rarely an emergency need for cargo in the home system.

[MarcAFK]

At it's most extreme on a conventional start you could be using 65 km/s freighters for colonising mars like I am.

[Captain_Goatse (OP)]

Ok, thanks everybody for the answers.  About the cargo, it looks like I skimped too much on the engines research project and I ended up with a cheap-ass FIAT nuclear engine.  Well, time to restart!

[83athom]

I have a quick question and a n00b question page would fit as I don't really want to make a new topic on it. Can a wreck be towed? What I want to do is like have a salvager base where wrecks are towed too, however I don't know if wrecks can be towed and I couldn't find the answer anywhere (here or wiki).
Also a quick side question thing. Do you think someone should make a dedicated "n00b/quick question" page here for simple things that really don't warrant their own page and where simple questions can be found easily there instead of creating a new topic page that asks the same question over and over? (I might make it myself but....  )

[Erik L]

I have a quick question and a n00b question page would fit as I don't really want to make a new topic on it. Can a wreck be towed? What I want to do is like have a salvager base where wrecks are towed too, however I don't know if wrecks can be towed and I couldn't find the answer anywhere (here or wiki).
Also a quick side question thing. Do you think someone should make a dedicated "n00b/quick question" page here for simple things that really don't warrant their own page and where simple questions can be found easily there instead of creating a new topic page that asks the same question over and over? (I might make it myself but....  )

Make a page on the wiki for it

[Paul M]

One comment on "painfully slow"...this is usually seen from the perspective of advanced antimatter engines on ships with all the other bells and whistles.  A low tech start will tend to produce ships that are considerably slower that 1000 km/s for freighters.  The NCC's freighters are currently moving at 331 km/s and that is 50% improvement over the classes starting velocity.  The limit is between your yards and your engines.  Unless you can afford to throw a lot of mass at the engines when you are talking about 2 or 3 engines per ship you have real problem pushing your velocity over 1000 km/s.

The NCC's freighters have  2 year endurance because it used to take 1 year to get from Earth to Faewald.  With a lot of the tech changes that have gone on the overall speed of a lot of survey and merchantile shipping has gone up but unless you are using large hulls the space requirements of payload impose a strong limit on your speed.  From my point of view that freighter is quite speedy...it is equal to the latest NCC design in terms of size (though the NCC's newest freighters move at a whopping 6xx Km/s) and faster than the heavy lift groups (461 km/s).

[MarcAFK]

I usually design extremely high powered engines at lower tech levels, by ION or magneto-pulse however I run into a serious fuel shortage and start to develop far more efficient engines. For instance my current freighters wouldn't be considered fuel hogs at a mere 12% fuel use, however they are 30% engine, which is a luxury I can't really afford. Before the crash refinery building and fuel production research program this freighter alone would consume 5 months fuel production just filling it's tanks.

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# Space X - Wyvern class Freighter 116650 tons     511 Crew     1659.5 BP      TCS 2333  TH 2800  EM 0
1200 km/s     Armour 1-212     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control 1     PPV 0
Maintenance Capacity 9 MSP
Cargo 75000   Spare Berths 7    Cargo Handling Multiplier 75   

25 HS 100 EP Commercial Nuclear Pulse Engine (28)    Power 100    Fuel Use 11.93%    Armour 0    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 2,180,000 Litres    Range 28.2 billion km   (271 days at full power)


This ship is classed as a commercial vessel for maintenance purposesThe true fuel hogs however are the corvettes with 2 dozen 1 HS 245% fuel use engines. Poor design maybe however they are a product of a more optimistic time when earth had fuel reserves in the tens of millions.