engine-less ships

[Michael Sandy (OP)]

So an outgrowth of the discussion of commercial engined military ships, is how about ships with no engines at all, relying on tugs?

You don't have to upgrade your freighters or colony ships or other commercial ships, just the tugs.  A downside is that if the civilian shipyards copy your designs, they will probably not be efficient in matching tugs to engineless ships.

It is probably best to only go with engineless designs for ship classes that have to be stationary for a long time, (salvagers and sorium harvesters) or ships that you generally don't use that much but want to have available like troop transports.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

'multi-segment ships' work fine, but most people find that its wayyyy too much micro...

[Iranon]

Ahh, the memories... my first serious fleet in Aurora was tractor-based.

I'm very happy with the efficiency, and micro wouldn't be an issue if the game was a little nicer to the concept - I'd be perfectly happy to semi-permanently have a pod carted around by a tugboat. It would in fact save micro... box launcher pods could be given a mission life of decades, then scrapped, the tugs last forever.

The one glaring problem with this is that tractor chains break whenever there's a malfunction on either ship, and that gets bloody annoying in short order.

[Michael Sandy (OP)]

I was considering making a railgun system defense ship.  My philosophy on system defense ships is that they are committed to defending a particular system, and are always deployed around a fleet base capable of maintaining them.  So they cheap out on deployment time and maintenance, and are 40-50% hull space in boosted size 50 engines, so 5-6,000 tons for 1 engine, or 10-12,000 ton for 2 engine ships.

I know there is a tendency to deploy every ship in all or nothing fights, and an extra 10% of fighting power can make the difference between winning and losing, but from an RP and historical perspective I find that difficult to do.

[linkxsc]

Tractor fleets work. Ive messed with them.

Thing to note, they only work on fairly large ships. I wouldnt suggest going for a combined 10kt ship as the tractor is a sizeable portion of the ship.

[Michael Sandy (OP)]

Yeah, I did the math.  You want engines at least 10x the mass of the tractor, preferably 20.

Below a certain size, you want hangars to move ships with zero or boosted engines, and above a certain other size, you want tractors.

Something I had been thinking about:
Tugs that are not towing a ship or base are very fast.  It is possible that if a ship attacked a tug-freight pod combo, the tug would be able to get away, where a freighter never would.  On the other hand, if there are a lot of completely stationary civilian ships around, boarding pods can be much more effective against them.

And I hesitate to consider the morale implications of serving on an engine-less freighter, knowing the tug will ditch them like a salamander's tail at the slightest sign of trouble!

[Tor Cha]

How About a Carrier Pod?? Or a Maintenance Pod?
In the Star-fire Universe During the Late Civil War the Rim Used Light  or Escort Carriers to Ambush Freighters for the War Fleet. Could Pods Be used as Well? Or in the Bug war they Used Hot Bays to Move 3-5 times the Normal Numbers of fighters thru WP's and as Support for the Fighters. In Aurora that May not be a Good Idea, But Having Pods Might Work

[Iranon]

Works well in theory. Hangars in particular, they are military but never break down - a civilian tug tractoring a barebones hangar pod gives you a functional warship that lasts forever.

But again... it's annoying because the tractor link breaks when a maintenance failure occurs, and if there's nothing breakable you get error messages to boot.

[Detros]

Works well in theory. Hangars in particular, they are military but never break down - a civilian tug tractoring a barebones hangar pod gives you a functional warship that lasts forever.

Shouldn't v7.2 offer also civilian hangars? This option could then get much more viable.

[Michael Sandy (OP)]

I have a question about missile pods:

Normally, when a missile launching fighter or ship is destroyed, the missiles that it launched that are still in flight destroy themselves, unless they have onboard sensors.  But what happens when the launching ship or fighter lands on a carrier?  Do the missile fire controls still work?

If the launching fighter has to stay outside the carrier until the missiles hit, that would greatly affect the effective rate of fire.

[83athom]

Shouldn't v7.2 offer also civilian hangars? This option could then get much more viable.

No they wouldn't. As stated in the changelog civilian hangars will only be used for repairing as they will not stop maintenance rolls or failure rates. However, the armor shell option coming will allow the tug route to shine better as you could then have a cargo/cryo section armor shelled that only has the bits they need and then pull them around with a drive section. I am personally planning to design a ship cradle to repair my battlefleets like the one in the Halo universe.

[Tor Cha]

Silly possible Stupid Question
Do fuel Harvesters Need Engines? Can the Just orbit a Gas Giant and when a Tanker comes by the Hoses just Hook up and Fuel is going to the Tanker. the tanker goes to the Harvesters Base. then Fuel is Sent to a World with refinery's?
Ok what About Ast Mining?Would a Pod Miner work there too?
Also if you set the Sizes to a Standard You could have Many Pod about and Most could be Doing Civilian work Not Mill and Maintenance would be cheaper. But if you had a War break out Pull the Pods back in and refit them to Battle or Military Pods.

[Iranon]

This would work, only you don't need a world with refineries - harvesting modules turn Sorium of a gas giant directly into fuel.

If you have plan to harvest from a given gas giant for a long time (accessibility and reserves are both good), tractoring engineless harvesting bases there is the cheapest way of exploiting it.

[MarcAFK]

Even better, if you put an orbital habitat onto a vessel it adds 200'000 tons, but also makes the 'ship' buildable using planetary factories. You can cram a ton of harvesting modules onto a ship and put a good percentage of industry towards it then afterhowever long you're willing to wait you'll get a massive fuel harvesting platform.