I've been playing Aurora for a few days (very nice, btw, I like it
), and I'm trying to get my first really serious game going. Loosely, the plan is to build a small exploration fleet (combined Geo / Grav Survey Ship, Jump Tender, Tanker) with no guns, no sensors, and hope like hell I don't jump straight into someones homeworld, a small defense fleet for Sol (one FAC Tender with a 6 ship flotilla. FACs have small Mesons, Tender will be a comparative monster with some missile capacity, a couple of small Gauss turrets and a CIWS, a decent search sensor, and a decent PD sensor) and a PDC backing it up.
Except I've never built a PDC before, and I don't have a good feel for what one should look like. I'm going to build a couple of fairly big, heavy twin Meson turrets for PD (and reuse the FC from the FAC), and probably some missiles, at least AMMs. What kind of sensor setup do I need though? I have a 10 HS thermal in research, but I'm not sure it's going to be big enough for this (it's slated for a class of scouts to watch the JPs, when I find them).
I guess I'll need a big active sensor too, but how big is big? The game will let you design humungous ones if you want, but I'd like to build this thing inside the first decade. I'm thinking a res of 80, to pick up 4000+ tons vessels. Anything smaller than that, I'm not too worried about, since it's unlikely to be armed. A size 20 sensor, would apparently give me 171m km range against 4000 ton targets, but I'm wondering if that's enough. It's a long way to walk, but missiles are fast. . .
I will at some point slap a couple of lasers on there too, although I seem to recall seeing something about lasers losing effectiveness in atmosphere. Should I rethink that one too, perhaps?
Also, what does a PDC barracks actually do? Do I need one? More?
It'll be a couple of game years before I'm in a position to build this thing anyway, but it'd be useful to know what bits to build for it, as I think that should shorten the final build time