reserve fleet idea

[Velociranga]

Mate, I know what the point of mothballing ships. I asked specifically what's the point in Aurora, as you alluded to older ships are way less useful in Aurora. What's the point of adding in a bunch of new systems just for an edge case that isn't actually going to help much.

That's not a downside whatsoever, you still have a brand new ship that you don't have to maintenance on until you decide to use it. Like you said reactivating ships is quicker than building them, so you just have people mothballing brand new ships could that allows you to keep a much bigger modern fleet. Like I said all the actual real downsides of mothballing aren't present in Aurora.

And again where are you keeping all these mothballed ships? While vacuum might be a good medium for mothballing equipment mothballing ships in space would be way harder and more complex than mothballing a water based ship.

[QuakeIV]

Its probably far easier from a mold and oxidation perspective.

[Velociranga]

That would be why I noted vacuum is a good medium for mothballing equipment. But only for those reasons 

A 5 cm price of space debris crashing through all your mothballed ships because the sensors missed it is way more of a problem than mould.

Not to mention how deadly any accidents while reactivating them will be. A hole that's developed is way more of a problem is space than it is on earth.

Again I like the idea, it just doesn't work in the current version of aurora. And in the nicest way possible I don't think you've fully considered what would be required. Mothballing ships is not as simple as its made out to be. And doing it in space would drastically increase the difficulty and resources required.

For example if they're in orbit of a world they would have to be monitored round the clock to ensure their orbits didn't change and you need either some thrusters on the ship working or tugs nearby to correct any issue

[QuakeIV]

You arent allowed to build a ship with less than 1-thickness of duranium armor which is able to withstand small nuclear weapons, orbital debris is no factor.

[Velociranga]

Do I seriously need to explain the difference between debris impacting a crewed warship with all its systems running and a mothballed ship that had nothing active.

Also that depends very heavily on how fast that peice of debris is travelling. A 150 kilogram peice of asteroid travelling at 30,000km/s would generate the same force as a nuclear bomb

Not to mention even if it did no damage it would alter the orbit.

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

[QuakeIV]

You kindof do.  Your hypothetical asteroid is like 0.02kilotons of tnt quivalent, not even a small atom bomb, and in any case outer space is not constant 150kg 30km/s asteroid dodgeball.

I am assuming you mean 30km/s, because 30,000 km/s is 10% of the speed of light and I am questioning if I seriously need to explain to you that that is well beyond solar escape velocity and characteristic of interstellar debris from a supernova or something rather than an asteroid.

[Velociranga]

Dude I'm not gonna respond if you going to continue to respond to what you feel like and not the whole post. Its like talking to a child

Yes I meant 30,000 km/s which is a speed easily reached by early to mid game missiles.

And? That's my point there's nothing stopping a piece of interstellar debris from a supanova smashing into those mothballs ships. Or from one of you missiles hitting a peice of debris and imparting a significant chunk of that velocity to that asteroid.

Not to mention your making quite the assumption that a trans-Newtonian mineral functions the same way as a Newtonian one when affected by acceleration. Considering the speeds our mass drivers can accelerate those minerals too I'm pretty sure they don't.

And all of this is just one tiny example as to why mothballing isn't as easy as you seem to think

[nuclearslurpee]

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.

However, the persistent big problem that prevents mothballing from making it into Aurora is that of (1) making mothballing only useful for old ships and infeasible for new ships while (2) not imposing arbitrary constraints to accomplish this - limits based on age, tech level, etc. lack justification and frankly will not work well given the huge array of game settings and house rules players like to use. Without a solution, we have the problem where the optimal approach in many cases is to build brand-new ships and mothball them immediately, a silly practice which was extremely common in Starfire and the prevalence of which is why we have no mothball mechanic in Aurora at present.

Once again, I will note that in real life the reason we cannot build directly into mothballs is because we do not build "extra" ships - every vessel must be approved in a budget and passed by the government which issues the funding. If the U.S. Navy were to procure an aircraft carrier, commission her, and immediately lock her up in a mothball yard "just in case, for the future", it wouldn't take a genius to guess how that will affect Congressional approval of their next fiscal year budget... so every ship is built with some purpose and once commissioned is deployed and sees service, usually these days on peacetime missions - showing the flag, escorting commercial shipping, diplomatic missions, and so on - and of course in wartime, well, the use cases are more obvious.

In Aurora, we lack anything like this. All governments are, aside from roleplay, effectively military dictatorships with unlimited authority to expand the military to the limit of economic supportability (or beyond). Meanwhile, we have no mechanics which create peacetime requirements for military deployments - this has shifted somewhat since 2.0 due to Raiders, but Raiders alone hardly require the majority of our fleets to be part of an active deployment rotation. So the principal motivation for military expansion remains preparation for present or future wars, and in that case there is little or no reason to use a mothballing mechanic for anything but bypassing economic limits to over-expand the fleet.

I've seen a lot of good proposals for a mothballing mechanic, in the sense that there's a lot of interesting and balanced ways to implement mothballing. However, I've yet to see a single proposal that can make mothballing useful without making building directly into mothballs an optimal strategy, or at least very strong in a broad range of situations, which it simply should not be. The exceptions have been arbitrary limits, e.g., "at least 20 years old", "at least two 'tech levels' out of date", and so on, and such arbitrary limits do not play well with Aurora, neither with its changing rates of growth and expansion over time nor with its very open-ended roleplay opportunities.

Anyways... given all of this, I'd like to suggest that we corral fruitless debates about "realism" here, the issue with whether or not mothballing can or should be done in Aurora is mechanical only as most of the prior discussion in this thread (and many others) shows.

[Velociranga]

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.

Yup that's fair, I sensed that and should have stuck to my guns and bowed out my bad

[StarshipCactus]

What if mothball traded MSP maint costs for wealth instead? Don't ships cost 25% of their mineral costs per year? Mothballing changes that to wealth so you're preserving minerals at the cost of a reactivation delay, plus a chance some ships will need longer to repair or have to be written off entirely.

[Steve Walmsley]

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.

[Skip121]

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.

I really like this idea, it reminds me of the 'extended readiness' that the UK Royal Navy uses when the government wants to cut costs on ships.  Theoretically, they can be brought back into service when needed but there is a time/cost tradeoff to doing so.

[Marski]

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.

[Froggiest1982]

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.

[nuclearslurpee]

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.

That seems reasonable. It would also encourage keeping museum ships as roleplay if they will not cost precious MSP, which is something I like the idea of.