Thank you for your work. Unfortunately I have another bug. I cannot activate shields on some ships. In the save file below I went to the Remnant->Bath Picket Group and used the button 'shields on' (Task Groups window) after which I progressed the game by one hour. The same screen (Task Groups window) claims the shields are 0 for all ships. Individual units detail is showing that shields are on. I also had task groups where some ships had shields activated and some didn't.
Thank you for your time.

Version 185 is now available with a fix for this crash.  Thanks for the report and the save file!

I've been playing and collecting bugs over the past several months intending to put them in one big post (I'm lazy like that). I'll start with the newest ones and move over to older ones, as I only have notes on them (don't necessarily remember the situations/don't have saves) and they may be from older versions of the game, although I should note I haven't seen them in the patch notes.

In aurora if a jump ship was at a jump point it acted as a jump gate for all relevant ships (smaller tonnage, type). What I mean by that is that if, for example, there was a 10kT military jump ship at a jump point I could order any warship 10kT or smaller to perform standard jump without having to put the ship in the same group, as if a jump gate was on the jump point. This worked from both sides of the jump point. In quasar ships need to be in the same group to make a jump which adds a lot of micromanagement.

In Aurora DB ship size for the purposes of a jump point transit was rounded up to nearest 50, the same as the ship size in tonnes. In quasar the exact ship size is used. For example I had an exploration ship massing 6600T and a destroyer massing 6600T but I was not able to jump. Turns out that the exact ship size of the exploration ship is 131.6 while the exact size of the destroyer is 131.9, which prevents the jump. In Aurora that would not have mattered.

When creating a new race, the gravity deviation claims to be percentage based however it is absolute. For example creating a species on a planet with gravity of 0.6 and deviation of 70% should result in gravity tolerance of 0.18 to 1.02 however it results in gravity tolerance of -0.1 to 1.3.

Reduced thermal signature doesn’t work. According to the ship design window it is lowered, however while playing two sides, the other side was able to detect full thermal signature as if the tech wasn’t applied.

Not sure if this is a bug, but it appears the game first applies last ditch point defense and then applies potential misses by missiles. I can’t be sure since I haven’t played Aurora in several years but I think the point defenses were engaging only missiles that were going to hit, ignoring those that were going to miss.

Extended orbit doesn’t appear to be working. The vessel treats this as “move to x distance from the object” instead of following the object at a given distance.

It is possible to start the game without scientists.

Order delay works as intended in case of normal orders, however if “cycle moves” is toggled on, it will only work the first time. The next time the orders are cycled there will be no delay. Adds a lot of micromanagement for fuel harvesting operations.

The above bugs were all observed on the newest version over the past few days. The bugs below were observed over the past several months.

I was salvaging wrecks (very large wrecks of ships which had hundreds of shield generators/box launchers each) and I’ve never seen more than five components of a given type salvaged from a single wreck but I’ve seen a lot of exactly five components recovered. Is it a bug or is it working as intended?

Secondary explosions do not show in the summary/tactical map if armor wasn’t breached. Not sure if it’s supposed to work like this.

It is possible to use damaged components in combat. The exact mechanics are as follows. You need two ships of the same class, let's call them A and B. B gets damaged, some weapons are no longer operational. You set up weapons for ship A and use "copy assign". The ship B can now use destroyed weapons.

I've got ruins on venusian planets in non-real stars. I think it happened exactly once.

Political stability doesn't appear to affect mining. It's always extracting the maximum possible amount, even when political stability modifier is 0.

New PDCs are being put into individual, new task groups rather than existing ones. I think it may have to do with there being two populations on the planet (genetic engineering was being performed).

If a ship has automated orders to survey both bodies and jump points it will move from bodies to jump points without regard for lagrange points. This makes surveying distant binaries very annoying. For example let us say we have a distant binary with lagrange points. If I send the ship to the secondary component, after performing geological survey it will then move through normal space towards the jump point survey until it runs out of fuel.

It seems like surveying bodies means surveying bodies withing 10 bln km of the central star rather than the ship itself. I'm pretty sure it was 10 bln kilometers from the ship in Aurora.

That's all the bugs I have right now. Thank you very much for your work.

Hi, if any of these are still bothering you can you please set up some example save files for me to look at.

Bug Report: Quasar seems to use rounded-up class size to calculate speed, when it should be using exact class size. Build cost for engines seems to be determined incorrectly

Example: I can reproduce the following design from Steve's VB6 Rigellian Campaign reboot. I don't know what version of VB6 Aurora the Rigellian campaign was written under, but based on the date I believe it was a fairly early of patch 7.0, so fairly current to the "final form" of VB6 Aurora:

Code: [Select]

A6M Reisen (VB6 7.0) class Fighter    295 tons     3 Crew     58.4 BP      TCS 5.89  TH 48  EM 0
8149 km/s     Armour 1-3     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 0     PPV 2.25
Maint Life 0 Years     MSP 0    AFR 58%    IFR 0.8%    1YR 3    5YR 50    Max Repair 12 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.2 months    Spare Berths 0   
Magazine 15   

Nakajima Sakae Fighter Engine (2)    Power 24    Fuel Use 336.02%    Signature 24    Exp 20%
Fuel Capacity 10,000 Litres    Range 1.8 billion km   (62 hours at full power)

TSH Dragon-5B Missile Launch System (3)    Missile Size 5    Hangar Reload 37.5 minutes    MF Reload 6.2 hours
Nagumo Engineering FC-40 Missile Fire Control (1)     Range 38.0m km    Resolution 120
ASM-4 Comet Anti-ship Missile (3)  Speed: 28,800 km/s   End: 30.6m    Range: 52.9m km   WH: 9    Size: 5    TH: 96/57/28

Nagumo Engineering AS-10 Active Sensor (1)     GPS 1008     Range 10.1m km    Resolution 120
Here is the design in the Quasar Class Design window. Aside from display rounding differences the design is identical - with the notable exceptions of the build cost, 84 BP in Quasar versus 58.4 in VB6, and the speed, 8000 km/s in Quasar versus 8149 km/s in VB6 7.0.

Code: [Select]

A6M Reisen (Quasar 183) class Fighter    295 tons     3 Crew     84 BP      TCS 5.9  TH 48  EM 0
8000 km/s     Armor 1-3     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 0     PPV 2.25
Maint Life 0 Years     MSP 0    AFR 58%    IFR 0.8%    1YR 5    5YR 74    Max Repair 24 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.2 months    Spare Berths 5
Magazine 15

Nakajima Sakae Fighter Engine (2)    Power 24    Fuel Use 336.02%    Signature 24    Exp 20%
Fuel Capacity 10 000 Liters    Range 1.8 billion km   (2 days at full power)

TSH Dragon-5B Missile Launch System (3)    Missile Size 5    Rate of Fire 2250
Nagumo Engineering FC-40 Missile Fire Control (1)     Range 38.0m km    Resolution 120
ASM-4 Comet Anti-ship Missile (3)  Speed: 28 799 km/s   End: 30.62m    Range: 52.9m km   WH: 9    Size: 5    TH: 96/58/29

Nagumo Engineering AS-10 Active Sensor (1)     GPS 1008     Range 10.1m km    Resolution 120
Usually the speed bug is not too noticeable as most ship designs aim for a round HS number, and the impact for large warships is almost unnoticeable. However, I have run into this bug when I design, e.g., a 250-ton scout fighter which is exactly size-5, and for some reason in the game code this is rounded up to size-6 for the speed calculation - a very noticeable 20% difference in speed between the Quasar class and the intended design! I have reproduced this bug using Steve's design to prove that this is an inconsistency between Quasar and VB6 which should be corrected.

The BP difference is attributable mostly to an engine cost bug which appears to be because the cost is multiplied by the EP modifier (2.0x) when this should only be the case when the EP modifier is lower than 1.0x - this is the case in C# and I cannot find any evidence that things were any different in VB6. This explains 24 BP of the 25.4 BP difference, I am unsure what factor accounts for the remaining difference.

I also note that there is some inconsistency in the display (Quasar appears to round more aggressively than VB6), a small inconsistency in the missile speed likely due to rounding, and that the box launcher is displayed with a rate of fire as if it was a larger, reloadable launcher type

Thanks for the report!  Version 184 has been pushed which fixes the major issues noted above. After the fixes I was able to get an exact match on 8149 km/s, with a BP of 57, and the design summary now shows Hangar/MF reload times for box launchers instead of a rate of fire.

---

As a general update: I haven't been spending time on Q4X, so there won't be any new features.  I probably wont be working on it any more in the near future either, outside of bug fixes -- as long as they don't require too much work setting up test scenarios.  I got the itch to do some coding in Godot, hence the small patch update, but further coding will probably be in some other project.  I'm pretty happy with the state of Q4X though, it is fairly complete and stable.

War at Sea in the Ironclad Age, by Richard Hill is a good starter. It covers from the start of the age of steam to the battleship revolution.
Battleships by Capt. Peter Hore
Battleships by Stanley Sandler

Those are good intros. I am looking for a couple of my other books. There are a couple that get into the whole thing about Mahan and the origin of the big gun battleship design, which actually started with Italy, not the UK. The theory of the all big gun battleship was done by an Italian designer, not the Brits, but they picked up up quickly since Jackie Fisher loved the idea.

The whole period is rather fascinating. While we make a big deal about the computer age, and what a technology shock and disruption that it was, it was not the first time where technology changed things overnight. The whole of the late 19th Century was one of technology changing at such a pace that it flipped the world on its head. In 1866 wars were fought with blackpowder muzzle loaders, 20 years later in 1886, it was with machineguns.

In the case of Ultimate Admiral, it does a pretty good job of showing this tech shock and transition. The pre-dreadnought battleships were developed in the late 1880s, and peaked in 1889 with the British Royal Sovereign class. By 1906 all of those pre-dreadnoughts were rendered obsolete. In many cases, these pre-dreadnought battleships had only been in service for a year or two before they were effectively left behind in the naval arms race. In several cases, pre-dreadnought battleships were completed AFTER the arrival of HMS Dreadnought, and were already obsolete before launching. It also shows the crippling costs of the naval arms race (which is a good analog to Aurora) and how obsolete ships were kept on due to costs, and upgraded where possible to keep them afloat and in service.

In the 1890s, the range of engagement was about 4km but most fighting actually occurred around 2km. As torpedoes got more effective, and longer ranged, gunner ranges increased. By 1904, gunnery was routinely reaching out to 6km, but during the Russo-Japanese war, both the Russians and the Japanese were scoring 12" gun hits at 13km. This was despite the fact that their range finders only went out to 4km (Russia) and 6km (Japan)!

I love the period, and I love the way that a lot of this crosses over into the mechanics we see in Aurora. I imagine that the tech shock in Aurora would be much the same as the late 19th, and early 20th century.