Civie supply ships?

[JRHaggs (OP)]

Maintenance Storage Bays turn ships military, it seems.  Why is that?

Does that mean that, in order to have a civilian supply ship, one must stack scads of Engineering Spaces instead?

I'm happy to do it that way, but I'm not sure what the rationale is. 

Also, no civie colliers either, right?

[MarcAFK]

I suppose the logic is that only military ships need maintenance so maintenance bays must be military. I have made civvies maintenance freighters using eng bays, they don't haul much per ton, but being civilian they're huge anyway.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Colliers and supply ships are fleet auxiliaries with no purpose aside from supporting the military, so it makes sense they'd be classed as military.  They also do not need to be particularly large, unlike freighters, sorium harvesters, etc.

  Also, they don't give you ulcers like military-rules freighters would, since all supply ships do is follow fleets or occasionally make runs between colonies. 

[JRHaggs (OP)]

Colliers and supply ships are fleet auxiliaries with no purpose aside from supporting the military, so it makes sense they'd be classed as military.   They also do not need to be particularly large, unlike freighters, sorium harvesters, etc.

  Also, they don't give you ulcers like military-rules freighters would, since all supply ships do is follow fleets or occasionally make runs between colonies. 

You say they don't need to be particularly large.  On that note, I feel like I'm doing something wrong with colliers.  Are magazines just massive? Is there an efficient way to cram a whole lot of 'em into a ship?

For anything that seems useful (not just constantly oscillating between colony and fleet) I keep ending up with ~40KT designs.  It just seems very expensive to produce a glorified freighter at a naval shipyard.  But I really just think I'm doing something wrong.

It seems I can design a reasonably useful hybrid collier/supply ship at about the 40KT scale.  2500 ASM (roughly 12 fighter wing reloads on top of the 5 reloads that the carrier will lug around) and 40000ish maintenance supply points.  Is this a good way to go? Overkill?

I've tried a design with fleet speed/2, but the space freed up by dropping the engines was so quickly consumed by magazine space that it hardly seemed worth the compromise.

I still haven't produced an armed vessel in Aurora.  Inching ever closer.  What a process.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

What's stopping you from making a 10,000T ship with 3 reloads and 10,000 MSP?  For colliers/supply ships, increasing their size doesn't truely benefit you once you get past 5,000-6,000 tons - since you mostly stop benefitting from engine size increases at that point.

Though you are probably overstating supply needs. To be honest, I don't think I've even used a supply ship for dozens of games.  It's too expensive to keep ships on deployment through supply deliveries and for battle damage MSP shared from other vessels works fine.  Pretty much the only thing I use supply ships for is to cache supplies on a forward survey base, and you don't need much for that.

I'd go down to 3000-6000 supplies and use the rest for magazine space.  Whether a collier needs to be fleet speed or not entirely depends on how you are using it. If your carrier has 5 reloads built into it you probably don't need battle-line colliers IMO, but that's a subjective judgement.

[JRHaggs (OP)]

Hmm.  Ok.

I guess I just hate the idea of some important ship will turn out to be space junk because I couldn't fix it.

I get pretty hung up on logistics in 4x/grand strategy/management games.  Like spending an entire weekend streamlining stockpile flows in DF. 

On the other hand, without any actual experience with Aurora's space battles, I don't honestly know what my needs are. . .

Twitchtwitchtwitch

[linkxsc]

Well i dunno particularly about other players doctrines. But across my games ive never had too much trouble throwing together a few 6000t maintenence ships or colliers. usually ill keep a couple colliers about. A few to periodically fly to bases and supply pdcs, and a couple others with extra reloads for AMM escorts.

And as far as msp, thing is, the supply ship wiill virtually never break down itself so its not like it really matters if its military.