Aurora 4x
New Players => The Academy => Topic started by: Captain_Goatse on December 22, 2014, 02:03:03 PM
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Hello everyone. Another newbie here with questions:
Is there any way to extend development time for a ship? I am getting bored with all the scouts having to come back home every three months. . .
Speaking of scouting, I have scouted a good part of the inner solar system. AFAIK the idea is to place a mass driver and about ten automated mines on every body with something solid available. Right?
Colonization: the only place that looks even remotely colonizable is Mars, and I have sent 200 infrastructure and half a million colonists in there, even if there are no minerals. I want to send some scouts to the other systems, but I have no clue on how to use the jumpdrive. Can anyone help?
My cargo ships are like that:
Et Nunc Et Semper class Freighter 31650 tons 95 Crew 321. 4 BP TCS 633 TH 320 EM 0
505 km/s Armour 1-89 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control 1 PPV 0
Maintenance Capacity 6 MSP
Cargo 25000 Spare Berths 3 Cargo Handling Multiplier 20
80 EP Commercial Nuclear Pulse Engine (4) Power 80 Fuel Use 7. 59% Armour 0 Exp 4%
Fuel Capacity 250 000 Litres Range 18. 7 billion km (428 days at full power)
This ship is classed as a commercial vessel for maintenance purposes
They take one year to build and run through the solar system quite nicely. Can you suggest a better design, or do you think that they are fine just like this?
Sorium Miners. I guess that Sorium will become scarce as soon as I start building Dreadnoughts. How can I use the Sorium miner module?
Jumpdrive and Jumpgate. I guess that sending a jumpdrive scout first is the safest idea, followed by a jumpgate constructor. Can somebody tell me how to do that, maybe explaining the difference between small and large jumpgate modules? One takes 180 days to build, the other 360 days. . .
I wish to thank the makers of this game. Aurora has already tickled my OCD and autism disorders, and I still have not managed to look at the military side!
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Your questions have answers already on the boards :)
Mission life. Upper left corner is a box that has a 3 in it. That is the number of months your ship can be deployed. You can change that number. I don't recall the exact wording on the label.
The mass driver is one option. Another is frequent cargo ship runs.
Did you do a grav survey of your system? If you have, you should have at least 1 jump point. Navigate to it and execute a jump order. Then survey the next system. Rinse. Repeat.
Other than being painfully slow, it's a decent entry-level freighter.
Build a ship, add a sorium harvester module. Make sure you have some spare room in your tanks. Park at a gas giant with sorium. Harvest the glorious fuel.
Jumpgates... They work for the bad guys too. Use with caution. The time to build is the time for the module to build a gate.
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This should also be in the Academy. :)
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Can somebody tell me how to do that, maybe explaining the difference between small and large jumpgate modules? One takes 180 days to build, the other 360 days. . .
The small one builds in 360 days and is 25k tons. The future modules are 50k tons but build much faster.
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Thanks for the answers!
So, what do you mean with "painfully slow"? What's a decent speed for a cargo, for you?
Can you elaborate on the jumpdrive? Should I add a jumpdrive to every ship that must use the jump point? Can I make a jump ship to carry the scouts over the jump? I've seen that the smaller jumpdrives on the research project are "self jump only". . .
I will try to build a bigger geoscout with more dev time and the smaller jumpdrive, send it on the other side and hope. Wish me luck. . .
BTW, can somebody explain to me the matter with civilian supply and demand contract? I have no clue. . .
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Thanks for the answers!
So, what do you mean with "painfully slow"? What's a decent speed for a cargo, for you?
Can you elaborate on the jumpdrive? Should I add a jumpdrive to every ship that must use the jump point? Can I make a jump ship to carry the scouts over the jump? I've seen that the smaller jumpdrives on the research project are "self jump only". . .
I will try to build a bigger geoscout with more dev time and the smaller jumpdrive, send it on the other side and hope. Wish me luck. . .
BTW, can somebody explain to me the matter with civilian supply and demand contract? I have no clue. . .
You might check the wiki for some example ships, or the Bureau of Ship Design forum.
Ships you expect to operate singly should have a jump drive. Other ships you can build a dedicated jump tender. Look at the Squadron Size attribute of the Jump Drive. That's how many ships it may ferry (including itself). Now as a jump takes no time, you can jump a fleet of 10 ships with 1 tender rated at 3 ships per jump. The issue comes up when you want to combat jump to get as many ships as you can on the other side of the JP as fast as you can. Then you need more tenders. The self-only engines are just that. They can only ferry themselves.
There is an option, bottom center of the game setup that lets the game generate the ships for you. You might start a game with that enabled to see how the ships are built. NOTE: These are not the most effective ships. And you will get some weird things, but it is a good place to see how things are put together.
Another thing to do is read some of the fiction. Most of them have ship designs for that particular game.
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So, what do you mean with "painfully slow"? What's a decent speed for a cargo, for you?
Around 2000km/s
Can you elaborate on the jumpdrive? Should I add a jumpdrive to every ship that must use the jump point? Can I make a jump ship to carry the scouts over the jump? I've seen that the smaller jumpdrives on the research project are "self jump only". . .
It depends on your doctrine and how you want your ships to be able to jump. Either way works fine, just make sure the ship is matched to the jump drive (ie Military drives for military ships). You can research smaller drives that aren't self-jump.
BTW, can somebody explain to me the matter with civilian supply and demand contract? I have no clue. . .
A planet "supplies" a building/material and gives it to a planet that "demands" it by means of civilian shipping lines. They start up after you have colonists on a second colony.
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Thanks for the answers!
So, what do you mean with "painfully slow"? What's a decent speed for a cargo, for you?
Can you elaborate on the jumpdrive? Should I add a jumpdrive to every ship that must use the jump point? Can I make a jump ship to carry the scouts over the jump? I've seen that the smaller jumpdrives on the research project are "self jump only". . .
I will try to build a bigger geoscout with more dev time and the smaller jumpdrive, send it on the other side and hope. Wish me luck. . .
BTW, can somebody explain to me the matter with civilian supply and demand contract? I have no clue. . .
I generally set cargo ship speed at half the "standard speed" of whatever engines I'm using. "Standard speed" is the speed of a ship with 25% space dedicated to engines without a changed power modifier. For nuclear pulse the standard speed would be 2000 km/s, so cargo ships would be about 1000 km/s.
A ship with a jump drive can use it's jump drive to send any other ship that is the same or smaller size than itself through a jump point. Putting jump drives on every ship is expensive, so it's recommended to put them only on ships you need to to constantly go through jump points without support (such as survery ships). For other ships, you might consider building a specialized jump ship to ferry them through jump points.
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Bah, as with so many things in Aurora it is a matter of taste, I usually make bare bones cargo ships and at NP tech they don't go much faster than your 500kps, If they are going really long distances you might want to either make faster ones or have a ton in transit all the time, but for anything Jupiter and closer to Earth I wouldn't bother, and usually if they are staying in Sol I let them be slow, there is rarely an emergency need for cargo in the home system.
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At it's most extreme on a conventional start you could be using 65 km/s freighters for colonising mars like I am.
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Ok, thanks everybody for the answers. About the cargo, it looks like I skimped too much on the engines research project and I ended up with a cheap-ass FIAT nuclear engine. Well, time to restart!
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I have a quick question and a n00b question page would fit as I don't really want to make a new topic on it. Can a wreck be towed? What I want to do is like have a salvager base where wrecks are towed too, however I don't know if wrecks can be towed and I couldn't find the answer anywhere (here or wiki).
Also a quick side question thing. Do you think someone should make a dedicated "n00b/quick question" page here for simple things that really don't warrant their own page and where simple questions can be found easily there instead of creating a new topic page that asks the same question over and over? (I might make it myself but.... :-\)
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I have a quick question and a n00b question page would fit as I don't really want to make a new topic on it. Can a wreck be towed? What I want to do is like have a salvager base where wrecks are towed too, however I don't know if wrecks can be towed and I couldn't find the answer anywhere (here or wiki).
Also a quick side question thing. Do you think someone should make a dedicated "n00b/quick question" page here for simple things that really don't warrant their own page and where simple questions can be found easily there instead of creating a new topic page that asks the same question over and over? (I might make it myself but.... :-\)
Make a page on the wiki for it :)
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One comment on "painfully slow"...this is usually seen from the perspective of advanced antimatter engines on ships with all the other bells and whistles. A low tech start will tend to produce ships that are considerably slower that 1000 km/s for freighters. The NCC's freighters are currently moving at 331 km/s and that is 50% improvement over the classes starting velocity. The limit is between your yards and your engines. Unless you can afford to throw a lot of mass at the engines when you are talking about 2 or 3 engines per ship you have real problem pushing your velocity over 1000 km/s.
The NCC's freighters have 2 year endurance because it used to take 1 year to get from Earth to Faewald. With a lot of the tech changes that have gone on the overall speed of a lot of survey and merchantile shipping has gone up but unless you are using large hulls the space requirements of payload impose a strong limit on your speed. From my point of view that freighter is quite speedy...it is equal to the latest NCC design in terms of size (though the NCC's newest freighters move at a whopping 6xx Km/s) and faster than the heavy lift groups (461 km/s).
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I usually design extremely high powered engines at lower tech levels, by ION or magneto-pulse however I run into a serious fuel shortage and start to develop far more efficient engines. For instance my current freighters wouldn't be considered fuel hogs at a mere 12% fuel use, however they are 30% engine, which is a luxury I can't really afford. Before the crash refinery building and fuel production research program this freighter alone would consume 5 months fuel production just filling it's tanks.
# Space X - Wyvern class Freighter 116650 tons 511 Crew 1659.5 BP TCS 2333 TH 2800 EM 0
1200 km/s Armour 1-212 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control 1 PPV 0
Maintenance Capacity 9 MSP
Cargo 75000 Spare Berths 7 Cargo Handling Multiplier 75
25 HS 100 EP Commercial Nuclear Pulse Engine (28) Power 100 Fuel Use 11.93% Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 2,180,000 Litres Range 28.2 billion km (271 days at full power)
This ship is classed as a commercial vessel for maintenance purposesThe true fuel hogs however are the corvettes with 2 dozen 1 HS 245% fuel use engines. Poor design maybe however they are a product of a more optimistic time when earth had fuel reserves in the tens of millions.
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Uhm...a freighter with 2 million litres of fuel?? My tankers carry 500,000 litres. It is also 117K tonnes. The largest ships the NCC has are 45K tonnes. The standard freighter is 30K tonnes, that has increased to 32K tonnes due to a combination of factors: the jump transports new generation jump engine and so on, this has resulted in the number of engines increasing from 1 to 2 (50 HS) which brings the speed up to some 6xx km/s.
That freighter also takes the gallicite required for 14 of the NCCs freighters. There is currently 24 of those Transorts/freighters in service. 4 ICGs (12 ships) will move more than that single ship. Fuel wise it uses more fuel than a full ICG (750,000 l) which have comparable range (24 billion Km or so)...and have 60 000 cargo and 20 000 passenger transport capacity plus are jump capable. True it is faster but with the update the more modern ICG will have only a bit lower range, half the speed, but carry 60 000 cargo and 30 000 colonists--and the gallicite cost of that lone freighter is reduced to 7 of these newer ships (2 ICGs). The Heavy Lift Groups have 80 000 cargo and 50 000 colonist lift, equivelent range but only move 461 km/s though again they have significantly lower fuel needs, with a comparable range.
There are very clear cost performance trade offs for having freighters that move nearly as fast as warships and have substantial cargo capacity. Add in the cost and time of the yard to build them, the jump gates I assume they need and so on.
With the current tech...Earths refineries produce 5 million l of fuel per year, though they have been idling as fuel is coming in from civillian refinery ships plus the use of an extensive network of NCC owned refinery ships to delivery fuel where it is needed. Standard civillian engines are down below 7% efficiency for the NCC. The current reserve on Earth sits at some 10 million but goes up and down by +3 million -1 million. Most colonies have several million l of fuel on hand.
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Thanks for the answers!
So, what do you mean with "painfully slow"? What's a decent speed for a cargo, for you?
BTW, can somebody explain to me the matter with civilian supply and demand contract? I have no clue. . .
I consider anything under 500 km/s "painfully slow" - my home system (note: I rarely start in Sol) has planets orbiting faster than 300 km/s.
Re: civilian contracts - the colony where you want something to end up 'demands' X number of that thing, and the colony where you want to send it from 'supplies' Y number and the smaller of X or Y gets moved by civilians at whatever rate they can manage, based on number of ships, amount of cargo space per ship, etc.
Also note, due to programming limitations civilians will only look for routes within four jumps of the 'supply' colony, and any jump points along the route will need jump gates or permanently stationed jumpships with orders to 'act as jump gate' (or something like that - last I looked it was a tick box on the TF orders screen).
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In just 2 years those Wyverns will be replaced with very similar ships, taking advantage of X 0.4 multiplier, 0.8 fuel efficiency, Ion engines, and half as many size 50 engines. ... It should look something like this:
Tiamat class Freighter 103,000 tons 321 Crew 1212.6 BP TCS 2060 TH 2160 EM 0
1048 km/s Armour 1-195 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
MSP 7 Max Repair 48 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months Spare Berths 1
Cargo 75000 Cargo Handling Multiplier 50
240 EP Commercial Ion Drive (9) Power 240 Fuel Use 4.05% Signature 240 Exp 4%
Fuel Capacity 1,550,000 Litres Range 66.8 billion km (738 days at full power)
CIWS-80 (2x2) Range 1000 km TS: 8000 km/s ROF 5 Base 50% To Hit
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposesBy taking out 1 cargo bay and an engine I can cram an efficiency 5 Jump drive into it with a slight speed cost.
Also, what? My tankers are tiny and hold slightly more than yours:
# Hyundai Hippo class Tanker 50,000 tons 202 Crew 4042.6 BP TCS 1000 TH 1600 EM 0
1600 km/s Armour 1-120 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
MSP 51 Max Repair 25 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months Spare Berths 6
25 HS 100 EP Commercial Nuclear Pulse Engine (16) Power 100 Fuel Use 11.93% Signature 100 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 28,590,000 Litres Range 862.7 billion km (6240 days at full power)
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
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My tankers can self jump and are under 12 000 tonnes, they currently zip along at 2000 km/s with NP engines. The entire stock of fuel on every planet in the NCC's space would barely fill two of those tankers...Earth has 10 ML, Faewald 15 ML, Forge 9 ML, Possidean 9 ML, Bifforst 13 ML, and Rossetta has 10 ML; total: 66 ML. That is probably a slight underestimate.
I find it humorous that you consider a 50,000 tonne ship "tiny." It is a differnt scale to what I consider "tiny" that is for sure. The largest ship the NCC has is 45 000 tonnes. They are currently building a military yard that can handle up to 12 000 tonne warships. The ships you have cost more (in critical galicite) than 3 smaller ships that can carry more and don't require a jump gate network. Their sole redeming feature is they are faster (by a factor of 2 or 3 depending on which version of my ships you compare to). But if I have more ships on the route then the speed of delivery is the same. Plus I'm not sure why it matters how fast something is delivered. For military sitatuations speed is critical but for most other reasons if it takes 3 months or 6 months to get a factory from earth to the colony what changes?
There are additional expenses associated with those ships: ship yards have to be bigger, the larger the ship yard the more it costs to do things like switch classes and so forth. The more population require to use it as well. Each refueling sucks an pretty substantial amount of fuel out of the farm. The Tribals and the Magazines draw down that sort of fuel...which makes them coming in to tank up "exciting" and one reason for a long time they were limited in what they did.
I've come out of a two decade long fuel crisis, and have dragged myself out of a galacite crisis and mostly out of my boronide crisis to face the fact that my main stay mineral production (the CMCs) will burn out in a few decades and I have that much time to set up a series of outsystem mines to feed the beast. I look at things from the point of view how much fuel do I need to get from A to B, if it takes longer but saves fuel then "takes longer" wins. If people find 500 km/s painfully slow...my first long range freighters did something like half that...what is that "mind boggling" slow?
Largely I think the difference is mostly due to different mission paramenters. My freighters and transports are intended to be first of all fuel efficient, and to be buildable with my existing yards. Speed is whatever I get. The tankers are designed to do rescue missions so speed is important as is self jump...tanker capacity is whatever survives the other requirements. My refinery ships and terraformers have a higher need for speed to reduce transit times so they have more engines as speed is considered valuable as it improves their time on station. The as yet unbuilt small priority freighter has again the goal of moving at "speed" -- it is still "painfully slow" at 900 km/s, but can self jump.
I'm not saying my ships are better, that is purely a subjective opinion anyway. I'm saying my ships do the same job with a lower investment in resources overall but at the cost of time. It is up to a player to decide, in my view at least, what is important to them: delivery speed, resource costs, whatever.
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Actually I never built those tankers as the shipyard refit cost was absurd.
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Yeah, I cringe at the retooling costs. That is why I try to handle the job with smaller ships, as the retooling cost seems to scale both with the ship size and the number of slips. It is a big disinsentive to have really large "civillian" designs. I have 3 civillian yards 15 K, 35 K and 45 K capacity. These sizes are decided based on my civillian jump engine size. Possibly with the next step in jump engine efficiency I will look into a larger freighter hull (60K or so).
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I could not agree more when I say that you keep ships as small as possible in response to their mission type.
As long as you can't dedicate yards to specific ship types and retooling is needed to fulfill your needed fleet quota then keep the ships small.
When it comes to speed versus fuel efficiency I also agree that this is highly situational. You can also calculate at which point a ship is most efficient in production cost versus speed and carrying capacity. If the ship is too slow the efficiency might prop in relation to the volume that can be carried in a certain time-frame. This can of course be important in the long run when ships are doing continuous runs of facilities to new colonies. At the same time fuel is important so increasing fuel efficiency and adding more engines is the solution if you have big enough yard-space to house those ships.
The same train of thought go into military ship design. Military ships usually focus more on powerful engines to trade less engine space for more mission tonnage in general. The problem now is that maintenance and supplies for super charged engines are very costly and fuel economy is atrocious. In my multi-national campaign ships usually need to be much more active and therefore fuel economy and ship size will matter much more.
As an example one nation is about to build a 2500 ton patrol ship that can burn 60.000 liters of fuel in 4 days at maximum speed and they produce about 3.8 million liters a year. Fuel consumption like this can be pretty destructive if you don't keep it under control. Once a couple of these ships are on constant patrol fuel will at some point become a huge concern.
The thought that goes into building a military ships are so complex that each ship must be judge by their own and their mission type, there are no optimal way to build a warship since it depend so heavily on a hugely complex set of factors. You always will have to trade some flaws for other strengths.
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Can a wreck be towed? What I want to do is like have a salvager base where wrecks are towed too, however I don't know if wrecks can be towed and I couldn't find the answer anywhere (here or wiki).
Found out you cannot tow wrecks.
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I tend to make my commercial engines very large (40HS usually) and low power (30% is typical) and the efficiency gains are dramatic. I can put one of those on a survey ship and send it off for a ten year mission with one or two fuel tanks. I also find that I can still have fast ships if I want them: I just add more engines. So my main line freighters are slow but have incredible range with very low fuel consumption, and I have tankers, colliers, and "couriers" that can go almost as fast as the military simply by having more engines and less cargo.
Besides, the civilian ships are available if I want some industrial installations moved around quickly, they're usually happy to do it, and they don't use my fuel.