Fighter Module

[misanthropope]

if it's surface area from volume, it's proportion to the (2/3) power.  a battleship can turn its "small face" as easily a fighter, that washes out.

ok, but for the sake of argument, let's use the square root.  so a 4000 ton frigate is twice as easy to hit as a 1000 ton gunboat.  this swamps by orders of magnitude any economy of scale that currently exists in the game.

[KriegsMeister]

What about allowing Fighters (and maybe FACs) to utilize the 'No Armor option to significantly reduce their size.  I just mucked about with some convential start designs for a single shot railgun fighter, and it was quite the challenge to even get it into the 500T limit with just the railgun, bfc, powerplant, engine and a fighter fuel tank.  Mostly due to the fact that conventional armor took up over half the tonnage.  Granted, that can be significantly reduced, but not after several tech levels in multiple fields will you be able to get a sub-100T vessel.  Removing the armor all together would make those small designs far more feasible, and really the armor is all but useless as is due to shock damage.  And building up to the full 500T (or 1000T) would allow you to pack a lot of punch in a small but very fragile package.

[nuclearslurpee]

What about allowing Fighters (and maybe FACs) to utilize the 'No Armor option to significantly reduce their size.  I just mucked about with some convential start designs for a single shot railgun fighter, and it was quite the challenge to even get it into the 500T limit with just the railgun, bfc, powerplant, engine and a fighter fuel tank.  Mostly due to the fact that conventional armor took up over half the tonnage.  Granted, that can be significantly reduced, but not after several tech levels in multiple fields will you be able to get a sub-100T vessel.  Removing the armor all together would make those small designs far more feasible, and really the armor is all but useless as is due to shock damage.  And building up to the full 500T (or 1000T) would allow you to pack a lot of punch in a small but very fragile package.

This would technically work: a quick test build shows that at MaxTech (i.e. best armor tech) you can just barely squeeze in a single-shot 10cm railgun with R1 power plant (again, MaxTech), 0.5-HS engine + 1,000 L of fuel, and a SW-BFC with 0.25x range and 3.0x speed - you'd really like to tune the engine + BFC to get 4x tracking speed but that's not feasible in 100 tons. This leaves you with 5 tons extra to make an even 100 tons, probably the optimal design would be a 3.1x or 3.2x BFC speed multiplier and a 97-ton craft to match speed and BFC, but for the sake of example I just threw an engineering space or fuel storage on to fill tonnage. Total armor weight was 0.04 HS (2 tons) so not a limiting factor at all.

However, for pretty much anything significantly below MaxTech the only thing you can make a 100-ton fighter out of is a Gauss cannon (bad) or a box launcher (boring, to the kind of person who desires viable sub-100 ton fighters), even if you neglect armor weight, as you simply lose so much tonnage to reactor, BFC, etc. at lower tech levels. A single-shot railgun already takes 49 tons before even thinking about a power plant, BFC, or engine to work up a useful speed. At TN Start tech, a single-shot 10cm Railgun plus R1 power plant already take 1.61 HS (about 80 tons), decreasing to 1.07 HS (about 53 tons) at MaxTech, basically you need to get this total under ~60 tons (~11 tons for the reactor) to have a viable 100-ton fighter. Really armor is not the limiting factor for fighters at most tech levels, the bigger challenge is the discrete nature of firepower and components. As Steve said, this isn't necessarily a bad (or good) thing, it is a consequence of maintaining equity between small and large ships.

Which brings up another question: if we allow this exception for fighters/FACs, what reason is there to not allow the same for larger ships? I think having such an exception would be questionable given Steve's position on the subject, since it allows fighters/FACs a capability that larger ships are not allowed to use. Although, you can argue that there is a tenuous precedent since fighters/FACs already don't have to mount Bridge components, but this is not really a capability as much as a design concession to these special classes so I am not sure such an argument holds up.

[Froggiest1982]

I honestly think that the whole fighter debates are due to the fact there are fighters still in Aurora C# while they are pretty much extinct from what they were in VB6.

Squadrons are gone and so are fighter mechanics as they are now compared to true ships.

In facts, I would actually say that either one of the 2 should be true for consistency:

a - remove fighter factories and fighters/FAC also making bridges mandatory for all ships. Remove all fighter exceptions and mechanics.

b - extend the fighter exceptions to all FAC renaming fighter factories FAC factories. So all ships under 1,000 tons would act as fighters are acting now.

To be honest coming up with a new name altogether would be even better, but FAC could still work.

I know it's extreme, but I always think that we have been left with an hybrid sort of mechanic while truth is that you will require an entire different framework to have fighters the way people expect: 1 pilot, few weapons, small tonnage, ecc

[Steve Walmsley]

The bridge isn't an exemption for fighters/FAC, but rather a requirement for a central command facility for ships beyond a certain size (1000 tons). FAC is just the common terminology for ships below that limit.

'Fighters' are those ships that are small enough (500 tons) to reach a planetary surface and can therefore be built there.

It would be possible to make those two limits the same amount, but there isn't any compelling reason to do so. 1000 ton and 500 ton ships are distinct enough to have different common references. I have just started a Battlestar Galactica game with 300-ton fighters (Vipers with 2-shot railguns) and 1000-ton Raptors used for surveying, scouting and marine assault.

[misanthropope]

istr there was originally some kind of "to keep the vacuum out" rationale for the necessity of armor.  you could invoke some similar idea to justify allowing zero armor for military units but at the cost of some kind of increased maintenance or failure rate.  this would make zero armor an uniformly available option that would probably tend to be used for parasite type units only. 

i have no horse in the race; recon fighters are essential and non-recon fighters are ruled out on a click-economy basis in my world, and only a gigantic change to game would change that.  it may be true for other universes that making those box launcher fighters smaller and cheaper is ultimately undesirable.

[xenoscepter]

I honestly think that the whole fighter debates are due to the fact there are fighters still in Aurora C# while they are pretty much extinct from what they were in VB6.

Squadrons are gone and so are fighter mechanics as they are now compared to true ships.

In facts, I would actually say that either one of the 2 should be true for consistency:

a - remove fighter factories and fighters/FAC also making bridges mandatory for all ships. Remove all fighter exceptions and mechanics.

b - extend the fighter exceptions to all FAC renaming fighter factories FAC factories. So all ships under 1,000 tons would act as fighters are acting now.

To be honest coming up with a new name altogether would be even better, but FAC could still work.

I know it's extreme, but I always think that we have been left with an hybrid sort of mechanic while truth is that you will require an entire different framework to have fighters the way people expect: 1 pilot, few weapons, small tonnage, ecc

 --- Or, ya know, not throw it out because C# isn't finished and was released early by Steve because we begged for it? frakks sake, I'm sorry dude, but this post irritated me. Other posts in the same spirit do too, though as they all make me wanna scream "IT'S NOT DONE, STOP WHINIG FOR frakkS SAKE!" I'm just quoting this post as an example and this is little more than a frivolous rant a (what feels like) a long time in the making.

 --- Now that the venting is complete, No Armor actually sounds pretty cool mechanically, but I think it might be weird in terms of consistency. What is it about this Structural Shell that makes it prohibit engines and guns for things over 500 tons, but not under them? I assumed the reason it was prohibited on all classes regardless of tonnage was that the force of the engines and / or guns would damage the frail shell. This falls apart when we consider that not all military components are guns, but then we must consider that this a game and thus gameplay matters.

 --- Personally, I'd vote for No Armor option for everything merely because it wouldn't really be an optimal choice for anything but what it is used for now and maybe Fighters / FACs. After all, if the player goes, "Haha, shield no armor strat go brrrrrr." they will be laughing all the way to the bug nest... where they will promptly be devoured. I could see it now, mighty and proud empire, laid low in their hubris by the discovery of the bugs who care not for shields, now put armor on their ships.

 --- On the subject of Abandon Ship; I'd personally like the option to offload crew, abandon ship and scuttle, with all three orders requiring time to carry out as do many of the new orders. It takes time to load missiles, pump fuel and stock MSP, but lifeboats are loaded and launched instantly & without incident from 1/10th of a ship the very attosecond before it explodes taking all (remaining) hands down with it? That's pretty nifty. Would make Salvage modules on space stations an interesting replacement for shipyards in the scrapping role. Civilian Shipping could have Salvage Yards much like they have Harvesters and the like, allowing the player to use their Wealth to Scrap things instead of population. Other things it would add would be a meaningful decision when abandoning ship, scuttling (which should take longer, tbh) and seeing if they can make it through the fight.

 --- On the subject of Wealth, perhaps have pop shortages cut into it? Something simple, like 10% of pop is "unemployed" 10% of wealth generated by said planet is lost to Welfare, theft, or whathaveyou.

[nuclearslurpee]

--- On the subject of Wealth, perhaps have pop shortages cut into it? Something simple, like 10% of pop is "unemployed" 10% of wealth generated by said planet is lost to Welfare, theft, or whathaveyou.

This is a good idea to make excess wealth a little bit useful and make "unemployed" population have some effect without crippling an empire or being overly annoying for players. Spending extra cash on a welfare state makes good fluff sense, but a new colony that doesn't generate much wealth anyways while you ship a bunch of colonists out to the cold, harsh frontier to set up for the future factory/mine shipments won't crash your empire. Overall I like this much better than the usual proposals that unemployed people should generate unrest.

[Droll]

--- On the subject of Wealth, perhaps have pop shortages cut into it? Something simple, like 10% of pop is "unemployed" 10% of wealth generated by said planet is lost to Welfare, theft, or whathaveyou.

This is a good idea to make excess wealth a little bit useful and make "unemployed" population have some effect without crippling an empire or being overly annoying for players. Spending extra cash on a welfare state makes good fluff sense, but a new colony that doesn't generate much wealth anyways while you ship a bunch of colonists out to the cold, harsh frontier to set up for the future factory/mine shipments won't crash your empire. Overall I like this much better than the usual proposals that unemployed people should generate unrest.

If anything maybe excessive debt should start causing unrest so that unemployment by itself wont cause unrest problems but could in the longer term result in unrest. Granted, debt already has a pretty massive effect so idk how good an idea it is to add yet another malus.

[xenoscepter]

--- On the subject of Wealth, perhaps have pop shortages cut into it? Something simple, like 10% of pop is "unemployed" 10% of wealth generated by said planet is lost to Welfare, theft, or whathaveyou.

This is a good idea to make excess wealth a little bit useful and make "unemployed" population have some effect without crippling an empire or being overly annoying for players. Spending extra cash on a welfare state makes good fluff sense, but a new colony that doesn't generate much wealth anyways while you ship a bunch of colonists out to the cold, harsh frontier to set up for the future factory/mine shipments won't crash your empire. Overall I like this much better than the usual proposals that unemployed people should generate unrest.

If anything maybe excessive debt should start causing unrest so that unemployment by itself wont cause unrest problems but could in the longer term result in unrest. Granted, debt already has a pretty massive effect so idk how good an idea it is to add yet another malus.

 --- Yeah debt is fine on it's own as is IMO. Debt / "Unemployment" would be ok to add unrest if that unrest generation was tied to pop count / Industrial Capacity. Off the cuff something like, oh IDK, top 10 most populated worlds in addition to worlds with "largest" industries. So a 4 million pop world would still generate Debt /"Unemployment" unrest if it has 90% of say, the empire's fuel refining or something. The rate of generation would likewise scale with not only how many of the "largest" industries a colony had, but how close it was to being the most populated. So 90% of the empires population controlling 90% of the empires overall industrial would generate HUGE amounts of unrest if the empire was massively in debt or if like say, a significant portion of them were "unemployed".

 --- A few ways to look at that would be that such a world was so corrupt that the "unemployed" were still working, but were effectively unpaid slaves. Or the impoverished 15%, being on a world with 90% of your empire's total pop, constitute enough overall that their unrest is the only unrest worth tracking. Or the Welfare costs needed to keep the 30% unemployed pop afloat is pissing off the folks who want to put up a Space Starbucks where the homeless shelter is and complain about the tax costs of keeping it there.

 --- This would make centralization of a economy come with an increased requirement to keep said population of said centralized economic world happy. Which is a rather sensible thing overall, no?

[Scandinavian]

The thing is, the "unemployed" population probably isn't actually idle - just doing things not modeled in the economy model of Aurora.

The terminology of the economic model of Aurora does not correspond to any real-world macroeconomic model or theory - and that is probably for the best. After all, the economy of an empire will depend extremely heavily on the political system of the empire. In a hive mind species, you probably wouldn't have "money" as we understand it. In a neo-feudal cyberpunk dystopia you would have money, but it would have a very different economic function from the one we are familiar with. A WH40K Imperium style garrison state would have some mix of feudal corvee, militarized command economy and monetary production. And so on and so forth and etc. So I think it works very well that we stay in the realm of broad abstractions

"Wealth" functions in Aurora as a sort of "reserve of untapped industrial capacity;" representing such things as (non-TN-)factories, civilian consumption that could be rationed to free up labor and materiel for wartime production, dual-use civilian goods that could be diverted to wartime use, etc. You're not "spending a government budget," so much as mobilizing your economy for wartime production. Which could be done through government spending, if your economy is organized around money and balance sheets. Or by calling up the levies if your economy is organized along feudal retinues. Or by any other mechanism by which a society decides what ends to collectively put its time, talent and treasure toward. The reason "going into debt" degrades your production capacity is that an economy can only maintain an over-mobilized state for so long before it begins to degrade its productive capacity. And once degraded, some time must be spent re-investing in restoring the neglected or degraded parts of your supply chains ("repaying the debt").

These constraints will apply however your society is organized, and whatever accounting conventions it uses, because they are statements about actual reality and not merely about money (which is just a political tool to organize society).

Similarly, the "manufacturing" sector in Aurora is better thought of as the total labor force that can be allocated to the broader military-industrial complex. People who make MRI scanners for hospitals are "manufacturing" in real world national accounting convention, but in Aurora they would be "service" or "life support" sector. While people who work in materials science labs are "service" sector in our world and "manufacturing" in Aurora.

So Aurora's "unemployed" aren't necessarily a "reserve army of the unemployed" subsisting on a dole or impressed into a Victorian work house. They could be, of course, if that is how you want to contextualize your empire's political economy. But they could also be entirely gainfully employed in manufacturing consumer goods, in sectors that could be easily temporarily or permanently diverted into wartime production. Or even hibernating members of your hive mind species that could be called up to work in the factories.

Getting too specific about the macroeconomic interpretations of the Aurora abstractions would risk creating some very jarring jumps in abstraction levels - and would also mean that you lock Aurora into a specific political economy. Which does not seem very justified from a gameplay or RP perspective.

[xenoscepter]

The thing is, the "unemployed" population probably isn't actually idle - just doing things not modeled in the economy model of Aurora.

...snip by Xenoscepter...

Getting too specific about the macroeconomic interpretations of the Aurora abstractions would risk creating some very jarring jumps in abstraction levels - and would also mean that you lock Aurora into a specific political economy. Which does not seem very justified from a gameplay or RP perspective.

 --- Accuse me of cherry-picking if ya want, but these things kinda contradict each other, no?

 --- Criticism aside, this convo should be moved to it's own thread, for we have hijacked OP's. To wit and grossly over-simplified, my response is: "You're wrong, because Available Workers are those left over after calculation for Agriculture, Services, Manufacturing AND the player-built industries is done. It is the remainder, and thus abstracting them as "Unemployed, Gulag'd, Non-Successful Start-Ups / Small Business seems like a safe bet."

 --- We can continue this in a new thread if you'd like something more meaty.

[linkxsc]

If you have ideas to make small craft more interesting (not more powerful per HS), then as long as they can be explained within that framework it is fine.

When I was thinking about this while writing my earlier post, one thought I had was to allow reduced-size versions of weapons that have a highly-elevated failure rate - mainly as this would allow the same weapons to be mounted on larger ships with the same downsides. However I think it would be very difficult to balance as MSP (to fix weapon failures) is quite cheap and space-efficient to put on larger ships, so this would basically be the same DPS-multiplication problem we had with 1.13 reduced-shot railguns and I wouldn't want to repeat that particular exploit.

Maybe if they also explode when they malfunction? Just kidding...

I have considered smaller than 10cm weapons that have less than a 100% chance to penetrate armour, damage shields or destroy missiles. If a weapon was 55% of the size with a 50% chance to penetrate for example, it becomes less effective over the long-term than a 'normal' weapon. This means it wouldn't be that useful for energy-based point defence, but fine for fighters that are trying to swarm a target.

Well, If you assume the 6HS version of a Gauss Cannon equivalent to a "10 cm" weapon... you've already effectively got this system in place for 1 weapons system. The question I'd have, is... do "Small Caliber" railguns, lasers, or whatever, have reduced range as well? As a 10cm rail has half the range of a 20cm, so naturally one would assume a 5cm have half the 10.

Though even with reduction to range. I could see a niche area where 5cm weapons, especially lasers (with 50% range, and a flat 50% tohit penalty) could still shine, esp when combined with other size reduction techs. Still not effective for Missile Interception duty compared to GCs, but could have a place on fighters, or madlads who think that they can get their ship of 100 guns to point blank. (And by extension being very weak in battles against ships with any large caliber beam weapons, that will easily outrange)

[ArcWolf (OP)]

Ok, so was playing around today with designing a 50t fighter using Ion Tech.

Basic Ship systems:

Off-Topic: show

Between the Crew Quarters -Fighter, the Engineering Space -Fighter, the Fule Storage - fighter, and the composite armour, that already accounts for 11tons.

That leaves 39tons for the engine, fire control & weapon system.

a .3HS engine (15 tons) at 200% provides 7.5ep, or enough to get a 50t fighter to 7,500 km/s. That sounds fair for a Ion Fighter. Now we have a weight of 29t, leaving 21t.

The fire control is a SW, 0.2x range (12,800 km) and 2x tracking speed (8,000 km/s) which comes out as .1 HS or 5 tons. This brings our total up to 34t with 16t left for a weapon system.

The smallest weapon systems currently are a .5HS (25t) Gauss cannon, with 8% innate accuracy, or a single shot, 10cm rail gun at .975HS (49t) plus a .6HS (30t) power plant with a 30% boost, for a total of 79t.

The Gauss fighter, at 62t is pretty close to the goal, the Railgun fighter though, comes in at 121t, which is not what i am looking for. So to keep the weapon power/HS roughly equal, i am looking for something about 1/2 the power of a .5HS gauss or 1/5 the power of a SS 10cm rail gun.

Weapon Efficiency:

Off-Topic: show

The fire control i designed has 22% accuracy at 10,000km. For the rail gun that means 2.64 hits per 12 shots. (1 hit every 30secs)

for the .5HS Gauss, the actually weapon accuracy after the 8% modifier is 1.76%. Which is 1 hit per 60 shots. (1 hit every 100secs @RoF3/75sec @RoF4)

Since the SS 10cm railgun (+Reactor) come out as a little over 3x the weight of the .5HS Gauss, this is pretty even.

Now Steve mentioned toying with the idea of weapons that had a chance to damage-on-hit. A new Weapon tech, lets call them auto-cannons for simplicity for now. You have 4 "levels". 20cal, 30cal,40cal & 50cal (2cm,3cm,4cm & 5cm), incrementing in 5,000 per tech level. So 5,000rp for 2cm, 10,000rp for 3cm, etc. All auto-cannons have a max range of 10,000km. Since ideally i thinking of actual bullets being fired by these weapons, no need for a Power supply like a railgun. As the caliber of the Auto-cannon goes up, the chance to penetrate also goes up. So a 5cm would have 50% chance per hit (so 1 damaging hit per 60 sec), and a 2cm would have a 20% chance per hit (so roughly 1 damaging hit every 150sec). Rate of fire will stay as 1 per 5 seconds (of course this is really more of 1 volley per 5 seconds). An additional tech can be introduced that increases the penetration chance by 1% per level. So at max tech a 5cm has a 60% pen chance as opposed to 50%. Since gauss improves RoF with tech, having ACs improve pen% with tech should be balanced.

So currently, there is no true "ammo" (not counting missiles). And it's been mentioned to avoid "special cases" since Steve wants to eliminate them, though i include this just to float the idea: Each ship with an AC has to load "ammo" (into the weapon like loading a missile into a launcher or a fighter-pod). Ammo is crafted in a missile factory, and each instance of "ammo" will allow each AC to fire a certain # of times. "Ammo" can be transported like missiles in a magazine, each "ammo" weighs 1MSP (2.5t) and if detonated explodes with the force of a size 1 warhead.

edit: I should add that reloading would be handled exactly like box launchers/missile launchers on parasite craft.

The Number of shots each weapon gets per "ammo" is based of the size of the weapon. A 5cm uses X amount of "ammo" per shot (2% for example), a 4cm, being 80% the size of 5cm uses Y=x*.8 (1.6% in this example). 3cm would use 1.2% and 2cm would use .8%. This would give a 5cm AC 50 shots, a 4cm 62 (rounded down), 3cm 83 (rounded down) and a 2cm 125.

TLDR Weapon Stats:

Off-Topic: show

Max Range: 10,000km
RoF: 1 shot per 5secs
Weapon Sizes: 2cm,3cm,4cm,5cm
Weapon damage: 20% chance/hit for 2cm, 50% chance/hit for 5cm
Weapon sizes: 2cm =.3HS (15t), 3cm = .425HS (21.25t), 4cm = .55HS (27.5t), 5cm = .8HS (40t)
Tech Cost: 5,000RP Increments

Thoughts? This should be much more balanced then my original idea, essentially being scaled down versions of single shot railguns with a set max range.

[Garfunkel]

That is an interesting idea for micro-fighters.

How does the damage output (let's say at 50% chance) compare to equal tech single-shot railguns that still fire every 5 sec, tonnage wise? Could I stack a battleship full of these and unleash hell at 10,000 km?