Aurora 4x
VB6 Aurora => VB6 Mechanics => Topic started by: Iranon on February 05, 2016, 02:13:21 PM
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I feel silly for asking such a basic question, and especially for not having asked it much sooner.
Most of the combat mechanics are available on the wiki, but I haven't been able to find out what actually causes a ship to give up the ghost and turn into a wreck.
Any ideas?
The answer could have interesting implications for ship design.
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I believe a ship is destroyed whenever all of its internal HTK have been "used up" in absorbing armour-penetrating damage.
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I believe a ship is destroyed whenever all of its internal HTK have been "used up" in absorbing armour-penetrating damage.
If that was the case, all components would be destroyed before the ship. That doesn't happen. (This is also disproved by the existence of salvageable components in wrecks.) There may be a threshold of internal HTK before the ship goes away, but it's not 100%.
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You are basing that on the idea that if a component is salvageable then it must not have been destroyed in battle, but as far as I know that is not necessarily true. It could work on a different system.
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The damage allocation code picks a component type for damage based on the damage allocation chart for each class.
If it finds that all components of that type have been destroyed, it re-rolls and tries again.
If this happens twenty times without success, the ship is destroyed.
Any component not destroyed at this point can be found in the wreck.
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I know that each weapon has damage pattern, what's a damage allocation chart?
Is it possible for a ship to become a wreck due to maintenance failure e.g. life support failure that will result in the loss of all of its crew?
Also speaking of damage and components is there any other fun surprises that can await us on top of these (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8288.msg85838#msg85838)
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The DAC (Damage Allocation Chart) shows up in a couple of places, chiefly the ship design and individual ship windows. Mostly, it's about what bits of the ship are most likely to be hit (sizes of components, and the number of them onboard).
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I see. size name (#of components/ single component HTK ). Does damage allocation code assign one point of damage each roll i.e. it would take 25 lucky hits for a component with 25 HTK to be destroyed or will need one hit of at least 25HTK. If the later, what happens when 25 damage hit a cargo component of 1HTK ?
Also I wish that loosing the bridge will have dire consequences, after all the chance of that happening is soooo small
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Thank you, Steve!
I've been experimenting with sacrificial components as damage sinks, and wondered how some combinations with the same total HTK seemed hardier than others.
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Is it possible for a ship to become a wreck due to maintenance failure e.g. life support failure that will result in the loss of all of its crew?
I've had a ship wrecked due to a maintenance failure on an engine, had insufficient supplies to repair and it exploded, setting off a magazine as a secondary explosion and totally wrecking the 18 ktonne Battlecruiser.
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I see. size name (#of components/ single component HTK ). Does damage allocation code assign one point of damage each roll i.e. it would take 25 lucky hits for a component with 25 HTK to be destroyed or will need one hit of at least 25HTK. If the later, what happens when 25 damage hit a cargo component of 1HTK ?
Also I wish that loosing the bridge will have dire consequences, after all the chance of that happening is soooo small
I don't recall with any certainty whether damage is applied one point at a time or not, but am confident damage from a single hit will be applied to a single component until the component is destroyed or the damage is exhausted. A component has a (damage/HTK) chance of being destroyed by damage; if it survives and is hit again, the calculation uses the reduced HTK due to damage sustained so far rather than the original value. Any overflow damage is applied to another component as normal. (I was sure I remembered seeing someone explain most of this in a post during the last week or so, but whatever.)
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Unless there was misleading info in a authoritative location, it's not applies 1 at a time. If a component with 5HTK is hit by 7 damage, it's destroyed automatically, then a 2-damage hit is applied to the next component of the same type (I wasn't sure the same type is selected, but confirmed by Steve here).
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The usual sacrificial damage sink would be size 1 magazines of as much armour as possible.
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If we wanted to build the toughest ship on a given tonnage, yes.
I've been focusing more on ships consisting mostly of very low-power engines: Cheaper per HTK, and more likely to be hit.
Add enough base-tech railguns (capacitors are expensive and can explode) to handle moderate ASM attacks and you end up with something promising.
Exceptionally crummy for its size...but sturdy, costing about 1/5 of a respectable warship, uses practically no fuel and it can rebuild itself multiple times over (all components are dirt-cheap, 1000MSP from a storage bay last forever).
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Thanks to everyone. Couple of thing that still bother me are the secondary explosions mechanic and the total loss @Cassaralla mentioned. I have tried playing with the SM function to assign points of damage but the results are all over the place.
1. Any ideas on how secondary explosions work? What can cause it (any weapon, mesons, shock damage) what is formula?
2. Any other fun catastrophic failures that can happen?
3. How maintenance failure cause ship to be destroyed?
I was sure I remembered seeing someone explain most of this in a post during the last week or so, but whatever.
Maybe it was, I didn't see it and I appreciate your effort try to explain it even better to silly ol' me ;)
EDIT:
Unless there was misleading info in a authoritative location, it's not applies 1 at a time.
Any chance for a link? Because going by an early tutorial it is applies one at a time, but there is also a different internal armor / HTK formula than the one I am familiar with and mechanics has been known to change many times.
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If we wanted to build the toughest ship on a given tonnage, yes.
I've been focusing more on ships consisting mostly of very low-power engines: Cheaper per HTK, and more likely to be hit.
Add enough base-tech railguns (capacitors are expensive and can explode) to handle moderate ASM attacks and you end up with something promising.
Exceptionally crummy for its size...but sturdy, costing about 1/5 of a respectable warship, uses practically no fuel and it can rebuild itself multiple times over (all components are dirt-cheap, 1000MSP from a storage bay last forever).
Why not use armored gauss turrets for even more extreme internal durability? Granted, they'll be kind of big for the PD they provide, but they'll actually be able to track incoming missiles and tank hits rather well.
Maybe a good mission-purpose of a craft like this would either be an escort, or a mothership-support ship hybrid.
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@ Mor: Sorry, no link and no exact recollection.
@ Iceball3: Because Gauss cannons are expensive, armour is expensive, and armoured Gauss turrets even more so. For the price of a properly armoured Guass turret, I could get get a whole ship:
Yorikke class Corvette 8 000 tons 153 Crew 308 BP TCS 160 TH 320 EM 0
2000 km/s Armour 3-35 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 2 PPV 36
Maint Life 1.72 Years MSP 60 AFR 204% IFR 2.8% 1YR 25 5YR 370 Max Repair 18 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months Spare Berths 2
160 EP Commercial Magneto-plasma Drive (2) Power 160 Fuel Use 0.54% Signature 160 Exp 2%
Fuel Capacity 15 000 Litres Range 62.5 billion km (361 days at full power)
10cm Railgun V1/C1 (12x4) Range 10 000km TS: 4000 km/s Power 3-1 RM 1 ROF 15 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S00.2 16-4000 (1) Max Range: 32 000 km TS: 4000 km/s 69 37 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Stellarator Fusion Reactor Technology PB-1 (2) Total Power Output 12 Armour 0 Exp 5%
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
Less extreme than my original concepts (reasonable armour, 62.5% machinery, too small for maintenance storage or damage control systems) but seems quite practical. It may be literally cheaper to build than to destroy with missiles. Can easily be made slightly more capable (more range to fight against beam-armed ships, better RoF if expecting small missiles) for a modest cost increase.
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1. Any ideas on how secondary explosions work? What can cause it (any weapon, mesons, shock damage) what is formula?
3. How maintenance failure cause ship to be destroyed?
1.) Engines, Powerplants and Magazines all have an explosion chance that you can see when designing them. This is the chance to trigger a secondary explosion when the component is destroyed. In the overall ship design it's given as "Exp 5%" for reactor and "Exp 2%" for engine in above example. Low tech magazines and high power reactors and engines have higher chance to trigger secondary explosions when destroyed.
3.) If you don't have enough maintenance supplies to repair a component that breaks it is instead destroyed, with a chance as in 1.) for secondary explosion.
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The explosion chance is clear... but what about the size of a secondary explosion? What does that scale with - size, power/capacity/actual magazine load? Will an empty magazine explode? What about a magazine loaded with warheadless buoys?
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For engines and powerplants I'm pretty sure it scales with their power ( so indirectly with size ). Since it's internal it also ignores armor (naturally)
Magazines should also scale with their capacity, but I'm not sure if it takes into account if they are loaded and/or with what they are loaded. That is an interesting question I'd also like answered.
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Unless there was misleading info in a authoritative location, it's not applies 1 at a time. If a component with 5HTK is hit by 7 damage, it's destroyed automatically, then a 2-damage hit is applied to the next component of the same type (I wasn't sure the same type is selected, but confirmed by Steve here).
I would be surprised if this (by which I mean "all components of the selected type are destroyed before the type changes for that particular hit) is the case, based mostly on vague memories from many years ago. By my reading, Steve's post upthread does not confirm it - I read him to be saying that that was the algorithm to allocate any damage remaining in the hit. In fact, my recollection was that the DAC has an entry for each component (which isn't quite what he said).
John
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I agree. The way understand it. When X-points of damage penetrates shield\armor.
1. A random component type is picked from DAC (aka probability table total ship size to total component size)
2. If one of its component isn't damage, X damage is applied against that component HTK.
4. Queue FUN stuff for secondary exposition chance.
5. Back to step 1 with X minus HTK .
What confuse me is that note in tutorial 15 about internal armor and HTK calculation.
1.) Engines, Powerplants and Magazines all have an explosion chance that you can see when designing them.
I was afraid of that, I hopped for some rare\crazy events on top of that. Anyway, while the Engine explosion chance has been described in Steve's tutorials from a few years back, in the create new project window you can see\test it only for Powerplants and Magazines. (And unfortunately Missiles/Magazines seems a bit overpowered in comparison)
3.) If you don't have enough maintenance supplies to repair a component that breaks it is instead destroyed, with a chance as in 1.) for secondary explosion.
If so, than I guess it comes back to how secondary explosions work.
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The explosion chance is clear... but what about the size of a secondary explosion? What does that scale with - size, power/capacity/actual magazine load? Will an empty magazine explode? What about a magazine loaded with warheadless buoys?
(http://i.imgur.com/I00IXNT.png)
Looks like, no, a magazine won't explode if it's empty. So the explosion size probably purely depends on how much payload goes off from a failure to eject.
It's actually kind of amusing, as most nuclear weapons are actually really difficult to set off on accident in the real world. Hitting a nuke with a bomb is going to more likely make it unable to detonate, rather than cause a detonation.
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It's actually kind of amusing, as most nuclear weapons are actually really difficult to set off on accident in the real world. Hitting a nuke with a bomb is going to more likely make it unable to detonate, rather than cause a detonation.
Except anti-matter weapons. If those get damaged, containment would probably be lost causing the whole thing to go boom. And regular nuclear munitions may go as well as the force from a reaction (enemy weapons fire) may cause a chain reaction in your own munitions.
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Anyway, while the Engine explosion chance has been described in Steve's tutorials from a few years back, in the create new project window you can see\test it only for Powerplants and Magazines.
Explosion chance of engines seems to be a straightforward 0.1*PowerMultiplier.
Useful when evaluating other people's designs.
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There's some way to see it in the project window. I believe it tops out at 30%, which accords nicely with the 0.1*modifier number you give. (I was checking for a friend who wanted exploding ships. No, I don't know why.)
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A bit off topic, but still on track. The image refers to one of my FACs right before they returned to the colony after an engagement near the asteroid field between Mars and Jupiter. It is sill alive, but I wonder if it would have survived if it couldn't have repaired the reactor.