Posted by: Ashery
« on: September 22, 2011, 08:43:22 AM »I tend to skip the asteroids unless I start getting into dire straights on minerals. So the 25 scanners in a squadron can crank out a grav survey in a couple weeks, and a geo survey in a month or so.
The only real advantage that I could see coming from this method is that your survey teams would be large enough that it'd be possible to provide a military escort so that your survey vessels won't be destroyed by a lone hostile. Should you not provide such an escort, though, then things can quickly turn worse for you as some unlucky placement could be the death of several survey ships and not just one.
I'm still doubtful of the effectiveness of that setup, though, as you may be able to survey a single system quickly, but you lose a *lot* of time to travel inefficiencies.
Onto other questions:
Can't really say re:sensor fighters, but jRides' setup looks good to my untrained eye.
For commercial jump drives, I'd say low eighties is one potential design goal as that's the size of a reasonably fast troop transport capable of carrying a full division (21 bays). Note that the troop transport will *not* have the jump engine itself, but would instead rely on a jump tender. However, realize that there is currently a bug that effectively sets all commercial ship sizes to 0 for the purpose of determining their build rate, so you might be better off focusing on smaller commercial ships for the time being. Despite my initial design flaw (thought brigades/divisions contained three subunits, not four), I might just keep my initial 66k'ish jump design due to said bug.
How you arrange your fleet depends heavily on what weapons you're using. I've been doing a purely beam based game for smegs and giggles (Save for some sensor buoys), and in that case I'm finding it difficult to justify the use of escorts. Sure, I could break off my ships with 20cm mesons and position them in front, but then if they happen to be the targets for the missiles, they'll get absolutely destroyed due to lack of coverage from my carrier/flagship based GC PD. But I've yet to see any real combat, so I'm sure others will have better advice when it comes to combat.