Post by: SteveAlt on March 25, 2009, 01:46:17 PM
A cryogenic transport module is 10 hull spaces, or about 500 tons, and can carry 10,000 colonists. It occurred to me that an average person weighs perhaps 12 stone (in UK terms), which is 168 lbs or 76 kg. If we round that to 80kg then a 500 ton module is 500,000 kilograms and is equal to only 6250 people even without the cryogenic equipment. Assuming the individual cryogenic modules weigh more than the person they contain, which seems likely even with advanced technology, then the cryogenic transport module is way too small, by a factor of somewhere between 4 and 5. Assuming the individual module+passenger weighs 250 kg then a 500 ton module would hold 2000 people, or the existing module would increase in size to 50 hull spaces and retain the 10,000 person capacity and the same cost. In the former case this effectively reduces the capacity of existing colony ships by eighty percent, which has significant implications for the speed and cost of colonization. In the latter case, colony ships would have the same cost but be almost five times slower, assuming the same engines. It's not quite as bad as it sounds because colony ships are effectively maintenance free so you can just build more without any long-term maintenance issues. I could also increase the chance of civilian colony ships to take up the slack. The upside is that colonization would be more realistic in terms of time and likely ship capacity.
This got me thinking about cargo holds as well. It's pretty unrealistic to think that five 500 ton holds could transport an entire factory complex, even if it is broken down for transport. That 2500 ton requirement should probably be more like 25,000 tons. Assuming I did increase the size of cargo holds by a factor of ten without changing their cost that makes cargo ships ten times as big and almost ten times as slow assuming the same number of engines.
In more general terms that would also mean that cargo ships and colony ships became much larger and slower than warships, which does seems more realistic. It would also mean that commercial traffic would almost certainly need jump gates, because of the individual ship size, and that jump gates would effectively become the sign of 'civilization'. Also, commercial shipping would require substantially larger shipyards, which would mean I would need to create a second shipyard type for commercial designs, which would be much cheaper to build and increase in size but would only be able to build non-warships. Again that seems realistic as in the real world there are many yards capable of building very large freighters but very few capable of building very large warships.
I would appreciate player thoughts on the above musing and the potential implications
I have also been considering ways to change civilian traffic, which partly would offset some of the above implications. At the moment, the reason that commercial traffic exists at all is not clear. The game assumes that colonists pay for their passage, which generates income for the civilian shipping line, and presumably infrastructure is a pre-requisite for colonization so there is a reason to deliver that in order to facilitate further income from colonization. However, that still doesn't explain why they would deliver colonists to some distant frozen wasteland instead of the garden planet next door.
Therefore I am tempted to create a contract system. A player would specify what needed to be transported, the start and destination systems and the wealth payment for delivery. Civilian ships would then fulfil that contract and receive the wealth. If there are multiple contracts available the civilians would decide which represented the best deal in terms of time required vs wealth gained, including the time to reach the start point. A contract might be "transport ten million civilians from Earth to Planet X for a total wealth payment of 1000". As individual ships transported colonists, they would receive a fraction of that amount based on the fraction of colonists transported. The chance of new civilian ships being built would be based on the number and type of outstanding contracts.
If I did this, the existing spaceport/convoy system would also be replaced with a new civilian trade system using a number of "export points" and "import points" building up on each planet. Civilian ships would look for opportunities to move export points to planets with import points. Each export point would be worth a set amount for the player and the civilian shipping line once it arrived. Civilian shipping lines would include these opportunities in their decisions regarding player contracts.
In the above scenario, civilian ships from one Empire could be authorised to fulfil contacts and export point transfers from another Empire. This could be allowed specifically by the player or perhaps as a result of a trade treaty. In this case, export and import points could be interchangeable between the two Empire so it would likely increase wealth generation.
One final option could be tarriffs for passage of ships of one Empire through a jump point controlled by another Empire. The amounts could be set by the player and control of key nexus system might be worth quite a lot in terms of income generated from tariffs. Civilian shipping lines would include tarrif costs in their consideration of which contracts to take. Treaties could waive the tarriff costs for specific Empires. All this would need a lot of work on my part but it would create a much more realistic civilian shipping scenario. It would likely generate a lot more traffic than at the moment and it would be distributed according to economic need. Protecting all that shipping would require naval forces
Steve
Post by: Kurt on March 25, 2009, 04:00:15 PM
Quote from: "SteveAlt"
While lying awake last night a disturbing thought occurred to me. I am trying to make Aurora as "realistic" as possible, or at the very least internally consistent so I am probably going to have to tackle the following problem in v4.1.
A cryogenic transport module is 10 hull spaces, or about 500 tons, and can carry 10,000 colonists. It occurred to me that an average person weighs perhaps 12 stone (in UK terms), which is 168 lbs or 76 kg. If we round that to 80kg then a 500 ton module is 500,000 kilograms and is equal to only 6250 people even without the cryogenic equipment. Assuming the individual cryogenic modules weigh more than the person they contain, which seems likely even with advanced technology, then the cryogenic transport module is way too small, by a factor of somewhere between 4 and 5. Assuming the individual module+passenger weighs 250 kg then a 500 ton module would hold 2000 people, or the existing module would increase in size to 50 hull spaces and retain the 10,000 person capacity and the same cost. In the former case this effectively reduces the capacity of existing colony ships by eighty percent, which has significant implications for the speed and cost of colonization. In the latter case, colony ships would have the same cost but be almost five times slower, assuming the same engines. It's not quite as bad as it sounds because colony ships are effectively maintenance free so you can just build more without any long-term maintenance issues. I could also increase the chance of civilian colony ships to take up the slack. The upside is that colonization would be more realistic in terms of time and likely ship capacity.
This got me thinking about cargo holds as well. It's pretty unrealistic to think that five 500 ton holds could transport an entire factory complex, even if it is broken down for transport. That 2500 ton requirement should probably be more like 25,000 tons. Assuming I did increase the size of cargo holds by a factor of ten without changing their cost that makes cargo ships ten times as big and almost ten times as slow assuming the same number of engines.
In more general terms that would also mean that cargo ships and colony ships became much larger and slower than warships, which does seems more realistic. It would also mean that commercial traffic would almost certainly need jump gates, because of the individual ship size, and that jump gates would effectively become the sign of 'civilization'. Also, commercial shipping would require substantially larger shipyards, which would mean I would need to create a second shipyard type for commercial designs, which would be much cheaper to build and increase in size but would only be able to build non-warships. Again that seems realistic as in the real world there are many yards capable of building very large freighters but very few capable of building very large warships.
I would appreciate player thoughts on the above musing and the potential implications
I have no real quibble with your chain of thoughts, except to note that you probably shouldn't be laying awake at night thinking about Aurora :)
Steve[/quote]
I really, really like the idea of tariffs for transiting through another government's jump gate, and if I could I'd have something like that in the 6 Powers Campaign. I also like what you've said above about export and import points, I think you are on the right track.
As things stand, I've given the area of "international interaction" a lot of thought. Aurora currently doesn't do very well with that, especially in situations where there are multiple governments on the same planet. The reality is that such nations would have a lot of interaction, even when they try to limit it. I think something like this would go a ways towards increasing international interaction.
Kurt
Post by: ShadoCat on March 25, 2009, 06:10:10 PM
Post by: Erik L on March 25, 2009, 06:57:53 PM
If you offer a contract for 10,000 pop to Planet 10, maybe have different shipping lines make bids.
Post by: Father Tim on March 25, 2009, 11:17:46 PM
Post by: cjblack on March 26, 2009, 01:39:16 AM
Post by: James Patten on March 26, 2009, 06:25:36 AM
Post by: IanD on March 27, 2009, 04:34:15 AM
As for the split between military and civilian construction, I think of civilian & military space industries as akin to the aeronautical industries today rather than the wet navy & commercial shipbuilding. Some manufacturers do both, but the skill and ability is in the design team, rather than the production end with techniques pioneered on military jets eventually making their way into commercial airliners years later. (But even the now defunct 1950’sV-bomber force was essentially hand crafted
.)Regards
Post by: sloanjh on March 27, 2009, 09:32:52 AM
I'd like to echo Kurts' concerns about slowing down the rate of economic expansion. As it stands, I've found it requires a significant economic effort to create useful colonies in a reasonable amount of game-play (i.e. wall-clock, not Aurora calendar) time. If the rate of colonization were cut by an order of magnitude, I think it would kill the game for me. That being said, I've always had a little bird twittering in the back of my head about how one would manage to cram 50K people into a wet-navy-destroyer-sized hull. In addition, I think the observations about relative size of civilian and military ships (both IRL and in the Honorverse) are appropriate.
So it seems to me that the trick is "how do I make civilian ships significantly bigger than military ships without seriously impacting the cost-per-person-km or cost-per-factory-km". Since most of the cost of civilian shipping is in cryo-storage and engines, it seems like the way to do that is to make sure that those two systems aren't prohibitively expensive. Cryo-storage is easy - since it isn't used by military designs you can just cut the cost (or even work it as "regular" life support). It's engines that are tough - how do you set it up so that a civilian ship with 10x the mass of a military ship doesn't cost 5 times as much (10x for the engines, which I cut by 2 to model the absences of weapons and sensors)? Note that this is the same old "civilian engines" conundrum again - "how do you make efficient, low-speed civilian engines without screwing up military designs?"
The best thought I've had so far is to make outdated technology significantly less expensive. If you gave a 2x or 4x cut per tech level to the build cost of a system, then civilian designs could use lower-tech (and slower) engines at a significant cost reduction. As a concrete example, if your current capacitor recharge rate was 3, and you decided to design a "Hyperdyne Systems 3000" laser using recharge-2 capacitors, the cost of the capacitors would only be 50% of what it would be if the your recharge tech level was 2. I used capacitors since I could actually remember the levels, but the same would apply to engines. If you go down this road, I would recommend that a new system actually be designed rather than just having the cost magically drop. In the example above, the Hyperdyne 3000 might be replacing a Hyperdyne 2000 laser which had exactly the same operating characteristics, except it would be more expensive because it was designed when capacitor tech was at recharge-2 (rather than 3).
If you're worried that e.g. a 2x reduction would make low-tech alternatives too cheap, there's still mineral and fuel cost. The only thing I've suggested changing is build cost, so a 10x as big ship would still cost 10x the minerals. I don't know if leaving mineral and fuel costs alone would end up making colonization costs prohibitive (bad) or prevent players from building huge military navies composed of 1- or 2-generation outdated ships (good), i.e. which way it would kick play balance. I suspect that fuel is going to be the problem - all those huge civilian ships would consume a huge amount of fuel compared to the military. Here's a thought: why not have fuel for civilian shipping come from the civilian economy? In addition to resetting the maintainence clock, the civilian maintainence facility could also fill the tanks of the civilian designs. This actually mimics real-life - military fuel consumption is small compared to civilian. The only problem is that you'd have to prevent fuel transfers between civilian and military designs (to avoid free civilian fuel getting into military vessels).
John
Post by: James Patten on March 27, 2009, 11:14:22 AM
Post by: SteveAlt on March 27, 2009, 12:55:35 PM
Quote from: "Kurt"
I have no real quibble with your chain of thoughts, except to note that you probably shouldn't be laying awake at night thinking about AuroraI do agree that making that change in isolation would slow down economic growth fairly dramatically. Now I have done the check on cryo-capacity though it will continue to nag at me until I fix it. The trick will be making other changes to accomodate the new reality without unbalancing something else.
My only comment is to point out that slowing down freighters and colony ships, while it may make sense, will effectively slow down economic expansion by approximately the same factor. I routinely evaluate colonization opportunities by the length of time it takes for a freighter or colony ship to make a round trip. The shorter the trip, the more trips the ships can make, and the fast the colony is established and the faster it can grow. Absent other pressures, this situation almost always drives my R&D efforts to focus on engine development, to develop faster and faster engines to propel my colony-establishment ships faster, to ensure that I can establish colonies further and further away in reasonable amounts of time.
Having said that, I make no judgements about whether this change is good or bad, I'm just noting the inevitable result of slowing down the ships that fuel economic expansion.
Quote
I am still not convinced that the whole "civilian" ship section of Aurora isn't more of a pain than it is worth, but then, it probably reflects reality much better than not having anything like it.Civilians were very basic in v3.1, a little better in v3.2 and a lot of their pathfinding issues are resolved in v4.0 so they are improving. The reason for the whole civilian sector is that I want a living breathing Empire with commercial traffic. In almost all other space games, the player has total control over everything, which in itself is unrealistic. While the Soviet Union in space might have centralised control, the US, Western or other market-led economics will likely end up with a lot more civilian controlled ships than government controlled. When a large alien invasion force comes calling, it should be complete chaos among the local commercial traffic and protecting that traffic should be important to the player.
Quote
I really, really like the idea of tariffs for transiting through another government's jump gate, and if I could I'd have something like that in the 6 Powers Campaign. I also like what you've said above about export and import points, I think you are on the right track.I agree. I have been giving this further thought and perhaps an Empire would actually need forces in place to monitor such traffic. In other words, only ships you can identify will be paying tarrifs. It will all be automated in terms of detection and payment but you would need to deploy some type of customs station or patrol ship in systems or near jump points that you claim.
As things stand, I've given the area of "international interaction" a lot of thought. Aurora currently doesn't do very well with that, especially in situations where there are multiple governments on the same planet. The reality is that such nations would have a lot of interaction, even when they try to limit it. I think something like this would go a ways towards increasing international interaction.
Steve
Post by: SteveAlt on March 27, 2009, 12:59:13 PM
Quote from: "ShadoCat"
Why not just consider the weight of the colony modules and cargo holds to be the dry weight. Then just modify the speed of the ship by the amount of weight that it is actually carrying.I have tried to avoid any on-going calculations for speed based on changing mass. Otherwise, it could be argued that ships will increase speed as they use fuel and that different types of cargo may have different densities and therefore different mass for the same volume. Ships that have fired their ordnance could also be faster, or carriers that have launched their fighters. While realistic and relatively easy to handle from a programming POV, it could add a lot of complexity from a player perspective without a commeasurate increase in gameplay.
Steve
Post by: SteveAlt on March 27, 2009, 01:06:54 PM
Quote from: "Erik Luken"
On the contract portion.Interesting idea. At the moment there is only a civilian sector as a whole rather than individual private companies. It probably wouldn't be very difficult to flag each civilian ship as belonging to a particular company and generating company names would be easy enough. Having them issue bids would be trickier though as it places more work on the player to manage those bids. The idea in my head at the moment is that different shipping lines would each take a portion of the contract as their ships became available. In that way the process is entirely automated after the player creates the contract and the "competition" is actually between different Empires to attract commercial shipping, including commercial shipping from other Empires.
If you offer a contract for 10,000 pop to Planet 10, maybe have different shipping lines make bids.
I do like the individual shipping lines idea though and will likely build that in, along with a screen where you can see the published profit/loss statements for each. In that case, they would start with a set amount of capital and have to generate the wealth to purchase additional ships. It would be fascinating to see which lines grow over time.
Steve
Post by: SteveAlt on March 27, 2009, 01:08:28 PM
Quote from: "Father Tim"
All of your musings sound good to me. I like civilian ships being bigger than warships (as with HH's approx 10-to-1 ratio and a modern double-hulled tanker vs the US Navy's 'dead president' CVNs), and the more commerce traffic there is around for raiding, the better.I agree. With plenty of shipping about and with that shipping carrying wealth around in the form of export points then raiders and pirates become a realistic option.
Steve
Post by: SteveAlt on March 27, 2009, 01:17:14 PM
Quote from: "cjblack"
As a "quick fix" have you considered increasing the ratio of tons to hull spaces by a factor of 5 to 10?That's a good idea but not quite as quick a fix as you might think
While its true that increasing hull size would solve the 'realism' problem for cargo holds and cryo modules, it would also increase the size of all the warships, making destroyers 50,000 tons or so and cruisers perhaps 100-200,000 tons. That would actually fit match up well with the warships in the Honorverse but the Aurora ratio between freighter and warship size would remain the same and I think I would prefer larger and slower commercial vessels in comparison to smaller and faster warships. The change would also up fast attack craft to 10,000 tons and 'fighters' to 2000 tons or so. Finally, while I initially used a global constant for the hull space to tonnage ratio, over the last couple of years I have pretty much assumed that wasn't going to change and the code will be riddled with functions that assume the existing ratio. Finding them all might be tricky. So, while it is a good idea, a combination of my programming laziness and my concept of the various units in the game means I probably won't be able to use it.
Steve
Post by: SteveAlt on March 27, 2009, 01:54:13 PM
Quote from: "IanD"
10 X more trips for the same number of colonists uses 10 X more fuel, consuming more soruim. Thus you hit the fuel crunch much earlier when you may not have an alternative source or sufficient funding to overcome it making reliance on civilian shipping much greater. Should all transport of every thing to the colonies be privatised, few Governments now have the ability to move large numbers of people (or even military personnel – see Falklands war).If the ships are the same size and cost the same and you only build the same number as before then although colonization will be 5-10x slower, fuel use would remain the same. Likewise, if the bulk of colonization is taken over by civilian shipping lines, fuel use would be unaffected. In the case where players build more ships to compensate, or perhaps put more engines on the ships than at the moment, then it would become a problem. I have a couple of ideas to resolve that, one of which is to make fuel production easier or generate more fuel per ton of Sorium.
Quote
As for the split between military and civilian construction, I think of civilian & military space industries as akin to the aeronautical industries today rather than the wet navy & commercial shipbuilding. Some manufacturers do both, but the skill and ability is in the design team, rather than the production end with techniques pioneered on military jets eventually making their way into commercial airliners years later. (But even the now defunct 1950’sV-bomber force was essentially hand craftedI guess I am working on the assumption that a lot more shipyards exist for merchant ships, that they tend to be of larger capacity than warships and that commercial ships are generally cheaper. On that basis a new "Commercial Shipyard" would be cheaper and larger than the equivalent "Military Shipyard" but would be unable to build warships.
As an example, the container ship Emma Maersk at 170,000 tons is larger than any warship ever built and is only $145 million. Compare that to a new 8000 ton Type 45 Destroyer with a price tag of about $1.5 billion. The container ship is twenty times larger and costs ten times less, or about 200x less on a per ton basis. Ignoring size, the cost ratio for freighters vs warships in Aurora is not quite as drastic but still ntoiceable. The sizes though are comparable and in most cases the warships are larger, which doesn't reflect either the current situation or a likely future scenario. In order to create larger commercial ships without requiring massive shipyard investment while retaining realistic limits on warship construction, I can't see any alternative except for two different types of shipyard
Steve
Post by: SteveAlt on March 27, 2009, 03:50:01 PM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
Hi Steve,I agree with the outline of the problem. I think I have accepted the fact that commercial ships need to be larger and likely slower but the problems are retaining a relatively cheap ship that doesn't use huge amounts of fuel and allowing the construction of enough to fulfil the demand. The idea of cheaper older systems is a possibility, although that wouldn't solve the fuel problem. If government-owned commercial ships had free fuel that would offset most of the attractiveness of the civilian sector.
I'd like to echo Kurts' concerns about slowing down the rate of economic expansion. As it stands, I've found it requires a significant economic effort to create useful colonies in a reasonable amount of game-play (i.e. wall-clock, not Aurora calendar) time. If the rate of colonization were cut by an order of magnitude, I think it would kill the game for me. That being said, I've always had a little bird twittering in the back of my head about how one would manage to cram 50K people into a wet-navy-destroyer-sized hull. In addition, I think the observations about relative size of civilian and military ships (both IRL and in the Honorverse) are appropriate.
So it seems to me that the trick is "how do I make civilian ships significantly bigger than military ships without seriously impacting the cost-per-person-km or cost-per-factory-km". Since most of the cost of civilian shipping is in cryo-storage and engines, it seems like the way to do that is to make sure that those two systems aren't prohibitively expensive. Cryo-storage is easy - since it isn't used by military designs you can just cut the cost (or even work it as "regular" life support). It's engines that are tough - how do you set it up so that a civilian ship with 10x the mass of a military ship doesn't cost 5 times as much (10x for the engines, which I cut by 2 to model the absences of weapons and sensors)? Note that this is the same old "civilian engines" conundrum again - "how do you make efficient, low-speed civilian engines without screwing up military designs?"
The best thought I've had so far is to make outdated technology significantly less expensive. If you gave a 2x or 4x cut per tech level to the build cost of a system, then civilian designs could use lower-tech (and slower) engines at a significant cost reduction. As a concrete example, if your current capacitor recharge rate was 3, and you decided to design a "Hyperdyne Systems 3000" laser using recharge-2 capacitors, the cost of the capacitors would only be 50% of what it would be if the your recharge tech level was 2. I used capacitors since I could actually remember the levels, but the same would apply to engines. If you go down this road, I would recommend that a new system actually be designed rather than just having the cost magically drop. In the example above, the Hyperdyne 3000 might be replacing a Hyperdyne 2000 laser which had exactly the same operating characteristics, except it would be more expensive because it was designed when capacitor tech was at recharge-2 (rather than 3).
If you're worried that e.g. a 2x reduction would make low-tech alternatives too cheap, there's still mineral and fuel cost. The only thing I've suggested changing is build cost, so a 10x as big ship would still cost 10x the minerals. I don't know if leaving mineral and fuel costs alone would end up making colonization costs prohibitive (bad) or prevent players from building huge military navies composed of 1- or 2-generation outdated ships (good), i.e. which way it would kick play balance. I suspect that fuel is going to be the problem - all those huge civilian ships would consume a huge amount of fuel compared to the military. Here's a thought: why not have fuel for civilian shipping come from the civilian economy? In addition to resetting the maintainence clock, the civilian maintainence facility could also fill the tanks of the civilian designs. This actually mimics real-life - military fuel consumption is small compared to civilian. The only problem is that you'd have to prevent fuel transfers between civilian and military designs (to avoid free civilian fuel getting into military vessels).
However, I have another idea that might be a possible solution and fit within the Aurora physics model. At the moment there are four type of engine with increasing power and decreasing fuel efficiency. Those are:
Ship Engine: 1x Power, 1x Fuel Use.
FAC Engine: 2x Power, 10x Fuel Use (Max 1 per ship)
Fighter Engine: 3x Power, 100x Fuel Use (Max 1 per ship)
Missile Engine: 5x Power, 10,000x Fuel Use.
I could add a new engine type to the start of that scale. A commercial engine that is half power per HS and 0.1x fuel use that is also much cheaper in terms of power produced and crew requirements (perhaps only 20% as much). Also as the size of the engine decreases on the way down the scale, I could make the engine much larger, perhaps 25 HS, which makes it a little less flexible and prevents huge numbers of engines per ship. Such an engine would be of little use to warships, which would want the best possible power ratio, but it would be fine for large commercial ships that are more interested in efficiency than top speed.
As an example, here is the Commonwealth's current freighter design and the engine it is using.
Code: [Select]
Atlas IV class Freighter 4250 tons 186 Crew 338.2 BP TCS 85 TH 400 EM 0
4705 km/s Armour 1-23 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
Annual Failure Rate: 144% IFR: 2% Maintenance Capacity 50 MSP Max Repair 40 MSP
Cargo 25000 Cargo Handling Multiplier 5
NPO Energomash Magneto-plasma Drive (5) Power 80 Efficiency 0.60 Signature 80 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 100,000 Litres Range 70.6 billion km (173 days at full power)Code: [Select]
NPO Energomash Magneto-plasma Drive
Power Output: 80 Explosion Chance: 5 Efficiency: 0.6 Thermal Signature: 80
Engine Size: 5 HS Engine HTK: 2 Internal Armour: 0
Cost: 40 Crew: 25Now here is the proposed equal tech commercial engine using the parameters described above. It is the same cost but has 2.5x the power and a fuel efficieny that is ten times higher. However, it is also five times larger so the power to mass ratio is half that of the military engine.
Code: [Select]
Commercial MPD
Power Output: 200 Explosion Chance: 15 Efficiency: 0.06 Thermal Signature: 200
Engine Size: 25 HS Engine HTK: 1 Internal Armour: 0
Cost: 40 Crew: 25Assuming a cargo hold that is ten times larger but otherwise identical in terms of cost, capacity, etc., the resulting equivalent of the Atlas would be as below. This design simply replaces the five existing engines and five cargo holds with their updated equivalents. The resulting ship is about twenty percent more expensive, mainly because of the increased armour requirement (90 BP instead of 23 BP). The range is actually greater (93 billion vs 70 billion) for the same fuel. The most notieable difference is speed, which drops from 4705 to 1552, which means this ship will take 3x as long to get anywhere (or perhaps slightly less as the unloading/loading will remain the same) but the fuel cost to do so will be about 20% less. The maintenance figures are also way out because of the increased size so I would have to tackle that somehow.
Code: [Select]
Testbed class Freighter 32200 tons 186 Crew 405.4 BP TCS 644 TH 1000 EM 0
1552 km/s Armour 1-90 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
Annual Failure Rate: 8294% IFR: 115.2% Maintenance Capacity 8 MSP Max Repair 40 MSP
Cargo 25000 Cargo Handling Multiplier 5
Commercial MPD (5) Power 200 Efficiency 0.06 Signature 200 Armour 0 Exp 15%
Fuel Capacity 100,000 Litres Range 93.1 billion km (694 days at full power)The proposed increase in cryo-transport size is only 5x not 10x so the equivalent colony ships would be as follows (original first and then with updated systems). In this case, the cost increase is negligible and the speed is 54% of the original. The resulting ship also has more than twice the range so it could drop a fuel bunker. This gives a ship that is slower but still competitive.Code: [Select]
Alaska IV class Colony Ship 4250 tons 211 Crew 788.2 BP TCS 85 TH 400 EM 0
4705 km/s Armour 1-23 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
Annual Failure Rate: 144% IFR: 2% Maintenance Capacity 116 MSP Max Repair 40 MSP
Colonists 50000 Cargo Handling Multiplier 5
NPO Energomash Magneto-plasma Drive (5) Power 80 Efficiency 0.60 Signature 80 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 100,000 Litres Range 70.6 billion km (173 days at full power)Code: [Select]
Testbed Two class Colony Ship 19550 tons 211 Crew 829.8 BP TCS 391 TH 1000 EM 0
2557 km/s Armour 1-64 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
Annual Failure Rate: 3057% IFR: 42.5% Maintenance Capacity 27 MSP Max Repair 40 MSP
Colonists 50000 Cargo Handling Multiplier 5
Commercial MPD (5) Power 200 Efficiency 0.06 Signature 200 Armour 0 Exp 15%
Fuel Capacity 100,000 Litres Range 153.4 billion km (694 days at full power)Here is the same ship with two extra engines. The cost has increased by 10% and the speed has been increased by 24% so that seems like a good investment (perhaps too good - maybe the 20% cost is too low). Diminishing returns kicks in faster with the engines though because of the lower mass-power ratio. BTW, these are all done with magneto-plasma drivesCode: [Select]
Testbed Two 22050 tons 261 Crew 915.4 BP TCS 441 TH 1400 EM 0
3174 km/s Armour 1-70 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
Annual Failure Rate: 3889% IFR: 54% Maintenance Capacity 26 MSP Max Repair 40 MSP
Colonists 50000 Cargo Handling Multiplier 5
Commercial MPD (7) Power 200 Efficiency 0.06 Signature 200 Armour 0 Exp 15%
Fuel Capacity 100,000 Litres Range 136.0 billion km (496 days at full power)How does the line of reasoning sound? Obviously more detail is needed but does it have the right feel?
Steve
Post by: rmcrowe on March 27, 2009, 03:54:32 PM
robert
Post by: schroeam on March 27, 2009, 04:35:36 PM
These all look really promising for the realistic separation between military grade ships and civilian vessels, but I have to ask, since you are already tinkering with the program, is this going to come out with 4.0, or in 4.1? Either way would be great...
Adam.
Post by: cjblack on March 27, 2009, 10:13:52 PM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
Here's a thought: why not have fuel for civilian shipping come from the civilian economy? In addition to resetting the maintainence clock, the civilian maintainence facility could also fill the tanks of the civilian designs. This actually mimics real-life - military fuel consumption is small compared to civilian. The only problem is that you'd have to prevent fuel transfers between civilian and military designs (to avoid free civilian fuel getting into military vessels).
Which begs another question: where is all that free civilian fuel coming from? Sorium is, after all, very much a finite resource.
Post by: sloanjh on March 28, 2009, 12:09:17 AM
Quote from: "SteveAlt"
How does the line of reasoning sound? Obviously more detail is needed but does it have the right feel?Yep - sounds right. I was actually trying to figure out how to do something similar, but didn't think of increasing the engine size so that the overall power per engine would go up while the power/mass ratio (and hence top speed) would go down. In effect, you're scaling up the size of all the commercial systems while keeping their cost fixed, which lowers the impact on play balance (and feels like the right thing to do to, considering the difference in real-world cost between military and commercial components).
From an efficiency point of view, I would say the following: same cost and same number of factories per payload but 3x slower means that the new freighter is 3x less efficient than the current one, since the rate of flow of factories into a particular colony will be 3x slower for the same number of freighters. So it's still going to have a fairly major hit on colonization rate. From a "realism" point of view I think this is reasonable, but from a gameplay point of view I'm a little nervous about colonization rate. The good news is that the fuel efficiency (fuel used per factory delivered) is the same or a little better - I don't remember if fuel, mineral costs, or SY capacity tends to be the limiting factor for my civilian fleet; I think often it's fuel.
One other bright spot - do I remember correctly that mineral cost is equal or proportional to build cost? i.e. if a component costs 100 build points, then it will cost 10x as many minerals as a component which only costs 10 build points? If so, then the huge mineral consumption problem is solved as well. If not, you can always make the civilian components cheap in mineral cost as well.
John
Post by: sloanjh on March 28, 2009, 12:10:43 AM
Quote from: "adradjool"
Steve,
These all look really promising for the realistic separation between military grade ships and civilian vessels, but I have to ask, since you are already tinkering with the program, is this going to come out with 4.0, or in 4.1? Either way would be great...
Adam.
I would vote for 4.1 - I'm champing at the bit to start a new campaign.
John
Post by: sloanjh on March 28, 2009, 12:28:09 AM
Quote from: "cjblack"
Quote from: "sloanjh"Here's a thought: why not have fuel for civilian shipping come from the civilian economy? In addition to resetting the maintainence clock, the civilian maintainence facility could also fill the tanks of the civilian designs. This actually mimics real-life - military fuel consumption is small compared to civilian. The only problem is that you'd have to prevent fuel transfers between civilian and military designs (to avoid free civilian fuel getting into military vessels).
Which begs another question: where is all that free civilian fuel coming from? Sorium is, after all, very much a finite resource.
Why, from the same place the civilian ships are getting it from right now - the fuel fairy. Just leave a quarter under your pillow, and the next day your fuel tanks are full!!! :-) ) - the problem is that it's a lot of work :-)
John
Post by: sloanjh on March 28, 2009, 01:02:39 AM
Quote from: "IanD"
Should all transport of every thing to the colonies be privatised, few Governments now have the ability to move large numbers of people (or even military personnel – see Falklands war).
The Falklands comment just caught my eye - I was thinking of cryo- vs. non-cryo transport, then thought of the civilian liners Canberra and Queen Mary (IIRC) being pressed into service as troop transports, then realized that you should probably be revisiting the size of troop transports and military units while you're on this topic. In the same way that cryo-modules always seemed to hold too many people, troop transports have had a similar feel - why should I be able to fit the entire ground army of a major nation inside 10-20 DD-sized hulls?
A few thoughts on this:
- It feels like there are two scales of units that are relevant - those that fit on an assault ship (~batallion size) and those that need to be transported by civilian shipping (~division or corps size). The wet-navy equivalent to the former would be a Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is roughly a battalion in size and embarked on an amphibious task group; the later would be an army division.
You might want to consider going back to SF's division of troop transport requirements into separate cargo and life-support tonnage. This would allow you to ship divisions around using existing civilian hulls, which are big enough to move the masses of troops that won't fit on a specialized assault ship.
National/world armies should be division-sized units. Units that fit in troop transports should be battalion-sized. This means it's going to be REALLY hard to take over someone's homeworld through ground combat alone. Colony worlds, on the other hand, won't have the population to support home-grown division-sized formations, and so would be realistic to take over by ground assault. Note that this leads to a "colonial battalion" universe, which is very common in military SF, e.g. Pournelle's CoDominion or Frezza's "A Small Colonial War" (a
That being said, if you can ensure the ability to land safely, then you can ship whole divisions in on civilian hulls. This is essentially how the US built up for both Gulf Wars - shipping the equipment on freighters, and flying the personnel over on planes.
Orbital bombardment and sheltering within PDCs make sense for evening the odds when assaulting a homeworld. It's reasonable to assume that PDCs will only have "life support" for battalion to bridage-sized units, so all those divisions are sitting ducks for the ships on orbit, at which point the ground troops go in to root out the PDCs. Of course the radiation and dust clouds are a bit of a downer :-)
John
Post by: sloanjh on March 28, 2009, 01:06:26 AM
John
Post by: SteveAlt on March 28, 2009, 10:32:34 AM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
These changes will be in v4.1. I am planning to release a beta version of v4.0 later today if possible.Quote from: "adradjool"Steve,
These all look really promising for the realistic separation between military grade ships and civilian vessels, but I have to ask, since you are already tinkering with the program, is this going to come out with 4.0, or in 4.1? Either way would be great...
Adam.
I would vote for 4.1 - I'm champing at the bit to start a new campaign.
Steve
Post by: SteveAlt on March 28, 2009, 10:37:35 AM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
Freighters will be around 3x slower with the same number of engines, although I suspect the number of engines might increase a little and it may end up more with freighters a little more expensive and about half current speeds. Colony ships will be affected less because of the smaller size increase and I imagine speed will be around 60-70% current with a minor increase in cost. In terms of playability, it will slow down the military-led colonization ability but I hope to compensate for that with a greater involvement of the private sector. The overall effect may well be similar expansion speed, more civilian ships and less fuel used by the military (and more realistic ship sizes).Quote from: "SteveAlt"How does the line of reasoning sound? Obviously more detail is needed but does it have the right feel?Yep - sounds right. I was actually trying to figure out how to do something similar, but didn't think of increasing the engine size so that the overall power per engine would go up while the power/mass ratio (and hence top speed) would go down. In effect, you're scaling up the size of all the commercial systems while keeping their cost fixed, which lowers the impact on play balance (and feels like the right thing to do to, considering the difference in real-world cost between military and commercial components).
From an efficiency point of view, I would say the following: same cost and same number of factories per payload but 3x slower means that the new freighter is 3x less efficient than the current one, since the rate of flow of factories into a particular colony will be 3x slower for the same number of freighters. So it's still going to have a fairly major hit on colonization rate. From a "realism" point of view I think this is reasonable, but from a gameplay point of view I'm a little nervous about colonization rate. The good news is that the fuel efficiency (fuel used per factory delivered) is the same or a little better - I don't remember if fuel, mineral costs, or SY capacity tends to be the limiting factor for my civilian fleet; I think often it's fuel.
One other bright spot - do I remember correctly that mineral cost is equal or proportional to build cost? i.e. if a component costs 100 build points, then it will cost 10x as many minerals as a component which only costs 10 build points? If so, then the huge mineral consumption problem is solved as well. If not, you can always make the civilian components cheap in mineral cost as well.
MIneral cost is equal to build cost for new construction so there won't be any significant change in mineral consumption.
Steve
Post by: SteveAlt on March 28, 2009, 10:41:18 AM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
Just noticed something - take a look at the annual failure rate on the new designs. I think you're going to have to adjust some parameters there :)
I might just remove any maintenance costs for freighters and colony ships and remove the commercial freight facility. I think that would be easier without any real gameplay loss. The maintenance aspect of the game is really intended to simulate managing the military, survey and logistical elements. I think maintenance of the large number of freighters and colony ships is probably more tedious than fun.
Steve
Post by: sloanjh on March 28, 2009, 11:36:17 AM
Quote from: "SteveAlt"
Freighters will be around 3x slower with the same number of engines, although I suspect the number of engines might increase a little and it may end up more with freighters a little more expensive and about half current speeds. Colony ships will be affected less because of the smaller size increase and I imagine speed will be around 60-70% current with a minor increase in cost. In terms of playability, it will slow down the military-led colonization ability but I hope to compensate for that with a greater involvement of the private sector. The overall effect may well be similar expansion speed, more civilian ships and less fuel used by the military (and more realistic ship sizes).
MIneral cost is equal to build cost for new construction so there won't be any significant change in mineral consumption.
Sounds great! And I'm looking forward to the 4.0beta!!
John
Post by: mavikfelna on March 28, 2009, 12:13:53 PM
A couple of thoughts though.
Is there any way at all to at least change the HS size to 100 instead of 50? It really would make my life easier and it wouldn't affect everything else too badly.
Are you going to fractionalize factories and allow current sized cargo holds to move them in pieces or just simply up the cargo hold size so the smallest hold will hold a full factory? I think having the ability to make small tramp freighters that couldn't move a whole factory at once would be kind of fun.
With the new commercial engine, how about 20 instead of 25 HS for it? I just think the 3x loss of speed and increase in cost really makes it hard to justify colonization on the imperial side of things.
Removing freighter management would be nice though.
--Mav
Post by: SteveAlt on March 28, 2009, 01:51:42 PM
Quote from: "mavikfelna"
It's all pretty interesting and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.As I mentioned, I have been lazy with the programming and the 50 ton per HS assumption would be hard to change. It's just in so many places so that I would be tracking down bugs for quite a while
A couple of thoughts though.
Is there any way at all to at least change the HS size to 100 instead of 50? It really would make my life easier and it wouldn't affect everything else too badly.
Quote
Are you going to fractionalize factories and allow current sized cargo holds to move them in pieces or just simply up the cargo hold size so the smallest hold will hold a full factory? I think having the ability to make small tramp freighters that couldn't move a whole factory at once would be kind of fun.Cargo holds will remain exactly as they are now in terms of cost, carrying capacity, etc. They will just be larger. The only thing I will probably change is their capacity for minerals. In that case, even a small freighter with one cargo hold would be able to move 2000 tons of minerals. I won't be fractionalising factories and mines, etc as it would involve a lot of work and the gameplay improvement would be fairly minor.
Quote
With the new commercial engine, how about 20 instead of 25 HS for it? I just think the 3x loss of speed and increase in cost really makes it hard to justify colonization on the imperial side of things.The 25 HS is fairly arbitrary. It was the mass-power ratio that was the important aspect. If i made it 20 HS I would have to drop the power by twenty percent. In any event, the 25 HS commercial engine has 50% of the power of five 5 HS military engines so the speed reduction in terms of the engines is only 50% (to maintain the engine progression). It's the mass-power ratio that will have the additional impact. Besides, they use only one tenth of the fuel of an equivalent power military engine so they have a considerable advantage in that area.
Quote
Removing freighter management would be nice though.I am almost certainly going to do that.
Steve
Post by: ShadoCat on March 29, 2009, 02:13:45 PM
Quote from: "SteveAlt"
How does the line of reasoning sound? Obviously more detail is needed but does it have the right feel?
Something else to deal with: jump ships.
There has to be a way of making jump ships that can transport these ships without huge jump drive costs. Also, building fuel tanks out gets even more cheesy at this point.
Unless we want to limit these ships to jump gate travel, the game needs some sort of civilian jump drive. The trick is how to you make a jump engine for the cargo ships cheep enough to be competitive without just making a cheap combat jump engine.
One thought, make the commercial jump drive be 5x the hull spaces but cheaper. The object is to make is so large that any ship carrying it would not be able to defend itself. It would also mean that the jump ship would not have to have enough fuel tanks to hold the entire empire's fuel reserve (a bit of exaggeration).
Another thought is to lower the minimum armor for commercial ships. That way the hulls are cheaper and more fragile.
Post by: Brian Neumann on March 29, 2009, 03:05:58 PM
Quote
Another thought is to lower the minimum armor for commercial ships. That way the hulls are cheaper and more fragile.
The problem with making the civilian ships more fragile is when you need to go into a nebula for some reason. I have come across very good habitable planets in nebula's. The only drawback was the slow speed of ships getting to the planet (strength 8 nebula). If I can't put a few levels of armor on my freighters and colonist they would be extremely slow (about 300km/s speed)'
Brian
Post by: SteveAlt on March 29, 2009, 04:13:12 PM
Quote from: "ShadoCat"
Something else to deal with: jump ships.I think I am leaning toward the idea that jump gates will be necessary for this type of activity. Jump drives would become something that the military uses for deep space exploration and wars. Within 'civilised' space, the norm would be jump gates. Sort of like Babylon 5. It will still be possible to build smaller colony ships that will work within the existing jump drive limits and by about jump drive efficiency 8, jump drives large enough for freighters would be just about possible. Because of this, as discussed in another thread, building jump gates would become easier. I'll woul probably make the tech cheaper, drastically increase the size of the construction modules but remove the need for jump gate components.
There has to be a way of making jump ships that can transport these ships without huge jump drive costs. Also, building fuel tanks out gets even more cheesy at this point.
Unless we want to limit these ships to jump gate travel, the game needs some sort of civilian jump drive. The trick is how to you make a jump engine for the cargo ships cheep enough to be competitive without just making a cheap combat jump engine.
One thought, make the commercial jump drive be 5x the hull spaces but cheaper. The object is to make is so large that any ship carrying it would not be able to defend itself. It would also mean that the jump ship would not have to have enough fuel tanks to hold the entire empire's fuel reserve (a bit of exaggeration).
Another thought is to lower the minimum armor for commercial ships. That way the hulls are cheaper and more fragile.
If I was going to create a "civilian" jump drive, the easiest way to make it unattractive for the military but useful for civilians would be to have it disrupt sensors and weapons for several hours rather than about the existing minute or so.
Steve
Post by: jfelten on March 30, 2009, 06:54:06 AM
I was going to re-suggest commercial engines but you beat me to that. As for commercial engine fuel you could techno-babble that the commercial engines use a lower grade fuel based on a less pure variant of sorium which is plentiful but is not represented in the game since it is useless to the military, or something along those lines.
Since cryogenic transport of people is still in the science fiction realm you can do pretty much whatever you like with it. Perhaps all the water is techno-magically removed (say it is necessary to avoid ice crystal damage) so each colonist only weighs a few Kg during shipment and is reconstituted on delivery from local sources. Freeze dried colonists.
For that matter, one could easily expect that a "non Newtonian" technology would make volume more important than mass.
Are not the super freighters/tankers a relatively recent development in wet navy history? The BB Yamato didn't displace that much less than the Queen Mary for example. I don't think that aspect translates well in to the space navy realm.
Post by: Hawkeye on March 30, 2009, 12:45:18 PM
Quote from: "jfelten"
I would be happy to see the need for jump gate components to go away. It is simply a hassle to keep delivering them when and where needed.
<Snip>
Are not the super freighters/tankers a relatively recent development in wet navy history? The BB Yamato didn't displace that much less than the Queen Mary for example. I don't think that aspect translates well in to the space navy realm.
I´m with you on this.
Of course, I am also more a WW2 guy, where BBs and CVs where much larger than your average commercial vessels (Back then, a tanker of 10.000t was a giant, while regular BBs massed 35.000 to 50.000t (leaving Yamato and Musashi aside) and CVs were around 25.000t. Those men of war dwarfed anything commercial, except for a few luxury liners. Even the famous liberty ships massed only some 14.000t (yes, I googled this
)Also, making jumpgates mandatory takes away a choice. No more choosing between building them and opening a system to alien attack but also easing movement of fleets, military and merchant alike, or using jump engines exclusively, playing it more safe, but dealing with the additional hassle that comes with this approach.
Of course, I can live with it, just wanted to show my thoughts
Hawkeye, Germany
Post by: Steve Walmsley on March 30, 2009, 02:51:30 PM
Quote from: "Hawkeye"
I´m with you on this.The original reason for increasing the size of freighters, etc was not to create a modern balance but to more realistically reflect the transport requirements of colonists and factories. The similarity to modern warship / freighters comparisons is a coincidence, although I prefer the idea of large commercial shipping. Bear in mind that even in WW2, 14,000 ton liberty ships and 10,000 ton freighters were usually escorted by 2000 ton destroyers and were larger than many cruisers. Yes, the capital ships were larger than the freighters but that can happen in Aurora too as tech levels rise. If I wanted to maintain parity between smaller warships and freighters I would have to up the size of all warship systems, which would be a huge undertaking. Besides, in WW2 they were not sending thousands of colonists and entire industrial infrastructures across huge distance. If you consider troopships as colonist equivalents then both Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth were larger than the Yamato. Several other ocean liners serving as troop ships were larger than battleships. Even US attack transports such as the Harris, Dickman and Bayfield classes which carried less than 2000 troops and were of 16,000 - 21,000 tons. Compare that to colony ships with similar displacements in Aurora now carrying 50,000 colonists - in v4.0, they were only 4000 tons!
Of course, I am also more a WW2 guy, where BBs and CVs where much larger than your average commercial vessels (Back then, a tanker of 10.000t was a giant, while regular BBs massed 35.000 to 50.000t (leaving Yamato and Musashi aside) and CVs were around 25.000t. Those men of war dwarfed anything commercial, except for a few luxury liners. Even the famous liberty ships massed only some 14.000t (yes, I googled this
Also, making jumpgates mandatory takes away a choice. No more choosing between building them and opening a system to alien attack but also easing movement of fleets, military and merchant alike, or using jump engines exclusively, playing it more safe, but dealing with the additional hassle that comes with this approach.
Of course, I can live with it, just wanted to show my thoughts
With regard to jump gates, that is an inevitable result of the changes to commercial shipping. If I make jump drives large enough for to be used economically for freighters then they become almost de rigeur for much smaller warships. It is a paradigm shift in Aurora, which makes the distinction between military and commercial activites much more apparent but the more I think about it, the happier I am. Jump gates (which are much easier to build in v4.1) become the sign of 'civilised' space whereas the vast expanse outside the jump gate network becomes the province of explorers and warships. Maintaining a commercial empire within the network is straightforward with limited micromanagement required while operating outside is where players will need to spend more effort.
With regard to alien invasion, I think the suggestion of destroyable jump gates may be a possibility but they would have to be pretty difficult to destroy.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on March 30, 2009, 03:16:56 PM
Code: [Select]
Large Jump Drive
Max Ship Size: 720 (36000 tons) Max Squadron Size: 3 Max Dist: 50
Jump Engine Size: 90 HS Efficiency: 8 Jump Engine HTK: 18
Cost: 2025 Crew: 450
Materials Required: 405x Duranium 1620x Sorium
Development Cost for Project: 20250RPExpensive but by no means completely unaffordableSteve
Post by: Doug Olchefske on March 30, 2009, 03:37:17 PM
Quote from: "SteveAlt"
As an example, the container ship Emma Maersk at 170,000 tons is larger than any warship ever built and is only $145 million. Compare that to a new 8000 ton Type 45 Destroyer with a price tag of about $1.5 billion. The container ship is twenty times larger and costs ten times less, or about 200x less on a per ton basis. Ignoring size, the cost ratio for freighters vs warships in Aurora is not quite as drastic but still noticeable. The sizes though are comparable and in most cases the warships are larger, which doesn't reflect either the current situation or a likely future scenario. In order to create larger commercial ships without requiring massive shipyard investment while retaining realistic limits on warship construction, I can't see any alternative except for two different types of shipyard
Steve
Keep in mind that you're comparing two different measurements. Warships are rated as displacement tons while commercial ships usually are GRT. There's a big enough difference between them that the two shouldn't really be compared. As for the cost, freighters are mostly steel and engines. Warships cost about the same for those portions. It's all the expensive stuff jammed into the warship (and the lack of volume production) that raises the cost so much.
You can go for two different shipyards which is probably more accurate historically, or you could flag the non military technologies and have them built at a faster rate. The first would likely be easier for you.
Post by: Steve Walmsley on March 30, 2009, 06:34:55 PM
Quote from: "Doug Olchefske"
Keep in mind that you're comparing two different measurements. Warships are rated as displacement tons while commercial ships usually are GRT. There's a big enough difference between them that the two shouldn't really be compared. As for the cost, freighters are mostly steel and engines. Warships cost about the same for those portions. It's all the expensive stuff jammed into the warship (and the lack of volume production) that raises the cost so much.That's a very good point. I actually hadn't registered the difference. I was familiar with displacement tons, which is the weight of water displaced by the ship, but I didn't realise that Gross Register Tonnage was based on volume. According to Wiki, each 100 cubic feet of volume is equal to one GRT. If that volume was filled with water it would actually mass 2.8 tons. I assume that means that when full their displacement could be considerably more than their GRT depending on the density of their cargo. I know Traveller bases spacecraft design on volume but, because I wanted a realistic power-mass ratio, I decided to base mine on mass. However, for simplicity I decided not to cater for changes in that mass. I agree that warships should be far more expensive on a per HS basis.
Quote
You can go for two different shipyards which is probably more accurate historically, or you could flag the non military technologies and have them built at a faster rate. The first would likely be easier for you.Yes, I have decided to go for two different shipyard types.
Steve
Post by: Doug Olchefske on March 30, 2009, 10:23:04 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
That's a very good point. I actually hadn't registered the difference. I was familiar with displacement tons, which is the weight of water displaced by the ship, but I didn't realise that Gross Register Tonnage was based on volume. According to Wiki, each 100 cubic feet of volume is equal to one GRT. If that volume was filled with water it would actually mass 2.8 tons. I assume that means that when full their displacement could be considerably more than their GRT depending on the density of their cargo. I know Traveller bases spacecraft design on volume but, because I wanted a realistic power-mass ratio, I decided to base mine on mass. However, for simplicity I decided not to cater for changes in that mass. I agree that warships should be far more expensive on a per HS basis.
Steve
It gets worse than that. You can enclose some of the decking and boom, your GRT just went up. Royal Caribbean ordered a ship in 2006 (Oasis class). It's about 20 meters longer than a Nimitz class carrier and about the same beam at the waterline but 3 meters less draft. It will be 220,000 GRT, but will displace only 100,000 vs. 97,000 for Nimitz.
On the other hand, Tirpitz had a deadweight displacement of 50,000 but a GRT of 28,000.
Since the weight of the stuff your moving in freighters is somewhat nebulous, you should feel free to stuff about as much as you want into one.
/Pedant
Post by: jfelten on March 31, 2009, 05:40:25 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
By the way I should point out that you can still create jump ships large enough for the new freighter sizes, as an alternative to jump gates. It is just a lot more expensive. If the Commonwealth built a jump drive large enough for their 35,000 ton freighters it would be as follows:Code: [Select]Large Jump DriveExpensive but by no means completely unaffordable
Max Ship Size: 720 (36000 tons) Max Squadron Size: 3 Max Dist: 50
Jump Engine Size: 90 HS Efficiency: 8 Jump Engine HTK: 18
Cost: 2025 Crew: 450
Materials Required: 405x Duranium 1620x Sorium
Development Cost for Project: 20250RP
Steve
20,250 is a lot research points for young empires, so they would have to make a hard decision if they wanted this.
Post by: Randy on March 31, 2009, 02:47:39 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
If I was going to create a "civilian" jump drive, the easiest way to make it unattractive for the military but useful for civilians would be to have it disrupt sensors and weapons for several hours rather than about the existing minute or so.You could also make them spectacularly visible - ie emit EM/thermal energy visible across the system...
Post by: Steve Walmsley on April 04, 2009, 09:54:21 AM
Quote from: "Randy"
That's a good idea too.Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"If I was going to create a "civilian" jump drive, the easiest way to make it unattractive for the military but useful for civilians would be to have it disrupt sensors and weapons for several hours rather than about the existing minute or so.You could also make them spectacularly visible - ie emit EM/thermal energy visible across the system...
Steve
Post by: simon on July 06, 2009, 11:09:41 AM
Post by: Brian Neumann on July 06, 2009, 11:57:02 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
If you have the civilian jump engine disrupt sensors, have it only effect the fire control. No ship is going to want to have its basic search sensors down for hours as it would not be able to spot something as minor as a mass driver packet in its course. On the other hand the fire control sensors would by thier nature be much more delicate and prone to being disrupted by the jump transit. I would make them spectacularly visable as the energy discharge is what is blinding your own sensors in the first place.Quote from: "Randy"That's a good idea too.Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"If I was going to create a "civilian" jump drive, the easiest way to make it unattractive for the military but useful for civilians would be to have it disrupt sensors and weapons for several hours rather than about the existing minute or so.You could also make them spectacularly visible - ie emit EM/thermal energy visible across the system...
Steve
Brian
Post by: Paul M on July 06, 2009, 01:01:44 PM
Worse case you could just say that civillian jump drives can only go in frieghters and colony transports.
But I don't see why you want to force people to build jump gates when its logically a bad idea since it leads an enemy straight to home. It only makes sense for large empires which have a "core", a developing ring, and a frontier. And even then the frontier would be serviced by jump ships since the economic value of a colony system in the initial development process is frankly non-existant, a gate only makes sense when the number of ships using it is relatively large.
Maybe I'm a lone wolf again but I don't see this as an issue which removing choice improves the game.
Post by: Randy on July 09, 2009, 03:17:02 PM
Post by: Steve Walmsley on July 18, 2009, 03:05:05 AM
Quote from: "simon"
Somewhere in the midst of the forum I remember you saying you liked what Weber did in the Honorverse before the pods arrived. One aspect that also i liked was vessel tonnage, if you draw a graph of naval vessel tonnage in history you get a pretty step gradient which could be extended into the aurora time-line, backing this is the fact that in aurora the distance scale is much greater than the planetary distances, I fear it may be too late to change such a basic parameter of the game but i believe it can smooth out inconsistencies within the game.You should find that within Aurora naval vessels will get much larger over time. The rate at which additional shipyard capacity can be built increases as the shipyard gets larger and research will speed up both shipbuilding and shipyard modification. Also, larger ships are faster to build on a per-BP basis.
Steve
Post by: sloanjh on August 08, 2009, 01:54:35 PM
A few background points/observations:
1) I upped my race's gravitational tolerance to +/- 0.7G, so that Mars would be habitable. A side note - it occured to me that it would be REALLY interesting to allow 0 - 2x gravitational range, e.g. +/- 1.0G for humans; this would allow lunar and asteriod (or even deep space) colonies. The exciting thing about this is that it would allow standard mines (and supporting populations) on small bodies, which in turn could drive a lot of civie traffic. Especially if the civies could drop mines on worlds with high mineral concentrations, i.e. generate a market for TN minerals in the civilian sector (the government could compete for civie minerals by buying them with wealth). Note that this would take some tweaks to the Aurora code, mainly with respect to terraforming (you shouldn't be able to put an atmosphere on a tiny rock) and low-temp habitability cost (radiating heat is the hard part in space, so low temp probably shouldn't raise colony cost above 2.0 or so).
2)The luck of survey gave Mars 0 minerals, so it's going to be purely an economic colony which will later specialize in research (once I'm able to move labs).
3) I've come up with three flavors of commerical class designs so far:
- A 10,750 ton design with 4 engines and either 1 cargo hold or 2 cryo holds (speed 1153 km/s). The reason for this design is that the initial size of a commercial SY is 10,000 tons, so this class was buildable within a month of the SY being built (conventional start doesn't have any SY). The purpose of the freighter version is to be able to carry infrastructure to Mars, without having to wait until the build capacity for bigger freighters (able to carry factories). So good observation number 1 is that the game led me to make a "tramp" freighter design.
A 29,050 ton standard colony ship with 5 cryo holds and 1280 km/s speed.
A 36,700 ton standard freighter with 5 holds and 675 km/s speed. Purpose is to be able to carry factories etc.
4) Starting the commercial SY out at 10Kton capacity was great - it meant that I couldn't build my standard freighter right away (actually, I still can't, but I'm almost there).
5) I wanted to tie the maximum size of civie ships to commercial SY capacity, so I didn't actually create the classes until I'd built and grown my commercial SY to the corresponding size. This led the commercial sector to build three tramp freighters and two tramp colony ships to start colonizing Mars. Observations:
- (Good) Mars is already up to ~2.7 million population.
(Good) There still aren't any non-tramp freighters around, so the
(So-so) I haven't researched troop transports yet, so I have no way to get troops to Mars. This means that I have no way of controlling unrest there, which adds to the wild-west/frontier flavor. On the other hand, this brings me back to the observation up-thread that you might want to allow ground units to be transported as personnel and equipment in commerical shipping - it seems like oine should be able to put a battalion into cryo and ship their equipment in cargo holds.
(Neutral) Two of my lines carry colonists, two carry cargo. The two colonist lines are very profitable; the cargo line with two ships is barely scraping by, while the one with one ship is losing money due to dividends.
(Pain) I'm doing 5-day updates because the only interesting thing happening in the game right now is economic development. This is hurting the civie lines, however, because a civie ship will only look for new orders at the beginning of a turn. So when Earth and Mars are close to each other (~1 day travel time one way), the civie ships are 5 times less efficient than they could be. I just did 1-day updates for the latest closest approach, and the unprofitable line became much closer to break-even. It would really help if there were a mechanism for civie ships to look for new orders at the end of an increment if they've run out, not just at the beginning (or maybe it's end) of a turn. Note that the same issue exists for default orders, especially surveying - if you run out of survey targets 20 seconds into a 5 day update, your ship just sits there until the next turn.
(Pain) I had a bit of trouble getting colonization going on Mars. As you suggested, I tried putting a small amount of infrastructure (1 unit
) on Mars, but the civies ignored it. I then added enough population to be supported by the infrastructure, and they still ignored it. I then experimented with more combinations, and ended up with 100 infrastructure (which would support 0.5 million pop) and 0.2 million population and they finally noticed Mars and got to work. It would be a lot easier if there were just a flag on populations which said "open for colonization" and would create a demand for colonists and/or infrastructure.[/list]
6) I still don't have any warships at all, and the only "military" ships I built were four geo-survey for surveying the system, but there are a bunch of civie designs running around the system. I think this is good - navies should arise after commercial shipping. Once you get pirates in, there will be an internal driver to build naval ships for commerce protection.
7) My standard passenger ship design is smaller and faster than my standard freighter, which makes a lot of sense. In other words, I think it was good to make the cryo holds 1/2 as big as the cargo holds.
8 ) My standard commercial vessels have 4 cargo handling systems (load time of ~0.5 days), and adding more would have probably been even more efficient. This is because they're VERY small compared to the size of a hold. I would recommend bumping the size/ and cost of this system up some.
9) I can't tell for sure because there aren't a lot of ships out there right now, but all the performance work does seem to have payed off - the game feels quicker. Thanks!!!!
10) Even with Mars' population less than 0.2% of humanity, the Mars colonization effort is generating 10% of the government's revenue. Again a good thing, since this means that the civie sector is going to be important enough to wealth production to need protecting.
In summary, so far it feels like you got the civie sector right - Mars is being colonized by a thriving, self-running civie sector, while the government has been focused on economic and technological development. In addition, the early colonization efforts are a struggle, with no way to get industry there on ships that are very primative and small (a good thing).
John
Post by: waresky on August 09, 2009, 01:36:51 PM
Am in fear because am at War toward a hostile Ferocious Alien..."Rabbit" look Precursors AI ships...
..i HATE Steve...WHY an Rabbit races need to reach the Star r unknow for me:)))))
Post by: Hawkeye on August 09, 2009, 10:35:43 PM
Quote from: "waresky"
great wotk John..
Am in fear because am at War toward a hostile Ferocious Alien..."Rabbit" look Precursors AI ships...:D :)
Post by: Father Tim on August 10, 2009, 02:37:13 PM
Post by: sneer on August 10, 2009, 03:54:57 PM
but
in the last game where i have 2nd colony about 5 months for freigter away and i need all capacity working i see sad that 3 civilian ft don't contribute and stay on earth all the time :) // but they are not active ....
Post by: Paul M on August 11, 2009, 03:27:55 AM
1. Did you build a commercial freighter centre?
2. What amount of capacity is added with each upgrade of the civillian shipyard?
The reason I am asking is that for some reason I am at nearly 0 stockpiled duranium...I am wondering if I made a mistake somewhere and selected "Build" rather than "Convert Conv. IND to" also due to low corbomite availablity I have been having trouble with my standard build financial centres work around to build up duranium stockpiles. Means I have to start making priorities here. I was also surprised that my 500 million population started with 800 conventional industry, that seems more than before. I cheated and gave myself 10 starting research facilities though. I also have both a low availablity and not large stock pile of neutronium. I'm still working my way through the C. IND conversion about 30% converted so far...which seems low and makes me think I did build rather than convert *sighs*.
I just completed design of my first two freighters. A 31,000 tonne freighter (25K cargo) and a 28,000 tonne mixed colony-freighter (20K colonists, 15K cargo) both are around 650 km/s velocity. I am currently building my first Geo survey ship. One thing I did notice is that I had to add more engineering spaces to the freighter to get stored maintenance over that of the max maintenance cost. Likely that is the Korval Nearscan array anyway (a short ranged low resolution active sensor).
I've also only got the planatary bases but the thing is that my feeling on a space navy is that it will grow with the demands placed on it. The navy yard is currently at 1500 Tonne with 3 slips. I have one x3.39 world in the system available for setting up a colony and crap load of asteroids/gas giants (including 3 super jovans) so I may make a second geosurvey ship to handle the initial survey. But at a bit over 2 years to develop jump drive theory I am going to be several years yet before becoming insterstellar, just started the next level of research speed tech and there are a few things in the queue before Jump drive theory. At which point I'm going to have to figure out how to handle those frieghters with a jump drive. One thing I make sure of though before going interstellar is to upgrade 6 of the missile bases to TN techs to give me planetary defence.
Post by: sloanjh on August 11, 2009, 08:29:12 PM
Quote from: "Paul M"
I'm also about 7 years into my 4.22 conventional start and I'm afraid that John is ahead of me. This leads to some questions:If you mean in terms of progress at the 7 year mark, it may be due to two things:
1) I like to start with 1Billion pop - everything goes twice as fast. (I rerolled HW minerals a few times until I got ~250Ktons of Duranium.)
2) I've got a confession - about 1/2 way through my v4.0b game I realized that I seemed to be spending all my time building automated mines, i.e. I felt that the economic growth rate (in terms of construction factor output) was imbalanced on the low side, mainly because (on average) you have to build several mines for every construction factory built. So I modded the DB to cut all construction factory and mine costs (and minerals) by 50% - but only for custruction factories and mines. So my factories and mines cost 60 and automated mines cost 120 - same as a fuel factory (120) or ordnance factory (120). This should have the effect (from a game mechanics point of view) of doubling the rate of GDP growth, since it costs half as much to increase the means of production. I really liked the effect on the game in my v4.0b campaign - it was still difficult to build enough mines but not crushing, so I did the same from the start for my v4.22 game. One aspect of this is that conversion costs for mines and factories went from 20 to 10, so I was able to fully convert in about 3 years (as opposed to the 6 or so it would take in an un-modded game) - I'm not convinced that this is a good thing. Not sure how much I like the effects in this game - the civie economy seems to have skewed the military economy more than one might naively expect. The big effect I'm seeing so far is that you don't need to support huge colonization fleets. This in turn means that you're spending a lot fewer minerals on building freighters and transports, plus (and possibly more important) fuel consumption looks a lot lower. OTOH, I still haven't left my system, so I've not yet role-played a need for a lot of military or exploration ships - consumption may go up once exploration kicks in.
One interesting thing about the 50% expense for construction factories and mines is in whether to convert to "production facilities" (construction factories or mines) or "consumables facilities" (ordnance or fuel factories). Without the mod, it's pretty much a no-brainer - convert to production, then use the production to build the consumables facilities. With the mod, however, every unit of conventional industry that you convert to a production facility only gains you 50 build points (and minerals) compared to building the production facility from scratch, while converting to consumables facilities gains you 100 build points. So it's in your best interest to convert as many ordnance and fuel factories as you think you'll need in the short term, rather than over-converting then needing to build these expensive facilities right away. I ended up keeping a "reserve" of about 400 of my 1600 conventional factories, since in my previous campaign I needed ~400 fuel factories and >100 ordnance. As I mentioned above, though, it seems like fuel consumption is going to be a LOT lower in v4.22 due to civie colonization, so I later converted another 100 of these. The good news is that this might in enough fuel to be able to do training for my military, rather then just keeping all my ships continually tied up alongside.
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1. Did you build a commercial freighter centre?I don't think these exist any more - if you stick an engineering HS on a commercial design it never (seems to) need maintenance.
STEVE - I just looked through the build list to confirm this, and commercial freight center isn't there (as expected). Commercial Space Port is, however - is this a mistake?
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2. What amount of capacity is added with each upgrade of the civillian shipyard?The same choices as for Naval, except they (seem to) cost 10x less. I think everything for commericial SY is 10x less expensive. The tonnage options are 500, 1K, 2K, 5K, 10K. I've been bumping my commercial yards in 5K increments, since the smaller increments tend to waste more time at the end of the econ update than is gained by efficiency improvements.
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The reason I am asking is that for some reason I am at nearly 0 stockpiled duranium...I am wondering if I made a mistake somewhere and selected "Build" rather than "Convert Conv. IND to" also due to low corbomite availablity I have been having trouble with my standard build financial centres work around to build up duranium stockpiles. Means I have to start making priorities here. I was also surprised that my 500 million population started with 800 conventional industry, that seems more than before. I cheated and gave myself 10 starting research facilities though. I also have both a low availablity and not large stock pile of neutronium. I'm still working my way through the C. IND conversion about 30% converted so far...which seems low and makes me think I did build rather than convert *sighs*.I tend to only convert to construction factories and mines until 75% are gone before building anything else - the difference in build points is so large that you'll get the thing built much quicker by first growing your economy then building other stuff. No neutronium is a real bummer - that's going to make it hard to grow your shipping industry.
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I just completed design of my first two freighters. A 31,000 tonne freighter (25K cargo) and a 28,000 tonne mixed colony-freighter (20K colonists, 15K cargo) both are around 650 km/s velocity. I am currently building my first Geo survey ship. One thing I did notice is that I had to add more engineering spaces to the freighter to get stored maintenance over that of the max maintenance cost. Likely that is the Korval Nearscan array anyway (a short ranged low resolution active sensor).On the mixed design - I think this will cause the civie sector severe psychosis. As far as I can tell, civies will only load one type of cargo at a time, so giving them a mixed design will probably confuse them (might be wrong here, though - I haven't tried it).
On the freighter's engineering spaces - you only need one space. What should happen is you should see "this ship classificed as a commercial design", and when you add the engineering space you should see the %chance of failure field disappear.
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I've also only got the planatary bases but the thing is that my feeling on a space navy is that it will grow with the demands placed on it. The navy yard is currently at 1500 Tonne with 3 slips. I have one x3.39 world in the system available for setting up a colony and crap load of asteroids/gas giants (including 3 super jovans) so I may make a second geosurvey ship to handle the initial survey. But at a bit over 2 years to develop jump drive theory I am going to be several years yet before becoming insterstellar, just started the next level of research speed tech and there are a few things in the queue before Jump drive theory. At which point I'm going to have to figure out how to handle those frieghters with a jump drive. One thing I make sure of though before going interstellar is to upgrade 6 of the missile bases to TN techs to give me planetary defence.
Yeah, I've been taking my time before researching jump theory - my civ is more interested in growing its economy and explointing Mars and Mercury before investing in interstellar travel (they just researched it about 13 years in - in my 4.0b campaign I think it was ~30 years). Of course I've got 2 NPR out there who might come visiting before I'm ready to leave.... One thing to be careful of - it looks like there's a "feature" in 4.20 that sets the system numbers sequentially in initial setup, so it's likely that you and any NPR that you started with will be in the same neighborhood of system IDs.
On the colony world - I would declare it a colony ASAP and put some colonists and infrastructure on it to seed the civies. Then you can have them build terraforming facilities to bring the temp down. I think in the long term it will be more efficient to build terraforming ships (civie design so free after they're built and don't take pop to run), but for that you have to research terraforming module and that's 5K research points.
I'm always a big fan of research the productivity levels as rapidly as possible - that multiplies the exponent of your economy's growth. Right now I'm trying to double my research lab count so that I'll be able to research higher efficiency levels in a decent amount of time (and sneak some weapons research in before I venture into the great beyond).
John
Post by: Paul M on August 12, 2009, 03:33:36 AM
Current research is lvl 2 Reaserch speed and I have developed all the starting techs to get me a basic Geosurvey ship and my frieghters. Weapons and the majority of the military systems are next up, followed by increase to construction rate and mining rate with Jump Theory somewhere in the mix. My planetary leader is good at sensors (20% research bonus as well). Looks like I need to start 3 new shipyards: 1 naval and 2 commerical yards.
I meant Commercial Space Port in the previous question I just got the name wrong. I wasn't sure if the Civies would build these or if I needed to build one to start of my civilian ship building.
The lack of neutronium (18.x Ktonne, Availability 0.2) will be a bit of an issue. Given the real estate in my home system I'm hoping to find a source of it and get serious numbers of automatic mines and mass drivers deployed. It will be interesting to see what is available, especially in terms of the colony worlds resources. The fact we can now ship terraforming facilities is a huge bonus. In my last game I really needed to be able to do that to get a x1.91 world down since it was located a long way (time wise) from my homeworld and the round trip time for the terraformers would have left them virtually no time on station. What was odd was that the 2nd level of terraforming speed also made a noticable improvement in the speed of terraforming.
As for the mixed design, if the civies just use it to move colonists and use the bigger freighters to move infrastructure bonus for me. That way the infrastructure is always greater than the colonists. I use that design since I can carry 50% more infrastructure then the colonists need for a x2 world which I like and I reserve my big ships for carrying factories. My problem is going to be the jump engine requirement to move a 31K ship through the JP. I'm afraid I don't consider jump gates standard operating procedure so I'll have to figure this out somehow. My usual and actually very effective plan last game was to use Tankers/Maintenance ships as jump tenders and station them at the JP for both communications links and to keep the whole chain working fuel maintance wise. I had 6 but was coming to the conclusion that I needed at least 3-4 more, as my colonies were now 3 jumps out and I needed at least a few to do inspace refueling of my exploration ships plus a reserve due to the need to overhaul from time to time.
Post by: Brian Neumann on August 12, 2009, 06:33:22 AM
Brian
Post by: Paul M on August 12, 2009, 10:00:31 AM
The new rules will make terraforming outsystem a lot easier. The other thing is that comercial engines have a rating of 62 compared to 25 for Nuclear Thermal Engines so in principle if you can afford the mass to have 2 of them you will have quite a fast survey ship 124 is essentially 5 regular engines. You might be close to 2000 km/s which is not shabby given they have pretty obscene efficiency. Even a military ship would likely benifit from using the commercial engines which seems a tad oddball to me. Have to wait and see what gives in due course I guess.
Post by: Brian Neumann on August 12, 2009, 10:38:14 AM
Quote from: "Paul M"
The new rules will make terraforming outsystem a lot easier. The other thing is that comercial engines have a rating of 62 compared to 25 for Nuclear Thermal Engines so in principle if you can afford the mass to have 2 of them you will have quite a fast survey ship 124 is essentially 5 regular engines. You might be close to 2000 km/s which is not shabby given they have pretty obscene efficiency. Even a military ship would likely benifit from using the commercial engines which seems a tad oddball to me. Have to wait and see what gives in due course I guess.
The commercial engines are 25hs vs 5hs for the military model. This makes them considerably less desirable for military uses as they are only about 60% as efficient on a per hull space basis. They do work quite well for something like the geo survey ships as this not only makes the ships a commercial design, but gives them a nice efficient engine and a decent speed. You can not make a grav survey ship as a commercial design unfortunately, those will have to be a military design, but even there it is probably worth the mass penalty to give them commercial engines, just for the fuel efficiency.
Brian
Post by: sloanjh on August 12, 2009, 07:38:35 PM
Quote from: "Paul M"
I'm afraid the orders to build rather than convert was accidental not intentional. Of the 800 CInd I plan to convert: 350 to Construction factories, 300 to mines, 50 to Ordinance Factories and 100 to Fuel Refineries. Give or take 10 in each catagory. I am somewhat confused by the lack of duranium since I have 0.9 availability and usually the stockpile grows significantly faster than the use during the start phase which makes me think I have make a mistake with the orders.Because I usually have a mineral crash, I converted (and built) at the rate of 15 mine : 10 construction (i.e. 40% construction), with some dregs left over for fuel and ordnance. I find that shipbuilding is a significant sink of duranium once the SY get rolling, so I'm building surplus mining capacity now (which is arguably a mistake, but once you get behind it's difficult to find the minerals to build a lot of mines without pausing construction or building fighter factories - I wish there were a wider selection of useful things to build that didn't suck duranium).
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I meant Commercial Space Port in the previous question I just got the name wrong. I wasn't sure if the Civies would build these or if I needed to build one to start of my civilian ship building.I didn't need one.
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The fact we can now ship terraforming facilities is a huge bonus. In my last game I really needed to be able to do that to get a x1.91 world down since it was located a long way (time wise) from my homeworld and the round trip time for the terraformers would have left them virtually no time on station. What was odd was that the 2nd level of terraforming speed also made a noticable improvement in the speed of terraforming.On shipping terraforming facilities: I've been burned doing this to high-cost (much higher than 1.91) worlds, since there's no population to run them. For low-cost (2-ish) worlds, I've actually found it to be cheaper (in shipping tonnage) to ship over ~50 factories and a bunch of duranium and boronide and let the remote terraforming population build the factories (after shipping in a seed of a few factories to start with) - the only reason I do this, however is when I haven't researched terraforming yet, and because I know I'll be able to ship them to another location when I'm done with them. Ditto on Brian's comment about terraforming ships - they last forever now and don't require a population (i.e. the equivalent of automated terraforming factories.
Hey!!! I just realized that all commercial designs should be marked "conscript only". I used to keep my terraformers with military crews so that they'd have longer time on station (less chance of breakdown) but that's moot now.
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As for the mixed design, if the civies just use it to move colonists and use the bigger freighters to move infrastructure bonus for me. That way the infrastructure is always greater than the colonists. I use that design since I can carry 50% more infrastructure then the colonists need for a x2 world which I like and I reserve my big ships for carrying factories. My problem is going to be the jump engine requirement to move a 31K ship through the JP. I'm afraid I don't consider jump gates standard operating procedure so I'll have to figure this out somehow. My usual and actually very effective plan last game was to use Tankers/Maintenance ships as jump tenders and station them at the JP for both communications links and to keep the whole chain working fuel maintance wise. I had 6 but was coming to the conclusion that I needed at least 3-4 more, as my colonies were now 3 jumps out and I needed at least a few to do inspace refueling of my exploration ships plus a reserve due to the need to overhaul from time to time.
I don't think you're going to be able to get out of the system on a conventional start without jump gates, i.e. I think Steve has changed the game so that they're a fundamental part of the commercial economy. The one way I can think of to get around this is to build tramp colony and cargo ships with 2 cryo or 1 cargo holds - these can move people and minerals (but not factories or mines) and be built at "only" 10K-11K tons. Then you'd need to build a troop transport (not sure how big this is 'cuz I haven't researched it yet) and lots of engineers - the engineers land on the remote planet and start building factories (and later mines - in the early days it's more efficient to ship minerals in from the home world).
STEVE - This is a reason to consider allowing factories and mines to be broken down into 5 1-hold pieces - it would allow them to be shipped in tramp freighters operating outside the jump gate network.
John
Post by: sloanjh on August 12, 2009, 08:39:20 PM
Quote from: "Paul M"
What was odd was that the 2nd level of terraforming speed also made a noticable improvement in the speed of terraforming.
Oops - missed this one out. I've seen a similar effect where a single terraformer doesn't produce atmosphere as rapidly as it should. I strongly suspect that there's a severe rounding effect going on at low numbers (i.e. 1) of terraformers. Consider that there are ~72 5-day updates in a year; if a single terraformer produces .001 atm/yr, then this is only .000014 atm/update. I suspect that this is being rounded down to 1.0e-5 somewhere. After a few terraformers are present, or if the efficiency goes up, this rounding probably becomes much less severe.
John
Post by: SteveAlt on August 12, 2009, 09:08:29 PM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
This can be an issue. Aurora uses the currency data type in both code and database, which has a maximum of four decimal places so in the above situation, nothing will be added. There are a lot of advantages for the currency data type over floating point data types though so I am tempted to live with this particular issue involving single terraformers at low tech levels. If it is a real problem, I guess I could use floating point data types in this area.Quote from: "Paul M"What was odd was that the 2nd level of terraforming speed also made a noticable improvement in the speed of terraforming.
Oops - missed this one out. I've seen a similar effect where a single terraformer doesn't produce atmosphere as rapidly as it should. I strongly suspect that there's a severe rounding effect going on at low numbers (i.e. 1) of terraformers. Consider that there are ~72 5-day updates in a year; if a single terraformer produces .001 atm/yr, then this is only .000014 atm/update. I suspect that this is being rounded down to 1.0e-5 somewhere. After a few terraformers are present, or if the efficiency goes up, this rounding probably becomes much less severe.
Steve
Post by: sloanjh on August 12, 2009, 11:29:43 PM
Quote from: "SteveAlt"
This can be an issue. Aurora uses the currency data type in both code and database, which has a maximum of four decimal places so in the above situation, nothing will be added. There are a lot of advantages for the currency data type over floating point data types though so I am tempted to live with this particular issue involving single terraformers at low tech levels. If it is a real problem, I guess I could use floating point data types in this area.
I was actually in the DB on this issue the other day, and I think you're ok (but there is a different bug, which is why I was in the DB) - the terraforming gasses seem to be saved as floats - you can get increments smaller than 1.e-4 from terraforming. A little bit of weirdness happens when it converts to currency for atmospheric pressures, but I've got a single terraformer that's been chugging away on Mercury at 16% efficiency and it's slowly (at the .0002 atm/yr level) putting anti-greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere - I can see the levels slowly increasing.
The bug is that Mercury started out with no atmosphere at all. As soon as I started adding a gas, I started getting divide-by-zero errors. The problem is that the total atmospheric pressure is currency type, and it's calculated on the fly by Aurora. The terraforming gasses seem to be a double, and I'd only added 1.e-6 atmosphere. Since this was the only gas present, and this number converts to zero in currency, when it went to calculate the %anti-greenhouse in the atmosphere it got 1.e-6/0.0 - oops
I worked around the problem by bumping the amount of terraformed anti-greenhouse up to 1.e-4 and the divide-by-zeros went away. Note that I wasn't able to get into the SM-mode atmosphere adjustment, since the divide-by-zero was messing up the F9 screen. So if someone starts terraforming a planet with no atmosphere, they should probably go into SM mode first and give it a little nitrogen to avoid this bug.John
Post by: Paul M on August 13, 2009, 02:55:49 AM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
Because I usually have a mineral crash, I converted (and built) at the rate of 15 mine : 10 construction (i.e. 40% construction), with some dregs left over for fuel and ordnance. I find that shipbuilding is a significant sink of duranium once the SY get rolling, so I'm building surplus mining capacity now (which is arguably a mistake, but once you get behind it's difficult to find the minerals to build a lot of mines without pausing construction or building fighter factories - I wish there were a wider selection of useful things to build that didn't suck duranium).
I usually build in groups of 10 and build x2 Construction followed by x1 mines, x1 fuel and x1 ordinance for 4 run throughs to get things going then start pushing up the number of mines. What I do before this is build Financial centres usually as they allow me to build up a fairly good duranium stocks. For colony worlds they are a very interesting choice. I had a world with no minerals that was a bit of financial centre and it was producing a hefty chunk of change. I was trying to keep 1 centre for each million population more or less. What astounded me was the civillians instance of putting 37 million people on a venus-like hellhole x16.x cost I think. It had a greenhouse pressure of nearly 10 and surface temperature of 400+ C but it had loads of low availablity minearls...and I had put some automatic mines there never thinking it would suddenly become the largest offplanet colony.
I agree that duranium seems to be over used in terms of producing your economy. And I agree whole heartedly that once you get behind crawling out of the hole is very hard. Especially if it involves building automated mines to do so.
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On shipping terraforming facilities: I've been burned doing this to high-cost (much higher than 1.91) worlds, since there's no population to run them. For low-cost (2-ish) worlds, I've actually found it to be cheaper (in shipping tonnage) to ship over ~50 factories and a bunch of duranium and boronide and let the remote terraforming population build the factories (after shipping in a seed of a few factories to start with) - the only reason I do this, however is when I haven't researched terraforming yet, and because I know I'll be able to ship them to another location when I'm done with them. Ditto on Brian's comment about terraforming ships - they last forever now and don't require a population (i.e. the equivalent of automated terraforming factories.
The Draakkaan Holding had 18 terraforming ships. They were operating on 3 worlds one of which had 2 terraforming engines of its own. But the round trip time to the colony world in question was a few months and if I sent a 6 ship group they would spend 4 months getting there. The system was a double binary and the travel times were not short but it was a fabulus system. I had a research centre there (recoverd from the ruins on the planet) so I was a bit strapped for people. I had plans to boost its local industry but currently had 5 Factories, 1 Refinery, 12 mines, and a few maintenance facilities plus the research station and some mothballed fighter factories. I had two planets with automatic mines (9 and 3) respectively and mass drivers flinging material around. Population was around 3 million if I recall properly. The civillian jump ship liners were routinely moving people there so I was in nearly continous "build infrastructure" mode.
What I found better was to send a freighter to the colony pick up minerals and cart them home and ship to the colony working factories. Until you get at least 15 factories online you can't build much quickly. I had one colony world I was really boot strapping. It was my only 0.0 world and was about a 1.5 year round trip...I had build the liners for that purpose actually. I still routinely would loose one to maintenance failure on the trip and need to send it in for repair. I had 2 ENG and 1 factory plus 2 mines after my first infrastructure shipment and as I lost a freighter on the return trip to an internal explosion I wan't planning on further trips till I had faster ships the only one in the plans. It was building mines...that was SLOW!
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Hey!!! I just realized that all commercial designs should be marked "conscript only". I used to keep my terraformers with military crews so that they'd have longer time on station (less chance of breakdown) but that's moot now.
I use my civillian merchant marine to train my commanders.
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I don't think you're going to be able to get out of the system on a conventional start without jump gates, i.e. I think Steve has changed the game so that they're a fundamental part of the commercial economy. The one way I can think of to get around this is to build tramp colony and cargo ships with 2 cryo or 1 cargo holds - these can move people and minerals (but not factories or mines) and be built at "only" 10K-11K tons. Then you'd need to build a troop transport (not sure how big this is 'cuz I haven't researched it yet) and lots of engineers - the engineers land on the remote planet and start building factories (and later mines - in the early days it's more efficient to ship minerals in from the home world).
STEVE - This is a reason to consider allowing factories and mines to be broken down into 5 1-hold pieces - it would allow them to be shipped in tramp freighters operating outside the jump gate network.
John
I think that is correct but I'l still try and see what happens. I am not fond of this change. I can live without the civillian shipping lines if it means I don't put up "here is the nice creamy oreo centre of my empire" billboards for any enemies. Assuming that they put out heat (and its hard to imagine they don't) they would be relatively easy to detect and would invalidate the need for a proper survey of the system. Attack Vector Tactical disregards the possibility of stealth simply because it would take an IR telescope about 5 hours to do a full sweep of the system and any man made object would stand out fairly seriously against cosmic background and the drive plume is impossible to avoid. The plume itself radiates both IR and visible light not to mention soft Xray in AV:T as they use fusion torches so they are using a mix of D, T, and He as propellent (not terribly efficient but I tried without success to point out that ion drives are really only limited by the onboard powersupply not intrinsically limited to being low thrust on physics principles).
But I don't see why you can't break things down to ship on smaller freighters. Once you are in your third wave of expansion I see the value to jump gates since you have both a navy and space to trade in the advent of a war before that not so much.