KriegsMeister's Conglomeration of Ideas for Fighters, FAC's, Ships, and Stations

[KriegsMeister (OP)]

    So after reading the recent thread on Fighter Modules by ArcWolf, I went down a major rabbit hole of reading and brainstorming over why fighters, are fighters, ships are ships, stations are stations, and the differences of civilian vs military designs.  What makes them separate from each other to necessitate the various game rules applied to them for their use and design.  And lastly, how "realistic^TM" are those rules.  All of these ideas that came to me from my research and thinking were reined in by an oft quoted quote that Steve is attempting with Aurora C# to reduce if not eliminate special case rules and streamline the mechanics of the game in comparison to its messy VB6 origins, such as removing PDC's and unifying the ship and missile engine calculations.
    The initial spark for this long train of thought comes from many a player wishing to shrink so called "Fighters" of aurora to be of similar size to what we call Fighters today in our modern airforces.  Many suggestions have come along such as reducing the size of weapons or introducing even smaller weapons, further reduce crew requirements, eliminating armor requirements, and many more.  However, most of the suggestions are always countered by Steve saying that Fighters (and to an extent Fast Attack Craft) are more akin to waterborne gun/torpedo/missile boats rather than fighters.  Which brings me to suggestion #1.



#1a Rename Fighters as Boats
    Plain and simple, if the game represents such vessels more as Boats, just call them Boats.  As they are now, people start off with a false pretense of what they are actually creating and envisioning as opposed to what the actual game mechanics allow them to do.  Of course this doesn't stop people from calling their boats fighters anymore than the current game prevents people calling fighters, boats.  But if the core designs are more like a boat, call it a boat to begin with.  Lastly, why use the specific term of "Fighter" (a small combat vehicle to hunt and destroy other small combat vehicles) to represent the entirety of small craft that can be built such as sensor scouts, missile bombers or ground troop transports.  However, Boat is synonymous with Craft in naval parlance which could cause confusion with Fast Attack Crafts, which again is a poor combat specific name to represent all possible design's in their category.  Sooooo. . . .

#1b Combine FAC's into the Boat category
    As it stands now Fighters and FAC's are similar in that both are small enough to not require a bridge, but only fighters can transit atmosphere and thus can be used as Ground Assault vessels, as well as be built on planetary surfaces in Fighter Factories.  This 1000T and 500T cutoff is very narrow, especially when there are no other tonnage based restrictions of any sort.  Everything from 1001T to infinity are all ships that can enter the atmosphere.  Unless this minute differentiation is absolutely paramount to keep, it would probably be best to combine the 2 categories in the spirit of C# streamlining goals.  It also lines things up a bit since the smallest shipyard is 1000T, and largest Hangar module is 1000T (oh hey, the smaller hangar bays are called "boat" bays, neat). 
    This also opens up an awesome opportunity to create transatmospheric cargo boats.  The smallest Cargo hold is 500T and as of now the only way to transfer cargo from the planet surface to a ship is to have a Cargo Shuttle Bay (which is 500T as well and so pushes the design over the 1000T FAC/Boat limit) or have Cargo Shuttle Station/Spaceport on both ends of the trip which is less than ideal when wanting to make a tiny mineral freighter to collect from a small mining outpost.  So if we up the transatmospheric capability to 1000T vessels we could make a boat with 500T capacity that could land and pick up cargo from the surface, or with the already 1. 14/2. 0 change, transfer cargo to another ship by landing in its hangar.  Also, perfect for a true conventional start in that you could build such a boat on the surface of your home planet with a Boat Factory, load it up with 0. 2 of a unit of infrastructure and send it to land on and start your first offworld colony without any spaceborne shipyards.  I don't believe this would cause too much disruption if such boats are treated as a single cargo shuttle for cargo handling calculations and thus be less efficient than a dedicated cargo shuttle bay.  The only problem is that such boats would automatically be classified as a military vessel despite its commercial purpose due to having engines smaller than 25HS/1250T, which leads me to suggestion #2.

#2a Remove the Size Constraint for Commercial Engines
    I fail to see a rational reason as to why a Commercial Engine must be of a certain large size to be considered commercial.  Why is a HS5 and 30% power engine a military engine that has a chance of failure and requires maintenance than an engine 5x its size which works perfectly till the day it gets shot or scrapped.  Its dumb and completely arbitrary and should be done away with.  Anything of 50% output or less, regardless of size, should be considered commercial.  I also do believe it to be silly that Commercial Engines have 0 maintenance requirement, which leads to suggestion #2b

#2b All Engines have a Maintenance Requirement that Scales Directly with Engine Power%
    This I see more as a game start option so that we have 1: Military ships require Maintenance, 2: No ships require Maintenance, and 3: All ships require Maintenance.  Its just odd to me that an engine would need absolutely no maintenance if its output power was significantly low enough, as I'm pretty sure even the small little quarter horsepower engine on the back of 6' fishing raft boat still needs fixing every once in a while and can even crap out if not properly taken care of.  I'm not good enough of a mathematician to suggest what the exact formula for this ought to be, but the IFR and MSP requirements should reduce the lower the output is to be near but never quite 0.



    Now I go into my bigger and crazy ideas after thinking about #2b and the delineation between Commercial and Military Engines and correspondingly ships.  I asked myself, "Why is Engine type the primary determinant of whether a vessel is a commercial or military vessel?" This followed with more inquiries into what makes something a military vessel military? What components or design choices separate it from commercial? Should commercial vessels have some access to military modules such as guns, shields, and sensors without being considered true military ships? Why are commercial shipyards so much bigger than military yards? Then I started delving into the differences between ships and stations, like, Why must a station buildable by ground facilities be strictly commercial and lack armor? Why do ships need armor? Why can't ships be built by ground facilities, even though we can build nearly every individual component on the ground?
    Overall a lot of ideas started brewing on how the game answers all these questions, and whether or not I could come up with better answers that make more logical^tm and/or realistic^tm sense, while simplifying or eliminating game rules to streamline the game.



#3 Just Get Rid of Player Designed "Commercial" Ships
    That is not to say, don't let the player design freighters and tankers and such, but remove the distinction of player built commercial and military ships.  AI designed civilian shipping would be the only commercial vessels as well as the NPR designed commercial vessels.  Any and all player designed ships would be considered military ships by the AI/NPR.  My reasons for this are that A) Really cuts down on any and all arbitrary restrictions between the two types of vessels, B) Makes sense somewhat realistically that all government built ships are tied to the government/military, even if their direct purpose is not for war, and C) Gives the AI civilian shipping a little more meaning. 
    However, I do understand that this a much bigger change to the game that many would like to see so I have come up with some alternative means of redefining what it means to be a "commercial" ship

#4a Eliminate the distinction between Commercial and Military Engines, and Remove the Military Only Restriction on Most Modules
    It you couldn't already tell from suggestion #2, I'm not to keen on the idea that certain engines should be absolutely free of all maintenance just because its of X size and Y power output.  So I figure if we remove the size limit and maintenance exclusion, why not remove the distinction between the two all together.   Generally speaking, throughout our naval history, all engine types have been available to both military and civilian shipbuilding, though civilian construction generally goes for the cheaper and more economical designs as a means of lowering build and operational costs.  However that doesn't mean that it was exclusive that military ships had high performance engines, racing boats/ships and fast freighters and passenger liners frequently topped speeds equal to or even in excess of their military counterparts, and conversely various naval support ships were slow and fuel efficient.
    I'm also not the fan of how many modules are military restricted, Sensors, hangars, shields, magazines and to a certain degree weapons.  It makes some sense as those modules are meant to be resource intensive and as it stands now, commercial ships were supposed to be maintenance free.  However, if we eliminate this exclusivity of maintenance free engines, it would be fitting to allow these maintenance needing modules to be placed on commercial ships.  Sensors and hangars are the key ones, doesn't make sense that commercial ships can not install large sensor arrays of any sort despite modern civilian shipping having radar and sonar almost universally available, as well as dedicated science and survey vessels having specialized equipment.  While there is not really a whole lot of precedence of civilian aircraft carriers beyond one or 2 helicopters or maybe seaplanes, there is a wide variety of boats which have been carried by many different ships throughout history, which makes it a bit silly to have the Boat Bays and "Military" Hangar Decks to be military restricted and the "commercial" hangar deck to be frivolous.  What is it about this particular hole inside of a ship to store a boat makes it have to be a military ship? Magazines are kinda similar, in that why does a hole in the ship designed to store a specific kind of cargo automatically make it a military vessel.   I get that munitions are for war, but the ship itself is just a specific kind of cargo ship akin to regular freighters or tankers.  Shields are another module that I think is silly to have as Military restricted, especially since we can put any absurd amount of armor on commercial ships.  Shields make more sense for civilian ships as it takes up less space/mass than armor (though not necessarily per point of protection) and is togglable, only needing it for emergencies. 
    Lastly, throughout multiple points of history, civilian ships have been armed to a certain degree to protect themselves from pirates or foreign enemies seeking to take their goods.  I thought about removing the military only restriction for at the very least beam weapons, if not beams and missiles up to a certain size, but I couldn't think of a good way to balance it without adding more special case rules which we are trying to avoid.
    But you may ask then, "KriegsMeister, how should we define commercial vs military ships?", and I would answer. . . .

#4b Give the No Armor/Structural Shell Option to Engined Ships, and Give any Boat/Ship with >1 Layer of Armor the Military Tag
    Except at the dawn of the ironclads, I cannot thing of a single example of a civilian ship that had any sort of significant armor beyond its structural frame and hull (except like Icebreaker ships, but those are very niche).  Even non-combat military ships (and many combat) hardly had any armor, even if it would be a good idea (*cough* munitions ships).  And also doesn't make much sense for the game to have only stations exclusively be armorless, when it could be of great benefit for many types of ships.  I can see the argument be made that some sort of armor would be necessary for any spacecraft as a means of preventing damage by micro-asteroid impacts while traveling through space.  So I suggest that having the No Armor check box checked (or just get rid of the check box and let us put 0 in the armor value), would significantly increase the IFR/AFR rate.  That leaves commercial vessels with a binary option of increased maintenance issues for a significantly reduced weight (tech dependent) or increased reliability for the cost of payload capacity. 
    Some may ask why I decided to give commercial ships shields and take away armor, tis a good question, and I'm not sure how to respond better than, I think it fits the sci-fi universe better while also keeping it inline with historical civilian construction.  Armor is very costly and takes up a lot of mass, and has been almost entirely exclusive to ships of war, "energy/plasma" shields on the other hand are completely fictional as of now so it is more difficult to predict their use in the future should they become a reality. 

#5 Stations, Spaceports, and Orbital Construction of Space Ships
    As it stands now, in order to build a Spacestation utilizing ground facilities, you need to have a Spaceport and for the station to meet 3 criteria; Engineless, No Armor, and no military modules.  In my eyes, only half of this makes sense, a spaceport as a means of shuttling parts to the orbital assembly area, and not having engines (it is supposed to be stationary after all).  What I don't understand is why must a station lack armor, what is it about trans-newtonian orbital physics that makes armor unbuildable by construction factories, even though fighter factories work just fine in building armored vessels (but can't build unarmored vessels).  Even more annoying is that ground facilities can pre-build military modules but it is impossible to weld them onto a structural frame unless it is done in a shipyard, while able to assemble millions of tons of terraforming stations, orbital habitats, and flying casino's, but god forbid I want to launch a 10ish-ton active sensor into orbit like we currently do for modern day satellites.  /endrant Well, not entirely, because again, why can we assemble such massive structures with ground facilities, but the moment you slap an engine on the design, its incapable of being built by anything but a shipyard.
    So far in previous suggestions, we have already removed the "No Armor" and most military module exclusivity from ship designs or wholly removed the distinction between Commercial and Military ships, so why not take it a step further in eliminating entirely the special rules for space station construction and open up the space port to build any and all ships/stations and whatnot.  I envision 3 different ways of constructing vessels; Boat Factories/Yards (pretty much unchanged from current Fighter Factories, just upped to 1000T designs), Shipyards of 1000T and greater (same as now, just kinda sorta remove the commercial yards), and Spaceports with Construction Factories/Conventional Industry, which would provide a little more flexibility in design and construction to dedicated yards but be more costly in time, workers, and pulling away resources from other ground construction projects.  I believe each spaceport should have a total tonnage limit based on total CF/CI output, say maybe 1HS per colony annual BP, so a colony with a 100 Construction Factories could build up to 50000T of ships and/or stations, additional spaceports would double that capacity (2x SP = 100000T, 5x SP = 800000T).  I, however, do not have the analytical prowess to properly balance this so as to not completely overshadow dedicated shipyards and these numbers would likely need a bit of tweaking.  This would also temper some of the more outrageous station designs that people can immediately build right off the bat and would require some build up to great the 100x module refinery monstrosities people come up with.



So that's I'll I got for now, I believe the first 2 suggestions would be of great benefit to the game while the other 3 could probably use a lot more refinement or be ignored, they are just my personal gripes with my headcanon and how I want to play the game.  Critique is welcomed and encouraged to make these suggestions better and possibly be introduced to the game.  I'm probably going to do a similar effort post in the near future but focusing on weapons.  Hope yall enjoy the read.



TL;DR
#1 Combine Fighters and FAC's into one category and rename Boats.
#2 Remove Size constraint of commercial engines and possibly remove the lack of maintenance for commercial engines.
#3 Forget about the distinction of *player built commercial vs military ships.
#4 Base commercial vs military moreso on presence/thickness of armor rather than engine type, remove military exclusivity of many module.
#5 Remove special rules of "Stations", allow spaceports and ground facilities to build all ships/stations upto a certain total tonnage limit.
   

[nuclearslurpee]

TL;DR

I'm just going to quote the end summary for brevity:

#1 Combine Fighters and FAC's into one category and rename Boats.

Personally I am sentimentally attached to this distinction. Really the distinction of FACs is fairly minor, all it means is you don't need to expend 50 tons on a Bridge plus tonnage for the bridge crew. The question of whether we should just have Fighters/FACs combined into one category, and if so what tonnage limit to set, is one of game balance I think best left up to Steve. I will note, personally I think a better name than "Boats" is needed, FACs I think is already a good designation although we need to decide what to call the "FAC Factory"

One thing I think has been neglected in this discussion though is the RP aspect. For many players even if we accept the inherent limitations of the "fighter" designation, many still roleplay these as stereotypical space superiority fighters/bombers and accept the weird tonnage - even Steve does this in many of his AARs including the current BSG one. There is a good argument to be made for preserving the current categories or something similar on the basis of roleplay, remembering that Aurora is intended to be a narrative generator more than a "realistic" game.

#2 Remove Size constraint of commercial engines and possibly remove the lack of maintenance for commercial engines.

I agree the size and EP modifier constraints are arbitrary, if reasonable choices mechanically. However I think it is a more or less necessary evil in order to have the current military/commercial distinction - which as I will get into below is indeed a necessary one.

The maintenance question is a false one, as commercial engines still have a maintenance requirement, it is commercial ships which do not. If you put a commercial engine onto a battleship class it will contribute to the maintenance needs of that battleship class. I don't want to presume, but from reading your post it seems like you might not be aware of this very important distinction, which does lead to a few errors in your analysis though I don't think it is necessary to highlight these.

#3 Forget about the distinction of *player built commercial vs military ships.

Absolutely not.

The distinction between "military" and "commercial" is mechanically arbitrary, there is no way around this, but it is necessary for Aurora to work as it is designed - removing that distinction would require nearly the entire game to be redesigned from scratch. You might preserve the basic mechanics (ship motion, combat, etc.) but the entire 4X strategic level would be completely different. I will give a few examples of what I mean:

• Shipyards: Commercial shipyards are nominally 10x the size of naval shipyards, because commercial ship modules (cargo, cryo, transport, ...) are all quite large. This is a realistic distinction; to pull a fairly random example, MV Emma Maersk nominally carried 11,000 TEU at 14 gross tons per TEU, or a bit over 150,000 gross tons. While gross tons are emphatically not equal to displacement, it is safe to say that the order of magnitude will not be extremely dissimilar. If we remove the commercial/military distinction, we either have to expand naval-costed shipyards at extreme cost to build reasonable commercial ships, or we will be able to easily expand commercial-costed shipyards to build oversized military ships, either of these is a serious problem for the game balance*.
• Space Stations: Large space stations would become effectively impossible to maintain, or at least a huge and boring logistical chore, if there is no commercial distinction. If I want to have a fleet of 20 terraforming stations over Venus, but I have to manage the maintenance of them all which means supply ships running back and forth, constantly tugging stations to Earth for overhauls and then back again - and then multiply this for every significant station fleet (harvesters, miners, OrbHabs, etc.). In principle this may sound fun to that not-small subset of the player base that wants a complex logistics simulator, but in practice it means a lot of tedious micromanagement which is difficult or impossible to automate, which discourages building stations. Other commercial ships make out better since they can fly themselves into port/spacedock but it still adds extra micro work.
• Maintenance: If you remove the commercial ship distinction, you must maintain them with maintenance facilities, which poses a problem since these facilities are tonnage-limited and commercial ships are much larger than military ships. Similar to the shipyards problem, either commercial-type ships become nearly unmaintainable, or we expand the capacity-per-cost of maintenance facilities and military ships become trivial to support.

*It should be understood that when I talk about "game balance", I mean the principle that the gameplay is reasonable and presents varied options and decisions for the player. I am not concerned about competitive balancing in the multiplayer sense.

The main point I'm trying to get at is that Military vs. Commercial is very core to Aurora's DNA, and the distinction runs much deeper than just whether or not a ship (again - ship, not engine! Or any other component...) consumes MSPs. It may be an arbitrary distinction - this is undeniably true - but it is essential, and without that distinction we would have no incentive to build a large amount of the many non-military ship classes needed to build a massive space empire. Civilian shipping can make up some of that difference, but only provides a few functions and is frustrating to deal with in many cases.

#4 Base commercial vs military moreso on presence/thickness of armor rather than engine type, remove military exclusivity of many module.

I'm not sure why in #3 you suggest to abolish commercial ships, and now we are talking about how to distinguish them?

In general, I'm not going to agree or disagree, but I will echo an earlier point - the distinction is arbitrary, but necessary, thus it must be made. In my mind, the best way to approach it is to roleplay in whatever fashion one likes to explain the distinction - for example, Commercial Magazines are larger and inefficient due to government rules about ammunition stowage to prevent civilian casualties in crowded port colonies, while military magazines are not subject to those rules due to trained personnel and less concern for such casualties anyways. Or something else, you decide, but treating these arbitrary limits as opportunities rather than annoyances is, generally, the best approach to Aurora. 

I will say, with the new spoiler race coming in 2.0 I would like to see some other options to lightly arm commercial ships, without representing a better option over military ships. Maybe expanding CIWS to fire when repelling boarders or something would be interesting.

#5 Remove special rules of "Stations", allow spaceports and ground facilities to build all ships/stations upto a certain total tonnage limit.

Being able to produce large warships with planetary construction facilities would be ridiculously overpowered and there would be virtually no reason to use shipyards except to build beyond the tonnage limit (and I'd probably rather pour all those BP and minerals into raising the planetary build limit). Planetary industry can build ships so much faster than shipyards that unless the tonnage limit is so prohibitive as to be not worth bothering, this will be a trivial decision.

Again, while the distinctions are somewhat arbitrary I don't think they are unreasonable. Armor is not really something you can just shuttle up and glue into place, IRL ship armor schemes are actually quite complex and usually involve some integration with other systems that isn't an issue when just building a bare structure - which is incidentally why we can't just pre-built a few hundred armor plates and fly them up to the yards when a new frigate is ordered, unlike most other components as you noted.

For the record, you can build a 10-ton active sensor (probably 11 tons with the structural shell, but whatever) with planetary industry and launch it into orbit very easily, if you want to. I don't know why you'd want to, but you can. You can also do this with fighter factories, incidentally, which would usually be the better method as you can put a sensor up to 450 tons plus shell material into orbit this way.

----

So in summary: As far as revising the fighter/FAC distinction, I'm not necessarily in favor but I'm not opposed and it does make sense mechanically and could be an interesting change. However, all the talk about removing the commercial/military distinction is I think not a fruitful avenue for changes... the arbitrary or unrealistic nature of some distinctions may be weird or annoying, but it is necessary to provide the set of game mechanics that make Aurora playable the way it is today, and removing those mechanics just because they are arbitrary will lead to a completely different game, not necessarily a "better" one.

[Droll]

I think is already a good designation although we need to decide what to call the "FAC Factory"

FACtory.

That was easy.

[Jorgen_CAB]

In general I agree that the game probably would be better if there were no Military and Commercial ship mechanic in the game. All ships should need to be maintained... I have never been in favour of the free maintenance as "zero" can always be abused mechanically and feels gamey in a way that it does not need to be.

All that said... it would require a huge rewrite of large parts of the game so it probably is not really possible to achieve without allot of work. You also need to get Steve to sign off on the idea by convincing him.

[Steve Walmsley]

In general I agree that the game probably would be better if there were no Military and Commercial ship mechanic in the game. All ships should need to be maintained... I have never been in favour of the free maintenance as "zero" can always be abused mechanically and feels gamey in a way that it does not need to be.

All that said... it would require a huge rewrite of large parts of the game so it probably is not really possible to achieve without allot of work. You also need to get Steve to sign off on the idea by convincing him.

Originally, there was no distinction and all ships had to be maintained. The military/commercial distinction was added fairly early in the life of Aurora so that you could focus on military logistics without getting bogged down by micromanaging the mass of different 'commercial' ship types. It really wasn't much fun having to maintain every freighter. I like 'realism' up to the point where it adversely affects gameplay.

Also, until about 2008, the 'commercial' modules were all an order of magnitude smaller (4000 ton freighters). Then I actually worked out the volume of everything and moved to the current sizes.

[Steve Walmsley]

Its dumb and completely arbitrary and should be done away with.  I also do believe it to be silly that Commercial Engines have 0 maintenance requirement

The above is definitely the approach to take if you want to convince me about something

It's worth bearing in mind that the game has been around now for eighteen years, so a lot of the basic mechanics have arrived at their current state after a LOT of playtesting and subsequent changes. The players involved in driving those changes are often very experienced and very analytical. A new player may not understand why a mechanic works as it does, but the chance of it being dumb and arbitrary (and no one noticed that) is probably fairly small.

[Steve Walmsley]

On Fighters and FACs.

There are two separate mechanics here. The size of ships that can be built by factories (with the associated technobabble about ship mass and system bodies) and the size of ships that do not require a centralized command component. There is no reason why those two separate mechanics have to use the same mass limit. In fact, having them as different limits adds something to the game.

Aurora has its original roots in Starfire, which had a 'small craft' split between fighters and gunboats. I think in early Aurora, what we now refer to as FACs were known as Gunboats (because early Aurora players were ex-Starfire players) until FAC entered general usage by players and the term was subsequently included in the game. Even so, they are not fixed designations. There are 'fighter factories' but I think the only use of FAC is for auto-assignment designation. They are more often player terms than game designations. In fact, I have a 600-ton 'fighter' in my game because I decided to give it a fighter hull designation even though I build it in shipyards. I also have 1000-ton survey vessels, assault transports and scouts, but no FACs.

Small craft in Aurora are not F-18s off the Nimitz. Real-world fighters operate in a different medium than their parent ship and have certain associated advantages. Aurora fighters operate in the same medium and have to follow the same rules. If you create a weapon that allows a 50-ton effective fighter, then a 5000-ton ship should be able to mount a hundred of those weapons, with all the associated complications for point defence. That is why the above mechanics use 500 and 1000 ton mass limits.

I'm using 300-ton Vipers in my current BSG game and it works very well in term of immersion. However, if you want to refer to 500-ton ships as 'boats' then go ahead. There is no rule against it.

One final thought. A Nimitz class is 90,000 tons and can theoretically operate 90 aircraft, although currently it is about 64. In my current campaign, the Galactica class Battlestar is 75,000-ton and operates sixty 300-ton Vipers, five 600-ton Cobras and three 1000-ton craft of various types. It also has a decent ship to ship armament plus defensive gauss turrets. So while Aurora 'fighters' might be larger than US Navy fighters, the strike groups for similar tonnage motherships are in the same ball park. This is because Aurora ships fit perfectly into hangar decks whereas real world fighters require a lot more hangar space than their own tonnage. So while the Aurora 'fighter' tonnage might seem large, it works out similar to the real world in practical usage of carriers.

[Droll]

Its dumb and completely arbitrary and should be done away with.  I also do believe it to be silly that Commercial Engines have 0 maintenance requirement

The above is definitely the approach to take if you want to convince me about something

It's worth bearing in mind that the game has been around now for eighteen years, so a lot of the basic mechanics have arrived at their current state after a LOT of playtesting and subsequent changes. The players involved in driving those changes are often very experienced and very analytical. A new player may not understand why a mechanic works as it does, but the chance of it being dumb and arbitrary (and no one noticed that) is probably fairly small.

You could maybe make it so that commercial type ships require wealth instead of MSP for the purposes of maintenance if for some reason you or the playerbase feels like having any ship stay up for "free" is too much. That would prevent the micromanagement nightmare while also adding a cost to having a massive merchant marine / making wealth matter consistently throughout the entire length of the campaign.

[nuclearslurpee]

Its dumb and completely arbitrary and should be done away with.  I also do believe it to be silly that Commercial Engines have 0 maintenance requirement

The above is definitely the approach to take if you want to convince me about something

It's worth bearing in mind that the game has been around now for eighteen years, so a lot of the basic mechanics have arrived at their current state after a LOT of playtesting and subsequent changes. The players involved in driving those changes are often very experienced and very analytical. A new player may not understand why a mechanic works as it does, but the chance of it being dumb and arbitrary (and no one noticed that) is probably fairly small.

You could maybe make it so that commercial type ships require wealth instead of MSP for the purposes of maintenance if for some reason you or the playerbase feels like having any ship stay up for "free" is too much. That would prevent the micromanagement nightmare while also adding a cost to having a massive merchant marine / making wealth matter consistently throughout the entire length of the campaign.

This wouldn't be a bad idea if it playtests well. Wealth is usually not too important after the first couple of generation techs so this would add another sink without requiring major alterations to the rest of the game economy or strategy layers.

[Droll]

Its dumb and completely arbitrary and should be done away with.  I also do believe it to be silly that Commercial Engines have 0 maintenance requirement

The above is definitely the approach to take if you want to convince me about something

It's worth bearing in mind that the game has been around now for eighteen years, so a lot of the basic mechanics have arrived at their current state after a LOT of playtesting and subsequent changes. The players involved in driving those changes are often very experienced and very analytical. A new player may not understand why a mechanic works as it does, but the chance of it being dumb and arbitrary (and no one noticed that) is probably fairly small.

You could maybe make it so that commercial type ships require wealth instead of MSP for the purposes of maintenance if for some reason you or the playerbase feels like having any ship stay up for "free" is too much. That would prevent the micromanagement nightmare while also adding a cost to having a massive merchant marine / making wealth matter consistently throughout the entire length of the campaign.

This wouldn't be a bad idea if it playtests well. Wealth is usually not too important after the first couple of generation techs so this would add another sink without requiring major alterations to the rest of the game economy or strategy layers.

I might even suggest that even military ships cost wealth in addition to their maintenance requirements. Though idk what havoc that would wreak to NPR economists.

[Steve Walmsley]

Its dumb and completely arbitrary and should be done away with.  I also do believe it to be silly that Commercial Engines have 0 maintenance requirement

The above is definitely the approach to take if you want to convince me about something

It's worth bearing in mind that the game has been around now for eighteen years, so a lot of the basic mechanics have arrived at their current state after a LOT of playtesting and subsequent changes. The players involved in driving those changes are often very experienced and very analytical. A new player may not understand why a mechanic works as it does, but the chance of it being dumb and arbitrary (and no one noticed that) is probably fairly small.

You could maybe make it so that commercial type ships require wealth instead of MSP for the purposes of maintenance if for some reason you or the playerbase feels like having any ship stay up for "free" is too much. That would prevent the micromanagement nightmare while also adding a cost to having a massive merchant marine / making wealth matter consistently throughout the entire length of the campaign.

It is possible, as I do that for ground units outside combat, but I would have to adjust wealth to account for it and I like the way wealth works now. Also, a lot of 'commercial' ship functions match planet-based functions so charging maintenance on one but not the other would cause some balance issues. In summary, it works very well now so I don't to mess with it for minimal gameplay benefit.

[Steve Walmsley]

This wouldn't be a bad idea if it playtests well. Wealth is usually not too important after the first couple of generation techs so this would add another sink without requiring major alterations to the rest of the game economy or strategy layers.

I'm always running into wealth problems

Its usually one of the major issues in my games. Maybe I am just building too much.

[Agraelgrimm]

Steve, a way to work around the usage of a weapon made for a 50 ton fighter to be used and abused by bigger ships can be worked around as:
1- require a weapon pod
2- It has a limited amount of ammo and has to be either spent or in case of a turret, have a small magazine for that. (unarmored, 100% chance of explosion by hit, single module, only size and ammo for dispenser
3- Make it kinetic, meaning, no energy weapons for that size, just slug throwers.
4- Because of the mechanics involved into making small sized weapons like these, no crew, but the need of a small reactor to keep everything working.

And while on the topic, small shield for fighters could work as well. And the idea is: They have to concentrate their shields into a far smaller target than a capital ship. But would require reactors and with a tonnage limit to fighters, it would require players to having to choose what they want, so balance is still kept. And it still not broken because a gauss cannon can shred a fighter just fine. If it hits all 5 shots, is 5 damage. Is probably more than the amount of shields the fighter has.

And for commercial ships, it would be nice to have them cost wealth. It would make players try and o Wealth being a thing, while making expansion be more planned. Also, while they are commercial ships, they are state made and state controlled, so they should cost something for the state... (As of now i think of them as a merchant navy of sorts...)

[Garfunkel]

I think is already a good designation although we need to decide what to call the "FAC Factory"

FACtory.

That was easy.

Hahaha 

But we should really go back to calling them gunboats except without the gun part.

Fighter - Boat - Ship

Because FAC is Fast Attack Craft and the 500–1000-ton range is used for lot of different things. It could be Light Attack Craft, it could be Survey Boat, it could be Assault Shuttle, it could be Bomber, it could be Missile Boat, and so on and so forth.

[Steve Walmsley]

Steve, a way to work around the usage of a weapon made for a 50 ton fighter to be used and abused by bigger ships can be worked around as:
1- require a weapon pod
2- It has a limited amount of ammo and has to be either spent or in case of a turret, have a small magazine for that. (unarmored, 100% chance of explosion by hit, single module, only size and ammo for dispenser
3- Make it kinetic, meaning, no energy weapons for that size, just slug throwers.
4- Because of the mechanics involved into making small sized weapons like these, no crew, but the need of a small reactor to keep everything working.

And while on the topic, small shield for fighters could work as well. And the idea is: They have to concentrate their shields into a far smaller target than a capital ship. But would require reactors and with a tonnage limit to fighters, it would require players to having to choose what they want, so balance is still kept. And it still not broken because a gauss cannon can shred a fighter just fine. If it hits all 5 shots, is 5 damage. Is probably more than the amount of shields the fighter has.

And for commercial ships, it would be nice to have them cost wealth. It would make players try and o Wealth being a thing, while making expansion be more planned. Also, while they are commercial ships, they are state made and state controlled, so they should cost something for the state... (As of now i think of them as a merchant navy of sorts...)

Why could only a small ship mount the above weapon - why not a 5000-ton point defence destroyer that would completely alter missile warfare? Why would this weapon explode when none of the others do? Even if only fighters could mount it, then a fighter swarm becomes the new point defence paradigm.

Shields are less efficient than armour, so they only make sense on large ships, If we had an effective small shield, why couldn't large ships mount many of them.

As for commercial, As I explained above if we add wealth maintenance for terraformers, fuel harvesters, orbital miners, etc, why not add maintenance for terraforming installations, fuel refineries, automated mines or even factories? There has to be a dividing line. Plus I would need to rebalance wealth generation. I just don't seem any significant gameplay benefit from a change that would cause potential balance issues.