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Posted by: sadoeconomist
« on: January 14, 2021, 09:26:59 PM »

Isn't the ship extremely short on ordnance capacity? If you're going to use standard-size ASM launchers, well, box launchers are 15% of their size, so if you've got fewer than 7 salvos worth of missiles onboard, it doesn't make a lot of sense to not just use box launchers, save some space, and be able to launch all your missiles at once. 90 box launchers is 2700 tons compared to the 4000 tons of 20 standard launchers, which also require 240 crew to man them, plus magazines. Even .3 launchers would be able to launch nearly all your missiles while staying in the same tonnage, and they could be reloaded from colliers instead of needing an ordnance hub. AMM launchers with only 4.5 salvos, too - you could launch all 180 of your AMMs before the first incoming salvo is even halfway through your launcher's envelope. You could cut 25 AMM launchers (along with another 125 crew) and still launch everything before anything traveling at your ASM's speed touches you. And even then, you'd only have the ammo to defend against a single ASM salvo, and then you'd be left with your pants down. Much of the tonnage taken up by those MLs is basically dead weight without the magazine space to back them up.

Also, is this meant to work totally independently or as part of a fleet? If it's part of a fleet then it can offload much of its fuel & MSP capacity to tankers and supply ships to fit more payload, and the engines could be boosted and reduced in size to add even more combat capability while keeping its speed high. And there's not much reason to put AMMs and ASMs on the same ship class instead of specializing. If it's going to function independently (as a scout? a commerce raider? what could it really do solo?) then it probably needs better sensors, some beam PD, and a jump drive. A ship that can run through all of its offensive ordnance in 75 seconds and then be left completely toothless isn't a good fit for an independent long-range ship though - it needs support from an ammunition transport at least, and if you're giving it one support ship you might as well give it the full set. It'd work better independently if it had a primary beam armament instead of the ASMs - then it could go on a long-distance cruise, kill multiple targets along the way, and be able to defend itself while heading home for an overhaul.

My rule of thumb for maintenance costs is to shoot for about 10% AFR for each 1000 tons, and at 400% AFR for 50000t this ship is a little heavy on engineering spaces, but if it's also got a chief engineer then its AFR will be even lower. Also, if its AFR is 400% and it deploys for 9 months, it's likely to have about 3 breakdowns per deployment, and its max repair is 450, so the MSP requirement is about 1800 for a worst case scenario of only your most expensive components breaking 1 more times than expected. It's got almost 6 times that much MSP capacity onboard though. In reality it probably won't even use a tenth of that, especially with a skilled chief engineer - there's no reason for it to be carrying anywhere near that much MSP.
Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: January 14, 2021, 05:28:54 PM »

Quote from: captainwolfer on January 14, 2021, 05:18:56 PM
Quote from: misanthropope on January 14, 2021, 04:50:46 PM
mass isn't a scarce resource, and it doesn't even associate all that closely with scarce resources.  effectiveness tends to increase with application of scarce resources, but with diminishing returns.  accordingly, when we optimize for "effectiveness at fixed tonnage" we ought to anticipate designs that are unduly resource-intensive.
I disagree. More mass means more cost, because you have to have bigger engines, more armour, more engineering, etc, to get the same performance.

You also need more maintenance facilities, larger yards, longer time to build the ship for the same mission tonnage. Time is also an important resource, population to man the things you need is also a resource.

In times of war it is far more efficient to pre-build expensive engines in factories to quickly get more powerful ships in the field. Overly large but fuel efficient ships are much slower to build due to its size.

The larger your ship is the more time we need to invest in their production but there are positives with big ships too of course, but they come later after a bigger investment in time.
Posted by: captainwolfer
« on: January 14, 2021, 05:18:56 PM »

 
Quote from: misanthropope on January 14, 2021, 04:50:46 PM
mass isn't a scarce resource, and it doesn't even associate all that closely with scarce resources.  effectiveness tends to increase with application of scarce resources, but with diminishing returns.  accordingly, when we optimize for "effectiveness at fixed tonnage" we ought to anticipate designs that are unduly resource-intensive.
I disagree. More mass means more cost, because you have to have bigger engines, more armor, more engineering, etc, to get the same performance.
Posted by: misanthropope
« on: January 14, 2021, 04:50:46 PM »

mass isn't a scarce resource, and it doesn't even associate all that closely with scarce resources.  effectiveness tends to increase with application of scarce resources, but with diminishing returns.  accordingly, when we optimize for "effectiveness at fixed tonnage" we ought to anticipate designs that are unduly resource-intensive.
Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: January 14, 2021, 02:52:01 PM »

Another fact with engines is that they are quite expensive to research so you might need to use them in many different hull types that need a varied amount of range. Also... fuel efficiency are never completely unimportant but in general one of the least important factor.

As long as we know that the optimal engine to fuel ratio is 3:1 everything else we do different to that is making an informed choice between different factors and risks.

As I often play my games with a research efficiency of 10-20% (in addition to other restrictions) a particular engine can take many years or sometimes as much as a decade to research depending on size and cost, that will make you consider compromises quite often.

We then have the general situation a particular scenario plays out in, this should heavily influence how and what ships and components you build and why.
Posted by: nuclearslurpee
« on: January 14, 2021, 01:58:14 PM »

Quote from: TheTalkingMeowth on January 14, 2021, 01:27:45 PM
I don't have the link on me, but rule of thumb is that (regardless of boost level and engine tech), a given range/speed combination is achieved with minimum mass by having 3x as much engine as fuel. You are waaay off that ratio.

Shameless self-promotion  ;D .  Note that while 3:1 ratio of engines to fuel is performance-optimal, A larger ratio of engines is usually more fuel-optimal, which makes logistics a lot easier. Given that these engines are running at 75% EP modifier (reverse-engineering from the EP and explosion% stats), it seems that the OP is going for fuel efficiency.

On the other hand, for the same total engine mass a design with fewer, larger engines will always be more fuel-efficient, but those larger engines do have drawbacks in terms of research costs, HTK, and I believe MSP consumption as well. OP has 5 x MP-1200 Drives @ 0.75 modifier which means each one is size 100. More efficient configurations would be 4 x size 125 or 2 x size 250, however as mentioned these would be more expensive to research. Additionally size 100 is the maximum of a tech level, so another tech is also needed which may not be viable in OP's game situation.

That said, I agree with other assessments that fuel efficiency for a large warship like this is not so critical and I would probably suggest 4 x MP-1600 (size 100, EP modifier 1.0) instead which gives a slightly higher speed (6400 km/s, which is more in line with MP era as 6000 km/s is a bit slow) while freeing up more tonnage space for other suggested improvements.

Quote
PD analysis: beam weapons have ~100% chance to hit in final fire against a target at their tracking speed (its a bit less, but crew and CO bonuses exist so I round up). Thus, a weapon effectively has a speed capacity to kill. 1 shot at 10,000 km/s tracking can stop 1 10,000km/s target or half a 20,000km/s target.

Thus, the PD threat of a missile volley is its speed*number of missiles. You have 20 missiles at 16,000km/s, so 320,000km/s capacity is needed to stop them all.

A 10cm railgun is 4 shots/150 tons. At 6000km/s tracking, you need 54 shots to stop all 20 missiles. You can get that with only 14 railguns, massing all of 6000 tons.

Because of PD/AMMs, it is rarely a good idea to optimize purely for hit chance as you will need extra speed (at the cost of hit chance) to defeat PD and AMMs. My personal missile optimizer is configured to maximize the product of accuracy and speed (i.e. speed squared times maneuver rating). 16,000 km/s is much too slow especially when you can design AMMs that fly more than 3x as fast. I'd try to get my ASMs to be at least 50% of my AMM speed if not closer to 2/3.
Posted by: captainwolfer
« on: January 14, 2021, 01:48:42 PM »

So, just putting this into Iceranger's missile and ship optimizer, for a 50,000 ton ship with a desired range of 70 billion and a speed of 6,000 km/s, and assuming you have fuel efficency 0.6, you could save a bit more than 5,000 tons of space by switching to:
5x 69 HS (3450 ton) engines with a 1.10 boost and 5,637,000 fuel.

However, what I would reccomend is switching to the following, since it is more fuel efficent than the above for only 200 tons more:
5x 75 HS engines with a 1.00 boost and 4,261,000 fuel


Personally, I would change the Size 4 launchers to be reduced size, and stick at least 60 of them on, and use the increased space from optimized engines to add magazine size as well.
Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: January 14, 2021, 01:42:31 PM »

In general terms I agree with what most have said about range and fuel. In general you should rely on tankers to bring your fleet too and from the theatre of operation. This is in regard to main battle fleets. I could see a case being made for long range capacity on a certain types of ships that operates alone and who's primary objective is reconnaissance.

If your objective is to attack an enemy far from your own territory you need to rely on commercial support ships to carry fuel, ammunition and supplies for sustained fleet operations. If you rely on your combat ships to provide for all the ammunition, supplies and fuel storage it leaves very little room for mission tonnage. In my opinion a proper military ship need to have at least around 50% of mission tonnage, that leaves 50% for engines, crew, engineering, supplies and fuel. Mission tonnage is hangars, armour, shields, weapons and ammunition.

The ship above is in my opinion a scout ship and not a combat ship and I see no real problem with such a concept. Reconnaissance in force also is a concept worth pursuing. But if you build an entire fleet around that concept you get a very inefficient fleet even from a role-play perspective in my opinion. The problem with using a 50k ship as ascout is that they are not very stealthy which is important on a scout. I like scouts to be below 10k in size and able to deploy fighter scouts as well.

Fuel efficiency for pure combat ships should in most scenarios be a very low priority as combat ships should not provide for the majority of scouting or generally be moving around as much, not even during battles, that is why you bring scouting element with any serious fleet.

When it comes to engines I rarely have combat ships with fuel efficiency lower than 50%... I usually like to have most capital ships at a fuel efficiency between about 40-80%. I do sometimes build commercial engines large combat ships that naturally get efficient engines but that is mostly an issue with providing them with jump capabilities that I can't afford for military engines. A 100k ton carrier at "Ion Engine" technology you can't build a realistic jump engine for.

In terms of maintenance I generally like to have about 2-3 years of maintenance life on most capital ships that have deployment ranges of 9-12 months. The more expensive components you have on a ships (generally engines) the more expensive its maintenance get. But you also need to consider what bonuses you get from offices, especially if you also have a main engineering section on the ship, this will reduce maintenance failures and give you more maintenance life than is suggested most of the time

In terms of missile launchers it might seem boring to not use full size launchers, but full size launchers are so inefficient against decent PD they become nearly useless against enemy capital ships. For role-play reasons I do restrict usage of box launchers to more sane reasons as I don't like to abuse game mechanic flaws. I often use 0.3 sized launchers on capital ships for ASM duty with roughly 1-2 salvos in the magazines. If I instead had box launchers I could probably still fit as many missiles on the ship with the advantage of firing a much larger salvo to overwhelm an opponent, I could then bring commercial hangar ships and reload them, but I feel that is taking too much of an advantage of the game mechanics.

My general assessment is that the ship have way too much engines and too little mission tonnage for what it is meant to be doing. Don't concern yourself about fuel efficiency and use tankers to move outside your borders and inside your borders you should have refuelling stations or colonies to deal with capital ships moving around. If the ship is meant to be a scout it is too big and don't have much of any scouting ability.

Posted by: TheTalkingMeowth
« on: January 14, 2021, 01:27:45 PM »

Quote from: xenoscepter on January 14, 2021, 12:12:26 PM
Quote from: TheTalkingMeowth on January 14, 2021, 08:52:14 AM
Won't a smaller allocation of higher boost engines, plus a larger fuel allocation, result in identical range/speed with less propulsion tonnage?

Also those ASMs are really slow for MPD missiles. Your opponent only needs 320,000 km/s PD capacity to eat them for breakfast.

For reference, at 6000km/s tracking, that's only 54 shots. 14 railguns. 2100 tons.

 - Probably not. Smaller engines eat more fuel than bigger ones of equivalent tonnage, and when you add boost on top of that, well no it absolutely destroys the range. Getting a ship to go fast AND far is hard.. and expensive. I cannot fathom the arcane math which led you to that PD analysis, could you explain that a bit better? ???

I don't have the link on me, but rule of thumb is that (regardless of boost level and engine tech), a given range/speed combination is achieved with minimum mass by having 3x as much engine as fuel. You are waaay off that ratio.

PD analysis: beam weapons have ~100% chance to hit in final fire against a target at their tracking speed (its a bit less, but crew and CO bonuses exist so I round up). Thus, a weapon effectively has a speed capacity to kill. 1 shot at 10,000 km/s tracking can stop 1 10,000km/s target or half a 20,000km/s target.

Thus, the PD threat of a missile volley is its speed*number of missiles. You have 20 missiles at 16,000km/s, so 320,000km/s capacity is needed to stop them all.

A 10cm railgun is 4 shots/150 tons. At 6000km/s tracking, you need 54 shots to stop all 20 missiles. You can get that with only 14 railguns, massing all of 6000 tons.
Posted by: xenoscepter
« on: January 14, 2021, 12:12:26 PM »

Quote from: brondi00 on January 14, 2021, 10:37:31 AM
Maybe you aren't a native speaker so this isn't meant to be rude.  But round trip means the distance to that place and back, usually over the same route.

So a 23b km round trip means 23 bkm there and back.  You have enough for a 100 b km round trip if we alot the rest of that fuel for operations in theatre (40bkm of range in theatre is still excessive in my opinion).

Which is why I said you have way more than 23bkm round trip.

There seems to still be some confusion since you say 23 there, 23 on theatre, and 23 back (46bkm round trip with a reserve for ops) but you still have 140bkm or range.

I'm not trying to be a pain, but you asked what we thought and that was my very first thought

As for the extra maintenance you do, you.  But you have to come back to base every 9 months to rest the crew and could easily restock the maint supplies then.  So you don't really need enough for its entirely life between overhauls on the ship.

But this a a philosophical difference.  You can certainly have your ships how you want.  Me, if I'm paying maintenance for a military ship I want it to be as military as possible, and I'm going to offload as much of the commerical components that don't require maintenance when isolated on a commercial ship, as possible. 

Which means a commercial ship with more fuel and more maint supplies to top my mil vessels off when they need it.  Then a 50k ton ship is a beast to fight since it is a lean, mean, fighting machine.   Armed and defended to the teeth. 

(Though I don't usually make 50k ton ships, maybe a few per game to be a battleship or carrier surrounded by cruisers that can do independent ops away from the battleship).

 - I uh, am a native speaker, but thanks for considering it. :) I uh, also made a math boo-boo... it was 48 round trip my dumb brain took the 48 for 46 and divided by half one too many times. My sincerest apologies.

Quote from: misanthropope on January 14, 2021, 10:05:00 AM
feel like the low throw weight overshadows the positives.  think you could trade almost anything for more firepower and wind up better off.

a benefit of longer-ranged AMMs is that you don't need as many launchers.  that's not true if you're wading through AMM spam but this ship pretty much is just going to have to soak AMM spam regardless. 

maybe im just johnny one note here, but i feel that "full-sized ASM launcher" is a non-starter unless you've got that "sonic boom" cheese going, where you're dumping out missiles the same speed as your ship to turn your entire magazine into one preposterous volley. 

from your own posts i infer that you have double the tanks you need.  on the back of the ol' envelope i make a 50 missile broadside with 4 total volleys, pretty attainable.

i could not agree more that "damage is damage".  flip side of that is "damage times accuracy" is a pretty good first approximation to what you want to optimize, and i suspect your ASMs are over-warheaded and under-speeded for that.

 - Yes, box launcher is king but the king is boring. :P I tweaked the ASMs a bit and got nearly 10% increase in accuracy. Might consider producing those instead. Maybe I have rotten luck, but I tend to get overtly massive systems in my games a lot. :(

Quote from: serger on January 14, 2021, 09:30:40 AM
And if these girls aren't obligatory gregarious - they need reserve Actives for missile guidance after heavy damage, I think.

 - They operate in pairs or squadrons of 4, plus a "Warp Cruiser" or two for Jump and Sensor capabilities.  :)

Quote from: Polestar on January 14, 2021, 09:27:22 AM
One thing I love about this game is learning about other folks' ship build priorities. For example, compared to most of my own missile cruiser or supercruiser-type ships at equivalent tech and totaling an equivalent size, the Boffman has:
* Vastly larger and more fuel-efficient engines; vastly greater range
* Very much smaller magazine capacity; lesser offensive throw weight; roughly equal defensive throw weight
* Somewhat greater defensive capability
* roughly equal space devoted to fire controls and sensors; more fire control and less active sensor redundancy
* Greater deployment time; far greater maintenance life.

So, if I were fielding ships to do what the Boffman does, the biggest change I'd make would be to downsize the engines, without accepting a loss of speed, and therefore accepting a massive loss in range - to be made up for with fleet tankers - and then to devote the saved space to missile storage. For a short-range missile combatant, I would also put a lot more tonnage into launchers.  In fact, I'd get twitchy if my design had less than 40% of its hull space devoted to missile launchers and missile magazines, and I've been known to go as high as 60%. As for reloads? For a short-range missile combatant like the Boffman, I'd feel naked without something like 12-15 reloads on the ship itself. For a medium or long-range combatant, my lower limit would be about 8 on-board; fleet ammo ships could carry extra.

Then there are the missiles themselves.
The Boffman mounts very short-range ASMs, coupled with extremely fast-firing ASM launchers, and is therefore intended for fights at what I call "polearm range" - greater than beam weapons; less than medium or long range missiles. I seldom build vessels mounting this class of missiles, because my enemies - who tend to have medium-range missiles - would typically get to fire off their entire offensive armament before I got so much as a shot in edgewise. For most of my playthroughs, the one use case for short-range, rapid-fire ASMs+launchers are in jump gate defence bases, hitting enemies post-jump, but which want to stay out of immediate beam weapon range. The kind of base that "pokes them with a pike before they can swing a sword", if that makes sense.

Let's talk tactical profile.
In Aurora, a space vessel might engage enemies at:
"artillery range" (long-range, two-stage ASMs) (greater than ~100m km),
"bow range" (medium-range, one- or two-stage ASMs) (~5-100m km),
"polearm range" (short-range, single-stage ASMs and AMMs, extremely long-range beam weapons) (~0.8-5m km),
"sword range" (longer-range beam weapons)(~200-800 k km), or
"knifefight range" (carronades, or anything coupled with a short-range fire control) (0 to ~200 k km).

The Boffman is intended for polearm-range combat. Here, it lacks both the launchers and especially the magazine space to be particularly potent for its size and cost. The shields are probably an inefficient use of space and cost at this range, but improve robustness and survivability at all other ranges.

The Boffman is just as vulnerable against artillery-range and bow-range attacks as a beam weapon ship would be. While it does have shields, armor, and AMMs, a 50k ton ship would benefit from better protection. More AMMs in the magazines, and/or perhaps 3-5% of hull space devoted to close in anti-missile defences, or always staying in a well-defended fleet - something along those lines. It entirely lacks long-range sensors, so I presume that it will never attempt lone operations, and will always work with ships having better sensors than itself.

The Boffman is exceedingly vulnerable at sword- and knife-ranges, as it lacks anything like the damage-per second to hold up in a close fight. While its protection is perfectly adequate for its tech level, the lack of damage-dealing ability means death against opponents of equal tech, size, and cost. While it entirely lacks active sensor redundancy against microwaves, the shields ease my mind considerably here.

A contributing problem is that, because this ship is exceedingly large, it takes longer to build, which in turn means greater time elapsed from design to fielding ships with trained crews, which in turn means the empire has to wait longer to field ships that can actually fight effectively at close and medium ranges. This will be less of a problem if this game involves very long travel distances to possible enemies and slow tech development.

Now, one thing the Boffman does have is fairly good speed for its tech level. If the enemy doesn't have spoiler tech or greater, speed is going to be a major force-multiplier for this design, allowing it to dictate the range in in at least some circumstances. If, however, the enemy does have sufficiently high tech - and some do - then the Boffman is going to be too slow. And, for the Boffman, being too slow means death.

 - That's quite an interesting breakdown! :) I designed around Tech +1, maybe Tech +2 tops... at Tech +3 the Boffman is dead meat no matter what.

Quote from: TheTalkingMeowth on January 14, 2021, 08:52:14 AM
Won't a smaller allocation of higher boost engines, plus a larger fuel allocation, result in identical range/speed with less propulsion tonnage?

Also those ASMs are really slow for MPD missiles. Your opponent only needs 320,000 km/s PD capacity to eat them for breakfast.

For reference, at 6000km/s tracking, that's only 54 shots. 14 railguns. 2100 tons.

 - Probably not. Smaller engines eat more fuel than bigger ones of equivalent tonnage, and when you add boost on top of that, well no it absolutely destroys the range. Getting a ship to go fast AND far is hard.. and expensive. I cannot fathom the arcane math which led you to that PD analysis, could you explain that a bit better? ???

Quote from: tobijon on January 14, 2021, 06:03:21 AM

23 billion for those three still leaves you with 69 b kilometers, your range is 140, you could easily decrease the fuel tank from 3.000.000 to 2.000.000 and use the leftover space for something else. 1.000.000 tanks take up a lot of space.

 - Because doing math at 5am is a bad idea. It's meant to be 48, but my tired brain turned that to 46 and then divided it by half again for reasons known only to the Old Gods which govern it. :)
Posted by: brondi00
« on: January 14, 2021, 10:37:31 AM »

Maybe you aren't a native speaker so this isn't meant to be rude.  But round trip means the distance to that place and back, usually over the same route.

So a 23b km round trip means 23 bkm there and back.  You have enough for a 100 b km round trip if we alot the rest of that fuel for operations in theatre (40bkm of range in theatre is still excessive in my opinion).

Which is why I said you have way more than 23bkm round trip.

There seems to still be some confusion since you say 23 there, 23 on theatre, and 23 back (46bkm round trip with a reserve for ops) but you still have 140bkm or range.

I'm not trying to be a pain, but you asked what we thought and that was my very first thought

As for the extra maintenance you do, you.  But you have to come back to base every 9 months to rest the crew and could easily restock the maint supplies then.  So you don't really need enough for its entirely life between overhauls on the ship.

But this a a philosophical difference.  You can certainly have your ships how you want.  Me, if I'm paying maintenance for a military ship I want it to be as military as possible, and I'm going to offload as much of the commerical components that don't require maintenance when isolated on a commercial ship, as possible. 

Which means a commercial ship with more fuel and more maint supplies to top my mil vessels off when they need it.  Then a 50k ton ship is a beast to fight since it is a lean, mean, fighting machine.   Armed and defended to the teeth. 

(Though I don't usually make 50k ton ships, maybe a few per game to be a battleship or carrier surrounded by cruisers that can do independent ops away from the battleship).
Posted by: misanthropope
« on: January 14, 2021, 10:05:00 AM »

feel like the low throw weight overshadows the positives.  think you could trade almost anything for more firepower and wind up better off.

a benefit of longer-ranged AMMs is that you don't need as many launchers.  that's not true if you're wading through AMM spam but this ship pretty much is just going to have to soak AMM spam regardless. 

maybe im just johnny one note here, but i feel that "full-sized ASM launcher" is a non-starter unless you've got that "sonic boom" cheese going, where you're dumping out missiles the same speed as your ship to turn your entire magazine into one preposterous volley. 

from your own posts i infer that you have double the tanks you need.  on the back of the ol' envelope i make a 50 missile broadside with 4 total volleys, pretty attainable.

i could not agree more that "damage is damage".  flip side of that is "damage times accuracy" is a pretty good first approximation to what you want to optimize, and i suspect your ASMs are over-warheaded and under-speeded for that.
Posted by: serger
« on: January 14, 2021, 09:30:40 AM »

Looks like battlecruiser, very autonomous, but... you'll need missile resupply in any case, and, well, she have no jump drive, so she isn't really so autonomous!
So, it will be quite more elegant to remove at least half of fuel tanks to fleet tanker, that will wait with jump tender at the nearest safe JP.
And if these girls aren't obligatory gregarious - they need reserve Actives for missile guidance after heavy damage, I think.
Posted by: Polestar
« on: January 14, 2021, 09:27:22 AM »

One thing I love about this game is learning about other folks' ship build priorities. For example, compared to most of my own missile cruiser or supercruiser-type ships at equivalent tech and totaling an equivalent size, the Boffman has:
* Vastly larger and more fuel-efficient engines; vastly greater range
* Very much smaller magazine capacity; lesser offensive throw weight; roughly equal defensive throw weight
* Somewhat greater defensive capability
* roughly equal space devoted to fire controls and sensors; more fire control and less active sensor redundancy
* Greater deployment time; far greater maintenance life.

So, if I were fielding ships to do what the Boffman does, the biggest change I'd make would be to downsize the engines, without accepting a loss of speed, and therefore accepting a massive loss in range - to be made up for with fleet tankers - and then to devote the saved space to missile storage. For a short-range missile combatant, I would also put a lot more tonnage into launchers.  In fact, I'd get twitchy if my design had less than 40% of its hull space devoted to missile launchers and missile magazines, and I've been known to go as high as 60%. As for reloads? For a short-range missile combatant like the Boffman, I'd feel naked without something like 12-15 reloads on the ship itself. For a medium or long-range combatant, my lower limit would be about 8 on-board; fleet ammo ships could carry extra.

Then there are the missiles themselves.
The Boffman mounts very short-range ASMs, coupled with extremely fast-firing ASM launchers, and is therefore intended for fights at what I call "polearm range" - greater than beam weapons; less than medium or long range missiles. I seldom build vessels mounting this class of missiles, because my enemies - who tend to have medium-range missiles - would typically get to fire off their entire offensive armament before I got so much as a shot in edgewise. For most of my playthroughs, the one use case for short-range, rapid-fire ASMs+launchers are in jump gate defence bases, hitting enemies post-jump, but which want to stay out of immediate beam weapon range. The kind of base that "pokes them with a pike before they can swing a sword", if that makes sense.

Let's talk tactical profile.
In Aurora, a space vessel might engage enemies at:
"artillery range" (long-range, two-stage ASMs) (greater than ~100m km),
"bow range" (medium-range, one- or two-stage ASMs) (~5-100m km),
"polearm range" (short-range, single-stage ASMs and AMMs, extremely long-range beam weapons) (~0.8-5m km),
"sword range" (longer-range beam weapons)(~200-800 k km), or
"knifefight range" (carronades, or anything coupled with a short-range fire control) (0 to ~200 k km).

The Boffman is intended for polearm-range combat. Here, it lacks both the launchers and especially the magazine space to be particularly potent for its size and cost. The shields are probably an inefficient use of space and cost at this range, but improve robustness and survivability at all other ranges.

The Boffman is just as vulnerable against artillery-range and bow-range attacks as a beam weapon ship would be. While it does have shields, armor, and AMMs, a 50k ton ship would benefit from better protection. More AMMs in the magazines, and/or perhaps 3-5% of hull space devoted to close in anti-missile defences, or always staying in a well-defended fleet - something along those lines. It entirely lacks long-range sensors, so I presume that it will never attempt lone operations, and will always work with ships having better sensors than itself.

The Boffman is exceedingly vulnerable at sword- and knife-ranges, as it lacks anything like the damage-per second to hold up in a close fight. While its protection is perfectly adequate for its tech level, the lack of damage-dealing ability means death against opponents of equal tech, size, and cost. While it entirely lacks active sensor redundancy against microwaves, the shields ease my mind considerably here.

A contributing problem is that, because this ship is exceedingly large, it takes longer to build, which in turn means greater time elapsed from design to fielding ships with trained crews, which in turn means the empire has to wait longer to field ships that can actually fight effectively at close and medium ranges. This will be less of a problem if this game involves very long travel distances to possible enemies and slow tech development.

Now, one thing the Boffman does have is fairly good speed for its tech level. If the enemy doesn't have spoiler tech or greater, speed is going to be a major force-multiplier for this design, allowing it to dictate the range in in at least some circumstances. If, however, the enemy does have sufficiently high tech - and some do - then the Boffman is going to be too slow. And, for the Boffman, being too slow means death.
Posted by: TheTalkingMeowth
« on: January 14, 2021, 08:52:14 AM »

Won't a smaller allocation of higher boost engines, plus a larger fuel allocation, result in identical range/speed with less propulsion tonnage?

Also those ASMs are really slow for MPD missiles. Your opponent only needs 320,000 km/s PD capacity to eat them for breakfast.

For reference, at 6000km/s tracking, that's only 54 shots. 14 railguns. 2100 tons.