Perhaps something similar to Paradox's system when you under pay for your fleet? The ships are at 5% health, and morale and organization are near zero.
In Aurora terms, training is now 0, and *all* ship systems are damaged except crew quarters or some such (to prevent boomies). Shipyards must be used to bring the ship back online, and then the crew must be trained. Ships would also need to be refueled and supplied. Essentially, the ship must almost be rebuilt.
Could be useful if you are the one starting the war and you have time to gear up, but not so much for a surprise attack.
What is the difference between mothballing and pausing ship construction at 99%? The mechanism exists at the cost of bulding more slipway and shipyards.
Yeah, mothballing has never been as prevalent or as useful as romantics make it seem. It's a weird fixation that a lot of people seem to have, that mothballing is easy, cheap, real and should be an integral feature of Aurora.
Just scrap your old ships if you can't maintain them.
ok another idea how to solve this
how about adding another 2 possible tasks to shipyards ( so no retooling needed for it)
mothballing and reactivating
( so both processes would take appropriate time /wealth/some MSP and the need of real active slipways ( however without retooling or full production costs , and with reduced time in comparison to build anything )
I would say those numbers are too low by one or 2 orders of magnitude
If I may detail it out:
- Mothball Task
Any Shipyard (Naval/Commercial/Repair) with an empty slipway of adequate size can perform the task of putting a ship into deep storage at the cost of 5% MSP of Max Repair (Minimum of 25 MSP) & takes 10 secs per ton (with a minimum of 2 hours).- Reactivation Task
Any Shipyard (Naval/Commercial/Repair) with an empty slipway of adequate size can perform the task of reacting a from deep storage ship at the cost of 15% MSP of Max Repair (minimum of 25 MSP) & takes 10 secs per ton + 1 minute per BP (with a minimum of 6 hours).
Does this align with your idea?
I would say those numbers are too low by one or 2 orders of magnitude
with your numbers reactivating a 10,000 ton ship would take 100,000 seconds or 27 hours. I would think 270 hours was way too short , so at least 1000 seconds per ton to get something which is an actual issue and reflects how long activating a ship takes
I was thinking about weeks to months for the process closer to 6-12 weeks of work time depending on tonnage
and restricting this to naval shipyards only ( or maybe commercial too but with significant time handicap)
In practice though... what are the difference of scrapping the ships and the rebuild them using the saved components... it practically give the same result?
You will need to keep one Shipyard retooled for the old class of ships so you can quickly rebuild them if you need them. If you have all the components to rebuild the ships they will not really take very long to construct again. It might not take long to retool a yard producing the new ships either as long as the ships still have some common components used.
Being able to scrap and build components and store them is a great way to prepare yourself for mass production of ships in a pinch.
I use this strategy all the time as having a large stading fleet doing nothing is a complete waste of resources and energy. The only thing you need an active fleet for is defending and patroling your territory not attacking anyone, having that capacity is just a luxury. But it is better to build that fleet when you need it, so you can tailor it for the task it needs to solve.
I usually keep one or two tech level components around, even older components can be quite effective if just combined with the right newer components... or even on their own. An older missile ship probably only need better missile fire-controls to become a pretty decent ship. A beam ship likewise with some new fire-controls. Most of the time it is better to have a bunch of outdated ships now than a few imaginary modern ones that only exist on the drawing boards.
I'm sorry dude but a thing that has been done ONCE by the United States after World War 2 is not "prevalent and common". No other country has mothballed bunch of ships in order to reactivate them again in the future in case of dire need. Aircraft are not really relevant comparison for Aurora but even if we allow them, we find that it's once again pretty much the United States only that does it routinely - some other countries have done a little bit here and there, mostly the Soviet Union. So even in the most optimistic read on human history, mothballing is not prevalent and common.Yeah, mothballing has never been as prevalent or as useful as romantics make it seem. It's a weird fixation that a lot of people seem to have, that mothballing is easy, cheap, real and should be an integral feature of Aurora.
Just scrap your old ships if you can't maintain them.
It's prevalent and common practice to mothball aircraft/spacecraft from the USAF and North American airlines to the PLAAF. I've personally been a team member to regenerated an older C-130 into a specialized mission variant and older space assets have been pulled out of long term storage for usage.
If you have the assets why not store it. Unlike a sea vessel a spaceship/craft would be more like an aircraft not being stored in a medium that rapidly corrodes the unit.
I'm sorry dude but a thing that has been done ONCE by the United States after World War 2 is not "prevalent and common". No other country has mothballed bunch of ships in order to reactivate them again in the future in case of dire need. Aircraft are not really relevant comparison for Aurora but even if we allow them, we find that it's once again pretty much the United States only that does it routinely - some other countries have done a little bit here and there, mostly the Soviet Union. So even in the most optimistic read on human history, mothballing is not prevalent and common.
And as others stated, sure you don't have salty seawater corroding the ship but vacuum does bad things to objects too, as does extreme cold. I don't want to come across as an asshole, just here to smeg on you, but the idea has been brought up many times - just like robot ships - and there's never been a good solution to prevent the exploits mentioned, nor has there been a good justification for the mechanic to exist in the first place. I understand that it's a thing from some space war books, where the 'Active' Fleet fights a desperate delaying action against an overwhelming enemy while the 'Reserve' Fleet is brought up to readiness but other than a specific dramatic event, it comes across as a player wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
I don't want to come across as an asshole, just here to smeg on you, but the idea has been brought up many times - just like robot ships - and there's never been a good solution to prevent the exploits mentioned, nor has there been a good justification for the mechanic to exist in the first place. I understand that it's a thing from some space war books, where the 'Active' Fleet fights a desperate delaying action against an overwhelming enemy while the 'Reserve' Fleet is brought up to readiness but other than a specific dramatic event, it comes across as a player wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
*The suggestion by El Pip to limit to ships of XX years age is the closest I've yet seen, and even that is entirely arbitrary, would interact poorly with different tech levels/research rates, and no matter what value of XX was chosen would interfere with somebody's roleplay setting I am sure.If anyone were serious about the mechanism then there are other options, say only the oldest 20% of the fleet is eligible (with that percent changeable as an option) age is based on launch date. Military tonnage only, FACs and fighters don't count either. Of course that is still gameable, just build a load of 1001t cheap ships to bloat fleet numbers, but in 'normal' play it should mostly give the intended result.
Historical (in)correctness aside, this is my eternal frustration on the topic: people in favor keep trying to propose new and increasingly complex ways to implement mothballing, without actually addressing the core problems with the mechanic which several quite knowledgeable players have repeatedly highlighted. I don't think anyone would have a problem with a mechanic to put old ships into storage for possible future reactivation, but no one has yet given a good solution for the problem of placing newly built vessels into mothballs to support an oversized fleet of modern ships and largely circumvent the maintenance mechanics. There is no mechanic suggested which can make mothballing work for older vessels and not new ones*, and this is exactly the same exploit which was (is?) present in Starfire that likely led Steve to not include the mechanic in Aurora in the first place.
*The suggestion by El Pip to limit to ships of XX years age is the closest I've yet seen, and even that is entirely arbitrary, would interact poorly with different tech levels/research rates, and no matter what value of XX was chosen would interfere with somebody's roleplay setting I am sure.
If anyone were serious about the mechanism then there are other options, say only the oldest 20% of the fleet is eligible (with that percent changeable as an option) age is based on launch date. Military tonnage only, FACs and fighters don't count either. Of course that is still gameable, just build a load of 1001t cheap ships to bloat fleet numbers, but in 'normal' play it should mostly give the intended result.
If there were a serious wartime/peacetime economy in Aurora I think I'd be more in favour of mothballing, or at least thinking about it properly, because then you could have huge wartime fleets that are unsupportable on peacetime budgets. So at the end of the war you would have a meaningful choice; do you invest a lot of shipyard time and resources into mothballing some of the fleet or do you just scrap them and used the released resources to build new ships with all the new tech and lessons learned. (This assumes putting a ship in reserve takes significantly longer than scrapping, etc). But in the absence of that, I'm still unconvinced it's worth the effort to implement.
Hunter class Light Cruiser 11,746 tons 344 Crew 2,613.8 BP TCS 235 TH 438 EM 2,130
5320 km/s Armour 5-46 Shields 71-426 HTK 66 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 6 PPV 44.9
Maint Life 1.16 Years MSP 1,334 AFR 184% IFR 2.6% 1YR 1,009 5YR 15,136 Max Repair 1093.75 MSP
Magazine 120
Captain Control Rating 4 BRG AUX ENG CIC
Intended Deployment Time: 6 months Morale Check Required
I am not convinced an F-16 can be reactivated from mothball in those timescales let alone a battleship. Also from a game play perspective you may as well make it instantaneous. If you time scale of hours was replaced with day's it may be vaguely credible. I don't think you could install all the software updates and patched and then deconflcit them in hours never mind check every electronic system for component failure
Still I see absolutely no reason to add a Mothball option to the game it has never been part of it for good reason. It did feature in Starfire which is the parent of Aurora and was a bad idea then. And also much more expensive and time consuming than your idea.
Times should also scale with ship build cost not size , it is going to be much easier to reactivate a freighter than a battleship as there are a lot less components to check , fix , replace and update.
Every time this idea comes up, the same objection is raised and never satisfactorily resolved: what prevents players from building ships and immediately putting them into mothballs? There is not really a problem with putting old ships into mothballs, since they will probably be outdated anyways when recalled to service, but rather brand-new ships which can be stored extremely cheaply for 20+ years and still be highly effective when recalled. This was a major exploit in Starfire, the TT game from which Aurora was largely derived, for similar reasons.
The ability to build a fleet several times larger than what a race can support in terms of maintenance and reactivate those ships in a far shorter time frame vastly outweighs any penalty from poor crew performance. So far nobody has come up with a mechanism for mothball fleets which is balanced, not overly complex, and able to prevent building directly to reserve from being a viable or dominant approach.
I think being able to mothball new ships directly, only to have to pay in terms of time and possibly MSP later would be something not exactly uncommon. It's not super uncommon for nations to practice what is essentially total defense, where while the active military isn't super big, the wartime military can quickly ramp up to meet actual wartime needs. There would indeed need to be a sufficiently long time penalty so that you would generally need to have some fleet presence for dealing with the occasional precursor and whatnot, as well as executing defense in depth for any initial attacks.
Potential mechanics may include not contributing to PPV, reducing maintenance cost to 1/3 to 1/10th, same with the tonnage maintenance (this way you still have an upper maintenance tonnage limit, but you aren't paying as much for ships you won't be needing in the near to medium term future), but also possibly requiring twice the normal overhaul MSP and maintenance capacity when reactivating, or requiring reactivation through shipyards, and requiring two to three times the normal overhaul length one would otherwise require. Possibly even a fixed time, meaning you can't simply reactivate your fleets every time you encounter a small precursor base then go smash with three hundred ships and then put them back to sleep. The cost of reactivation can easily be scaled so that it would cost more to actually reactivate any given ship an x number of time over a certain number of years than simply keeping it working. It allows for a wartime stockpile, like both superpowers have (or had), with hundreds of tanks, and thousands of military vehicles sitting, waiting for the day they are either needed or scrapped.
People should not forget that even mothballed ships and vessels still receive regular maintenance, albeit more rarely, and of the more preventative kind. You can't simply park a car and expect it to run with regular maintenance after ten years.
Yeah, mothballing has never been as prevalent or as useful as romantics make it seem.
The real hurdle is that even realistic mothball rules -
--- I mean, has anyone tried doing what I do? Design some warships during peace time, then build some components of those designs and use the "Use Components" option to build them quickly in the event of war?
The real hurdle is that even realistic mothball rules -
Frankly, the real hurdle is that there is no realistic mothball rule, short of placing a completely arbitrary age limit on it, that prevents building brand-new ships into mothballs to make a killing on maintenance savings, within the current set of game mechanics. At the very least, you would need to have a mechanic in Aurora which increases maintenance failure rate as a ship gets older (separate from the overhaul clock), which I think will never be added as it does not play nicely with many roleplay settings, nor the fact that a 20-year-old ship (for instance) at NPE tech is very different from a 20-year old ship at antimatter tech because successive tech levels take progressively longer to play through.
This phenomenon of building directly to mothballs was a problem in Starfire, and I believe was a reason why mothballing was removed very early in VB6 development. If there was some reasonable and effective mechanism in place to prevent that, any one of the numerous suggestions made to date would work perfectly fine.
What about not having age limit but tech one, lets say you can only mothball ships that don't have the most recent weapon, armour and engine, possibly shield/sensor, tech?
As this is a completely arbitrary restriction I don't see Steve ever going for such a thing.
Well, what about cost scaling to the mothball procedures depending on the tech level? It would be ridiculously pricy on the new tech as you have not had an opportunity to develop procedures to long-term store such technology, which would fall down to cheap around 2 tech levels behind what you currently have and then just stay there or rise, I guess to simulate you no longer have people who specialize in that tech so its pricier to find qualified workers for it.
Which you know you refuse to respond too. So I'm gonna bow out of this conversation. Mothballing would just give power gamers a way to exploit the maintenance system without adding anything to the actual game. It only makes sense if you want the semblance of reality without understanding why those things are done in reality
The discussion here is getting a bit tense so I suggest we chill the tone a little bit. Regardless of how "realistic" mothballing spaceships may or may not be, it is true that Aurora has the all-powerful trans-Newtonian element of handwavium at its disposal, indeed many would argue that Aurora while impressively detailed is anything but "realistic." Suffice to say, if Steve wanted to implement such a mechanic it would not be realism that stopped him.
There are a number of mechanics that could be used for mothballing. However, the challenge is to make mothballing a ship a meaningful decision, rather than a way to simply reduce overall maintenance costs or a way to build a massive fleet ready for activation. For that decision to exist, there must be a scenario where mothballing a ship turns out to have been the wrong choice.
For example, lets say it takes a year to reactivate a ship. One scenario is alien attack and the ship is not available to fight for a year - but with the wrong mothballing rules you could have your regular navy (the same fleet you would have without mothball rules) plus a huge fleet in mothballs, so that situation is actually a lot better than before, not worse.
In principle, I think shipyards (maybe repair yards) would be needed to move ships in and out of mothballs, so that you have a meaningful decision regarding how you use that finite capacity. This would be relatively cheap in BP but costly in time. Even in the above scenario, you would then have to choose between building new ships or reviving old ships. Once ships are in mothballs, there would need to be some cost and perhaps facilities involved in maintaining them in that state to avoid a massive mothball fleet. I think the simplest mechanic would be to use existing maintenance rules/facilities, but treat the mothballed ships as smaller, perhaps 20% of their normal size/cost for maintenance purposes.
That way, you can establish a fairly sizeable mothball fleet, but by limiting to some extent your active fleet. Also because you can only store and revive at the cost of building new, you would tend to start mothballing when you are in a less active period - which makes sense - and then you are faced with another meaningful decision in terms of whether to reactivate or build new. Setting the right time/cost of reactivation would be key to making that a difficult choice.
Mothballing would only make sense if you planned to do it for a while, so that the cost of storing and reactivating would outweigh the long-term saving of 80% of MSP expenditure.
The mothballing topic comes out from time to time and to be honest while I understand why Steve is against while other players may be reqiesting it, I was wondering if could be easier to introduce the non maintenance (or a reduced one) checkbox at a fleet level only under SM mode.
This way only those who are actually interested will be using the function.
The code should be partially there and I think coding wise the biggest challenge will be ensuring the save and reload trick is not needed for the modification to take effect.
Repair yards "repairing" mothballed ships back in to service would make the most sense, perhaps reset the training revel as well so they're not 100% ready for combat right out the yard.
In space, not really, heck it only took the USN abut 6 months for the yarddogs to mothball status a couple of thousand ships, and just several years later they were able to reativate 540 for the Korea Conflict, these then when back into mothball status and then another 600+ were reactivated during Vietnam.
Keep in mind, the last month or so of a ship's "active status" was spent by the crew readying it for the reserve, logging and fixing problems, using up and transporting perishables, and securing non-perishables, along with stripping paint and begin setting up dehumidifiers before they hit they yards.
What if it was allowed to undergo maintenance failures as if it had no MSP remaining, but at a diminished rate?
What if it was allowed to undergo maintenance failures as if it had no MSP remaining, but at a diminished rate?
I like this idea, but in the opposite direction - maintenance failures happen at the same (or even an increased?) rate, however they are guaranteed not to cause catastrophic damage (i.e., ships won't blow up from engine or magazine failures). Then to reactivate a mothballed ship requires conducting repairs using the same mechanics that already exist (Repair Yards, etc.).
This seems like it could address the build-to-mothballs issues, since fixing nearly every component on a ship is pricey enough that it's probably not an attractive means to cheat the maintenance system. Repairing older ships with less advanced, thus cheaper, components is cheaper and faster (for a given shipyard work rate), which makes mothballing more attractive for older ships that could be restored a bit quicker in an emergency.
We can assign a (reduced) MSP cost or monetary cost as Steve feels necessary to maintain balance, but since this cost is a secondary part of the mechanic it does not have to be the main balancing factor so we can set it to a reasonable value and it is probably fine - say, 25% of the maintenance cost for an in-service ship for example.
I do think diminishing the rate of maintenance failures is the wrong direction, as that seems like it would be more economical than maintaining active-duty ships which doesn't solve any problems. You basically want the ship to be an irreparable hulk after several years, after which is can be restored to active service relatively more quickly than new construction but not necessarily much more cheaply so. We can roleplay/handwave the rate of failures as due to lack of shipboard maintenance, harsh radiation environment, etc. etc. as desired.