'Fighters' in Aurora are not F-18s operating off the Nimitz, because those operate in a different medium than their parent carrier. Aurora 'fighters' are more like a small missile or gun boat, which also operates on water but is usually fast, short-ranged and heavily focused on offensive weapons. There are games that give small craft disproportionate firepower compared to other ships in the same medium, such as Starfire, and do not allow larger ships to use the same systems, which seems illogical. C# Aurora is very much about creating a set of internally consistent physics rules that apply in all situations, from a missile to a battleship.
If you have ideas to make small craft more interesting (not more powerful per HS), then as long as they can be explained within that framework it is fine.
If you have ideas to make small craft more interesting (not more powerful per HS), then as long as they can be explained within that framework it is fine.
If you have ideas to make small craft more interesting (not more powerful per HS), then as long as they can be explained within that framework it is fine.
When I was thinking about this while writing my earlier post, one thought I had was to allow reduced-size versions of weapons that have a highly-elevated failure rate - mainly as this would allow the same weapons to be mounted on larger ships with the same downsides. However I think it would be very difficult to balance as MSP (to fix weapon failures) is quite cheap and space-efficient to put on larger ships, so this would basically be the same DPS-multiplication problem we had with 1.13 reduced-shot railguns and I wouldn't want to repeat that particular exploit.Maybe if they also explode when they malfunction?Just kidding...
'Fighters' in Aurora are not F-18s operating off the Nimitz, because those operate in a different medium than their parent carrier. Aurora 'fighters' are more like a small missile or gun boat, which also operates on water but is usually fast, short-ranged and heavily focused on offensive weapons. There are games that give small craft disproportionate firepower compared to other ships in the same medium, such as Starfire, and do not allow larger ships to use the same systems, which seems illogical. C# Aurora is very much about creating a set of internally consistent physics rules that apply in all situations, from a missile to a battleship.There are conceivable scenarios where you could have an internally consistent weapon that can be fitted to both small and large ships, but you would only reasonably want to use on a small one. I can think of two examples:
If you have ideas to make small craft more interesting (not more powerful per HS), then as long as they can be explained within that framework it is fine.
'Fighters' in Aurora are not F-18s operating off the Nimitz, because those operate in a different medium than their parent carrier. Aurora 'fighters' are more like a small missile or gun boat, which also operates on water but is usually fast, short-ranged and heavily focused on offensive weapons. There are games that give small craft disproportionate firepower compared to other ships in the same medium, such as Starfire, and do not allow larger ships to use the same systems, which seems illogical. C# Aurora is very much about creating a set of internally consistent physics rules that apply in all situations, from a missile to a battleship.
If you have ideas to make small craft more interesting (not more powerful per HS), then as long as they can be explained within that framework it is fine.
I always wondered if accuracy should be scaled by the cube root of size difference of the target. Not because smaller ships are faster or more maneuverable (in Aurora neither is necessarily the case) but because they're simply a smaller target to hit - if a laser misses a fighter by a few meters, logic is the same shot probably would have hit a battleship.
presuming volume is the measure of "size" you start with, it's the square of the cube root, not the square root, of course.
such a thing would add a welcome dash of low fantasy verisimilitude, but it would also apply untoward downward selection pressure on ship sizes.
If you have ideas to make small craft more interesting (not more powerful per HS), then as long as they can be explained within that framework it is fine.Honestly, biggest thing I'd think is reducing the tech-related escalation of cost of beam fire controls. Beam fighters become basically unfeasible at higher tech levels because the fire control alone ends costing more than everything else combined a few times over.
presuming volume is the measure of "size" you start with, it's the square of the cube root, not the square root, of course.
such a thing would add a welcome dash of low fantasy verisimilitude, but it would also apply untoward downward selection pressure on ship sizes.
What about allowing Fighters (and maybe FACs) to utilize the 'No Armor option to significantly reduce their size. I just mucked about with some convential start designs for a single shot railgun fighter, and it was quite the challenge to even get it into the 500T limit with just the railgun, bfc, powerplant, engine and a fighter fuel tank. Mostly due to the fact that conventional armor took up over half the tonnage. Granted, that can be significantly reduced, but not after several tech levels in multiple fields will you be able to get a sub-100T vessel. Removing the armor all together would make those small designs far more feasible, and really the armor is all but useless as is due to shock damage. And building up to the full 500T (or 1000T) would allow you to pack a lot of punch in a small but very fragile package.
I honestly think that the whole fighter debates are due to the fact there are fighters still in Aurora C# while they are pretty much extinct from what they were in VB6.
Squadrons are gone and so are fighter mechanics as they are now compared to true ships.
In facts, I would actually say that either one of the 2 should be true for consistency:
a - remove fighter factories and fighters/FAC also making bridges mandatory for all ships. Remove all fighter exceptions and mechanics.
b - extend the fighter exceptions to all FAC renaming fighter factories FAC factories. So all ships under 1,000 tons would act as fighters are acting now.
To be honest coming up with a new name altogether would be even better, but FAC could still work.
I know it's extreme, but I always think that we have been left with an hybrid sort of mechanic while truth is that you will require an entire different framework to have fighters the way people expect: 1 pilot, few weapons, small tonnage, ecc
--- On the subject of Wealth, perhaps have pop shortages cut into it? Something simple, like 10% of pop is "unemployed" 10% of wealth generated by said planet is lost to Welfare, theft, or whathaveyou.
--- On the subject of Wealth, perhaps have pop shortages cut into it? Something simple, like 10% of pop is "unemployed" 10% of wealth generated by said planet is lost to Welfare, theft, or whathaveyou.
This is a good idea to make excess wealth a little bit useful and make "unemployed" population have some effect without crippling an empire or being overly annoying for players. Spending extra cash on a welfare state makes good fluff sense, but a new colony that doesn't generate much wealth anyways while you ship a bunch of colonists out to the cold, harsh frontier to set up for the future factory/mine shipments won't crash your empire. Overall I like this much better than the usual proposals that unemployed people should generate unrest.
--- On the subject of Wealth, perhaps have pop shortages cut into it? Something simple, like 10% of pop is "unemployed" 10% of wealth generated by said planet is lost to Welfare, theft, or whathaveyou.
This is a good idea to make excess wealth a little bit useful and make "unemployed" population have some effect without crippling an empire or being overly annoying for players. Spending extra cash on a welfare state makes good fluff sense, but a new colony that doesn't generate much wealth anyways while you ship a bunch of colonists out to the cold, harsh frontier to set up for the future factory/mine shipments won't crash your empire. Overall I like this much better than the usual proposals that unemployed people should generate unrest.
If anything maybe excessive debt should start causing unrest so that unemployment by itself wont cause unrest problems but could in the longer term result in unrest. Granted, debt already has a pretty massive effect so idk how good an idea it is to add yet another malus.
The thing is, the "unemployed" population probably isn't actually idle - just doing things not modeled in the economy model of Aurora.
...snip by Xenoscepter...
Getting too specific about the macroeconomic interpretations of the Aurora abstractions would risk creating some very jarring jumps in abstraction levels - and would also mean that you lock Aurora into a specific political economy. Which does not seem very justified from a gameplay or RP perspective.
If you have ideas to make small craft more interesting (not more powerful per HS), then as long as they can be explained within that framework it is fine.
When I was thinking about this while writing my earlier post, one thought I had was to allow reduced-size versions of weapons that have a highly-elevated failure rate - mainly as this would allow the same weapons to be mounted on larger ships with the same downsides. However I think it would be very difficult to balance as MSP (to fix weapon failures) is quite cheap and space-efficient to put on larger ships, so this would basically be the same DPS-multiplication problem we had with 1.13 reduced-shot railguns and I wouldn't want to repeat that particular exploit.Maybe if they also explode when they malfunction?Just kidding...
I have considered smaller than 10cm weapons that have less than a 100% chance to penetrate armour, damage shields or destroy missiles. If a weapon was 55% of the size with a 50% chance to penetrate for example, it becomes less effective over the long-term than a 'normal' weapon. This means it wouldn't be that useful for energy-based point defence, but fine for fighters that are trying to swarm a target.
That is an interesting idea for micro-fighters.
How does the damage output (let's say at 50% chance) compare to equal tech single-shot railguns that still fire every 5 sec, tonnage wise? Could I stack a battleship full of these and unleash hell at 10,000 km?
There should also be a reasonable tech progression to feel in line with the other weapon types.
Given this I think probably the best (and simplest) implementation would be to extend the low range of the Gauss Cannon to perhaps 0.25 HS (12.5 tons) with 4% base accuracy - you can actually do this pretty trivially with a single DB edit if you want to try it in your own games by adding a line to the FCT_TechSystem table.
Good idea, i've played with adding a weapon system before but broke my db (had backups) but just gave this a try and works well enough. Will probably use it in my next campaign.I think you will find it disappointing, or at least I did after a quick look. In my test game I can get a 16km/s fighter with a 4% hit gauss gun in ~70tonnes. Or I can go to 200t and on the same speed fit a single shot rail gun with a longer ranged BFC.