Size of Commercial Ships / Civilian Contracts

[SteveAlt (OP)]

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.

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 .)

I 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

[SteveAlt (OP)]

Hi Steve,

  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).

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.

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.

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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)

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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: 25
Now 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.

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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: 25
Assuming 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.

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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.

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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)

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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 drives

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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

[rmcrowe]

seems reasonable to me.

robert

[schroeam]

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.

[cjblack]

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.

[sloanjh]

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

[sloanjh]

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

[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

[sloanjh]

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

great series, btw).

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

[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

John

[SteveAlt (OP)]

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.

These changes will be in v4.1. I am planning to release a beta version of v4.0 later today if possible.

Steve

[SteveAlt (OP)]

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.

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.

Steve

[SteveAlt (OP)]

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

[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).

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

[mavikfelna]

It's all pretty interesting and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.

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