Repulsion's Copious Pile of Questions

[Sloshmonger]

10. The sensor thing is the sensor strength in Thermal/EM/Grav/Geo.  The numbers for Therm and EM are the range to detect a strength 1000 contact.  The Grav/Geo numbers are points per hour.

12. For armor, the x/x stands for armor rating/armor columns.  Armor rating is how many rows of armor protect a single column, and the number of columns is determined by ship size and armor tech (maybe).  When damage is applied, it is applied to the outermost row of a random column, and once there are no more rows left for that column another hit to it may cause internal damage.

For Shields, the x/x stands for Shield Strength/recharge time in seconds.  So a 8/300 shield level will have 8 points of shield that recharge in 300 seconds (or 5 minutes).  These 8 points of shield need to be stripped before damage is applied to armor/internal, and will recharge.  I don't remember how partial points of sheilds function when taking damage.


14.   Matter of taste: I generally put a small sensor on my grav/geo ships, but only turn them on when they are about to die.  NPRs dislike seeing active sensors in "their" systems, even if you don't know that they're there.

To unlock a design, you need to go into SM mode and re-open the Class Design screen.  Unlock will then be available.  If you modify a design with active ships, you'll need to go to the F6 screen and select the ship to have them update.

[Ashery]

Q10: They are as follows: Thermal passive/EM passive/Grav/Geo

Q11: The expected life should you have "average" luck. Maint. life is, I believe, a combination of your engineering spaces, the overall size of your ship, and the cost of each component. There's probably a bit more to it as I'm going mostly from memory here.

Q12: Armor: Depth/width; Shields: Max strength/recharge time.

More in depth: Look at the "Armor status" menu under the F6 menu to get a visualization of what the armor looks like. The width is determined simply by the size of the ship and the depth is a player adjustable value.

So if you had a 1-10 ship taking fire from a gauss cannon (one damage per shot), the first hit will breach your armor and the second will have a 10% chance of causing internal damage. Or if you got hit with a missile with a size four warhead you'd be guaranteed to take one point of internal damage on the first hit. A fairly basic explanation, but there's tons of info on the wiki.

Shields are slightly different in that they cover the entire ship and must be taken down completely before armor takes damage. The downside, however, is that they will generally provide less overall protection per HS than armor. They also have two tech components: Their max strength and recharge rate. When researched equally, the shield will take five minutes to fully charge.

Q13: The handling rate affects the rate at which the cargo is un/loaded.

Q14: No. Grav/Geo might benefit from a passive sensor (With a bit of a nod going to thermal) in that they might be able to see potential enemies from far enough away to flee before being spotted, but an active sensor will just attract further attention to defenseless vessels. But generally speaking, if you follow a doctrine similar to mine when it comes to exploration (Lone warp capable combination vessels), you'll just eat the occasional survey vessel loss early on.

(Heh, four others posted while I was posting, putting it up as is anyways.)

Edit for Q15: I typically just hit the "Copy design" button on the bottom, make my changes, and then obsolete the old version. Designs are always considered "finished" the moment you close the window, so be careful about leaving a cargo vessel design with 100k capacity and a single engine. Civilians will build any non-obsolete freighter/cryogenic transport/luxury liner. You can temporarily obsolete certain roles if you want your civilians to focus on a specific area.

[Din182]

15. Go into Sm mode. Civvies build it automagically.

[HaliRyan]

Q15 -

Designs get locked whenever you retool a shipyard to build them, or if you manually lock the design in the design window. Simply closing the window won't lock your design on you. Once locked a design can't be altered (although you can use SM to unlock a design). If you want to make changes to a locked design it's best to make a copy and rename it something like "Ship Name Mod A", and make your changes to the new design.

Civilian shipping lines will only build locked non-obsoleted commercial designs. As far as I'm aware, they are also restricted to building designs which include a luxury passenger module, cargo hold, or cryogenic hold.

Oh, and be aware that if you do use SM to force unlock a design and make changes to it, this will affect ships of that design which have already been built.

Edit - I forgot to mention, if you want your civilian lines to be able to build your fancy new freighter/colony ship/passenger liner you need to make sure they have enough cash to do so. The civilian lines window will tell you the amount of money each line has, and let you subsidize them to give them money. The cost for a ship is the build points shown in the design window.

[Ashery]

Small correction to the above: Ships do not need to have their design locked as a prerequisite for civilian construction. Due to the earlier commercial shipyard bug, my commercial shipyards had a massive backlog of necessary construction and so I decided to rely purely on the civilian sector for colonist transport. Despite having never manually locked the design, however, my civilian sector slowly built up the colony ships (Took a 30k subsidy, though, heh).

[Repulsion (OP)]

Q16: Is there a good resizer program to use with Aurora? As of the moment, the taskgroup window is presenting big problems.  The whole bottom row of buttons is cut off, which means deleting and making Taskgroups is a real hassle.  I've tried resizeenable, but it doesn't really do anything other than screwing up the buttons. 

Q17: Is a super survey ship practical? I'm talking about a beast of a ship; jump-capable, geo and grav sensors, as well as thermal and EM sensors.  I'll need to advance down some research lines before this becomes really possible, but is it a good idea? Or would the cost of it be out of my league?

[Ashery]

Q16: No idea.

Q17: I'd say no, but I am of the belief that survey vessels should be small and fairly disposable as you're pretty much guaranteed to lose quite a few if you scout aggressively.

Here's my current design that's served me well for the past decade and a half or so:

Code: [Select]

Victory MkII class Geosurvey Ship    3,000 tons     285 Crew     674.5 BP      TCS 60  TH 160  EM 0
2666 km/s    JR 3-50     Armour 1-18     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/2/2     Damage Control Rating 3     PPV 0
Maint Life 7.3 Years     MSP 422    AFR 24%    IFR 0.3%    1YR 14    5YR 208    Max Repair 100 MSP

J3000(3-50) Military Jump Drive     Max Ship Size 3000 tons    Distance 50k km     Squadron Size 3
Magneto-plasma Drive E7 (2)    Power 80    Fuel Use 70%    Signature 80    Armour 0    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres    Range 214.2 billion km   (930 days at full power)

Gravitational Survey Sensors (2)   2 Survey Points Per Hour
Geological Survey Sensors (2)   2 Survey Points Per Hour
I had around 24 working at peak, but I'm now down to around a dozen or so after frequent losses (208 known systems, 85 surveyed). My next generation will feature the next generation of geo/grav sensors, a significantly smaller jump engine, and will be a full 1k tons smaller. I'll throw in some small passive sensors as well if I happen to have some spare room.

My current technique involves sending one survey vessel to each system and largely ignoring them save for when they discover a new jump point, in which case I cancel their current orders and have'em poke their head through to see what's on the other side. This has caused me to lose two ships to black holes though, heh.

[Repulsion (OP)]

Q18: Wait, so you can send a grav/geosurvey ship to a system and they will survey automatically? Or is there some other command to do it?

Q19: How does one figure out the colony cost of a SB?

[Ashery]

Q18: Under the F12 menu, "Special Orders/Organization" tab, there's two sets of default orders that you can set. If you're going for a type of vessel similar to mine, I'd put "Survey next three system locations" as the primary and "Survey next five system bodies" as the secondary. This setup will cause the survey vessel to do all grav surveys prior to starting work on the geo portion.

Q19: Huh? SB?

[Repulsion (OP)]

By SB I mean system body.  As in, Mars, or an Asteroid.  I figured you could figure it out by geosurveying it, but I've surveyed a few asteroids and nothing.  Can you even create colonies on asteroids?

[Tarran]

Q19: To find the Colony cost, look at the system, then the planet in the System Information (F9) window. It should be the fourth line of data about bodies. Alternatively, for bodies with existing colonies, look in the colony in Population and Production window, and look at "Planet Suitability (colony cost)" underneath Species.

And yes, you can create colonies on asteroids.

[Ashery]

By SB I mean system body.  As in, Mars, or an Asteroid.  I figured you could figure it out by geosurveying it, but I've surveyed a few asteroids and nothing.  Can you even create colonies on asteroids?

Ah, should've figured. You can view colony costs in the F9 menu. There are a bunch of influencing factors that should be listed in depth in one of the tutorials.

And you can create colonies on asteroids for mining purposes, but you'll never be able to terraform one such that it becomes habitable without an orbital habitat. Note that a "colony" in simply a stellar body that has stuff on it that belongs to you.

[voknaar]

Q19: How does one figure out the colony cost of a SB?

You need to create a species that has a acceptable gravity tolerance as the body. Otherwise it won't list a colony cost. If you do then you will need to take care of the other environmental factors population needs. Gas giants Can't be colonized.

[HaliRyan]

Small correction to the above: Ships do not need to have their design locked as a prerequisite for civilian construction. Due to the earlier commercial shipyard bug, my commercial shipyards had a massive backlog of necessary construction and so I decided to rely purely on the civilian sector for colonist transport. Despite having never manually locked the design, however, my civilian sector slowly built up the colony ships (Took a 30k subsidy, though, heh).

Had you retooled for the design or done anything that would otherwise result in the locking of the design? I could have sworn it needed to be locked for civvies to build it.

[Ashery]

Had you retooled for the design or done anything that would otherwise result in the locking of the design? I could have sworn it needed to be locked for civvies to build it.

Didn't do anything to lock it due to the backlog of commercial ships that I needed to build. Hell, the design is still unlocked well over a decade after the first civilian vessel was launched.