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

[nuclearslurpee]

Since this is morphing in a discussion on the usefulness of fighters generally.... How does ECM/ECCM play into this? The benefit of larger ships and the weakness of smaller ships, which is amplified with fighters, is the "infrastructure" that goes with having a working ship becomes a larger part of your overall tonnage. A bridge is a good example, although we dodge that with fighters since they're sub-1000 tons. ECM/ECCM becomes more important at higher tech levels, since it impacts ability to hit or be hit, but even the reduced size ECM or ECCM is 50 tons, or 10% of the size of a max-size fighter. Will fighters still be viable at higher tech levels with the handicap that they'll have to start committing a minimum of 10% of their mass to ECM or ECM (or 20% to both)?

At higher tech levels, you can make that 50 tons - 25 tons, thanks Xeno - back by way of reduced armor mass, better power reactors, and perhaps most importantly better BFCs as you can get high point-blank accuracy with reduced investment into BFC range.

[Bremen]

Everyone seemed focused on a purely offensive comparison between beam and missile fighters. A fast fighter with a high tracking speed and fast-firing guns is ideal for point defence. Missile fighters have no defensive capability.

Missile fighters don't have direct defensive capability, no, but they're frequently used to launch missile strikes from outside enemy missile range, so indirectly they're often extremely capable anti-missile defense.

To be fair, beam fighters can do that too. It's just if beam fighters are used as long range strike capability they tend to take heavy losses and missile fighters don't. So my gut feeling/limited experience is that beam fighters don't have a strong campaign scale logistics advantage over missile fighters or beam/missile capital ships, but I'm willing to see how it works out in practice.

[Migi]

I wasn't going to comment, but I wanted to respond to the first point specifically, and then I got carried away.

even though fighter factories work just fine in building armored vessels (but can't build unarmored vessels). 
(snip)
but god forbid I want to launch a 10ish-ton active sensor into orbit like we currently do for modern day satellites

This is not correct. The design below is essentially a sensor that sits in orbit and can be built in 3 different ways.
1) With fighter factories
2) With construction factories (and a spaceport)
3) With a shipyard

Code: [Select]

Sentry R1 class Sensor Outpost      229 tons       11 Crew       34.2 BP       TCS 5    TH 0    EM 0
1 km/s      No Armour       Shields 0-0     HTK 4      Sensors 5/5/0/0      DCR 1      PPV 0
MSP 93    Max Repair 10 MSP
Drengr    Control Rating 1   
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months   


Active Search Sensor Std Rng 08.6 Res 10 (1)     GPS 100     Range 8.6m km    Resolution 10
EM Sensor Standard 05 (1)     Sensitivity 5     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  17.7m km
Thermal Sensor Standard 05.0 (1)     Sensitivity 5     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  17.7m km

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as a Space Station for construction purposes
This design is classed as a Space Station for auto-assignment purposes


On other topics
(generally money)
I don't understand how people deal with money, I alternate between having too much and CMCs pop up everywhere, then the bottom falls out of my economy and I now have 40% of my construction building 150 finance centres and hope I don't go bankrupt while they get built over ~3 years.

(generally) Renaming FACs and Fighters
Renaming FACs and Fighters to 'Boats' makes a certain amount of sense (and sets expectations which is important) but I object because 'Boats' sounds worse. 'Small Craft' is a bit too unwieldy. 'Sloop' or 'Brig' might work, less likely 'Yacht' or 'Dingy'. But sailing ship types might not set expectations correctly. Maybe 'Planes' would work? Maybe not.
Anyway if we're going to rename anything it had better be swapping Commercial and Civilian so that all of that finally makes sense.

(generally) Adding maintenance for Commercial ships
For initial balancing my suggestion is that you only count 10% of the mass of commercial ships, and/or have commercial ships use MSP at 10% of the normal rate during upkeep.
But please don't do it, I have enough trouble keeping my military ships in maintenance.

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

I'm not an expert but I am fairly sure that IRL there are huge differences between military and civilian sensors. I have previously wondered if the 50T limit might be too large given the changes to sensor range in C# 1.0.

(generally) Armoured ships should be military
If it was limited to 'ships with armour 2 layers or thicker are classed as military', I don't think this would be completely insane. The biggest problem I see is trying to move 1m tons of ground units to invade someone's homeworld, which I suspect would be practically impossible if the troop transports used maintenance, and unarmoured troop transports are lunch for hidden STOs.

(generally) You can't use components with fighter factories or ground factories
This is for balance even if it makes me sad sometimes.

(generally) Spaceports build all ships
This basically makes spaceports replace shipyards, shipbuilding is currently strictly limited by shipyard type and slipways and tooling. This is a core gameplay feature so you'd need to replicate it somehow.

Everyone seemed focused on a purely offensive comparison between beam and missile fighters. A fast fighter with a high tracking speed and fast-firing guns is ideal for point defence. Missile fighters have no defensive capability.

Missile fighters don't have direct defensive capability, no, but they're frequently used to launch missile strikes from outside enemy missile range, so indirectly they're often extremely capable anti-missile defense.

To be fair, beam fighters can do that too. It's just if beam fighters are used as long range strike capability they tend to take heavy losses and missile fighters don't. So my gut feeling/limited experience is that beam fighters don't have a strong campaign scale logistics advantage over missile fighters or beam/missile capital ships, but I'm willing to see how it works out in practice.

Basically compare the BSG campaign with the 40k campaign.

[xenoscepter]

(generally) You can't use components with fighter factories or ground factories
This is for balance even if it makes me sad sometimes.

 --- I SM modify shipyards into "Fighter Complexes" to get around this. It's pop inefficient after a certain tonnage, but I like it just fine. Oh and it let's you both use components for fighters AND refit them... although the latter presents certain... difficulties.

[ArcWolf]

(generally) Renaming FACs and Fighters
Renaming FACs and Fighters to 'Boats' makes a certain amount of sense (and sets expectations which is important) but I object because 'Boats' sounds worse. 'Small Craft' is a bit too unwieldy. 'Sloop' or 'Brig' might work, less likely 'Yacht' or 'Dingy'. But sailing ship types might not set expectations correctly. Maybe 'Planes' would work? Maybe not.
Anyway if we're going to rename anything it had better be swapping Commercial and Civilian so that all of that finally makes sense.

Patrol Craft might work, after all that does seem to be the intention behind "fighters", something more akin to a WW2 PT boat or a WW1 Torpedo Boat (which typically has less the 300 tons to displacement). Then again, in my mind Patrol Craft & FAC are interchangeable.

[Droll]

(generally) You can't use components with fighter factories or ground factories
This is for balance even if it makes me sad sometimes.

 --- I SM modify shipyards into "Fighter Complexes" to get around this. It's pop inefficient after a certain tonnage, but I like it just fine. Oh and it let's you both use components for fighters AND refit them... although the latter presents certain... difficulties.

It also allows you to repair internal component damage on the fighters. I've noticed that carriers will only repair their armor.

[xenoscepter]

(generally) You can't use components with fighter factories or ground factories
This is for balance even if it makes me sad sometimes.

 --- I SM modify shipyards into "Fighter Complexes" to get around this. It's pop inefficient after a certain tonnage, but I like it just fine. Oh and it let's you both use components for fighters AND refit them... although the latter presents certain... difficulties.

It also allows you to repair internal component damage on the fighters. I've noticed that carriers will only repair their armor.

 --- Really!? That sounds like a bug to me... also, would a carrier with a Maintenance Module be able to carry out such repairs via Overhauling?

[Steve Walmsley]

If you set a fighter to repair a system, it will do so using the carrier's MSP.

[Droll]

If you set a fighter to repair a system, it will do so using the carrier's MSP.

Will it use the carriers damage con rating or the fighters?

I talk from experience, my carriers would refuse to repair the damaged internals of my GSFs despite having plenty of supplies.

[Garfunkel]

Yeah, you can't use your missile fighters for augmenting PD unless you equip them with AMMs which I doubt anyone does because that'll eat into your magazine space pretty badly and you would still need to reload them all the time. And your missile fighters need separate fighters to defend them if you have to penetrate the enemy AMM sphere before launch. And you can't send your gauss turrets to chase down enemy ships/stations. Sure, you can detach an escort to do that but a couple of beam fighters would probably do the same job faster and cheaper while maintaining all your escorts guarding your carriers where they should be.

I've seen similar arguments happen in other games, a lot, because people mistakenly compare apples and oranges on a strictly 1:1 to basis - whether it's hybrids versus pure classes in MMOs or stacking attack stats or defence stats in Hearts of Iron series or spell casters versus melee characters in party-based RPGs. We have to look at context and the big picture here instead of focusing in a too-narrow way and looking at one thing.

Especially since Aurora is just as much about campaigns than it is about battles, if not more so. Well, actually probably lot more so because a battle can be over in less than a minute but building the forces for that battle might have taken a decade.

[Sebmono]

Yeah a beam fighter is often going to cost multiple missiles fired (relatively) safely from a missile fighter. So I'm not convinced entirely on the overall strategic superiority of beamy bois.

However I also don't really have an answer to that problem without arbitrarily adding fighter-only systems which would go everything aurora currently stands for. Back when meson fighters were a thing you beam fighters were quite powerful to the point where they could be a bit broken. But perhaps the meson needs to be revisited (just in general, not just for fighters) and make it not so underwhelming.

An idea: I think if you want to keep the % to ignore armor setting you could add a tech-line for mesons that can increase their damage beyond 1. You roll the chance to ignore armor like usual but whenever the roll fails, the meson loses 1 damage (deals it to the armor) and keeps rolling until it either it reaches the internals or runs out of damage to roll with. You would still keep the overall damage number of mesons really small compared to equivalent weapons but now they'd have a better go at achieving their gimmick of ignoring armor even on heavily armored ships.

Add evasion stat to ships. Calculated from speed and tonnage modified so its negligible to large warships, but another layer of protection for fighters and facs?

I'm also curious as to why ship size isn't a factor in ToHit chance calculations, and only speed - does anyone have any insight or historical knowledge as to why this is the case? I would've thought that even in a transnewtonian world if two objects of largely different sizes were moving at the same velocity, the smaller object would be more difficult for weaponry to hit.

[TallTroll]

>> I'm also curious as to why ship size isn't a factor in ToHit chance calculations, and only speed

Compare vessel size and speeds. Modern CVs are around the 300m mark, for a displacement of around 100,000 tons (and yes, displacement isn't the same as gross tonnage, but it makes the point adequately). The largest ship ever built was an oil tanker of about 450m. Now consider that an Aurora freighter will likely be travelling at at least 1000km/s (barring some very early, low-tech designs) and that even if it was a full kilometre long, it would still be traversing 1000x its' own length every second at that speed. Target size is a negligible factor compared to just putting a beam or warhead in the general vicinity of a target due to its' speed

[ArcWolf]

>> I'm also curious as to why ship size isn't a factor in ToHit chance calculations, and only speed

Compare vessel size and speeds. Modern CVs are around the 300m mark, for a displacement of around 100,000 tons (and yes, displacement isn't the same as gross tonnage, but it makes the point adequately). The largest ship ever built was an oil tanker of about 450m. Now consider that an Aurora freighter will likely be travelling at at least 1000km/s (barring some very early, low-tech designs) and that even if it was a full kilometre long, it would still be traversing 1000x its' own length every second at that speed. Target size is a negligible factor compared to just putting a beam or warhead in the general vicinity of a target due to its' speed

Additionally beam weapons, specifically lasers, travel at the speed of light, which is 299,792.5Km/s, or 300x faster then the example ship, which is as close to 'hit-scan' as you can get. Railgun and plasma carronades you can make an argument for being able to dodge because they would travel significantly slower then the C, but not lasers.

[Bremen]

>> I'm also curious as to why ship size isn't a factor in ToHit chance calculations, and only speed

Compare vessel size and speeds. Modern CVs are around the 300m mark, for a displacement of around 100,000 tons (and yes, displacement isn't the same as gross tonnage, but it makes the point adequately). The largest ship ever built was an oil tanker of about 450m. Now consider that an Aurora freighter will likely be travelling at at least 1000km/s (barring some very early, low-tech designs) and that even if it was a full kilometre long, it would still be traversing 1000x its' own length every second at that speed. Target size is a negligible factor compared to just putting a beam or warhead in the general vicinity of a target due to its' speed

That doesn't really make sense, though. Or rather, it would only make sense if weapons had a 100% chance to hit, or vastly less than 1% - if you're getting 30% chance to hit against a target, then it doesn't really make any sense that that means 30% of your shots are exactly dead on and all others don't come within a kilometer.

The real reason I think there's no accuracy modifier for size is that it would be realistic but also, given current Aurora mechanics, vastly unbalanced in favor of smaller ships. We talk about large ships being favored now, and I think that's true, but anything but the smallest accuracy bonus against large targets would probably completely turn that around and make smaller ships vastly superior, which also risks becoming a micromanagement nightmare.

I mentioned in a previous thread the possibility of an accuracy difference based on the cube root of the size difference and the discussion made me wonder if even that wouldn't be too much. Maybe one day if there's a major combat rebalance, possibly including other changes that favor larger ships like armor deflection, then such a change would be balanced.

[Blogaugis]

Either way, TL:DR discussion summed up between OP and Steve is this:

While I agree with most of the KriegsMeister's points, the idea of reducing exceptions and making all follow the same rules is the general direction, Steve replied, that the reason why Aurora4x is what it is, is mostly due to reducing micromanagement.
Thus, it is now a Unified ruleset versus less micromanagement. Compromises had to be made, as it would be too annoying to look after your terraforming stations - delivering them the MSPs in one way or another...
So, it is likely that commercial/military designations will stay, fighters will stay, stations will stay...

The choices that average players have is - setting of 'maintenance use' box,
and database editing.