I will post some ship designs from the new game. my survey ships are large yes. and mulitpurpose so i did not require different
ships to do geo and grav surveys yet hopefully still survive. they use commercial high quality engines (magneto plasma) but are
only about 1400kps because they usually require long times surveying systems i found (at least to me).
What is the range on your survey ships?
The big problem with your survey ships being that large is the NPRs can see the ship from much farther away so its hard to be stealthy. I will add my voice into the chorus of saying survey ships should be small, fast, and cheap. The smaller they are the smaller their EM and Thermal signatures are going to be and therefore harder for NPRs to find. Fast allows them to be hard to hit, earlier you used the following example "read my lips. 2000kps or 4000kps vs 21300kps missile. if i have a Barrett 50cal sniper rifle and your driving away in a Lamborghini or a Subaru it will make little difference don't you think? You may get one more blink in if your in the Lamborghini but its a waste of money." and in real life that is absolutely true. In Aurora, especially with the speeds we are talking about, its simply not true. Keep in mind a ship going 4,000 kilometers per second will go twice as far in a second as a ship going 2,000 kilometers per second and that 2,000 kilometer difference can be enough to cause the missile to miss even though its going over 5 times faster. Going back to your example a Barrett 50 cal doesn't go 5 times faster than a Lamborghini, it goes closer to the order of hundreds or thousands of times faster. Faster ships will stay in a potentially hostile system for less time, have a better chance to escape if found, and the speed WILL up its survivability.
my frigates had 4 size9 launchers and i thought were well armed. the missles worked quite well and hit continually.
Your missiles are too large. Use sizes 4-6, not only will that give you another missile or two, BUT more importantly as far as sensors go size 6 or smaller is resolution 1 whereas higher than 6 is seen at higher resolutions, which means they will be seen at larger distances.
i built purpose built smaller ships but found the game too boring with many dinky fleets going too and fro. I built 3/3 naval/commercial yards with up to 4 bays each and built 4 ship survey/warship squadrons and sent them in 4 ship groups to survey or fight with a tanker/collier in reserve. my warships had 3900kps speed which although not 4000k (tongue in cheek) I thought was fast enough looking thru posts.
Please expand on this. I would like to hear more about every part of this, why smaller ships were too boring, what your squadrons actually looked like, etc.
Remember I have only been exploring other systems for 3 years.
This confuses me greatly. You are 43 years into your game but only exploring for 3? What were you doing for the first 40? Did you do a conventional start? Did you do a TN start and just researched for 40 years?
I built up a powerful economic base for my empire based basically on only 2 mining centers in Sol (that were fantastically good) with up to 100 mines on each and plenty of Civ mines. built up a steady supply of labs from a starting 9 (my only cheat over the 5 in a basic game) to 40 in 35 years game time with high research rates and ship building rates.
You have no other colonies? Just two mining colonies? And are 40 years into the game? I would recommend more, at lot more.
My complaint was that in a really basic starting game in Aurora does require a number of years of research to get decent techs and not simply rush to jump drives and let in the bad guys right away. I was very careful to build powerful drives/sensors/missiles/beams on powerful ships. I thought a 16,000 ton ship is dinky! If you need 100000 tons for a space station in this game (due to the recreation center) then 16k ships are small to me.
Wait, hold the phone. Did you use any of your starting research points on giving yourself SMed research? That is a pretty basic part of the game. Also recreation centers are a no go. Don't use them. They don't work right.
I imagine i will learn more as i go along but it appears to take about 12 hours of playing to get to the point where you can start doing decent things in the game. Most is building an economy that won't collapse because you forgot to watch your minerals.
I have been playing for several (real) years now and that seems glacially slow to me.
I suppose its just me and old sci fi books but a decent crusier should be alot bigger than 16,000 tons. A corvette system protector of about 9000 maybe but I will see more later on. Heck, a decent small carrier is about 28,000 tons by my estimates so far. Too much WW2 history for me I suppose!
There are two factions on this forum when it comes to ship size, I lean toward the smaller size camp and my battlecruisers are 8,00-16,000 tons. To me a battleship is 15,000-20,000 tons. What you are calling a corvette is larger than most of my heavy cruisers and bigger than some battlecruisers. 28,000 tons is right in the range of my fleet carriers, my escort or pocket carriers are generally around 10,000-15,000 tons. For the faction of small ship sizes mine are on the large size to boot. The major plus about smaller ships is the cost and time to build is much lower, also the ships have smaller cross sections and are generally harder to find than large ships.
Now there is also a faction on the forum that goes the other way, sometimes all the way up to 100,000+ tons, so be aware that such a philosophy does exist here but most of the people who will talk to you on these things are part of the smaller size faction. (Also side note, faction may be the wrong word because that suggests a more split and dogmatic stance than you will actually find, but it is a differing of opinion)
Well, started the new game. Have 2 scientists only. 1 Bio and 1 Sensor specialist. As Bones would say...oh, joy.
Have fun with that, but if you want to up your chances of getting more soon, build more military academies. That will up the chance of getting officers of any and all kinds.