Author Topic: Are Missiles the Ultimate Meta...  (Read 8719 times)

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Offline Jorgen_CAB

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Re: Are Missiles the Ultimate Meta...
« Reply #45 on: December 21, 2019, 01:50:34 PM »


Sensors require "power" to be used and the power needed was always size times active strength which made really large sensors very expensive. Since I did not like the linear range of sensors I often did this.



Off topic, but I always wondered why most ships didn't need a power plant on-board for their systems.

I think that it could have worked a bit like in Distant Worlds... you have a power plant and the engine supply it with power thus burning fuel. You also could have the equivalent of Energy Collectors that would charge a ships power supply if it is idle so you don't burn fuel for life support and other more static sources on the ship.

You would then have two values for the power plant, power per 5s interval it can supply the ship with and a pool of stored power.

The engines would simply burn power rather than fuel directly.

It would be another set of logistics to master on a ship during ship design. You could design a ship to release a huge amount of power in a short time or a good power throughput to sustain firepower over time. Engines could burn power differently based on speed, so you could have slow rather fuel efficient cruising speed and sprint speed but which burn power like no tomorrow and might drain stored power over time, especially of you want to fire weapons at the same time. You could build a ship to function at sprint speed and fire all its weapons at the same time but that would require more reactors installed on the ship to convert enough fuel into power every 5s turn. You would have to juggle power plants, power cells and capacitors. Shields probably also could be overcharged so they recover faster but at a huge power cost, would work well against large missile volleys for example or ships that are the opponent focuses their fire at during combat.

At least I would be on board for something like that.
 

Offline Father Tim

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Re: Are Missiles the Ultimate Meta...
« Reply #46 on: December 22, 2019, 01:53:17 AM »
Off topic, but I always wondered why most ships didn't need a power plant on-board for their systems.


They do; such a power plant is simply assumed to be part of the engines and that it produces enough power for all the auxilliary systems and housekeeping and so forth that the ship needs.  This is why every level of engine tech has an associated level of power plant tech as a pre-requisite.

When Aurora was first being developed, one of the guiding principles was to avoid anything like a Star Fleet Battles-style power allocation system -- so as not to slow down the game play.  This is why shields are either ON or OFF and power up at a fixed rate, and why the player has basically no control over what happens on a ship that can't fully power all of its energy weapons.

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Granted, with the current system it is not possible for damage to leave a ship unpowered -- or underpowered -- for basic systems.  Though you can choose to interpret any sort of damage to 'system X' as "loss of power to system X" rather than "system X is destroyed," such a distinction has no effect on result, repair cost or time.

Other than adding certain systems to the 'Electronic DAC' I'm not sure what a separate power plant could do.