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[Stardust]

I always have a scientist and a good proportion of labs working on the next power plant or engine technology.  I don't necessarily begin design upgrades upon completion, but I keep the technology progressing.

Especially later in the game when we start moving into studies that require 1,000,000+ research points, achieving the next power plant/engine advance is a 1 or 2 decade endeavor.

Keep up the good work Alfapiomega!

[Alfapiomega (OP)]

I always have a scientist and a good proportion of labs working on the next power plant or engine technology.  I don't necessarily begin design upgrades upon completion, but I keep the technology progressing.

Especially later in the game when we start moving into studies that require 1,000,000+ research points, achieving the next power plant/engine advance is a 1 or 2 decade endeavor.

Keep up the good work Alfapiomega!

Thank you for the feedback! Interesting. I see the engines really as a breakthrough that should be held for a while, otherwise you must be in a state of constant flux based on the fact that engines upgrade on the ship is most of the times from what I see is more expensive than a new ship/scraping the old one.

[wobbly]

Engines however are easy to replace in the sense that a shipyard can often build the exact same ship with completely different engines (as long as ship size is close), whilst building the same ship with different sensors & fire controls will often require a retool. So to upgrade an old ships engine is a pain, but to build a new model with new engines is easy. Big & cheap is easier to change on a design, small & expensive is easier to add to an existing ship (small & cheap even better of course!).

Edit: Thinking about this again, I'm not sure it's 100% correct. Usually when I do this I'm adding commercial engines - building small mineral freighters at my naval shipyards, replacing my commercial ship-engines with higher fuel efficiency models. Will have to double check. A more expensive military engine may be harder.

Edit2: True for commercial vessels. False for military.

[Stardust]

While Emma's still kicking, I strongly suggest having her improve your research capability and economic output.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I usually end up using Ion engines as my first line of mainstream engine technology.

I often skip one level of engine on my military ships while missiles and commercial ships might upgrade a little more easy.

If you have 25-30% of a ship made up of engines as you often have on a military ship it will certainly require a retool unless the other components of the ship is really expensive. Military engines are pretty expensive, especially if you go over power 1x on them. If you go with slightly reduced power levels such as x0.85 you can actually upgrade your military ships with newer engines more often to a much lower price.

The way you go is entirely up to you and your preferences, there is not right way to do it.

[Alfapiomega (OP)]

Thanks for the feedback everyone, I will take you up on your advice and do some changes. I have published an episode and the next three days in the morning a new one will be published too.
There will also be a large session on Sunday which I will upload during the next 14 days automatically as I am leaving for 14 days for my holidays

Any advice for a large session?

I expect to finish the jump engines and search new system or two, enlarge the colonies on Mars, Moon, start a new one at one of the Jupiter Moons. Also I plan to start the problem Fleet of military ships and maybe even, and that is a dream, starting an interstellar expansion

[Alfapiomega (OP)]

So I did what are over 3 hours of recording of Aurora (probably nearly 4) and I got some insane advancements in that time.
We have literally full blown colonies on Mars and the Moon, we are ready to colonize Io, we have tons of civilian mining colonies all over the place with the best two spots mined by the government (Comas Solla and Halley’s Comet), we upgraded the Lilian class ships to new refit A2S1 and preparing to equip them with gravitational sensor arrays, we finished tons of technologies…

But new questions arise!
1) I have a small problem with the laser tech. It has a range of only 30 000 kms. I increased the range by researching the focal size of 12cm but that is still hopeless, I was hoping for at least 200 000 kms. I have checked the wiki fast and it seems that the problem is with the laser tech itself, right? I have only the infrared and nearing the visible light. Will that one up the distance the laser can reach?

2) I build a dedicated shuttle for my survey teams (495 tons – finally got the fighters working!) but I can’t launch it. Is it because I have no PDC with hangar bay?

3) Can somebody explain how the deep space tracking station works? I got it to level 6 now and I checked that the sensor grid is now across the entirety of solar system + the boundaries around. I also know that I can up the resolution by research of the sensor tech but I have no idea how to calculate the resolution and distance of the current one. Can someone give me a formula or a link to somewhere where I could see the calculation?

Thanks in advance! And for those following – the ~15 episodes will be gradually published during the next two weeks when I am out of the city/Youtube/life vacationing myself

[Alfapiomega (OP)]

BTW just to make sure... I know about the "Particle Beam Range" tech if that is it but in the game it says it works for torpedoes... So I disregarded that one.

[Nightstar]

Yes, visible light laser will double the range of your lasers. Near ultraviolet's x3 range. Also, 15 cm lasers are much bett.er than 12 cm. Same size, 1.5x the damage/range. The quickest way to get your laser range past 200k km is 15 cm ultraviolet (x4 range) lasers, for 240k km range. Of course, that's 20k RP in total, and to use it you need good BFC tech as well. Might be a bit expensive for you.

What do you mean, 'can't launch'? Unless you did something with hangers, built fighters should just appear in their own task group, and can then be used like any other ship.

DSTS are just MASSIVE thermal and EM sensors that stack with each other. No active sensors, no res, detection distance is proportional to enemy signatures. = 1000 km * signature * sensor strength. Default start gives you four DSTS * 250 str each = detect a strength 1000 signature from 1 billion km out.

[Alfapiomega (OP)]

Yes, visible light laser will double the range of your lasers. Near ultraviolet's x3 range. Also, 15 cm lasers are much bett.er than 12 cm. Same size, 1.5x the damage/range. The quickest way to get your laser range past 200k km is 15 cm ultraviolet (x4 range) lasers, for 240k km range. Of course, that's 20k RP in total, and to use it you need good BFC tech as well. Might be a bit expensive for you.

What do you mean, 'can't launch'? Unless you did something with hangers, built fighters should just appear in their own task group, and can then be used like any other ship.

DSTS are just MASSIVE thermal and EM sensors that stack with each other. No active sensors, no res, detection distance is proportional to enemy signatures. = 1000 km * signature * sensor strength. Default start gives you four DSTS * 250 str each = detect a strength 1000 signature from 1 billion km out.

Thanks! That covers the lasers and confirms what I already suspected

Well they are marked in fighter group Task Force (it says New Fighter Group) but I don't have that task force anywhere. I play on conventional start so I have no PDC's or hangar bays installed on Earth. Therefore I thought I might have problem that they have nowhere to operate from? Though I could load the survey teams onto them so that was superconfusing.

[Black]

Your default fighter group should be on Earths orbit. You can then assign the fighters to wings and those can be transfered to motherships.

[kks]

Well they are marked in fighter group Task Force (it says New Fighter Group) but I don't have that task force anywhere.

Do you mean Task Force or Task Group? I assume the later as ships can't assigned to Task Forces directly, or did i missunderstand you?

When you constructed the fighters, did you set a Task Group for the new fighters? I mean if you used the drop-down menu after new fighters?
If you did so, the fighters now should be in the taskgroup you set. You can give orders to them like to any other taskgroup then.
If you left it blank the new fighters/shuttles are lost, I fear. I would suggest to use SM then (or have a few officers retire because of their incompetence :p )

kks

[wobbly]

I leave it blank all the time, it'll create a task group (new fighters - earth) & place it there. Double check it's not there. You should be able to find it:

In the task groups menu (F12)
or clicking on your ships menu
or listed as a vacancy in the officer's menu

[kks]

Oh, I'm apparently missinformed then. I thought I read somewhere that the fighters would disappear if you leave it blank, but I didn't try it. I'm sorry.

[Alfapiomega (OP)]

Thanks for the feedback, I found the shuttles and put them to good use in the next few parts I recorded

My empire is starting to have financial trouble though. Last year I went 100 million over the earnings – I still have 15.5 billion in reserve cash but at this rate I can ran out quite quickly. I will have to start building financial centers on Earth.

Other than that everything is going fine! New episodes will be up tomorrow and the next day.