Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => C# Bureau of Design => Topic started by: Theoatmeal2 on January 31, 2021, 02:38:05 PM
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Looking for input before committing to building, the purpose of this behemoth is to be able to do (nearly) everything by itself.
Mercury class Battlestar 100,000 tons 2,173 Crew 17,218.4 BP TCS 2,000 TH 5,400 EM 3,000
5400 km/s Armour 12-191 Shields 100-300 HTK 418 Sensors 286/286/0/0 DCR 70 PPV 184.6
Maint Life 1.96 Years MSP 22,456 AFR 1333% IFR 18.5% 1YR 7,702 5YR 115,535 Max Repair 1165.4 MSP
Hangar Deck Capacity 7,000 tons Magazine 3,238 Cryogenic Berths 200
Commander Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Flight Crew Berths 140 Morale Check Required
Ion Drive EP1350.00 (8) Power 10800 Fuel Use 36.81% Signature 675.0 Explosion 12%
Fuel Capacity 6,840,000 Litres Range 33.5 billion km (71 days at full power)
Delta S25 / R300 Shields (4) Recharge Time 300 seconds (0.3 per second)
Twin 20cm C4 Ultraviolet Laser Turret (4x2) Range 192,000km TS: 10000 km/s Power 20-8 RM 40,000 km ROF 15
CIWS-160 (5x6) Range 1000 km TS: 16,000 km/s ROF 5
Beam Fire Control R192-TS10000 (2) Max Range: 192,000 km TS: 10,000 km/s 95 90 84 79 74 69 64 58 53 48
Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor R32 (1) Total Power Output 32 Exp 5%
Size 3.0 Missile Launcher (40) Missile Size: 3 Rate of Fire 20
Missile Fire Control FC50-R100 (2) Range 50.3m km Resolution 100
Nightfall Anti-Ship Missile (1089) Speed: 14,933 km/s End: 56.3m Range: 50.4m km WH: 4 Size: 3 TH: 89/53/26
Active Search Sensor AS202-R100 (1) GPS 54600 Range 202.9m km Resolution 100
EM Sensor EM26-286 (1) Sensitivity 286 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 133.7m km
Thermal Sensor TH26-286 (1) Sensitivity 286 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 133.7m km
Strike Group
10x Fury II Fighter Speed: 10520 km/s Size: 9.98
2x Fury II-L Fighter Speed: 10520 km/s Size: 9.98
1x Viper Assault Shuttle Speed: 10004 km/s Size: 19.99
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
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I hope you're playing with maintenance off because that AFR is something to behold. I also think the shields are rather low for the size of the vessel. Same with the missile launchers. 40 missiles is a pretty small volley. Last, you really need a CIC, an Auxiliary Command, and if maintenance is on, Main Engineering. I can't tell if you have this, but if not you need damage control and ECCM.
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I would agree that the ships lack in engineering sections will probably be quite costly. I would make sure I had at least a three year expected maintenance using engineering components alone, no maintenance storage included in that calculation... you could add maintenance storage as well on top of that if you like. You also need a Main Engineering command module and assign your best engineer to that position. This should reduce the cost of using the ship significantly.
I'm also not fan of those missile... they have a rather low chance to hit a ship of similar speed and with no ECCM capability that chance could be very low if the opponent uses ECM which they probably will. So, you will not do allot of damage with those missiles unless you engage someone with a lower tech level than you have. Also... at less than 15k km/s you will not get many missiles past most point defences either, they are just too slow and they don't have any ECM either because they are so small.
I also would put at least a rudimentary resolution 1 sensor or the ship.
A ship this size should have all the commend modules except survey and perhaps flight controller.
Do you really have the research to build a 100k ton capacity jump-drive for a tender to jump the ship, or you don't intend to use it outside of your stabilised jump point networks?
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I hope you're playing with maintenance off because that AFR is something to behold.
I would agree that the ships lack in engineering sections will probably be quite costly. I would make sure I had at least a three year expected maintenance using engineering components alone, no maintenance storage included in that calculation... you could add maintenance storage as well on top of that if you like. You also need a Main Engineering command module and assign your best engineer to that position. This should reduce the cost of using the ship significantly.
There is a perfectly valid doctrine for very massive ships which is to not put much engineering on it at all and simply let it fail every increment and repair it with MSP, basically exploiting the fact that you can have at most one maintenance failure per construction increment (5 days, usually). I'm not sure if this ship is quite massive and complex enough to use this doctrine, and it does cost a pretty penny of duranium and gallicite for all those MSPs.
As for the ship itself...candidly, I don't get this apparent fixation many on the forum have with trying to design massive all-in-one ship classes. A good ship should have a clear primary purpose and loadout to match, and while it makes sense to have secondary weapons to cover e.g. PD or recon needs everyone seems to try building a ship that is good at beam combat AND missile combat AND point defence AND by the way also it's a carrier. This design goes even further by ALSO being a huge sensor ship - a baffling design decision as a ship this big has no hope of passing anywhere undetected. I'm just glad there has not also been some attempt to fit a jump drive on this thing.
The use of shields is nonsensical here as the total shields are barely half a layer of armor. With 12 layers of armor you can afford to take a few leakers on the chin, and anything more than that will either not be a threat or will overwhelm the shield shortly anyways.
All command modules are needed although I would not include flight control and reduce hangar size (or include flight control, drastically increase hangar size, and scrap a lot of the armaments - choose one and stick to it). A 100k ton ship wants to have as many commanders attached to it as possible to maximize what you get out of them...where is your Tactical 30 LCDR going to be better used, at the helm of a FAC or as tactical officer on a behemoth?
The laser battery is something I could probably fit onto a 10,000-ton ship. The CIWS is woefully insufficient to protect this ship from any serious missile attacks, and if it is meant to operate in a fleet you should not use CIWS as it does nothing to contribute to fleet-wide PD. The missile launcher loadout is unimpressive and I would have expected considerably more out of a capital ship both in number of missiles and size as size-3 is rather unimpressive.
A res-1 sensor is not needed for this design, but with proper changes it will be necessary for PD. Your passive sensors are much too large, large sensors should really be reserved for smaller scouts that can use stealth to some extent. Even then I wouldn't have more than size 12 except for very specialized ships.
The strike group again is unimpressive for such a large ship...you basically have numerous different unimpressive loadouts when what you should have is one dominant choice of weapon and 1-2 additional secondaries for PD, recon, or other purposes. This ship simply doesn't do anything well except absorb fire.
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I agree with nuclearslurpee that the ship lacks in a primary focus, this makes the ship difficult to use strategically. At 100.000 tons a ship should be a considerable threat but I feel this one have too many weapons system that crosses into each others area to really make much sense.
It is Ok to have beam weapons for self defence and a hangar for scouting crafts if you use missiles as the ships offensive primary form of attack.
I would never ever abuse the mechanic and put no engineering on a ship because you are limited to a single failure per 5 day cycle (no matter the size of the ship)... you should never abuse the game mechanic in the game that is pointless in my opinion. In terms of size of military ships I think that Aurora have a limit due to game mechanic where it should not be bigger, hard to say where that limit is but not far beyond 100kt anyway.
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A res-1 sensor is not needed for this design.
I put a 1HS res-1 sensor on every warship I make. At worst, it's a tiny bit of dead weight, at best it lets every ship defend itself no matter what happens to the rest of the fleet.
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A res-1 sensor is not needed for this design.
I put a 1HS res-1 sensor on every warship I make. At worst, it's a tiny bit of dead weight, at best it lets every ship defend itself no matter what happens to the rest of the fleet.
I agree... even at 5 tons res "1" can usually detect and track missiles 5-10 seconds before they impact.
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just for starters, when you're build a monster ship, you can either be intending to beat comparable opponents, or to steamroll lesser opponents. the way you build your ship will differ considerably. if you're going towards maximizing force, a thin layer of shield over thick armor makes perfect sense. a shield is never reasonably capable of just bouncing the attack of a "fair" opponent, so having armor enough to buy your shields the opportunity to recharge multiple times is pretty much the only way shields might wind up worth their tonnage.
a high speed carrier is difficult to pull off because you wind up with a small strike group relative to the resource investment. trying to make a high-speed battle carrier is accordingly more difficult- i would say impossible. full size ASM launchers are extravagant uses of tonnage in virtually any case, here i think they are the deal-breaker.
if you reduce the speed to no more than 4000 and cut the ASM launchers i think you wind up with an improvement almost no matter what you do with the space you gain. think since you're screwing with fighters anyway you might as well substantially replace the giant expensive sensors with small inexpensive and highly effective recon fighters.
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A res-1 sensor is not needed for this design.
I put a 1HS res-1 sensor on every warship I make. At worst, it's a tiny bit of dead weight, at best it lets every ship defend itself no matter what happens to the rest of the fleet.
I would almost always do so, but this specific design doesn't need it because it relies on CIWS for PD and everything larger than about 3 HS will still be detected outside of the laser's range.
I.e. the reason this design doesn't need a res-1 active is because of the questionable-at-best PD design, however, and a good rework of this should would need to have a res-1 active for effective PD.
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Maybe it's just me, but 100,000 tons ship at Ion era is a waste of time.
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Maybe it's just me, but 100,000 tons ship at Ion era is a waste of time.
Honestly to me it seems like a reasonable size so I am somewhat curious as to the justification for that perspective.
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It's not just the difficulty of making a 100,000 ton ship, but also keeping it stocked, fueled, and getting it where it's needed when it's needed. These are all much easier to do with smaller ships. I would think, by the time you were ready to build and deploy 100kton monster like this, you would have researched beyond ion tech.
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Maybe it's just me, but 100,000 tons ship at Ion era is a waste of time.
Honestly to me it seems like a reasonable size so I am somewhat curious as to the justification for that perspective.
The engines are not powerful enough so lots of displacement gets used to get the 100,000 moving at a decent pace. Same goes for missiles. It will carry down to the fighters as well etc.
Also when I say Ion era I mean it the way I intend the era. Ion is a 8,000/10,000 tech level at most. Assuming you have been developing linearly too many techs at 8,000 are good individually for neat little specialized ships. Magneto era will bounce it forward to the 20,000 and 15,000 one which is already good to have some decent performances with sensors, Beams, missiles, and obviously engines. At that level you can reach a good balance/compromise to have all round ships.
I still do agree with nuclear and Jorge on the fact that a multirole ship will always suffer a same tech specialized ship and you have an edge only with tech superiority which will amend for the general lack of threat you can pose in any area.
Obviously this is my view and I am sure that others have succesfully played in different ways and this is the beauty of Aurora, isnt it?!
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I usually do not build such large ships. But if I decide to do it, I would go command carrier route for it. Add all command modules (minus science module) and flag bridge, get rid of the missile launchers and add more hangars and fuel tanks.
You are using 20cm lasers with 15s recharge in turrets, that is imho poor choice. 15s recharge is too slow to use in point defence mode. So I would go with turreted weapon with 5s recharge time.
If you do not want to give up the missile launchers, I would switch to reduced sized ones and add more so you have bigger salvo, that has actually chance to penetrate enemy defences.
As was stated by other, you really need more engineering if you have maintenance on.
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Maybe it's just me, but 100,000 tons ship at Ion era is a waste of time.
Honestly to me it seems like a reasonable size so I am somewhat curious as to the justification for that perspective.
The engines are not powerful enough so lots of displacement gets used to get the 100,000 moving at a decent pace. Same goes for missiles. It will carry down to the fighters as well etc.
Also when I say Ion era I mean it the way I intend the era. Ion is a 8,000/10,000 tech level at most. Assuming you have been developing linearly too many techs at 8,000 are good individually for neat little specialized ships. Magneto era will bounce it forward to the 20,000 and 15,000 one which is already good to have some decent performances with sensors, Beams, missiles, and obviously engines. At that level you can reach a good balance/compromise to have all round ships.
I still do agree with nuclear and Jorge on the fact that a multirole ship will always suffer a same tech specialized ship and you have an edge only with tech superiority which will amend for the general lack of threat you can pose in any area.
Obviously this is my view and I am sure that others have succesfully played in different ways and this is the beauty of Aurora, isnt it?!
One of my biggest issues is the Jump-engine you need for the jump tender... at Jump Engine efficiency of 6 it will cost 87234 RP and at efficiency 8 it will cost 51788 RP. A ship of this size and power but no ability to get outside the stabilised jump point infrastructure seem like being a bit misplaced in resources?!?
I don't think the research needed to build the jump drives are warranted at this tech level no matter if you have the industry to build it. If you are playing at low tech progression then having the industry to build it and support it might definitely be possible. If I build a monster carrier at this level of technology they would have to use commercial engines.
I wold probably have my largest capital ships with military engines at this level of technology at around 20k... that would leave research cost of about 4-5000 RP for the jump engine to support them. Which is a more reasonable investment in time and effort.
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For me upper (and lower) ship size is set by the max size of engine I can economically produce, due to those rather sweet fuel effeciency gains with scale. I dont usually put more than four or so max sized engines into military ships.
It seems like adding more wouldn't really be that bad of a disadvantage though. You lose some force granularity but thats not the worst thing in the world. The jump engine thing is an issue as Jorgen put it (while I was originally messing with this post), though I would point out that its fairly cheap to get a jump point stabalizer that can then happily go about stabalizing the path to your enemy. Its not really that much of a strategic impediment (for me at least) to simply expand the gate network. I guess trying to keep the networks divorced buys some security but honestly I haven't really had much success keeping it that way (they usually find some backdoor in or stabalize somewhere that I thought they didnt have any ships and suddenly everything is connected). Also, to be honest, I think usually the aliens would be better served to worry about me stabilizing a rout to them rather than the vice versa, so that probably puts a certain spin on things.
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Problem with jumping through stabilized jump point still stands, right? You still get disruption to fire controls if you are not using squadron jump.
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I like the speed, and the armor.
The shields are 4 tiny 25-strength shields? Always build max size generators. Two 20HS generators would give you 142 strength in the same tonnage.
Try reduced fire rate launchers for bigger volleys?
The missiles seem slow and long-ranged. Maybe split the ordnance into faster short-range missiles and some long-range ones? If your fighters are missile ones, they probably don't need as much range either as they can just go wherever the enemy is.
You can benefit a lot from the command and control modules on a ship this size. Adama to the CiC!
Your firepower in all three aspects (beam, missile, fighters) is unimpressive by itself. But that's just the nature of an omni-role ship.
The sensors are huge and will make an amazing contribution to any fleet group this beast is a part of, but they're also the only sensors you have. A ship this size can do with some small redundancy sensors.
The jump issue I assume entirely bypassed by using this ship only in stabilized space. Building a jump engine for a ship this size really is prohibitively expensive and inefficient at this tech level.
A lot of the criticism here about building a ship this size in the first place seems invalid to me. Any mission you'd send 5x 20k ships on you can also send 1x 100k ship on, if you have the ability to build them. In this case the argument isn't quite as strong as you're essentially taping together 5 very different 20k ships, but still.
Supplying or making engines to move 100k of ship is no more difficult than doing the same for a number of smaller vessels, the math here is entirely linear.
The supply situation should be the same, your AFR is about what I get when I upscale my ion era designs, but not your maintenance life (which you have already generously stretched by adding tons of MSP storage). I assume that's because you have a bunch of expensive components like the turrets and sensors, maybe huge engines? I say this ship is still fine if it never accumulates more than a year of maintenance clock.
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One thing that I would like to mention with comparison 1x 100k ship versus 5x20k ships. The 5 ships can be at 5 different places if necessary, that is not the case for 100k ship. You can kind of see this problem in Steve's current campaign where several jump points are threatened and he has trouble to sufficiently guard them all.
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Ok, thank you for all the replies and suggestions. You are right, trying to marry a carrier and a battleship results in vessel that is poor in both roles.
For this end I have decided to build a carrier, battleship and an escort with the available shipyards at 30k, 60k and 100k. The reason I tried this in the first place is for fun. Don`t tell me Battlestar Galactica wasn`t cool. I have an extensive network of jump gates and my reason for such a high speed in poor tech level was that I have an enemy able to go 5200 km/s. I have also neglected research.
Here are the new ships.
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Mercury class Carrier 100,000 tons 1,833 Crew 15,867.3 BP TCS 2,000 TH 5,400 EM 3,000
5400 km/s Armour 12-191 Shields 100-300 HTK 410 Sensors 77/77/0/0 DCR 100 PPV 0
Maint Life 2.91 Years MSP 21,917 AFR 800% IFR 11.1% 1YR 3,830 5YR 57,449 Max Repair 1012.5 MSP
Hangar Deck Capacity 21,000 tons Magazine 1,740
Commander Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Flight Crew Berths 420 Morale Check Required
Ion Drive EP1350.00 (8) Power 10800 Fuel Use 36.81% Signature 675.0 Explosion 12%
Fuel Capacity 10,225,000 Litres Range 50 billion km (107 days at full power)
Delta S25 / R300 Shields (4) Recharge Time 300 seconds (0.3 per second)
Nightfall Anti-Ship Missile (580) Speed: 14,933 km/s End: 56.3m Range: 50.4m km WH: 4 Size: 3 TH: 89/53/26
Active Search Sensor AS105-R100 (1) GPS 14700 Range 105.3m km Resolution 100
Thermal Sensor TH7-77 (1) Sensitivity 77 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 69.4m km
EM Sensor EM7-77 (1) Sensitivity 77 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 69.4m km
Strike Group
36x Fury II Fighter Speed: 10520 km/s Size: 9.98
4x Fury II-L Fighter Speed: 10520 km/s Size: 9.98
1x Viper Assault Shuttle Speed: 9128 km/s Size: 19.99
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
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Jupiter class Battlecruiser 60,000 tons 1,412 Crew 11,009.1 BP TCS 1,200 TH 3,240 EM 1,500
5400 km/s Armour 12-136 Shields 50-300 HTK 347 Sensors 77/77/0/0 DCR 40 PPV 258.4
Maint Life 3.02 Years MSP 16,587 AFR 720% IFR 10.0% 1YR 2,721 5YR 40,813 Max Repair 810.000 MSP
Commander Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Morale Check Required
Ion Drive EP1080.00 (6) Power 6480.0 Fuel Use 41.15% Signature 540.000 Explosion 12%
Fuel Capacity 6,818,000 Litres Range 49.7 billion km (106 days at full power)
Delta S25 / R300 Shields (2) Recharge Time 300 seconds (0.2 per second)
Twin 20cm C4 Ultraviolet Laser Turret (16x2) Range 192,000km TS: 10000 km/s Power 20-8 RM 40,000 km ROF 15
Beam Fire Control R192-TS10000 (4) Max Range: 192,000 km TS: 10,000 km/s 95 90 84 79 74 69 64 58 53 48
Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor R64 (2) Total Power Output 129 Exp 5%
Active Search Sensor AS105-R100 (1) GPS 14700 Range 105.3m km Resolution 100
Active Search Sensor AS11-R1 (1) GPS 36 Range 11.2m km MCR 1m km Resolution 1
Thermal Sensor TH7-77 (1) Sensitivity 77 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 69.4m km
EM Sensor EM7-77 (1) Sensitivity 77 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 69.4m km
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
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Apollo II class Escort Cruiser 30,000 tons 641 Crew 4,865 BP TCS 600 TH 1,620 EM 1,500
5400 km/s Armour 6-86 Shields 50-300 HTK 149 Sensors 17/17/0/0 DCR 20 PPV 138.32
Maint Life 3.01 Years MSP 6,027 AFR 360% IFR 5.0% 1YR 1,000 5YR 15,003 Max Repair 607.500 MSP
Commander Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Morale Check Required
Ion Drive EP810.00 (4) Power 3240.0 Fuel Use 47.52% Signature 405.000 Explosion 12%
Fuel Capacity 3,913,000 Litres Range 49.4 billion km (105 days at full power)
Delta S25 / R300 Shields (2) Recharge Time 300 seconds (0.2 per second)
Twin Gauss Cannon R300-100 Turret (8x6) Range 30,000km TS: 16000 km/s Power 0-0 RM 30,000 km ROF 5
Beam Fire Control R192-TS16000 (2) Max Range: 192,000 km TS: 16,000 km/s 95 90 84 79 74 69 64 58 53 48
Active Search Sensor AS50-R100 (1) GPS 3360 Range 50.3m km Resolution 100
Active Search Sensor AS11-R1 (1) GPS 36 Range 11.2m km MCR 1m km Resolution 1
Thermal Sensor TH1.6-17.6 (1) Sensitivity 17.6 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 33.2m km
EM Sensor EM1.6-17.6 (1) Sensitivity 17.6 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 33.2m km
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
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By the way how do I bring down the annual failure rate?
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Having fun is completely valid and very important aspect. Many of us, including me, build designs that are driven by role-play and as such are far from "ideal" ships.
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By the way how do I bring down the annual failure rate?
Add engineering spaces, they do provide a little in the way of MSP as well as dropping your annual faliure rate
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Mercury class Carrier 100,000 tons 1,833 Crew 15,867. 3 BP TCS 2,000 TH 5,400 EM 3,000
5400 km/s Armour 12-191 Shields 100-300 HTK 410 Sensors 77/77/0/0 DCR 100 PPV 0
Maint Life 2. 91 Years MSP 21,917 AFR 800% IFR 11. 1% 1YR 3,830 5YR 57,449 Max Repair 1012. 5 MSP
Hangar Deck Capacity 21,000 tons Magazine 1,740
Commander Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Flight Crew Berths 420 Morale Check Required
Ion Drive EP1350. 00 (8) Power 10800 Fuel Use 36. 81% Signature 675. 0 Explosion 12%
Fuel Capacity 10,225,000 Litres Range 50 billion km (107 days at full power)
Delta S25 / R300 Shields (4) Recharge Time 300 seconds (0. 3 per second)
Nightfall Anti-Ship Missile (580) Speed: 14,933 km/s End: 56. 3m Range: 50. 4m km WH: 4 Size: 3 TH: 89/53/26
Active Search Sensor AS105-R100 (1) GPS 14700 Range 105. 3m km Resolution 100
Thermal Sensor TH7-77 (1) Sensitivity 77 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 69. 4m km
EM Sensor EM7-77 (1) Sensitivity 77 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 69. 4m km
Strike Group
36x Fury II Fighter Speed: 10520 km/s Size: 9. 98
4x Fury II-L Fighter Speed: 10520 km/s Size: 9. 98
1x Viper Assault Shuttle Speed: 9128 km/s Size: 19. 99
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
Are those missiles for your fighters? you may want to consider a faster or heavier missile, those have a pretty long range for fighter missiles, unless that is what you are going for.
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Mercury class Carrier 100,000 tons 1,833 Crew 15,867. 3 BP TCS 2,000 TH 5,400 EM 3,000
5400 km/s Armour 12-191 Shields 100-300 HTK 410 Sensors 77/77/0/0 DCR 100 PPV 0
Maint Life 2. 91 Years MSP 21,917 AFR 800% IFR 11. 1% 1YR 3,830 5YR 57,449 Max Repair 1012. 5 MSP
Hangar Deck Capacity 21,000 tons Magazine 1,740
Commander Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Flight Crew Berths 420 Morale Check Required
Ion Drive EP1350. 00 (8) Power 10800 Fuel Use 36. 81% Signature 675. 0 Explosion 12%
Fuel Capacity 10,225,000 Litres Range 50 billion km (107 days at full power)
Delta S25 / R300 Shields (4) Recharge Time 300 seconds (0. 3 per second)
Nightfall Anti-Ship Missile (580) Speed: 14,933 km/s End: 56. 3m Range: 50. 4m km WH: 4 Size: 3 TH: 89/53/26
Active Search Sensor AS105-R100 (1) GPS 14700 Range 105. 3m km Resolution 100
Thermal Sensor TH7-77 (1) Sensitivity 77 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 69. 4m km
EM Sensor EM7-77 (1) Sensitivity 77 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 69. 4m km
Strike Group
36x Fury II Fighter Speed: 10520 km/s Size: 9. 98
4x Fury II-L Fighter Speed: 10520 km/s Size: 9. 98
1x Viper Assault Shuttle Speed: 9128 km/s Size: 19. 99
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
Are those missiles for your fighters? you may want to consider a faster or heavier missile, those have a pretty long range for fighter missiles, unless that is what you are going for.
Yep, I`m fighting an enemy with 30mkm range missiles. The furies are designed to work in tandem, one paints the other fires. I`ll do faster when I get magneto-plasma.
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If your enemy is at 5200 km/s, those missiles are painfully ineffective.
Their hull-mounted weapons will track at 5200km/s, meaning every shot has >1/3 chance of hitting a missile. Even if you launched all 580 missiles in one volley, they would only need 580*14933/5200=1665.5 shots (I'm neglecting the fact that fire controls have slightly less than 100% accuracy at 10k, since crew grade will make up for it).
If they use, say, 10cm railguns, they need 417 of them. That's a lot, sure, but the weapons only mass 62550 tons. In other words, an equivalent tonnage of ships can probably no-sell all the missiles you are carrying, simultaneously. I don't know how many missiles you can actually fire per volley, but it's probably less.
The whole point of using fighter launched missiles is that your missiles don't have to outrange enemy capital launched missiles, since the fighters can enter capital missile range without getting shot at due to fire control limits. Sacrifice some range for bigger engines/more boost. Ion drive missiles can go high 20,000 km/s with mid 20 million km range.
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Yep, I`m fighting an enemy with 30mkm range missiles. The furies are designed to work in tandem, one paints the other fires. I`ll do faster when I get magneto-plasma.
When using missile fighters, small size and speed are your defenses, not long range. You want to have shorter range missiles on your fighters so that you can put more MSP into speed to mitigate enemy AAMs and PD. At ion tech speed of 20k km/s is a bare minimum if you have missiles as a primary weapon, and realistically you can get up to 25k km/s with overboosting.
Do you have intel on enemy sensor capabilities? Even if you just know the GPS signatures you can make some educated guesses to estimate the sensor resolution and range. For example, a "common" NPR sensor design has a 126 GPS signature, which matches a res-1 size-6 sensor with active strength 21 tech (GPS = STR*SIZE*RES). You can then guess that they have EM Sensitivity 11 tech (same RP as Active 21) and estimate a range of 21m km. In your case this would mean that if the enemy has these sensors and another active that has a resolution of, I dunno, 100 or so, your fighters will be safe even as close as 22m km even though the enemy missile range is 30m km, and you should design your own missiles accordingly.
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Having fun is completely valid and very important aspect. Many of us, including me, build designs that are driven by role-play and as such are far from "ideal" ships.
100% agree with this.
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I would do something about the armour on your cruiser, and possibly the carrier unless you have planned for it to stay well back. 12 layers sounds like a lot, but I have seen folks showing results of combat where an NPR made use of particle lances. If you come across that sort of weaponry you are going to be looking at holes in your ship instantly with every hit.
It can be a frustrating thing at first but simply put in Aurora you cannot get all round ships until higher up the tech chain. Better to have three of those cruisers carrying 50% l;ess weaponry each, but double the armour and shields. It might cost you more to setup the fleet, but they will survive long enough to take out your opponents so your after battle reports is full of repair reports and not casualty lists. Far cheaper in the long run of minerals too.
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I would do something about the armour on your cruiser, and possibly the carrier unless you have planned for it to stay well back. 12 layers sounds like a lot, but I have seen folks showing results of combat where an NPR made use of particle lances. If you come across that sort of weaponry you are going to be looking at holes in your ship instantly with every hit.
It can be a frustrating thing at first but simply put in Aurora you cannot get all round ships until higher up the tech chain. Better to have three of those cruisers carrying 50% l;ess weaponry each, but double the armour and shields. It might cost you more to setup the fleet, but they will survive long enough to take out your opponents so your after battle reports is full of repair reports and not casualty lists. Far cheaper in the long run of minerals too.
They are at Ion tech (that's what, 12000RP?). Particle Lances are 30k RP. I don't think they need to worry about particle lances unless the enemy has WAY higher tech than them. In which case an energy range engagement is probably suicide regardless.
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I would do something about the armour on your cruiser, and possibly the carrier unless you have planned for it to stay well back. 12 layers sounds like a lot, but I have seen folks showing results of combat where an NPR made use of particle lances. If you come across that sort of weaponry you are going to be looking at holes in your ship instantly with every hit.
It can be a frustrating thing at first but simply put in Aurora you cannot get all round ships until higher up the tech chain. Better to have three of those cruisers carrying 50% l;ess weaponry each, but double the armour and shields. It might cost you more to setup the fleet, but they will survive long enough to take out your opponents so your after battle reports is full of repair reports and not casualty lists. Far cheaper in the long run of minerals too.
If you're seriously worried about particle lances, the solution is to go all-in on shields, not armor. Putting dozens and dozens of armor layers is simply a waste of tonnage and ends up crippling your ship because it doesn't have enough tonnage left for weapons, engines, etc. to be effective in battle. Particle lances hit really hard, but a heavy amount of shielding will negate their armor penetration entirely and then you can fire several rounds of your own beam weapons while the lances recharge.
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i mean, you've already given yourself two outs against lances, even if they *were* common. youve paid out the nose for speed, and your offense is missile-based. it would take a much more modest tech disadvantage to get you killed by a missile strike, and leaning heavily into shields magnifies your vulnerability there.
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i mean, you've already given yourself two outs against lances, even if they *were* common. youve paid out the nose for speed, and your offense is missile-based. it would take a much more modest tech disadvantage to get you killed by a missile strike, and leaning heavily into shields magnifies your vulnerability there.
Shields are a pretty strong defences against missiles though, so I don't see why that would be a problem, especially box launched salvos as you will have time to recharge shields between strikes. Shields in general is extremely powerful on large ships and you should use them if you have them. Most ships of this size can have both powerful shields and a decent armour belt.
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the dangerous missile attack modes are the alpha-strike ones, and shields are strongly contraindicated. the quantity of hit points you surrender when you replace armor with shields is immense. looking at Mercury, even granting size 20 shield generators instead of the existing size 10, right off the top you'd be losing _half_ the total durability. some fraction of armor never gets used tis true, but with 12 levels of armor the fraction that outlives the ship is going to be pretty small.
even looking at AMM spam, a conspicuously shield-friendly use case, if just 25 missiles per increment are incident upon shields, the hypothetical all-shield variant would succumb before the incumbent design be likely to take any internal damage. the number of volleys involved is also significantly less than those accursed all-magazine ground bases will spit out.
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the dangerous missile attack modes are the alpha-strike ones, and shields are strongly contraindicated. the quantity of hit points you surrender when you replace armor with shields is immense. looking at Mercury, even granting size 20 shield generators instead of the existing size 10, right off the top you'd be losing _half_ the total durability. some fraction of armor never gets used tis true, but with 12 levels of armor the fraction that outlives the ship is going to be pretty small.
even looking at AMM spam, a conspicuously shield-friendly use case, if just 25 missiles per increment are incident upon shields, the hypothetical all-shield variant would succumb before the incumbent design be likely to take any internal damage. the number of volleys involved is also significantly less than those accursed all-magazine ground bases will spit out.
That is only in some very niche situations where the shields are not better. In most scenarios there will be more than one strike such as fighters, FAC or missile boats of all kinds. They will reload and come back.
The idea with the shields is that you can survive multiple larger strikes not just one strike. In my opinion if you are that close to collapsing you will not survive a second strike anyway so it does not matter if you barely survive the first. You have to assume that you are able to blunt the strike enough so you take some of the force on the shields, this saves allot of resources in so many situations as you don't need to destroy every missile coming in... armour don't regenerate.
In the cases that the shields and whatever armour you have don't hold, most of those cases you are likely not going to survive the battle anyway. In terms of AMM you either deal with it some other way or you retreat so you can regenerate the shields.
In general I find that surviving multiple strikes are way more important than surviving any individual strike seen to the whole. The other thing is missile yields... when missiles get to nine or more in yields shields actually start to become quite valuable even from a pure damage perspective. A ship will be destroyed long before it's armour are gone and certainly damaged even earlier.
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the dangerous missile attack modes are the alpha-strike ones, and shields are strongly contraindicated. the quantity of hit points you surrender when you replace armor with shields is immense. looking at Mercury, even granting size 20 shield generators instead of the existing size 10, right off the top you'd be losing _half_ the total durability. some fraction of armor never gets used tis true, but with 12 levels of armor the fraction that outlives the ship is going to be pretty small.
even looking at AMM spam, a conspicuously shield-friendly use case, if just 25 missiles per increment are incident upon shields, the hypothetical all-shield variant would succumb before the incumbent design be likely to take any internal damage. the number of volleys involved is also significantly less than those accursed all-magazine ground bases will spit out.
That is only in some very niche situations where the shields are not better. In most scenarios there will be more than one strike such as fighters, FAC or missile boats of all kinds. They will reload and come back.
The idea with the shields is that you can survive multiple larger strikes not just one strike. In my opinion if you are that close to collapsing you will not survive a second strike anyway so it does not matter if you barely survive the first. You have to assume that you are able to blunt the strike enough so you take some of the force on the shields, this saves allot of resources in so many situations as you don't need to destroy every missile coming in... armour don't regenerate.
In the cases that the shields and whatever armour you have don't hold, most of those cases you are likely not going to survive the battle anyway. In terms of AMM you either deal with it some other way or you retreat so you can regenerate the shields.
In general I find that surviving multiple strikes are way more important than surviving any individual strike seen to the whole. The other thing is missile yields... when missiles get to nine or more in yields shields actually start to become quite valuable even from a pure damage perspective. A ship will be destroyed long before it's armour are gone and certainly damaged even earlier.
It is probably worth being explicit about the type of combat under discussion. I get the sense that some are talking principally of vs. NPR combat while others are speaking to Player vs. Player combat. These are two very different cases and it will be helpful to specify which is being discussed.
For example NPRs (e.g. Precursors) do not tend to launch multiple large strikes as from box launcher fighters or reduced-size launcher missile cruisers, rather they tend to launch continuous strikes with full-size launchers until their magazines are exhausted. In this latter case the recharge time of shields is significantly less impactful as shields do not recharge appreciably in the typical 10-20 seconds between missile waves. Similarly, AMM spam is a tactic somewhat unique to, certainly a signature of, NPRs, and for players who principally play against NPRs it is certainly not a "niche situation" which can be easily dismissed as it will come up against nearly any NPR which uses missiles in some capacity. While it is true that these tactics are not particularly clever or indeed difficult to beat on even footing, often in combat vs. NPRs the game is more about finding ways to beat an NPR which is ahead in tech, whether a spoiler race or an NPR that rolled high on the starting conditions, without having to wait around camping a JP until the tech gap is closed.
On the other hand in Player vs. Player games the situation is very different as player races will use more diverse tactics and will tend to avoid the most straightforward or spammy approaches that NPRs are reliant on, thus a wider variety of use cases arise many of which are not seen against NPRs. Notably player tactics tend to be based on using speed and alpha strikes rather than continuous fire, under such circumstances shields for example are far more efficient. Similarly, player races will tend to be very even in tech (by design, otherwise the game wouldn't be that much fun) so the problems of e.g. AMM spam are not nearly as drastic as they are against NPRs with a tech lead even if a player does choose to use such a tactic.
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I probably speak of both fights against NPR and player controlled multi-faction scenarios.
Against full size launched attacks you generally want shields to catch leaking missiles so you don't need to repair armour as often.
There is nothing wrong with mostly using armour, it has different pros and cons, but in general I think a combination of shields and armour are the best strategy overall for many different reasons.
My general advice is that the larger the ship is the more you gain by giving the ship really strong shields rather than allot of armour if you have good shield technology, you still can have a decent armour belt you don't need a paper thin armour.
I think there is too much focus on what is best in any one particular instance (especially roughly equal ones that rarely exists in practice) rather than what saves you resources in the long run or even in most situations. In most situations you should stack the deck as much in your favour as possible and that is why shields are so effective, they reduce the overall cost in resources you need to expend to defend so you can put those resources elsewhere.
You should already know what the capabilities of an NPR are before you commit huge forces to engage them, that is just sound military strategy. You can just build a fleet and blindly sail it toward the enemy in the hopes it is big enough. Though, the smarter thing is to probe the enemy first so you know their capability and you can bring the right weapon to deal with it.
Sure... in the one situation where you are surprised and overwhelmed by an enemy then armour "might" be a better protection, depends on the missile yield and your armour thickness. With proper scouting that should be rare to happen against the NPR unless you are really unlucky, in multi-faction games with several faction under human control things get way more complicated in general.
Another thing that can also be important in the choice of any component or combination of component is resources... shields will cost Corbomite rather than mostly Duranium. Can be important in the long run too.
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There is one thing no one really seems to touch upon in this dichotomy of shields vs armor which I find to be particularly relevant in this new C# era of reduced research rates.
That being, of course, the actual research cost aspect. You will essentially always research armor. Every ship in existence benefits from it, your ground forces are heavily dependent on it. Meanwhile, this massively important technology consists of a single technology line, and requires no additional research to deploy a new application of the technology.
Shields, on the opposite side of the equation require two technology lines to be at all effective, and are greatly enhanced by a third. They also require a new investment in RP every time you wish to deploy a new level of acquired tech to the field.
While there are certainly many situations in which shielding is superior to armor, you can not simply wave away these costs in a game with a 10 or 20% modifier, especially if a certain spoiler is active which gives zero poo’s about tech speed modifiers.
Outright ignoring shield tech, or deliberately leaving it multiple generations behind and only deploying it in paltry amounts to blunt niche cases like Lances is a legitimate decision to take.
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I agree, the biggest downside to Shields are the cost in research points.
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I still think ships themselves should have an RP cost to bring a new design to production. At least for making airplanes and modern warships and stuff, there is a lot of work that goes into figuring out the design of the platform itself, even if it is made out of otherwise known components.
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The decision to have ships be able to operate independently is an RP decision. I went with specialist ships which evolved into a doctrine of ships NOT being able to operate independently. The theory was that one ship might go rogue, but the ship with weapons did not have active sensors, and even if they did, they did not have independent jump capability, and the jump ships had neither active sensors nor weapons.
The Fleet had certain doctrines:
No ship enters a new system alone. No matter how high tech an enemy is that destroys one of our ships, we will know when, and we will know where, and that news will make it home. That security depends on distance, so there may be no rescue possible to get this certainty.
The exploration corps had a certain level of fatalism, tempered by the policy that if they died heroes, their families received compensation. Money, social status, position in the promising new colonies, and their stories were made into holodramas to be seen by millions.
And sometimes they risked, discovered enemies, and made it home alive, with valuable sensor data.
The romance stories largely revolved about the exploration ships, eliding out the fact that the vast majority of their deployments were utterly boring. The deployment of naval vessels to missions were far less spontaneous. They would typically be short, supported by logistics and scouts, against an enemy whose capacities had been discovered by the sacrifice and daring of scouts and explorations ships. But those deployments were not independent commands by any stretch.
RP wise, they would have a profound distrust of a completely independent warship, as that would not be tied to responsible civil authorities.
Of course, that RP developed to support how I enjoyed the game, how I wished to play. If you wish to have independent ships or squadrons, say a Space Cruiser Yamato type story of a battlecruiser with a small carrier component for scouts and fighters for stealthy approaches, where battles are fought by the fleets in sector, rather than calling all the ships of the civilization to fight, then have fun with that.
What can often happen in a game, especially one that starts from a conventional start, is that you have a shipyard that has been continually expanded but not tooled, and then when you suddenly have the need to build a fleet, well, you only have one super large shipyard that you can put all the latest tech on. And that ship has to be able to do a lot right off the bat, because retooling will take so long. So you can have that super ship, but it will just be the first in a series. Perhaps it gets rushed out a bit, built with industry produced components for the first one. But you inevitably get a series of those ships, and instead of the Yamato you just have a cruiser with a number on it for the most part. And you have invested an awful lot into that big ship philosophy and it can be hard to switch from it. Like if you have a huge amount of ordnance factories, you get a bit of fleet inertia, where your investment in the infrastructure and the tech forces you to stay focused in a particular weapon doctrine, a particular ship size and fleet speed.
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On the subject of shields vs armor:
If you have the ability to control the range, and the ability to outrange the enemy, shields can be MUCH better because you can simply withdraw a damaged ship before it gets too pounded on. If you have two beam ships with equivalent ranged weapons and fire control, and one with shields and the other armor, if the shielded ship can fight at max range, the reduced accuracy results in dps on both sides lower than the shield regeneration. With a missile engagement, a lone damaged ship wouldn't be able to clear a missile envelope in time to get away, but if it had enough repair capability, it could get its shield back online before a followup volley.
Which means an enemy couldn't afford to be efficient with their missiles. They would have to go with overkill, or their entire volley would be largely wasted. Vs armor, you could spread your shots and simply wear your enemy down, maybe getting some lucky chain magazine hits.
Shields magnify a tech/mass advantage. A fleet with shields has more options that result in them taking no or negligible damage from an inferior foe. An armored fleet is counting on superior attrition in every fight. You get a different RP, a different fleet philosophy that way.
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Even if a shielded beam fleet doesn't outrange its foe, as long as it can outrun them it still can withdraw and recharge its shields. Obviously the range advantage is nice, but even a shorter range can benefit from shields.
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You can even retreat if you have slower speed as long as you have powerful enough beam weapons so that the opponent don't want to close with you. If the opponent tries to follow a ship or ships that retreat to try and recharge shields that will also get them closer and more damage from the rest of your fleet.
So... as long as you are more powerful or better in some category then shields will help you with attrition.