Thinking Out Loud

[IanD]

It depends what you want. WWII in space, modern navies in space, or modern aerospace craft or something else. Going on the realism Steve has ploughed into Aurora I would have thought aerospace, something else or modern navies at least.

Crew
I like the idea of increased crew comfort contributing to endurance, but remember that nuclear submarines still hot bunk and they are on patrol for months at a time.  
However I think crewing requirements in Aurora are currently over done, ships complements in todays wet navy warships are shrinking. Remember the Tiger class cruisers had fully automatic 3” and 6” gun turrets decades ago. The Canadians used an automatic 3” turret on their escorts in the last century. In comparison a quad laser turret in Aurora has a crew of 144. What are all these people doing?
I think you could increase the space required for crew but vastly reduce the crew required to run a ship,  the new RN Daring class (8000 tons) have a complement of just 190 with accommodation for 235. A jump destroyer in Aurora (8500 tons) has a crew of well over 800! On this basis crew complements in Aurora should be cut by a factor of four. Edit Interestingly a WWII Tribal class destroyer also had a complement of 190.

Fuel
I have no great problem with doubling the fuel requirements other than the supply of sorium which is not always abundant. More than that and sorium would be a real prolem in some games if you just do not get lucky.

Maintenance
This can be overegged; again it is worth remembering that the Invincible changed a complete engine in the middle of a war zone during the Falklands war.  I have no real problems with it as it is.

Shipyards
While we’re at it shipyards should also be considered.
Today many if not most large sea-going vessels are constructed in a dry dock by assembling prefabricated sections (see the new RN carriers). Few are still launched off a slipway. Thus to rehash some old proposals, when considering space-borne shipyards it is quite conceivable for a 20,000 ton construction slipway (or construction bay, as I prefer) to accommodate the construction of more than one vessel. So that it could construct up to 16,000 tons of vessels, allowing 20% of capacity for adequate spacing of the different construction projects and the additional proviso that no vessel can leave the slipway before all ships have been completed.
Another alternative is to commit smaller yards to help the main yard with the project, thus shortening the time it takes to build a ship.

[Rastaman]

Given that free floating space stations are not possible programming wise, PDCs can and do take the place of forward stations just splendidly. And they don't need maintenance. They only need lots of construction brigades to reassemble them in a sane timeframe. Even with 20 brigades it takes years to build a 5+ part PDC. I have experimented with an orbital station that holds a million people and 20 factories. Don't know what is better.

[dgibso29]

This was my foray into designing a starbase.

Code: [Select]

Sentinel class Starbase    75,000 tons     5238 Crew     14446 BP      TCS 1500  TH 0  EM 0
1 km/s     Armour 20-158     Shields 0-0     Sensors 280/280/0/0     Damage Control Rating 300     PPV 50
Maint Life 16.17 Years     MSP 36115    AFR 150%    IFR 2.1%    1YR 260    5YR 3899    Max Repair 720 MSP
Hangar Deck Capacity 10000 tons     Troop Capacity: 2 Battalions    Magazine 5570    Cargo Handling Multiplier 5   

Fuel Capacity 2,460,000 Litres    Range N/A

Defender Missile Launcher (50)    Missile Size 1    Rate of Fire 10
Missile Fire Control FC105-R1 (10)     Range 105.8m km    Resolution 1
Striker SM Mk. 1 (642)  Speed: 27,500 km/s   End: 63.6m    Range: 105m km   WH: 8    Size: 4    TH: 165 / 99 / 49
Defender AMM Mk. 1 (3002)  Speed: 50,000 km/s   End: 3m    Range: 9m km   WH: 1    Size: 1    TH: 533 / 320 / 160

Planetary Search Sensor MR1008-R100 (1)     GPS 72000     Range 1,008.0m km    Resolution 100
Anti-Missile Search Sensor MR100-R1 (1)     GPS 720     Range 100.8m km    Resolution 1
Thermal Sensor TH20-280 (1)     Sensitivity 280     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  280m km
EM Detection Sensor EM20-280 (1)     Sensitivity 280     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  280m km

Strike Group
36x Falcon Fighter   Speed: 16400 km/s    Size: 5
4x Falcon-C Fighter   Speed: 16400 km/s    Size: 5
I absolutely love the design, and I love seeing it in orbit of Earth. Obviously meant as more of a system defense base than a full blown starbase featuring maintenance docks, living quarters, etc.

[Rastaman]

This was my foray into designing a starbase.

16 years maintenance life ... this is a starbase already. So there is no real problem maintenance wise, 2000 units per year. The problem is that in order to base whole fleets there, it needs to be of massive size, too large to be build in a naval shipyard. Maybe it's possible to include the modular ship-building idea: Only the modules are built in a shipyard. A 500 000 ton ship or base could be assembled by factories with 10x 50 000 ton modules which were built in a 50 000 ton naval shipyard. Forget overhaul though. Just keep it supplied.

[dgibso29]

Exactly my point. I was able to design a starbase for a defensive purpose, albeit only by utilizing fully 20% of it for engineering spaces. I was unable to build the sort of deep-space base we are envisioning.

[Rastaman]

It might be possible to build a very large military rated base with end game construction technologies and lots of resources. Like a million ton carrier. Sure components will break down in deep space, but with a constant resupply maybe that's not so problematic.

Edit: Having the game before me now, I can't really see any need for a big outer space station whatsoever. Actually it's insane to build such a thing when you could build a massive mobile force for the same costs.

I designed a 650 000 ton PDC with 500 000 tons of hangar space and a hundred million liters of fuel, this makes 256 PDC parts. With 40 factories or brigades, which is large but doable for a deep space building operation, it would take five years to assemble it. Construction tech is 25 BP, which is tech level 6 of 12 I think. No maintenance.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

For purposes of the fuel discussion, I thought I had better point that in NA the rate of increase in terms of fuel consumption for boosted engines is less than in Aurora. The multiplier is 4x rather than 10x. Remember that in Aurora a GB engine uses 10x fuel, a fighter engine uses 100x fuel and a missile uses 10,000x fuel

In NA, there is no distinction between engine types. Instead, one of the factors in engine design is the amount of boost. This is incremented in 5% steps up to the researched maximum, which could be 300% or more. The Fuel consumption is (4^ Engine Power Modifier) / 4

So if an engine used 100 litres of fuel per hour at normal power, it would use 400 litres at double power and 1600 litres at triple power.

In other words if Aurora moved to a much higher base fuel consumption rate but also used the NA fuel modifier, GB would be less affected by the increase and fighters even less affected. For example, assume base fuel consumption was increased by a factor of 8, which is in the ballpark of what I am considering. Normal engines would require 8x more fuel than now. The equivalent to the current GB engine would use 3.2x as much fuel as now and the equivalent to the current fighter engine would use about 28% more fuel than now.

The effect of this in ship design would be that ships had to use much more fuel storage. Around 10-15% instead of 1-2%. Because of space concerns, FACs would probably stick with a similar percentage to their current amount which would reduce their endurance from about a month to perhaps a week to 10 days (which returns them to their originally intended system defence role) and fighter ranges would drop a little or fighters would be slightly larger.

However, the new engine design in NA means you could have a much greater variety of engine sizes and boost amounts. The boost goes the other way as well with reduced power engines having better fuel efficiency and replacing current commercial engines. Larger engines get fuel efficiency savings.

Steve

[metalax]

With the scrapping of the distinction between engines, how would fighters be designated for purposes of if they can be built by fighter factories? Purely any design under 500 tons? Perhaps rename fighter factories to smallcraft factories as I can think of several designs such as scouts, survey team shuttles, weapons satellites, survey probes, etc, that would make sense to be capable of being built in factories rather than needing a full shipyard.

[UnLimiTeD]

I like the prospect, but I honestly think that an increase by around 5x would be sufficient. With a 5x Mp for GB and fighters.
Large swarms of fighters are already one of the most efficient tactics available, no need to buff it relative to regular ships, even if in absolute numbers it's a nerf.
I think it should also be possible to add a size multiplier, where a larger engine is slightly more efficient no matter what other technology is inside, that'll differentiate a dreadnought from a fighter a bit more.
Crap, I forgot thats already in that system. I am deeply sorry.
That'll allow for a neat 2x multiplier in chance of sorium and sorium amounts, as well as harvesting speed by scoops, and cutting requirements of scoops and refineries by that factor.

Hmm, while we're at it; the reason fighter swarms with few small missiles are so effective might be connected with targeting and missile armor. If multiple salvos of one or two missiles are inbound, they'll be targeted a piece, and armor is no alternative.

[Rastaman]

Don't forget - large ships can make use of large and fuel efficient engines. A 2500 ton engine will have 50% reduction in consumption according to Steve's NA rules. So they can get away with four times larger consumption than now.

I don't think more fuel is a big deal, ship capability will go down 10-20% per ton. But any opposition feels the same effect. You do need more tanker tonnage, crude Sorium transports, and more refineries.

In every game I build freighters that carry 200 000 tons, why not some super-tankers too? My pet peeve: Make fuel tanks less crew intensive. My 200 000 ton fuel tank needs 12000 crew. It should be 10 at most. Modern supertankers have 40 crew altogether. An equivalent size cargo hold in Aurora only needs 200 crew, 5 per 5000 tons.

[jRides]

If you put it in orbit of one of the moons, you could create a maintenance base on that moon use the existing maintenance modules. I've also considered some type of very large, expensive "self maintenance" module intended for bases. I just haven't found a plausible mechanic to prevent its use by very large warships.

Steve

Why would you want to dis-allow this for big ships? If you make it big enough it would only really be of use in really big ships, coupled with a huge size, massive amounts of crew (One of these monsters would clear your pool of trained crew available in one fell swoop and still fall short, you would need a huge dockyard and a long, long old time to build it. Leave it in as a possibility just make the negatives outweigh the positives. I say this as the first thing I thought of was building a new class of armoured tug to pull such a station around. I recently read (on your recommendation Steve), the Galactic Marines ennealogy, and on book 7 (I think) they used a station with tugs to transport the fleet to the nearest stargate, by book 8 it had its own engines which they used to reach the Galactic core.

You could make the component the engine itself, used for station keeping - this then opens up the possibility of a tech tree so you'd need a better type to hold station in gravimetrically dense areas such as around warp points or in black hole systems.

Either that or you only allow it to work when the station is in place (same as orbital terraformers), and linked to a target planet - so for instance a low tech version on a station that will link to terrestrial planets (like an orbital habitat module is assumed to have all the infrastructure to transport its workers to and from the surface), the component has all the kit required to mine, transport and convert relevant raw materials from its linked target planet for use as consumables, as the tech gets better new self maintenance module designs become available that can extract what it needs from deep space, warp points, even wormholes at the top of the tree.

[chrislocke2000]

I really like the idea of upping the fuel requirements and also moving to the NA style of engine design. Would you continue to leave the NPRs with basically limitless fuel or now look to revise the AI so they can cope with this?

Better tracking of ships crew sounds like a great idea as well, it's always bugged me to see a ship with it's bridge destroyed and hardly any life support left merrily continuing on its way. If you wanted to get really clever you may want to start worrying about deaths v wounded and the ability of the crew to get back on their feet as much as making repairs to the ship. A bit of quick googling found one piece of research on the area

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a258369.pdf

[xeryon]

Regardless of the outcome I will be pleased when crew matter.  As of right now crew is merely a meaningless number during ship design.  It has no use other then a little bit of RP.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Re Starbases

A self maintenance component could be large with high crew requirements. A ship with it would not be subject to overhaul clocks, but would constantly drain its supplies as if systems were failing at an arbitrary rate. So it would require constant resupply via ship. I don't really see the problem with such a module being mounted on a ship. It would enable super large ships if people want but logistically it would just make sense to mostly use ships that you can actually use maintenance facilities on. Otherwise you'd be spending a hell of a lot of money and resources on maint supplies.

[Mel Vixen]

If we get Starbases i would like it if no crewquarters are needed if a Habitat-module is present unless you have more crew then the Habitat can harbor. As for the Maintenance i would go with the Module. If the Station can count as Colony it would be nice if only the Military components + drives fail.