Change Log for v7.00 Discussion

[Steve Walmsley]

So with the NPR carriers, would I be correct in assuming if you manage to board one that still has fighters in it's hangers you would also gain control of the fighters in the hangers.

Yes, that's correct. Good luck though on the fighters still being in the hangars if you are close enough to board one .

[linkxsc]

Will there ever be an update to... fix, pregenerated ship and module designs (assuming that box is checked) sometimes they arent bad, but sometimes it comes up with some pretty terrible ship designs. It comes to mind because I dunno what npr fighters will look like, but fighters can god bad really fast when designed wrong.

[Steve Walmsley]

Will there ever be an update to... fix, pregenerated ship and module designs (assuming that box is checked) sometimes they arent bad, but sometimes it comes up with some pretty terrible ship designs. It comes to mind because I dunno what npr fighters will look like, but fighters can god bad really fast when designed wrong.

If you see a specific issue with the design, please let me know. Without knowing what is wrong with the designs, I won't be able to fix the appropriate part of the design code.

[alex_brunius]

As long as NPRs wont build dozens of Carriers each launching 100 useless 100t mini-fighters shooting one AMM each I am happy, because by the gods we don't need that much micromanagement to try to kill-interrogate-salvage them all

[iceball3]

As long as NPRs wont build dozens of Carriers each launching 100 useless 100t mini-fighters shooting one AMM each I am happy, because by the gods we don't need that much micromanagement to try to kill-interrogate-salvage them all

Wouldn't default orders help with automation a bit?

[ExChairman]

F-15 is 63'9" long 42'10" wide and 18'6" high, with a crew of 1-2
Su-27 is 72' long 48'3" wide and 19'6" high, with a crew of 1-2
or for a more modern twist
F-22 is 62'1" long 44'6" wide and 16'8" high, with a crew of 1
hell even the Joke Strike Fighter (F-35) is 50'6" long, 35' wide and 14'2" high, with a crew of 1

not really that different

People really seem to underestimate the size of Jet fighters

JAS 39 Griffon has a length of about 47 feet, wide 28 feet and a height of 15 feet, 1 crew.

[MarcAFK]

We don't actually know how large auroran ships are, you should have mentioned the tonnages, as I recall:

A-10 Warthog 23t
F-18 24t
F-15 30t
CH-53 Sea stallion 33t
F-22 Raptor 38t
F-111 45t
YF-12 63 t
Sr- 71 Blackbird 78 t
Space shuttle 110 tons (I'm not counting the external tanks or solid rocket boosters)
B2 Spirit 170t
B1 Lancer 216t
B52 Stratofortress 220t
C5 Galaxy 380t
A380 590t

[alex_brunius]

We don't actually know how large auroran ships are, you should have mentioned the tonnages, as I recall:

That is a good point. Aurora fighters are generally 250-500 ton, 10 times more mass then the real counterparts.

[MarcAFK]

Warships are of course more dense and compact than aircraft, especially considering armouring, a higher surface area requires more weight for a certain depth of armour, but perhaps since aurora fighters generally aren't armoured much, they might be designed more like aircraft in order to get the maximum quantity of ordinance into the design.

[Paul M]

That is a good point. Aurora fighters are generally 250-500 ton, 10 times more mass then the real counterparts.

In reality the "mass" value of the ship is misleading.  The ships are of some specific size given by their TCS (target cross section) which is then translated into a mass of 50 tonnes per point of TCS for a game convention.  The TCS though is a measure of volume (well specifically of cross section) not mass.  How heavy an aurora ship is in reality is very hard to say, but they are probably considerably more massive then their 50 tonne per TCS point indicates.  Water is 1 tonne the cubic meter and metals are inevitably more dense then that.

It all really depends on what cross section the TCS indicates.  But 50 tonnes of water is 50 m3 and that is essentially a 3.7 m on a side cube...nearly 10 m2 target cross section, if you consider it made of solid aluminum it would be only 18.5 m3 and that is a cube 2.6 m on the side or 8 m2 cross section.  In reality the TCS will vary with the component in question.  One way to look at the large size of comerical ships is to just consider they are mostly empty space where as a warship is mostly "not empty space" but is composed of high density components (reactors, power distribution systems, electronics, cooling systems, armour, ordinance, massive launch systems, optical or particle beamlines with shielding, etc).  The warship may mass considerably more than the comerical ship but it will be physically significantly smaller.  Even more so for things like FACs where the crew space may be very minimal and the FAC has a very high effective density, so it could be reasonably enough not that large physically.

In Aurora a fighter is size 4-10, what that means in terms of mass is anyones guess.  The 50 tonnes is just a number tossed out as a convention you can't use it to compare to a real world object.  To do that you need to know the average density of an Aurora vessel.  And since people argue that duranium isn't a metal I wish you luck on coming up with a number that would be agreed on.  And even worse the TCS is most likely an "effective average target cross section." 

I hope this makes sense.

[alex_brunius]

I always thought GRAVITATIONAL sensors measured mass or gravitational disturbance,  not cross section area. But what do I know most technobabble is left to your own fantasy/imaginagion anyways so doesnt really matter.

[boggo2300]

JAS 39 Griffon has a length of about 47 feet, wide 28 feet and a height of 15 feet, 1 crew.

Wow! I didn't realise the Gripen was so small it's even smaller than even the Rafale (50.1' 35.4' wingspan, 17.5' height), which was my yardstick for small fighters

the only smaller 4th Gen fighter I could find was the Indian Tejas,  and of course all the 5th Gen ones are much bigger I think the Chinese J-20 wins there as big bird at 66.8' long 44.2' wide and 14.7' high.

*derail over* (er again)

though to be honest I've always taken the Mass figures in Aurora to be Displacement rather than actual Mass, but that's probably just too much Traveller

Matt

[MarcAFK]

Through extremely bad estimates it looks like an F22 would displace something like 70-100 tons of water, so I would have to assume that in aurora most fighters I listed down there would have 2-3 times the weight in aurora. A commercial airliner probably would displace even more considering it's not weighed down quite as much as a military jet.
EDIT: also this derail's gone on a bit long into the changelog discussion, I swear I'm done, there should be no need to move to a new thread

[Paul M]

I always thought GRAVITATIONAL sensors measured mass or gravitational disturbance,  not cross section area. But what do I know most technobabble is left to your own fantasy/imaginagion anyways so doesnt really matter.

TCS which determines your sensors ability to resolve the target is "target cross section" as far as I am aware and well nothing says what the heck the sensors are.

That 1 HS = 50 m3 = 50 tonnes is a convention.  An airplane or tank or ship in the real world has a density defined by its materials and so its mass varies significantly with its size...compare a warship's mass to an equal sized tanker.  In aurora this is not the case so you can't really compare a 250 tonne aurora fighter to a modern jet fighter or the space shuttle.  I would not even begin to guess the true size of an aurora ship.  The likelyhood is that if the volume is accurate the mass varies considerably from what you get by assuming a density of water.

And my point was not about technobabble but about comparing Aurora to the real world, which in terms of the sizes of ships is on very shaky ground. 

[Jorgen_CAB]

I might be pretty stupid but thrust on ships are measured against its printed mass. So in my opinion the volume of the ships probably don't matter at all and active scanning are rather measuring the disturbance of a ships mass in space not it's physical shape.

TCS is more or less just a factor of it's mass and the wording Target Cross Section are just a leftover from how current radar detect objects. An active scanner detect curvatures in space and not a ships actual volume.