Author Topic: Orbital Habitat Civilian Designs?  (Read 8875 times)

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Offline linkxsc (OP)

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Orbital Habitat Civilian Designs?
« on: October 05, 2014, 11:32:46 PM »
Just been having some odd thoughts though since I haven't messed with orbital habitats yet.


If you built a habitat, that included a couple dozen terraforming modules, and a recreation module. Flew it to the planet, sent a colonizer to load it with people, drop a couple factories/automines on the planet, and had the terraformers go to work. How feasible is this. It does save on the effort of building a crazy big shipyard to build it in, since it could conceivably be built by construction factories on a planet. (Especially since the craft can and would probably exceed 500kt)

Also another thought comes up, of loading a habitat with a number of cryo transport modules, and having it carry its own colonists along with itself to its destination (and a cargo hold packing whatever facilities they are intending on using)

Last, can you do armed habitat ships? I remember reading about a guy who was doing some warhammer 40k based ships in the order of 500k-2000k. And with sticking a habitat and a recreation mod on them, one could possibly skip over using shipyards to build their fleet, and they could setup at any planet for a few months, and let the recreation module cut down their morale timer.
 

Offline Jorgen_CAB

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Re: Orbital Habitat Civilian Designs?
« Reply #1 on: October 06, 2014, 05:35:53 AM »
You can't put military weapons on anything without it becoming a military platform that will be in need of maintenance. Having a 500.000kt station in need of maintenance facilities will be a hard thing to solve.

If you want military grade weaponry (CIWS can be used on commercial ships/stations) you will need to build a separate station and keep it in the same group and just RP that they are connected into a hub or something. If you have enough maintenance facilities on the main station to care for those weapon platforms you will essentially get a self servicing station.

From a pure mechanical point of view the Recreation facility is not needed if you have a habitat. The recreation facility is meant to service as a smaller hub for replacing or entertain crew on shore leave in remote places. An orbital habitat is large enough to perform that same function. You might include it for RP sake, but I think it is easy enough to imagine a habitat being able to perform the same function given its size.

Lets say you build a huge Habitat that can take 1.000.000 people (20 habitats), perhaps 10 terraform modules and enough maintenance to at least service a destroyer class ship... say 10.000t or so. You can now use the station as a giant naval and colony hub with factories and all. You can include weapon station at up to 10.000t size which is pretty huge when you need no engines. It's going to be expensive but pretty impressive if you can pull it off.  ;)
 

Offline linkxsc (OP)

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Re: Orbital Habitat Civilian Designs?
« Reply #2 on: October 06, 2014, 09:33:43 AM »
What about that colonization business? I know you can't fly a habitat with people in it to a destination, but can 1 cryocolonize itself?

Also, how does the habitat's inhabitants account for the agriculture/service/manufacturing portions.

I know that above colony cost ~5, its basically worthless because you'll require too many agriculture workers, and your manufacturing sector will be nonexistant. (Hence the big habitat ships with a solid portion of terrafoming capability to start chipping away at the colony cost.)
 

Offline JacenHan

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Re: Orbital Habitat Civilian Designs?
« Reply #3 on: October 06, 2014, 09:59:27 AM »
For habitats, almost all of the population works in manufacturing, ignoring colony cost. That's the main reason to use habitats: colonizing high-cost worlds that infrastructure wouldn't cut it on.

I'm pretty sure a habitat can hold colonists in cryogenic storage for travel. Also, I believe that 10,000 colonists serves the same function as a recreation module, so you shouldn't need one in your habitat.

Edit: Here's a hypothetical design I just drew up:
Code: [Select]
Terra Nova class Colony Ship    8,256,650 tons     11360 Crew     70435.4 BP      TCS 165133  TH 40000  EM 0
242 km/s     Armour 1-3638     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
MSP 5    Max Repair 500 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    Spare Berths 0    
Cargo 1250000    Cryogenic Berths 500000    Habitation Capacity 1,000,000    
Terraformer: 50 module(s) producing 0.125 atm per annum
Maintenance Modules: 50 module(s) capable of supporting ships of 10000 tons

400 EP Commercial Magneto-plasma Drive (100)    Power 400    Fuel Use 4.42%    Signature 400    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 100,000,000 Litres    Range 49.3 billion km   (2356 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as an Orbital Habitat for construction purposes
Contains space for 50 regular-sized installations and 1,000,000 colonists (but only 500,000 in cryogenic storage), has 50 terraformer modules, and can support ships up to 10,000 tons in size. It's also self-propelled, although it's slow.
« Last Edit: October 06, 2014, 10:12:39 AM by JacenHan »
 

Offline Whitecold

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Re: Orbital Habitat Civilian Designs?
« Reply #4 on: October 06, 2014, 11:27:14 AM »
If you care about cost, you're vastly better off shipping colonists separately. Cryomodules are expensive. I do use orbital habitats to be able to build terraformers, mining modules and fuel harvesters with industry, saving myself the million ton yards.
 

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Re: Orbital Habitat Civilian Designs?
« Reply #5 on: July 17, 2018, 10:06:30 PM »
is there any idea for a military orbital platform? any layout
 

Offline The Forbidden

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Re: Orbital Habitat Civilian Designs?
« Reply #6 on: January 31, 2019, 09:30:23 AM »
is there any idea for a military orbital platform? any layout

There's a thread on a Super-Dreadnought made with an in-built habitat (it basically creates a colony wherever it wants shore leave, and it can be built by industry). Otherwise military orbital platforms are essentially engine-less ships, with less concern for maintenance if you're above a planet that can sustain it. That means more weapons per tonnage (as the engines take quite a bit of space) but of course it can't move on it's own (You can make it self-propelled but it'll have to be slow otherwise it'll negate it's weaponry advantage), meaning turrets and you can't dodge.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: Orbital Habitat Civilian Designs?
« Reply #7 on: January 31, 2019, 09:35:50 AM »
is there any idea for a military orbital platform? any layout

If you are building a platform with construction factories, it cannot have military components. Otherwise, it can have anything a ship can have.
 

Offline The Forbidden

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Re: Orbital Habitat Civilian Designs?
« Reply #8 on: February 01, 2019, 06:57:28 AM »
is there any idea for a military orbital platform? any layout

If you are building a platform with construction factories, it cannot have military components. Otherwise, it can have anything a ship can have.

Oh wait that exploit has been fixed in VB6 ?
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: Orbital Habitat Civilian Designs?
« Reply #9 on: February 01, 2019, 07:04:43 AM »
If you are building a platform with construction factories, it cannot have military components. Otherwise, it can have anything a ship can have.
Oh wait that exploit has been fixed in VB6 ?

It is a change in rules rather than fixing the VB6 rules:

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg106780#msg106780
 

Offline The Forbidden

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Re: Orbital Habitat Civilian Designs?
« Reply #10 on: February 01, 2019, 07:31:15 AM »
If you are building a platform with construction factories, it cannot have military components. Otherwise, it can have anything a ship can have.
Oh wait that exploit has been fixed in VB6 ?

It is a change in rules rather than fixing the VB6 rules:

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg106780#msg106780

Yes. But the change itself is in C#. It's still possible to build outrageously huge warships with habitats for fun and candy in VB6.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: Orbital Habitat Civilian Designs?
« Reply #11 on: February 01, 2019, 07:47:12 AM »
If you are building a platform with construction factories, it cannot have military components. Otherwise, it can have anything a ship can have.
Oh wait that exploit has been fixed in VB6 ?

It is a change in rules rather than fixing the VB6 rules:

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg106780#msg106780

Yes. But the change itself is in C#. It's still possible to build outrageously huge warships with habitats for fun and candy in VB6.

Yes, sorry - assumed this was a C# question :)
 

Offline The Forbidden

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Re: Orbital Habitat Civilian Designs?
« Reply #12 on: February 01, 2019, 12:19:07 PM »
If you are building a platform with construction factories, it cannot have military components. Otherwise, it can have anything a ship can have.
Oh wait that exploit has been fixed in VB6 ?

It is a change in rules rather than fixing the VB6 rules:

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg106780#msg106780

Yes. But the change itself is in C#. It's still possible to build outrageously huge warships with habitats for fun and candy in VB6.

Yes, sorry - assumed this was a C# question :)

No need to apologise, it's normal to assume that since a lot of people (including me) are constantly bombarding you with questions over C# Aurora.
 

Offline MarcAFK

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Re: Orbital Habitat Civilian Designs?
« Reply #13 on: February 01, 2019, 11:38:47 PM »
But any military ship with a habitat ends up with an unmanagable mauintenence load. Every time I've tried it just isn't useful at all.
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Offline Michael Sandy

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Re: Orbital Habitat Civilian Designs?
« Reply #14 on: February 03, 2019, 01:31:40 PM »
One solution to the maintenance load of orbital habitat monstrosities is to have cheap systems and systems that don't fail.

An orbital habitat that is mostly hangar, engineering, maintenance supplies, magazines and perhaps bulk basic railguns is going to have a lot of systems that can't fail, and a lot that are simply cheap to fix.

But that means is isn't the juggernaut of death either.  I would be concerned about aggressively using an orbital habitat in combat where it takes any damage because the Orbital Hab part is likely to fail, and because the way the check for ship destruction works, if the damage keeps attempting to apply to a destroyed system that can destroy the ship.  A ship with a giant hole in a middle is more fragile than one without it.

An orbital habitat that generally only entered missile range might be better, because it could have a huge concentration of point defense, and shields to shrug off leakers (or missiles with ECM or laser heads).  And because it won't encounter mesons, the classic Giant Killer weapon.