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C# Bureau of Design / Re: Very first step into planetary assault - will they last long enough
« Last post by nuclearslurpee on April 07, 2024, 12:42:25 AM »You need to get all the ships involved into the area, but if you can use a far smaller number of expensive militarized dropships to land the army, how is that not advantageous? (The idea of course being that the non-militarized transports will stay outside STO range, while the dropships with all the trimmings shuttle between the 'offshore' group and the drop zone.)In Aurora's technology, there isn't really such a thing as being stealthy at close range. A sneaky ship is one you see fewer millions of kilometers out...
Would it be possible to cross-deck troops from a non-military transport to a specialized assault ship reasonably quickly in space? That seems like it might let you use cheap transports for the bulk but also use high-performance craft for the under-fire step.
I think it's possible, though I'm not sure how it's done mechanically, but there's not really an advantage to doing this. Either way, you still have to get all of the ships involved into the area of operations - so you might as well just transport the troops with the assault ships anyways.
In VB6, drop-capable ships used to work this way since ground units which stayed inside them for more than a few days suffered morale losses, so transferring troops from bulk transports to specialized dropships was more or less a requirement. This feature did not make it into C# and I imagine that was because the extra micro involved did not translate to any interesting gameplay decisions, so it was just needless busy-work and added costs in practice.
It might not be an improvement on using an entire flotilla of technically-commercial heavily armored assault ships, but if one wants higher-performance military assault ships, being able to use much less tonnage of those than you would need to transport the entire force seems helpful?
Ah, I see what you mean. I think in this case, there are a couple of problems with the idea:
- The dropships will take damage from STOs on each run, so you may end up losing the dropships before you finish landing the troops. One advantage of a large number of dropships is that the STO fie will be dispersed between them, or at least that if a few get destroyed a larger proportion of the troops will make planetfall.
- Transferring troops between ships is not an instantaneous operation (unlike in VB6). I think, based on the loading times I've seen for both cargo shuttle bays and picking up troops from captured ships with boarding-capable bays, that the time required to make the transfer would exceed the 8-hour ground combat increment or at least would be comparable in magnitude. Which means that the first troops of the much smaller wave will take very heavy damage and perhaps even be annihilated (depending on relative force sizes) before the next wave lands.
