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Posted by: ollobrains
« on: May 22, 2012, 07:08:27 PM »

actually ancient ruins could have crew effiecncy technology or AI systems taht can reduce crew numbers if u want to expand the whole ancient ruins, xeno side of the game and have it interact with other levels of the aurora and aurora TN game
Posted by: Mel Vixen
« on: May 22, 2012, 12:47:00 PM »

If we get Starbases i would like it if no crewquarters are needed if a Habitat-module is present unless you have more crew then the Habitat can harbor. As for the Maintenance i would go with the Module. If the Station can count as Colony it would be nice if only the Military components + drives fail.
Posted by: TheDeadlyShoe
« on: April 18, 2012, 02:56:48 AM »

Re Starbases

A self maintenance component could be large with high crew requirements. A ship with it would not be subject to overhaul clocks, but would constantly drain its supplies as if systems were failing at an arbitrary rate. So it would require constant resupply via ship. I don't really see the problem with such a module being mounted on a ship. It would enable super large ships if people want but logistically it would just make sense to mostly use ships that you can actually use maintenance facilities on. Otherwise you'd be spending a hell of a lot of money and resources on maint supplies.
Posted by: xeryon
« on: April 13, 2012, 09:14:16 PM »

Regardless of the outcome I will be pleased when crew matter.  As of right now crew is merely a meaningless number during ship design.  It has no use other then a little bit of RP.

Posted by: chrislocke2000
« on: April 13, 2012, 08:15:22 AM »

I really like the idea of upping the fuel requirements and also moving to the NA style of engine design. Would you continue to leave the NPRs with basically limitless fuel or now look to revise the AI so they can cope with this?

Better tracking of ships crew sounds like a great idea as well, it's always bugged me to see a ship with it's bridge destroyed and hardly any life support left merrily continuing on its way. If you wanted to get really clever you may want to start worrying about deaths v wounded and the ability of the crew to get back on their feet as much as making repairs to the ship. A bit of quick googling found one piece of research on the area

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a258369.pdf



Posted by: jRides
« on: April 13, 2012, 07:13:58 AM »

Quote
If you put it in orbit of one of the moons, you could create a maintenance base on that moon use the existing maintenance modules. I've also considered some type of very large, expensive "self maintenance" module intended for bases. I just haven't found a plausible mechanic to prevent its use by very large warships.

Steve
Why would you want to dis-allow this for big ships? If you make it big enough it would only really be of use in really big ships, coupled with a huge size, massive amounts of crew (One of these monsters would clear your pool of trained crew available in one fell swoop and still fall short, you would need a huge dockyard and a long, long old time to build it. Leave it in as a possibility just make the negatives outweigh the positives. I say this as the first thing I thought of was building a new class of armoured tug to pull such a station around. I recently read (on your recommendation Steve), the Galactic Marines ennealogy, and on book 7 (I think) they used a station with tugs to transport the fleet to the nearest stargate, by book 8 it had its own engines which they used to reach the Galactic core.

You could make the component the engine itself, used for station keeping - this then opens up the possibility of a tech tree so you'd need a better type to hold station in gravimetrically dense areas such as around warp points or in black hole systems.

Either that or you only allow it to work when the station is in place (same as orbital terraformers), and linked to a target planet - so for instance a low tech version on a station that will link to terrestrial planets (like an orbital habitat module is assumed to have all the infrastructure to transport its workers to and from the surface), the component has all the kit required to mine, transport and convert relevant raw materials from its linked target planet for use as consumables, as the tech gets better new self maintenance module designs become available that can extract what it needs from deep space, warp points, even wormholes at the top of the tree.
Posted by: Rastaman
« on: April 12, 2012, 04:53:07 PM »

Don't forget - large ships can make use of large and fuel efficient engines. A 2500 ton engine will have 50% reduction in consumption according to Steve's NA rules. So they can get away with four times larger consumption than now.

I don't think more fuel is a big deal, ship capability will go down 10-20% per ton. But any opposition feels the same effect. You do need more tanker tonnage, crude Sorium transports, and more refineries.

In every game I build freighters that carry 200 000 tons, why not some super-tankers too? My pet peeve: Make fuel tanks less crew intensive. My 200 000 ton fuel tank needs 12000 crew. It should be 10 at most. Modern supertankers have 40 crew altogether. An equivalent size cargo hold in Aurora only needs 200 crew, 5 per 5000 tons.

Posted by: UnLimiTeD
« on: April 12, 2012, 03:11:55 PM »

I like the prospect, but I honestly think that an increase by around 5x would be sufficient. With a 5x Mp for GB and fighters.
Large swarms of fighters are already one of the most efficient tactics available, no need to buff it relative to regular ships, even if in absolute numbers it's a nerf.
I think it should also be possible to add a size multiplier, where a larger engine is slightly more efficient no matter what other technology is inside, that'll differentiate a dreadnought from a fighter a bit more.
Crap, I forgot thats already in that system. I am deeply sorry.
That'll allow for a neat 2x multiplier in chance of sorium and sorium amounts, as well as harvesting speed by scoops, and cutting requirements of scoops and refineries by that factor.

Hmm, while we're at it; the reason fighter swarms with few small missiles are so effective might be connected with targeting and missile armor. If multiple salvos of one or two missiles are inbound, they'll be targeted a piece, and armor is no alternative.
Posted by: metalax
« on: April 12, 2012, 03:05:34 PM »

With the scrapping of the distinction between engines, how would fighters be designated for purposes of if they can be built by fighter factories? Purely any design under 500 tons? Perhaps rename fighter factories to smallcraft factories as I can think of several designs such as scouts, survey team shuttles, weapons satellites, survey probes, etc, that would make sense to be capable of being built in factories rather than needing a full shipyard.
Posted by: Steve Walmsley
« on: April 12, 2012, 02:05:59 PM »

For purposes of the fuel discussion, I thought I had better point that in NA the rate of increase in terms of fuel consumption for boosted engines is less than in Aurora. The multiplier is 4x rather than 10x. Remember that in Aurora a GB engine uses 10x fuel, a fighter engine uses 100x fuel and a missile uses 10,000x fuel

In NA, there is no distinction between engine types. Instead, one of the factors in engine design is the amount of boost. This is incremented in 5% steps up to the researched maximum, which could be 300% or more. The Fuel consumption is (4^ Engine Power Modifier) / 4

So if an engine used 100 litres of fuel per hour at normal power, it would use 400 litres at double power and 1600 litres at triple power.

In other words if Aurora moved to a much higher base fuel consumption rate but also used the NA fuel modifier, GB would be less affected by the increase and fighters even less affected. For example, assume base fuel consumption was increased by a factor of 8, which is in the ballpark of what I am considering. Normal engines would require 8x more fuel than now. The equivalent to the current GB engine would use 3.2x as much fuel as now and the equivalent to the current fighter engine would use about 28% more fuel than now.

The effect of this in ship design would be that ships had to use much more fuel storage. Around 10-15% instead of 1-2%. Because of space concerns, FACs would probably stick with a similar percentage to their current amount which would reduce their endurance from about a month to perhaps a week to 10 days (which returns them to their originally intended system defence role) and fighter ranges would drop a little or fighters would be slightly larger.

However, the new engine design in NA means you could have a much greater variety of engine sizes and boost amounts. The boost goes the other way as well with reduced power engines having better fuel efficiency and replacing current commercial engines. Larger engines get fuel efficiency savings.

Steve
Posted by: Rastaman
« on: April 12, 2012, 10:31:30 AM »

It might be possible to build a very large military rated base with end game construction technologies and lots of resources. Like a million ton carrier. Sure components will break down in deep space, but with a constant resupply maybe that's not so problematic.

Edit: Having the game before me now, I can't really see any need for a big outer space station whatsoever. Actually it's insane to build such a thing when you could build a massive mobile force for the same costs.

I designed a 650 000 ton PDC with 500 000 tons of hangar space and a hundred million liters of fuel, this makes 256 PDC parts. With 40 factories or brigades, which is large but doable for a deep space building operation, it would take five years to assemble it. Construction tech is 25 BP, which is tech level 6 of 12 I think. No maintenance.
Posted by: dgibso29
« on: April 12, 2012, 10:13:54 AM »

Exactly my point. I was able to design a starbase for a defensive purpose, albeit only by utilizing fully 20% of it for engineering spaces. I was unable to build the sort of deep-space base we are envisioning.
Posted by: Rastaman
« on: April 12, 2012, 10:10:59 AM »

Quote
This was my foray into designing a starbase.


16 years maintenance life ... this is a starbase already. So there is no real problem maintenance wise, 2000 units per year. The problem is that in order to base whole fleets there, it needs to be of massive size, too large to be build in a naval shipyard. Maybe it's possible to include the modular ship-building idea: Only the modules are built in a shipyard. A 500 000 ton ship or base could be assembled by factories with 10x 50 000 ton modules which were built in a 50 000 ton naval shipyard. Forget overhaul though. Just keep it supplied.
Posted by: dgibso29
« on: April 12, 2012, 09:56:13 AM »

This was my foray into designing a starbase.

Code: [Select]
Sentinel class Starbase    75,000 tons     5238 Crew     14446 BP      TCS 1500  TH 0  EM 0
1 km/s     Armour 20-158     Shields 0-0     Sensors 280/280/0/0     Damage Control Rating 300     PPV 50
Maint Life 16.17 Years     MSP 36115    AFR 150%    IFR 2.1%    1YR 260    5YR 3899    Max Repair 720 MSP
Hangar Deck Capacity 10000 tons     Troop Capacity: 2 Battalions    Magazine 5570    Cargo Handling Multiplier 5   

Fuel Capacity 2,460,000 Litres    Range N/A

Defender Missile Launcher (50)    Missile Size 1    Rate of Fire 10
Missile Fire Control FC105-R1 (10)     Range 105.8m km    Resolution 1
Striker SM Mk. 1 (642)  Speed: 27,500 km/s   End: 63.6m    Range: 105m km   WH: 8    Size: 4    TH: 165 / 99 / 49
Defender AMM Mk. 1 (3002)  Speed: 50,000 km/s   End: 3m    Range: 9m km   WH: 1    Size: 1    TH: 533 / 320 / 160

Planetary Search Sensor MR1008-R100 (1)     GPS 72000     Range 1,008.0m km    Resolution 100
Anti-Missile Search Sensor MR100-R1 (1)     GPS 720     Range 100.8m km    Resolution 1
Thermal Sensor TH20-280 (1)     Sensitivity 280     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  280m km
EM Detection Sensor EM20-280 (1)     Sensitivity 280     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  280m km

Strike Group
36x Falcon Fighter   Speed: 16400 km/s    Size: 5
4x Falcon-C Fighter   Speed: 16400 km/s    Size: 5
I absolutely love the design, and I love seeing it in orbit of Earth. Obviously meant as more of a system defense base than a full blown starbase featuring maintenance docks, living quarters, etc.
Posted by: Rastaman
« on: April 12, 2012, 09:45:29 AM »

Given that free floating space stations are not possible programming wise, PDCs can and do take the place of forward stations just splendidly. And they don't need maintenance. They only need lots of construction brigades to reassemble them in a sane timeframe. Even with 20 brigades it takes years to build a 5+ part PDC. I have experimented with an orbital station that holds a million people and 20 factories. Don't know what is better.