So after reading the recent thread on Fighter Modules by ArcWolf, I went down a major rabbit hole of reading and brainstorming over why fighters, are fighters, ships are ships, stations are stations, and the differences of civilian vs military designs. What makes them separate from each other to necessitate the various game rules applied to them for their use and design. And lastly, how "realisticTM" are those rules. All of these ideas that came to me from my research and thinking were reined in by an oft quoted quote that Steve is attempting with Aurora C# to reduce if not eliminate special case rules and streamline the mechanics of the game in comparison to its messy VB6 origins, such as removing PDC's and unifying the ship and missile engine calculations.
The initial spark for this long train of thought comes from many a player wishing to shrink so called "Fighters" of aurora to be of similar size to what we call Fighters today in our modern airforces. Many suggestions have come along such as reducing the size of weapons or introducing even smaller weapons, further reduce crew requirements, eliminating armor requirements, and many more. However, most of the suggestions are always countered by Steve saying that Fighters (and to an extent Fast Attack Craft) are more akin to waterborne gun/torpedo/missile boats rather than fighters. Which brings me to suggestion #1.
#1a Rename Fighters as Boats
Plain and simple, if the game represents such vessels more as Boats, just call them Boats. As they are now, people start off with a false pretense of what they are actually creating and envisioning as opposed to what the actual game mechanics allow them to do. Of course this doesn't stop people from calling their boats fighters anymore than the current game prevents people calling fighters, boats. But if the core designs are more like a boat, call it a boat to begin with. Lastly, why use the specific term of "Fighter" (a small combat vehicle to hunt and destroy other small combat vehicles) to represent the entirety of small craft that can be built such as sensor scouts, missile bombers or ground troop transports. However, Boat is synonymous with Craft in naval parlance which could cause confusion with Fast Attack Crafts, which again is a poor combat specific name to represent all possible design's in their category. Sooooo. . . .
#1b Combine FAC's into the Boat category
As it stands now Fighters and FAC's are similar in that both are small enough to not require a bridge, but only fighters can transit atmosphere and thus can be used as Ground Assault vessels, as well as be built on planetary surfaces in Fighter Factories. This 1000T and 500T cutoff is very narrow, especially when there are no other tonnage based restrictions of any sort. Everything from 1001T to infinity are all ships that can enter the atmosphere. Unless this minute differentiation is absolutely paramount to keep, it would probably be best to combine the 2 categories in the spirit of C# streamlining goals. It also lines things up a bit since the smallest shipyard is 1000T, and largest Hangar module is 1000T (oh hey, the smaller hangar bays are called "boat" bays, neat).
This also opens up an awesome opportunity to create transatmospheric cargo boats. The smallest Cargo hold is 500T and as of now the only way to transfer cargo from the planet surface to a ship is to have a Cargo Shuttle Bay (which is 500T as well and so pushes the design over the 1000T FAC/Boat limit) or have Cargo Shuttle Station/Spaceport on both ends of the trip which is less than ideal when wanting to make a tiny mineral freighter to collect from a small mining outpost. So if we up the transatmospheric capability to 1000T vessels we could make a boat with 500T capacity that could land and pick up cargo from the surface, or with the already 1. 14/2. 0 change, transfer cargo to another ship by landing in its hangar. Also, perfect for a true conventional start in that you could build such a boat on the surface of your home planet with a Boat Factory, load it up with 0. 2 of a unit of infrastructure and send it to land on and start your first offworld colony without any spaceborne shipyards. I don't believe this would cause too much disruption if such boats are treated as a single cargo shuttle for cargo handling calculations and thus be less efficient than a dedicated cargo shuttle bay. The only problem is that such boats would automatically be classified as a military vessel despite its commercial purpose due to having engines smaller than 25HS/1250T, which leads me to suggestion #2.
#2a Remove the Size Constraint for Commercial Engines
I fail to see a rational reason as to why a Commercial Engine must be of a certain large size to be considered commercial. Why is a HS5 and 30% power engine a military engine that has a chance of failure and requires maintenance than an engine 5x its size which works perfectly till the day it gets shot or scrapped. Its dumb and completely arbitrary and should be done away with. Anything of 50% output or less, regardless of size, should be considered commercial. I also do believe it to be silly that Commercial Engines have 0 maintenance requirement, which leads to suggestion #2b
#2b All Engines have a Maintenance Requirement that Scales Directly with Engine Power%
This I see more as a game start option so that we have 1: Military ships require Maintenance, 2: No ships require Maintenance, and 3: All ships require Maintenance. Its just odd to me that an engine would need absolutely no maintenance if its output power was significantly low enough, as I'm pretty sure even the small little quarter horsepower engine on the back of 6' fishing raft boat still needs fixing every once in a while and can even crap out if not properly taken care of. I'm not good enough of a mathematician to suggest what the exact formula for this ought to be, but the IFR and MSP requirements should reduce the lower the output is to be near but never quite 0.
Now I go into my bigger and crazy ideas after thinking about #2b and the delineation between Commercial and Military Engines and correspondingly ships. I asked myself, "Why is Engine type the primary determinant of whether a vessel is a commercial or military vessel?" This followed with more inquiries into what makes something a military vessel military? What components or design choices separate it from commercial? Should commercial vessels have some access to military modules such as guns, shields, and sensors without being considered true military ships? Why are commercial shipyards so much bigger than military yards? Then I started delving into the differences between ships and stations, like, Why must a station buildable by ground facilities be strictly commercial and lack armor? Why do ships need armor? Why can't ships be built by ground facilities, even though we can build nearly every individual component on the ground?
Overall a lot of ideas started brewing on how the game answers all these questions, and whether or not I could come up with better answers that make more logicaltm and/or realistictm sense, while simplifying or eliminating game rules to streamline the game.
#3 Just Get Rid of Player Designed "Commercial" Ships
That is not to say, don't let the player design freighters and tankers and such, but remove the distinction of player built commercial and military ships. AI designed civilian shipping would be the only commercial vessels as well as the NPR designed commercial vessels. Any and all player designed ships would be considered military ships by the AI/NPR. My reasons for this are that A) Really cuts down on any and all arbitrary restrictions between the two types of vessels, B) Makes sense somewhat realistically that all government built ships are tied to the government/military, even if their direct purpose is not for war, and C) Gives the AI civilian shipping a little more meaning.
However, I do understand that this a much bigger change to the game that many would like to see so I have come up with some alternative means of redefining what it means to be a "commercial" ship
#4a Eliminate the distinction between Commercial and Military Engines, and Remove the Military Only Restriction on Most Modules
It you couldn't already tell from suggestion #2, I'm not to keen on the idea that certain engines should be absolutely free of all maintenance just because its of X size and Y power output. So I figure if we remove the size limit and maintenance exclusion, why not remove the distinction between the two all together. Generally speaking, throughout our naval history, all engine types have been available to both military and civilian shipbuilding, though civilian construction generally goes for the cheaper and more economical designs as a means of lowering build and operational costs. However that doesn't mean that it was exclusive that military ships had high performance engines, racing boats/ships and fast freighters and passenger liners frequently topped speeds equal to or even in excess of their military counterparts, and conversely various naval support ships were slow and fuel efficient.
I'm also not the fan of how many modules are military restricted, Sensors, hangars, shields, magazines and to a certain degree weapons. It makes some sense as those modules are meant to be resource intensive and as it stands now, commercial ships were supposed to be maintenance free. However, if we eliminate this exclusivity of maintenance free engines, it would be fitting to allow these maintenance needing modules to be placed on commercial ships. Sensors and hangars are the key ones, doesn't make sense that commercial ships can not install large sensor arrays of any sort despite modern civilian shipping having radar and sonar almost universally available, as well as dedicated science and survey vessels having specialized equipment. While there is not really a whole lot of precedence of civilian aircraft carriers beyond one or 2 helicopters or maybe seaplanes, there is a wide variety of boats which have been carried by many different ships throughout history, which makes it a bit silly to have the Boat Bays and "Military" Hangar Decks to be military restricted and the "commercial" hangar deck to be frivolous. What is it about this particular hole inside of a ship to store a boat makes it have to be a military ship? Magazines are kinda similar, in that why does a hole in the ship designed to store a specific kind of cargo automatically make it a military vessel. I get that munitions are for war, but the ship itself is just a specific kind of cargo ship akin to regular freighters or tankers. Shields are another module that I think is silly to have as Military restricted, especially since we can put any absurd amount of armor on commercial ships. Shields make more sense for civilian ships as it takes up less space/mass than armor (though not necessarily per point of protection) and is togglable, only needing it for emergencies.
Lastly, throughout multiple points of history, civilian ships have been armed to a certain degree to protect themselves from pirates or foreign enemies seeking to take their goods. I thought about removing the military only restriction for at the very least beam weapons, if not beams and missiles up to a certain size, but I couldn't think of a good way to balance it without adding more special case rules which we are trying to avoid.
But you may ask then, "KriegsMeister, how should we define commercial vs military ships?", and I would answer. . . .
#4b Give the No Armor/Structural Shell Option to Engined Ships, and Give any Boat/Ship with >1 Layer of Armor the Military Tag
Except at the dawn of the ironclads, I cannot thing of a single example of a civilian ship that had any sort of significant armor beyond its structural frame and hull (except like Icebreaker ships, but those are very niche). Even non-combat military ships (and many combat) hardly had any armor, even if it would be a good idea (*cough* munitions ships). And also doesn't make much sense for the game to have only stations exclusively be armorless, when it could be of great benefit for many types of ships. I can see the argument be made that some sort of armor would be necessary for any spacecraft as a means of preventing damage by micro-asteroid impacts while traveling through space. So I suggest that having the No Armor check box checked (or just get rid of the check box and let us put 0 in the armor value), would significantly increase the IFR/AFR rate. That leaves commercial vessels with a binary option of increased maintenance issues for a significantly reduced weight (tech dependent) or increased reliability for the cost of payload capacity.
Some may ask why I decided to give commercial ships shields and take away armor, tis a good question, and I'm not sure how to respond better than, I think it fits the sci-fi universe better while also keeping it inline with historical civilian construction. Armor is very costly and takes up a lot of mass, and has been almost entirely exclusive to ships of war, "energy/plasma" shields on the other hand are completely fictional as of now so it is more difficult to predict their use in the future should they become a reality.
#5 Stations, Spaceports, and Orbital Construction of Space Ships
As it stands now, in order to build a Spacestation utilizing ground facilities, you need to have a Spaceport and for the station to meet 3 criteria; Engineless, No Armor, and no military modules. In my eyes, only half of this makes sense, a spaceport as a means of shuttling parts to the orbital assembly area, and not having engines (it is supposed to be stationary after all). What I don't understand is why must a station lack armor, what is it about trans-newtonian orbital physics that makes armor unbuildable by construction factories, even though fighter factories work just fine in building armored vessels (but can't build unarmored vessels). Even more annoying is that ground facilities can pre-build military modules but it is impossible to weld them onto a structural frame unless it is done in a shipyard, while able to assemble millions of tons of terraforming stations, orbital habitats, and flying casino's, but god forbid I want to launch a 10ish-ton active sensor into orbit like we currently do for modern day satellites. /endrant Well, not entirely, because again, why can we assemble such massive structures with ground facilities, but the moment you slap an engine on the design, its incapable of being built by anything but a shipyard.
So far in previous suggestions, we have already removed the "No Armor" and most military module exclusivity from ship designs or wholly removed the distinction between Commercial and Military ships, so why not take it a step further in eliminating entirely the special rules for space station construction and open up the space port to build any and all ships/stations and whatnot. I envision 3 different ways of constructing vessels; Boat Factories/Yards (pretty much unchanged from current Fighter Factories, just upped to 1000T designs), Shipyards of 1000T and greater (same as now, just kinda sorta remove the commercial yards), and Spaceports with Construction Factories/Conventional Industry, which would provide a little more flexibility in design and construction to dedicated yards but be more costly in time, workers, and pulling away resources from other ground construction projects. I believe each spaceport should have a total tonnage limit based on total CF/CI output, say maybe 1HS per colony annual BP, so a colony with a 100 Construction Factories could build up to 50000T of ships and/or stations, additional spaceports would double that capacity (2x SP = 100000T, 5x SP = 800000T). I, however, do not have the analytical prowess to properly balance this so as to not completely overshadow dedicated shipyards and these numbers would likely need a bit of tweaking. This would also temper some of the more outrageous station designs that people can immediately build right off the bat and would require some build up to great the 100x module refinery monstrosities people come up with.
So that's I'll I got for now, I believe the first 2 suggestions would be of great benefit to the game while the other 3 could probably use a lot more refinement or be ignored, they are just my personal gripes with my headcanon and how I want to play the game. Critique is welcomed and encouraged to make these suggestions better and possibly be introduced to the game. I'm probably going to do a similar effort post in the near future but focusing on weapons. Hope yall enjoy the read.
TL;DR
#1 Combine Fighters and FAC's into one category and rename Boats.
#2 Remove Size constraint of commercial engines and possibly remove the lack of maintenance for commercial engines.
#3 Forget about the distinction of *player built commercial vs military ships.
#4 Base commercial vs military moreso on presence/thickness of armor rather than engine type, remove military exclusivity of many module.
#5 Remove special rules of "Stations", allow spaceports and ground facilities to build all ships/stations upto a certain total tonnage limit.