Question on Troop Transports

[Lunaticus (OP)]

Hi!
I am quite new to this fantastic game and enjoying it thoroughly.  Took me three tries to understand the basics but now after digging through the forum and wiki I am finally off and away colonizing the Solar System and a litle bit beyond.  This is my first post and I just want to say many thanks to Steve for this great & outstanding game.  Still looking forward to my first combat encounter. . .
Got one question where I would be very thankful for some advice by the experts after not having found much by searching:
I wanted to transport some Engineering Brigades around to help building stuff (and to explore how this works).  I found out that my first attempt at a troop transport for this task was too small to fit a whole Brigade so I designed a larger one.  However I was really unsure on whether my troop transport should be a civilian ship or a military design? As with the resized larger Troop Transport Bays the Transport would be large anyway I thought it would be far more efficient to design it with civilian engines, avoiding maintenance troubles and also aligning much better with my shipyards' capabilities.  However all Troop Transport designs I found where military designs.  So am I missing something? Any advice appreciated.

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Baltimore Mk 2 class Troop Transport    18,000 tons     148 Crew     548.6 BP      TCS 360  TH 472  EM 0
1311 km/s     Armour 3-61     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
Maint Capacity 19 MSP    Max Repair 40 MSP
Troop Capacity: 5 Battalions   

Ion Engine E0.88 (3)    Power 157.5    Fuel Use 8.8%    Signature 157.5    Armour 0    Exp 1%
Fuel Capacity 50,000 Litres    Range 56.8 billion km   (501 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes


[UnLimiTeD]

There difference you found there is the one between a troop transport and a dropship.
Troop transports are regularly civilian, due to their high size, and essentially you can take your average freighter and convert it to a Troop transport.
They will load and unload very slowly, so I recommend putting cargo Handling on them.

As for Combat zones, a CiWS and extra armor will protect it well, 3 is actually very good for a non-combat ship.
However, if you want to board ships or Assault Planets, you might need a dropship, which is a military design because of the much smaller drop modules.
This is the point where Cargohandling will become crucial, and given the size of your smeg, extra handling modules won't hurt it too much.

[Brian Neumann]

Another thing to consider when building your troop transports is to have the capacity for 6 battalions on your normal size transports.  This lets you include a division hq or a replacement unit with each brigade.  Also while it is probably a bug the engineer brigades can be grouped with a brigade hq.  They should really be placed directly under the division hq but that is not how it works currently.  So for now you could have a engineer brigade with a hq in addition in that 6th space.

To protect your troops in a combat situation make sure you have plenty of armour.  5-6 points will take a lot of damage to get through from missiles, or pretty much anything except lasers (20cm plus at short range) or mesons.  Toss in a few ciws systems and it will be a very tough target for a missile attack.  (This is mostly because of how many columns of armour your ship will have.  If you need a minimum of 2 hits on top of each other and there are 60-70 columns you can see how hard it will be to penetrate the armour.)

Brian