Shipyards
For a new shipyard the first retooling is for free.
I can build any class of ship the yard has been tooled up for?
I can refit a class without re-tooling if the BP does not differ by more than 20% (according to old fiction)
A yard can only be tooled up for one ship class at once. You can build that ship class or any other ship class for which the refit cost from the tooled class would be 20% or less in BP. Note its not the build cost that matters, but the refit cost. That's why you often get the situation that a yard tooled for an expensive colony ship can often build a much cheaper freighter but not the reverse. Adding cargo holds instead of cryogenic transport modules is cheap and so the refit cost is low. The reverse is much more expensive so a yard tooled for the cargo ship won't be able to build colony ships.
I can repair a ship in any yard, not just one tooled up to produce it ? does slip capacity matter?
I've checked the code and it looks like that in v3.0 any yard can carry out a repair. I've changed this for v3.1 so that only yards with sufficient capacity can handle repairs, although tooling up will still not be necessary.
Does a refit give you the benefits of a minor overhaul? To my mind a refit should repair any damaged system, replenish spares and reset the clock (at least that?s what happened when my father used to refit RN carriers ? e.g. re-build of Victorious), while making any modifications.
A refit doesn't give you the benefits of a minor overhaul, although you can carry out both simultanerously. The reason is that refits can potentially be much cheaper than minor ovehauls and could therefore be used as a cheap overhaul. Minor overhauls are gone in v3.1 anyway.
What limits ship building ? what if I exceed my budget, build capacity ? I think the answer is it all goes slower?
You can't physically build ships that are larger than build capacity for a specific shipyard. Each shipyard can build the class it is tooled for (or any class that has less than a 20% refit cost) and it can build one of those ships in each slipway. Each ship to be constructed also needs the Required Materials listed on the Manage Shipyards tab plus wealth equal to its build cost. Wealth and minerals are used up during construction on a pro-rata basis. So if you have built 30% of a ship, you will have used 30% of the wealth and minerals required.
Can shipyards multitask e.g. add capacity and a slip and build/refit ships?
Yes. Building/refitting ships is seperate to upgrading the capacity or adding extra slipways and can be done simultaneously.
Research
A colony has recovered one lab, has 1million scientists but produces no research points?
Research labs will always produce research points so there is some other factor at work here. Check the various production modifiers on the lower right on the summary tab. Its possible you have run out of money or the unrest level is too high.
How do I delete a research topic once selected to begin research on? If I complete a research topic on one world does it automatically delete it from the active research and queues of other worlds researching the same topic?
You can't actually delete topics, although you can change them. If you complete a research project on one world it should delete from the research queues of others but it won't stop them working on it if it is the current topic. I need to take a general look at this area to see if knowledge can be transferred in the same way as it can by ships that have scanned alien vessels.
Nebula
Does a task Group automatically slow down in a nebula to a velocity that will not damage it ? I didn?t think so. I saw talk of armour levels ? does this equate to armour boxes? Are 7 armour boxes enough to protect my survey ships in a class 7 nebula? I had ships zipping around at 1600k/sec when the nebula?s max velocity was 357k/sec with no apparent ill effects.
Ships do automatically slow down. The speed shown on the map for v3.0 is their assigned speed rather than their actual speed. For v3.1, if a fleet is being slowed down the actual speed will be shown and all times to complete orders will be shown based on the actual speed.
Terraforming
It would be useful to have a box in the Race screen detailing the minimum pressure a race can live with. Otherwise I am going to try and modify atmospheric pressure to close to 1. After all the maximum pressure is given, but how often do you find a planet with a dense atmosphere in my limited experience ? never? While planets with thin atmospheres abound.
There quite a lot of planets with very dense atmosphere, especially the venusian type worlds and high grav terrestrial worlds. Besides, maximum pressure is based on the racial homeworld so a race with a low-pressure atmosphere on their homeworld may well find a lot of worlds that would be acceptable to humans where the pressure is too high for them. There is no minimum pressure as such, just unbreathable atmosphere. A race can live on an airless world if there is enough infrastructure. For ideal habitable worlds, each race needs a minimum pressure of breathable gas and that cannot be more than 30% of the total atmospheric pressure.
Ship Design, basic requirements.
In recent fiction Steve usually has his first generation warships fitted with ion drives, box launchers etc, while I am struggling to get one of them within the first 15 years.
That's because I often manually assign 100-200k in starting research points.
E.g. Power Plants
Should I design a power plant to deliver the maximum power a weapon requires? E.g. a 15cm Visible light laser requires 12-4, should the power plant have an output of 12 or 4? I have not found the answer in the old fiction, but again could be my myopia!
You need power equal to the amount used every 5 seconds, which is the 4 above. The easiest way to check is to look at the Power Systems section of the Class Design window (near the top in the middle). There are several fields and the bottom one is Power Required. That tells you how much power you need from your reactors.
Sensors
How big is big enough for your first ships, I might want to see 100million k but could I fit much else into the ship?
That depends entirely on what you are planning to do with your ship. For a freighter, you might decide to forget sensors entirely as every ship has an inherent strength-1 thermal sensor. For a warship, good sensors and fire control systems are essential but have to be balanced with weapons and defences. For a scout ship, you will probably devote more space to sensors than anything else. Aurora has a very open-ended ship design process so how much space for sensors is really up to your ship design preferences, You will probably find as a game progresses and you run into alien races, your sensor requirements will evolve based on factors such as observed alien weapon ranges and the size of alien ships.
Engines
What?s a good proportion of tonnage for a first basic warship to devote to engines?
It's entirely up to you. Speed is important in Aurora for warships so they can control the combat range and to a certain extent for gravitational survey ships as they spend a lot of time moving between survey locations. Its far less important for terraformers, fuel harvesters, construction ships, etc. as they spend a lot of time in one place. For colony ships or freighters you need to weigh up the comparison between cargo space and speed. If you could double the cargo space and have 60% of the speed, that would be better in terms of overall transport capacity, although the time spent loading needs to be considered as well. Again this will evolve based on alien contact. If you get into a fight with aliens that have better engine tech, you might decide to devote more hull space to engines to try and compete or you might give up on trying to keep up with them and instead go for slow ships that have long range weapons.
Sorry if the above is a little basic for the old hands, but while I can get by reading the old fiction the changes in version tend to confuse things. I dread my first encounter with aliens, as my warships are probably not up to much (and I keep finding these ruins.....).
Because of the breadth of options in ship design, there is not really a right way to design a ship (which is a good thing). It depends on the mission and the circumstances
Steve