The Bejing

[Iranon]

You need both an active sensor lock and a missile fire control lock on the target, so you may want to match the systems for a given range and resolution.

There is one key difference though: The firing ship needs to have the fire control, while any ship can paint the target with an active search sensor. Passive sensors (EM, thermal) do not count for this.

[Borealis4x (OP)]

Thanks for the advise so far. I really wish there was a way to just instantly test out designs and fight enemies outside all the setup of a normal game.

So what are the speeds you should shoot for on commercial and military ships at each engine tier?

Is there ever a point at using smaller lasers/railguns/lower-yield warheads for smaller ships? When does quantity of guns outweigh quality?

How do you judge you have enough of, well, anything? In particular shields, point defense, fuel and main weapons.

How long should I stock up my ship for? I have 120 months here, and I make it 120 months for my commercial ships, but I'm guessing anything bar a deep scout will need that much for military missions.

I want to give all my line ships frigate and up boat bays or small boat bays. What exactly do they do and what can I put in them?

[Iranon]

Speeds: Not fixed for me. Most of my commercial ships use 0.3 power engines, freighters possibly even less. Survey ships won't be that slow because engines may take above 50% of their mass.
Military can be any speed really. At Magneto-Plasma I've fielded some 2.5k ships (extreme penny pinching beam fleet, mostly base-tech railguns for missile defence) and some 12k ships (armed with particle beams or long-range lasers, hoping to control the range to enemy beam ships and pick them offunopposed).

There are good reasons to use small guns, but weapon size does not necessarily scale with ships.
Usually I prefer rate of fire over damage per shot. Big ships may also be expected to handle missiles when deployed alone, this favours standardising on something large enough to be effective at our main combat range but small enough to be effective area defence.
If we want big guns and devastating single salvos over continuous output, the logical extreme is strapping a huge spinal laser to an engine, which is still a fairly small ship.

You have enough when you have enough to make your doctrine work. You can build a combat ship with a year deployment time and fuel for 50b km (reasonable if you don't want to depend too heavily on the logistics train). Or you could build a similarly-equipped ship with a deployment time of 3 days and matching endurance, and put it in a carrier. If you intend to destroy your enemies with missiles before they can even see you (extreme range missiles, or very small missile fighters that you hope they won't have the right sensors for), you don't need any defences. If you rely exclusively on beams, you need either the speed to force an engagement or enough defenses to deal with repeated missile attacks even if your enemies get to retreat and reload until they run out of ordnance... little room for half measures. If you build a mixed fleet, what role do your missiles play? Major source of damage, one big strike before your beam ships clean up, or just an ace in the hole when things don't plan out?
Aurora is very open-ended, many things are possible and some even work.

10 years of deployment/maintenance life is quite a bit. Fine for survey ships. For combat ships, it depends on how you approach the logistics side.
If your ships get periodic overhauls or are intended to be refitted eventually, it's excessive. 6-12 months will usually do, you may want a little more leeway.
I will happily build armed vessels with 10+ years of maintenance life, but I probably intend to use them without overhauls until they're fit for scrapping.

[Prince of Space]

It seems like everyone has their own rules of thumb for ship speeds, so take my advice woth a grain of salt and go with whatever you think is best. In fact do that for most of the advice on these forums. Anyway, for warships, I take the current engine tech's power per HS value and multiply it by 375. That is the target speed for my warships, unless some other concern warrants increasing or decreasing speed.

For capacitor-driven guns, smaller guns probably fire faster. Same with smaller missile launchers based on launcher reload tech. More but smaller hits grind off armor, and once it's gone they pound the vulnerable parts of the ship. Bigger guns tend to shoot farther and hit harder, possibly ending the fight in one hit but taking longer to recover and take a second swing. For missiles, it's not the lower warhead, it's the smaller missile size that helps: more launchers in the same amount of space means more missiles in a volley, which can make it more likely that warheads will end up on their targets.

Enough fuel is when the ship has enough range, plus a little extra wiggle room. The ship needs to get from the last place it can refuel (a colony or a tanker) to the place where it does it's job (enemy fleet, enemy homeworld, survey points) and back again.

Ten years is a long deployment, but for a surveyor or for a picket ship that is meant to keep an eye on a jump point, it might be called for. If the ship is only meant to leave port when something needs killin', then I go with 9 months.

Boat bays and small boat bays are smaller hangars. If you don't know what you would put in them, then use the tonnage for something more useful. But if you're looking for ideas, you could have fighter-weight utility craft in them that scout around with active or passive sensors, or recover life pods, or scout through jump points before the mothership risks a transit. It's a neat creative space for designing specialist ships.

[Borealis4x (OP)]

Can someone post the basic beam ship tutorial that was lost when the forums moved and the wiki went down?

Also a somewhat unrelated question, is it safe to put conscripts on my gas/asteroid rigs, cargo haulers, construction ships and other government owned commercial ships? Also, can a single small tug with a single tractor beam pull a huge gas mining station itself? How much slower will it go?

[Prince of Space]

A ship's speed is determined by the followin formula:

Speed = (Total Engine Output / Class Size in HS) * 1000

For a tug and its tractored ship, use the total size in HS and the total engine output to determine their speed while conjoined. Only one tractor beam is needed, regardless of the towed ship's size.

I routinely use conscripts on my asteroid miners, Sorium miners, and jump gate constructors. As long as they never end up near anything hostile, it shouldn't make a difference. My geosurveyors and my jump tankers, though? They get trained crews.

[Borealis4x (OP)]

Alright, I have made another masterpiece.

Greece class Cruiser    30,000 tons     730 Crew     3964 BP      TCS 600  TH 1620  EM 270
3600 km/s     Armour 10-86     Shields 9-300     Sensors 18/24/0/0     Damage Control Rating 32     PPV 102
Maint Life 2.98 Years     MSP 1858    AFR 320%    IFR 4.4%    1YR 313    5YR 4699    Max Repair 173 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 6 months    Spare Berths 1   

Northrop-Grumann 240 EP Nuclear Pulse Engine (9)    Power 240    Fuel Use 49%    Signature 180    Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 1,500,000 Litres    Range 18.4 billion km   (59 days at full power)
Evo Corporation Beta R300/252 Shields (6)   Total Fuel Cost  63 Litres per hour  (1,512 per day)

Intergrated Weapon Systems PLC Variable Gauss Cannon R3-100 (10x3)    Range 30,000km     TS: 3600 km/s     Accuracy Modifier 100%     RM 3    ROF 5        1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Saeder-Krupp 20cm Railgun V3/C3 (6x4)    Range 120,000km     TS: 3600 km/s     Power 12-3     RM 3    ROF 20        4 4 4 3 2 2 1 1 1 1
Raytheon Fire Control S08 96-12000 (1)    Max Range: 192,000 km   TS: 12000 km/s     95 90 84 79 74 69 64 58 53 48
Shiawase Corporation  Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor Technology PB-1.05 (3)     Total Power Output 56.7    Armour 0    Exp 7%

Mitsuhama Computer Technologies Active Search Sensor MR64-R100 (1)     GPS 8000     Range 64.0m km    Resolution 100
Raytheon Thermal Sensor TH3-18 (1)     Sensitivity 18     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  18m km
Raytheon EM Detection Sensor EM3-24 (1)     Sensitivity 24     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  24m km

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes


I want to try and make a version that also has 2-4 big "frakk you" missile but I
a. Don't know what constitutes a "frakk you" missile
b. I don't know how to put missiles in my ship
c. I don't know how many missiles 1 magazine capacity can carry
d. I'm guessing if I want to launch 4 missiles at once I need 4 missile launchers, yes?

[Iranon]

Your fire control is off - 12k tracking speed while the weapons are limited by the ship at 3.6k.
It has more range than it strictly needs to, but that's justifiable... expensive, but improves accuracy particularly at long range.
If you wanted to turret your Gauss cannon, it'd probably be better to make a long-ranged 1x tracking speed fire control for anti-ship weapons and some fast-tracking short-ranged fire controls for your Gauss cannons.

The propulsion plant is good this time.

Maintenance life 5 times as long as the deployment time is peculiar. Not necessarily wrong, but  you probably want the values closer.

Unturreted Gauss cannons are almost strictly inferior to 10cm railguns - 3 shots on 6HS vs. 4 shots on 3HS+power.

You have an adequate sensor to detect ships, but nothing to see missiles.

*

a) Design a missile engine, don't forget to give the the highest available power multiplier. Then design the missile (button at the bottom of the design tech window). My guideline for a general purpose missile is 40% engine, 30% warhead, 20% agility, 10% fuel You may need almost no fuel if it's meant to be a point blank torpedo, that can go towards warhead.

b) Design a missile launcher. Put launcher, missile fire control and possibly magazine (if you want reloads, every launcher already fits 1 missile of its size) on ship. Specify loadout in the ordnance/fighters tab.

c) Depends on tech, between 15 and 20 MSP per HS. You don't need to worry about it, what you want is best done with box launchers. That's the last in the line of reduced-size launcher tech. These can only be reloaded in a hangar or at a colony, but take only 15% of the size of full-size launchers. If that's beyond your tech budget, use the smallest practical one.

d) Yes, another reason to go for reduced-size launchers.

[Borealis4x (OP)]

Damn, I thought gauss turrets were automatically turreted...

You talk about having two different types of fire control, one focusing on range for the rails and another on tracking speed for the gauss. Why not just make one big fire control system that allows the maximum range for the rails and maximum speed for the turrets?

[Borealis4x (OP)]

Turrets confuse me. How is this?

Damage Output 1x6      Rate of Fire: 5 seconds     Range Modifier: 3
Max Range 30,000 km    Turret Size: 14.28    SPW: 7.14    Turret HTK: 4
Cost: 83    Crew: 23
Maximum Tracking Speed: 10000km/s
Materials Required: 11.4x Duranium  72x Vendarite 

Development Cost for Project: 830RP

[Borealis4x (OP)]

Here is my frakk off missile.

Missile Size: 50 MSP  (2.5 HS)     Warhead: 100    Armour: 5     Manoeuvre Rating: 16
Speed: 1300 km/s    Engine Endurance: 23.9 hours   Range: 111.7m km
Cost Per Missile: 32.81
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 20.8%   3k km/s 0%   5k km/s 4.2%   10k km/s 2.1%
Materials Required:    26.25x Tritanium   6.56x Gallicite   Fuel x25000

Development Cost for Project: 3281RP

I mean, it seems like its rather fast and long ranged, but then again I was told going 4km/h in a 30 ton warship was a snails pace...

[Iranon]

One quad-speed (default range) fire control and one quad-range fire control (default speed) is smaller and cheaper than one fire control with both, and gives you some redundancy in case of battle damage.
Each fire control can engage a single salvo. One huge fire control that has both range and tracking speed will perform well against one massive salvo, but against 10 salvos of 5 missiles each it will only shoot down 5 missiles even if your weapons are good for 20.
If you want multiple fire controls to handle multiple salvos, overengineering them for long range gets expensive.

If I bother with turrets, I usually set them to the maximum speed my fire control can handle (4x base, probably 12000km/s in your case).

Your missile will cause a lot of damage if it hits, but it's unlikely to hit anything because it is very slow. You probably want a higher power multiplier, which will cost you some range.
5 armour is a reasonable hedge. If you use it a range against lightly defended targets a 4-missile salvo will be as difficult to destroy as a 24-missile salvo, which isn't too bad.

[Borealis4x (OP)]

Think I'm going to actually build this.

Alexandria class Cruiser    30,000 tons     611 Crew     4176 BP      TCS 600  TH 1440  EM 240
3200 km/s     Armour 12-86     Shields 8-300     Sensors 32/32/0/0     Damage Control Rating 30     PPV 115.12
Maint Life 2.28 Years     MSP 1740    AFR 360%    IFR 5%    1YR 453    5YR 6800    Max Repair 262 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    Spare Berths 2   
Magazine 200   

Aegis Dynamics 320 EP Nuclear Pulse Engine (6)    Power 320    Fuel Use 48%    Signature 240    Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 1,700,000 Litres    Range 21.3 billion km   (76 days at full power)
Evo Corporation Gamma R300/384 Shields (4)   Total Fuel Cost  64 Litres per hour  (1,536 per day)

Twin Integrated Weapon Systems PLC Gauss Cannon R3-100 Turret (4x6)    Range 30,000km     TS: 10000 km/s     Power 0-0     RM 3    ROF 5        1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Saeder-Krupp 20cm Railgun V3/C3 (4x4)    Range 120,000km     TS: 4000 km/s     Power 12-3     RM 3    ROF 20        4 4 4 3 2 2 1 1 1 1
Renraku Computer Systems Fire Control S02.5 128-5000 H70 (1)    Max Range: 256,000 km   TS: 5000 km/s     96 92 88 84 80 77 73 69 65 61
Oshkosh Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor Technology PB-1.05 (3)     Total Power Output 56.7    Armour 0    Exp 7%

Ares Macrotechnology Size 50 Box Launcher (4)    Missile Size 50    Hangar Reload 375 minutes    MF Reload 62.5 hours
Raytheon Missile Fire Control FC94-R70 (70%) (1)     Range 94.9m km    Resolution 70

Raytheon Active Search Sensor MR105-R70 (70%) (1)     GPS 14700     Range 105.4m km    Resolution 70
 Rockwell Collins Thermal Sensor TH4-32 (70%) (1)     Sensitivity 32     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  32m km
Rockwell Collins EM Detection Sensor EM4-32 (1)     Sensitivity 32     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  32m km

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes

I'll try the duel targeting computer next time.

[Ostia]

Here is my frakk off missile.

Missile Size: 50 MSP  (2.5 HS)     Warhead: 100    Armour: 5     Manoeuvre Rating: 16
Speed: 1300 km/s    Engine Endurance: 23.9 hours   Range: 111.7m km
Cost Per Missile: 32.81
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 20.8%   3k km/s 0%   5k km/s 4.2%   10k km/s 2.1%
Materials Required:    26.25x Tritanium   6.56x Gallicite   Fuel x25000

Development Cost for Project: 3281RP

I mean, it seems like its rather fast and long ranged, but then again I was told going 4km/h in a 30 ton warship was a snails pace...

Frankly, that missile is BAD. To large and to slow. That thing is going to show up on any missile sensor long before it is in range, which makes it easy lunch for AMMs. And as Iranon pointed out: Even if gets into range, it isn't going to hit anything.
If your target is going at 1k km/s (Thats a Freighter for me), 1 out of 5 missiles is going to hit. Early combat ships start at 3k km/s at least. and to add insult to injury: Those ships can simply outrun that missile. So it's literally only good to kill Space Stations without PD or severely crippled ships.

Suggestion:
-Bring the size down. The smallest missile detection range is up to Size 6. (You can see this when you design an Active search sensor with Resolution 1)
-Get the Speed up. you should aim for at least 15k km/s, but better 20k km/s.
-The missile control should be a bit oversized, to counter ECM.


And for the Alexandria:
-you need a Resolution 1 Active Search Sensor to pick up missiles. That Res 70 Sensor is only good for ships.
-8 Shield Strength is not going to save you from anything. You might as well save the weight and go with a pure Armour design. Proper shield strength starts around 150 points.
-Personally i wouldn't mix Beams and missiles at all, since missiles have no reason to be used close and personal, but that is personal doctrine.

-The Turrets and the Railguns need their own  Fire Controls. One for all won't work.
-The one you have is good enough Tracking Speed wise for the Railgun, but you can also reduce the range on it to save space.
-The turrets need a Fire Control that matches their range and Tracking Speed. As their are for PD work, each turret getting its own Fire Control would be the best option imo.
-Overbuilding Range a bit is also an good idea, because of ECM again.

That's all i can think up right now. Or at least it's the most glaring issues.

[Sheb]

Frankly, that missile is BAD. To large and to slow. That thing is going to show up on any missile sensor long before it is in range, which makes it easy lunch for AMMs. And as Iranon pointed out: Even if gets into range, it isn't going to hit anything.
If your target is going at 1k km/s (Thats a Freighter for me), 1 out of 5 missiles is going to hit. Early combat ships start at 3k km/s at least. and to add insult to injury: Those ships can simply outrun that missile. So it's literally only good to kill Space Stations without PD or severely crippled ships.

Suggestion:
-Bring the size down. The smallest missile detection range is up to Size 6. (You can see this when you design an Active search sensor with Resolution 1)
-Get the Speed up. you should aim for at least 15k km/s, but better 20k km/s.
-The missile control should be a bit oversized, to counter ECM.

1) If he wants a big, last resort, "fy" missile, size his fine. It's not efficient, but that's up to personnal choice.
2) The speed IS waaaaaay to low. It cannot even keep up with your ship. Use the highest power multiplier. Also, I don't see what's inside, but generally you want a single engine per missile for efficiency purpose.
3) It's not true that the fire control should be longer than the range. If an enemy is moving away from you, your missiles will have to go further to overhaul and hit it. If an enemy is going at half the speed of your missile for exemple, your missile will have to travel twice the distance between your ships to hit it. So it make sense to have a missile ranging further than your sensor.
4) If your goal is a "frakk you" missile to use as last resort, you might want to shorten the range. Your ship is mostly an energy fighter, so will have to close to short range anyway. Less fuel means more speed and agility.


Also, does someone have an idea of why this missile has a 4% chance to hit targets going at 5k km/s, but 0% at 3k km/s?