24th March 2022 05:34
While surveying the innermost planet of the Cambridge system, the Buckland class geological survey vessel Harland detects an unknown ship just over five million kilometers away and closing at high speed. Harland?s passive sensors are extremely limited, which is why the unknown ship was able to get so close without being detected earlier. Commander Elizabeth Booth, captain of the Harland, immediately notifies the other two Federation ships in the system, Einstein and Kepler, which are carrying out a gravitational survey. Unfortunately all three ships are unarmed so there is little they can do if the alien proves hostile. Their priority is to warn the rest of the Federation that evidence of aliens is no longer restricted to ruins. Both are a long way from the jump point on opposite sides of the system so it will take Einstein twelve days to reach the Manchester system, assuming she is not intercepted en route, with Kepler arriving thirteen days later.
The alien contact is moving at 5200 km/s, which is much faster than Harland?s top speed of 3750 km/s and appears to be about 7700 tons with strength 75 shields. Harland is unable to head directly for the jump point because the alien would quickly cut her off so Commander Booth orders her helmsman to head directly away from the alien ship and increase the time before interception takes place. In the meantime she tries to hail the alien but her communication attempts are either misunderstood or deliberately ignored.
27th October 2022
The task force enters orbit of the innermost planet of Swansea-B, a small, barren world covered with lakes of lava and molten metals, without detecting any contacts. It is possible whatever hostile force attacked Buckland has already left the system, or perhaps the ship was lost to some other cause, such as a catastrophic maintenance failure, although that seems unlikely. Admiral Rowley is determined to leave no stone unturned so he orders a search of the other two planets of Swansea-B and the outer planets of Swansea-A.
Midway between the second and third planets, the task force detects a contact at 240 million kilometers, closing from its port quarter at 5500 km/s, even faster than the alien in Cambridge. For some reason the alien ship must have been in the Swansea-B asteroid belt when the task force entered the inner system. Rear Admiral Rowley orders a reciprocal course to meet the alien head on. Based on the contact information, this is a much larger ship than in Swansea, almost fifteen thousand tons, and shields are strength-150, seven times stronger than the Victory class missile cruisers. Admiral Rowley attempts to hail the unknown, just in case this is an unfortunate case of a innocent ship being in the wrong place at the wrong time but his communication efforts are ignored. There is no way to know if this is from the same race as the first alien or that the galaxy is simply filled with hostile species. A worrying thought.
G'Day Steve, as the version 1.5 patch loads the program just before the battle, I played out these two battles to have a look how Aurora handles battles (and the short answer is that battles are
exciting).
I've included some comments below to give you some things to ponder......
Comments:
1) Is it possible to have a look at these "beserker" ship codes? I'm just curious as to what the ship designs are, and what level of technology these ships have.
2) Is it possible for the SM (at least) to check a system for the presense of beserkers? This is important due to the next point....
3) Aurora
REALLY needs to prompt the players with a pop-up when a new contact is detected. An example of why this is important is that when I was playing out these battles (I did the first battle twice, and the second battle three times), in 3 of the 5 battles I wasn't aware of the enemy ships until they were within range, and had already destroyed at least one of my ships! (This was due to the fact that I was incrimenting the time in 6 hour intervals - if I have used 1 day (or more) intervals, I wouldn't have been aware of the ships until
ALL of my ships had been destroyed!)
I know that it is going to be a pain to code, but unless a player is aware that a enemy ship is in the system (see comment 2) above), then a player would increment the time scale in 1 or 5 day increments - wouldn't allow a player enough time to respond to a new sensor contact.....
4) I noticed that the beserkers try and keep their target at approximately 200K range - however they tend to ignore other ships that are closer. An example of this is in the first battle, where the beserker targeted a missile cruiser. I was able to detach the escorts and they were able to get to point blank range to the beserker and kill it with laser fire before the beserker could kill the missile cruiser (for the second battle, this didn't work out as well, as the beserker was able to kill the missile cruisers quick enough that the detached escorts wasn't able to get to point blank range).
You might want to add some code to allow the beserker to change targets if a non-targeted ship gets to within a specified range.....
5) I noticed that in the second battle, that when a missile salvo attacked the beserker, it would give the missiles a 35% chance of hitting the beserker - but the
actual hit ratio was much lower then this (it was about 25%).
The figure given (35%) - is this an accurate figure (given the target's ECM verses the firers ECCM), or is it based
only on the firers firecontrol systems?
Final summation - unless the SM/player knows about the presence of a beserker/enemy ship in a system (see comment 2) above) (allowing the SM/player to increment the time in smaller increments), then some kind of automatic pop-up warning the SM/player that a possible hostile contact has been detected is needed. I
know that this is going to be a pain in the ass to code, but without it you will end up with the situation of an entire fleet being destroyed as no-one told the crews to raise sheilds and open fire........
