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My current thought, assuming it can even be done, is to build the Survey Fighters and design a Survey Tender that can carry them. Maybe four or so. However many is possible or seems appropriate. This way they can operate independently for a while and maintain themselves at the mothership while also preparing for the inevitable alien invasion, those counter-revolutionary bastards.
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Oct 29, 2020 17:27
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By which I mean developing carrier designs that can quickly be repurposed for... peacekeeping duties with minimal Shipyard time.
Rhjamiz fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Oct 29, 2020 |
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Oct 29, 2020 17:28
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Are ranges measured in straight distances, instead of using more fuel efficient but less direct transfer orbits? Because at it's furthest oint Jupiter is about 1 billion km from the Earth, and Neptune can be as much as 4.7 billion km from Earth. Those small survey "fighters" with 11.4 billion km range should be able to travel across all the inner system and a large part of the outer system. If we were to hypothetically find some way to travel between systems we would probably need the tender or another larger survey ship.
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Oct 29, 2020 18:16
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Servetus posted:Are ranges measured in straight distances, instead of using more fuel efficient but less direct transfer orbits? Because at it's furthest oint Jupiter is about 1 billion km from the Earth, and Neptune can be as much as 4.7 billion km from Earth. Those small survey "fighters" with 11.4 billion km range should be able to travel across all the inner system and a large part of the outer system. If we were to hypothetically find some way to travel between systems we would probably need the tender or another larger survey ship. Imagine the efficiency of an exploration ship arriving at a new system somehow and releasing a small fleet of survey fighters. You’d cut survey times in half! Probably. Edit; it would also mean any catastrophic accident wouldn’t strand our comrades out there alone. If something happened, the Tender would be there to assist or at least, send word home. Rhjamiz fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Oct 29, 2020 |
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Oct 29, 2020 18:27
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Servetus posted:Are ranges measured in straight distances, instead of using more fuel efficient but less direct transfer orbits? Because at it's furthest oint Jupiter is about 1 billion km from the Earth, and Neptune can be as much as 4.7 billion km from Earth. Those small survey "fighters" with 11.4 billion km range should be able to travel across all the inner system and a large part of the outer system. If we were to hypothetically find some way to travel between systems we would probably need the tender or another larger survey ship. Aurora 4X does not have momentum or acceleration, so it's all straight-line hard burns. You can reduce the output of an engine in-flight, but that doesn't change its fuel use. If something says 11.4 billion km range, that's an absolute limit. Rhjamiz posted:What’s the range on those fighters? Could they zip to the belt and back in a reasonable time? Would they cover the Inner solar system at least? At 502 km/s they're not getting anywhere anytime fast. They can do the inner system fine, but they'd take forever to survey the whole system. The range is listed on the card—11.4b km. Rhjamiz posted:My current thought, assuming it can even be done, is to build the Survey Fighters and design a Survey Tender that can carry them. Maybe four or so. However many is possible or seems appropriate. This way they can operate independently for a while and maintain themselves at the mothership while also preparing for the inevitable alien invasion, those counter-revolutionary bastards. This is possible, although I'll note that it's micro-intensive for the person actually playing the game. The good thing about a survey carrier is that it doesn't need to be a military ship, although civilian hangars don't stop the maintenance clocks on ships they hold.
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Oct 29, 2020 18:30
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23 days to Jupiter at it's furthest point, 109 days to Neptune. With Foxfire's design it will be less than 8 days to Jupiter and around 35 to Neptune. At furthest distances in the orbits obviously.
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Oct 29, 2020 18:53
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Ah. Hmm. That is rather speedy in comparison.
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Oct 29, 2020 18:56
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The inner system trips should be easy in the Small Fry, but it's a long haul to explore the outer system without a faster tender/carrier to carry the Small Fry.Zurai posted:This is possible, although I'll note that it's micro-intensive for the person actually playing the game. The good thing about a survey carrier is that it doesn't need to be a military ship, although civilian hangars don't stop the maintenance clocks on ships they hold. This does beg the question: would making a "military" carrier with military hangers to carry our civilian survey craft be consistent with our present no warships regulations?
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Oct 29, 2020 19:06
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Servetus posted:Are ranges measured in straight distances, instead of using more fuel efficient but less direct transfer orbits? Because at it's furthest oint Jupiter is about 1 billion km from the Earth, and Neptune can be as much as 4.7 billion km from Earth. Those small survey "fighters" with 11.4 billion km range should be able to travel across all the inner system and a large part of the outer system. If we were to hypothetically find some way to travel between systems we would probably need the tender or another larger survey ship. Once an object is untethered from one of the rotating celestial spheres containing a planet or asteroid, it doesn't move without applying engine power. Idling ships, wrecks, buoys, etc.. don't move on their own. Veloxyll posted:
Commercial ships ignore the deployment time and maintenance rules. They require (1) no military systems, (2) 3 months deployment time, (3) one normal size engineering space PurpleXVI posted:What's fundamentally the more effective strategy? Building up a single powerful center of industry and using it to jumpstart others one at a time, or focusing on seeding dozens of smaller colonies and letting them grow with minimal support from a home base mostly focused on just pumping out seed operations? Apart from mining or strategic waystations, the only thing colonies mechanically do better than Earth is grow population. If there's no minerals on it & Earth hasn't reached population capacity, it's mechanically just a point for civilian trade and there's no reason to ever put industry there. Antilles posted:Is there something Earth can do to stop the growing overcrowing penalty on Lunagrad? If Infrastructure is the culprit can you build and ship it, like you did the facility? This will just kind of always happen because civilian shipping is dumb. Luna generates infrastructure itself, then the civilian colony ship algorithm doesn't consider capacity, it just sees that Luna wants colonists and transports a load that overfills it. It'll tend to happen less often once civilian freighters also launch since they will be shipping Earth's autogenerated infrastructure as trade goods and will generally keep pace
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Oct 29, 2020 19:14
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Servetus posted:This does beg the question: would making a "military" carrier with military hangers to carry our civilian survey craft be consistent with our present no warships regulations? As long as it isn’t armed itself I’d think it would be hard to call it a “warship”, military designation or not. That the design might be repurposed to carry armed fighters later is simply efficient use of design space. We can always iterate it to strap missile tubes to it if necessary.
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Oct 29, 2020 19:23
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assuming that our survey ships do find tnes out there to grab and that there are techs to unlock that improve the rate at which we can extract them, would it be better to focus on building up earth's industries to extract what we have or build facilities in the solar system? i lean towards the latter because it is a space game after all, just wondering
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Oct 29, 2020 19:41
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It's generally easiest to have one single major industrial center in a system where all the factories and population are, then a bunch of small to moderate sized mining colonies on bodies with large and/or accessible TNE deposits that fire all the minerals over to the industrial hub to feed the factories. Extraction colonies are extremely necessary but manufacturing is probably all best done on Earth for the forseeable future with its bottomless workforce and breathable air. If Luna doesn't have any TNE's then Lunagrad is very, very hosed. Crazycryodude fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Oct 29, 2020 |
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Oct 29, 2020 19:54
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Servetus posted:The inner system trips should be easy in the Small Fry, but it's a long haul to explore the outer system without a faster tender/carrier to carry the Small Fry. The survey craft are actually technically military designs by Aurora's rules, since both kinds of survey sensors are considered military components. They're definitely not warships, though. I think future laws are going to need to include more specificity in regards to what is and isn't a warship. For example, "civilian" ships (by Aurora's designation) can actually carry and launch (but not re-arm or maintain) true starfighters, while simply slapping a small, powerful engine on something or including the wrong types of sensors can classify something as a "military" ship in Aurora. Also, there is a type of weapon (CIWS, Close-In Weapon System, which in Aurora is an all-in-one point defense system) that can be fit on "civilian" ships, so even defining something as a warship by whether it's armed or not is probably not precise enough.
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Oct 29, 2020 20:12
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Crazycryodude posted:If Luna doesn't have any TNE's then Lunagrad is very, very hosed. Why? It might not be a strategically important center of mining and industry, but neither are most places on Earth. It's kind of like Minnesota or Vladivostok with slightly worse weather.
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Oct 29, 2020 20:30
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Zurai posted:For example, "civilian" ships (by Aurora's designation) can actually carry and launch (but not re-arm or maintain) true starfighters... ... this is concerning, given the trouble being caused by Gladio. Something to consider during the next legislative session.
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Oct 29, 2020 20:32
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Financial centers and academies don't require TNEs to function (just to be built), so even if Luna doesn't end up as a mining hotspot, its population can still be made use of.
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Oct 29, 2020 20:33
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Foxfire_ posted:Why? It might not be a strategically important center of mining and industry, but neither are most places on Earth. It's kind of like Minnesota or Vladivostok with slightly worse weather. Minnesota and Vladivostok are still places that humans can survive with minimal TNE-based life support infrastructure, jokes about the weather are fun but it's a fundamentally hostile environment to human existence in a way that nowhere on Earth except kinda maybe Antarctica is, and at least you can still breathe the air there. There is zero reason to put anything on Lunagrad if there's no TNE's there, research labs and financial centers would be much better off on the garden world 45 seconds away where their population wouldn't be tying up infrastructure that could be shipped somewhere with an actual industrial application. Earth being right there means anything besides a mine that you could build on the Moon would be better off on Earth. If Luna has TNE's, then great Lunagrad just became some of the most valuable mineral extraction real estate in the solar system. If it doesn't, we should really set up some plaques and monuments, leave behind a little (so little it's pure fluff) research colony, and ship everything and everyone else back down the well before it gets super out of hand and we're stuck pouring resources into a boondoggle colony with no use besides PR. Crazycryodude fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Oct 29, 2020 |
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Oct 29, 2020 20:44
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It's helpful to have a second academy complex with a different specialization, and that requires a second colony. And it really doesn't cost much in either time or minerals to make infrastructure.
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Oct 29, 2020 21:04
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It still adds up and there's no reason to build up a population of millions and millions on an airless rock with no TNE's when there is a perfectly good garden world right there next door. An academy is the kind of thing we can throw in on a moderately developed mining colony we were building anyways, it's not worth keeping a colony around for the sole purpose of supporting.
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Oct 29, 2020 21:06
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There's really no justification to uproot over a million people for a second time just to make numbers on a spreadsheet line up infinitesimally better.
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Oct 29, 2020 21:13
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They never should have been there in the first place, we massively jumped the gun on everything related to Lunagrad multiple times. Relocating a million refugees is a rounding error, we're riding herd on billions with far worse sob stories that don't require us to keep pouring resources into a giant airless sinkhole. Let's just really hope there's TNE's there and we don't have to worry about any of this.
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Oct 29, 2020 21:15
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It really costs nothing to grow and maintain if we're not using government factories to fast-build infrastructure. Some civilian ships will route there instead of a hypothetical further away colony, but the travel time from Earth is essentially zero, and that trade isn't an economic drag since its taxable and makes civilians build more ships. e: the mechanical min-max strategy is to colonize it regardless of minerals and drop a couple points of infrastructure on it, then let civilian trade grow it/grow the merchant marine Foxfire_ fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Oct 29, 2020 |
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Oct 29, 2020 21:18
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i think at some point we'll have to accept that things like lunagrad are done for story purposes. unless someone wants to raise the issue in-character and make a relocation proposal
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Oct 29, 2020 21:18
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It's entirely possible for the story to be "we got really excited about this brave new era of communism and Trans-Newtonian technology and did the big thing people have been dreaming about for millennia only to find out after a decade that it's kinda useless"
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Oct 29, 2020 21:20
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This seems like a complete non-issue whose only consequence is maybe it’s slightly inefficient. It’s a morale booster and the necessary first step.
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Oct 29, 2020 21:23
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If there's no TNE's that's all it will ever be though, we'll be scrambling to come up with a post-facto reason to keep Lunagrad existing while Mars or the Jupiter system or wherever the TNE's are hiding gets the heavy investment, passes it by, and turns Lunagrad into an antiquated relic. Which is a perfectly fine story to tell, just if I were playing the game with no narrative only mechanics I would be getting rid of the colony if there weren't any TNE's there. It's not the end of the world if we keep Lunagrad around with no TNE's, just not perfect play, it's not super critical that we have an evacuation plan in place even if I'd prefer it. And hopefully there are TNE's and this is all pointless anyways.
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Oct 29, 2020 21:28
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Foxfire_ posted:It really costs nothing to grow and maintain if we're not using government factories to fast-build infrastructure. Some civilian ships will route there instead of a hypothetical further away colony, but the travel time from Earth is essentially zero, and that trade isn't an economic drag since its taxable and makes civilians build more ships. Oh right, I forgot that the civilian economy will actually produce infrastructure for free. Yeah, there's literally no reason not to let Lunagrad grow.
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Oct 29, 2020 21:28
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Zurai posted:There's really no justification to uproot over a million people for a second time just to make numbers on a spreadsheet line up infinitesimally better. you vastly underestimate the audacity of Soviet central planning, comrade
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Oct 29, 2020 21:30
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surely it's good to have a place to test and refine colony infrastructure, if nothing else
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Oct 29, 2020 21:40
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Servetus posted:Are ranges measured in straight distances, instead of using more fuel efficient but less direct transfer orbits? Because at it's furthest oint Jupiter is about 1 billion km from the Earth, and Neptune can be as much as 4.7 billion km from Earth. Those small survey "fighters" with 11.4 billion km range should be able to travel across all the inner system and a large part of the outer system. If we were to hypothetically find some way to travel between systems we would probably need the tender or another larger survey ship. People have already responded, but yeah, sadly, proper orbital mechanics do not really exist in Aurora. For that matter, there is not really any acceleration or deceleration in Aurora, either; things can jump from 0 to their max speed more or less instantly, or slow from relativistic speeds to a stop instantly with no ill effects. The lore explanation is that Trans-Newtonian space behaves sort of like a fluid, so you've got resistance, drag, etc. A ship built out of TNEs can't burn to accelerate, turn off the engine, and then coast, for example, because when you turn off your engine the 'fluid' of TN space (officially called the Aether by the game's dev) acting on the ship will rapidly slow it to a stop. There's also no inertia in the Aether, so everything outside of a gravity well that doesn't have some kind of force acting on it will pretty much instantly stop dead, and will then just float there until something happens to it. Gravity works weirdly in the Aether - the planets and stars don't physically exist there, but their gravity wells do, and TNEs (which normally float freely in the Aether) get drawn into them and just hang out down there (until we use TN mines to drag them up). There are some more weird things with gravity - if we ever encounter a black hole we'll see just how weird they can get. At some point I'll do an in-universe write-up of how exactly TN space works as far as the Comintern understands. Out-of-universe it's extremely soft sci-fi space magic that bears more resemblance to how people thought space worked in the 1800s than how it actually works. It is pretty well thought out space magic and is for the most part very internally consistent, though, which I appreciate. The real life explanation is that it would be extremely complicated to simulate, particularly given the way this game is built (Aurora is essentially a Microsoft Access database and a user interface for querying or entering data into that database). Steve was for a time working on 'Newtonian Aurora', which would use simulated Newtonian physics, but he set it aside to focus on porting Aurora from VB6 to C#, which ended up taking like seven years. If Newtonian Aurora ever comes out it's not going to be anytime soon, although I will LP the poo poo out of it if it ever does.
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Oct 29, 2020 22:08
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I'm not sure exactly how taxing civilian trade is going to be handled by RP in this game, but I usually find it worth it to drop colonies on the larger bodies in-system that can be colonized without low-gravity infrastructure. Places like the Moon, Mars, Titan, and the Galilean moons I think. (Mercury also qualifies but I avoid it for RP reasons since the colony cost is unrealistically low. Tidally locked planets have 1/5 the temperature colony cost of non-tidally locked planets, and Mercury is modelled as tidally locked (I believe Steve has said this was intentional), even though it's actually in spin/orbit resonance.) Once the colony size gets up to 25(?) million you can set it to stop accepting colonists and instead be a source of them. So in the far future once Lunagrad gets big enough you could see people immigrating from there to Mars or wherever. Also, do we have low-gravity infrastructure researched yet? If we do, I'd like to formally propose that we set aside a bit of industry to produce ~1,000 units at a low rate (maybe 5% of our production capacity) in case we find an asteroid worth colonizing (or if we want to colonies Ceres or one of the larger rocks for RP purposes).
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Oct 29, 2020 22:52
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Realistically, yes, we should have given the moon a more thorough scientific survey before getting overexcited and turning it into a million+ population refugee camp. While it is in theory self-sufficient in a base subsistence way, it's difficult to imagine a future without a capacity for basically any heavy industry up the the modern TN-based standard, which seems the only way it can realistically expand its habitable infrastructure without just being a rump state totally beholden to Earth polities. Also, as delegate of the Democratic Republic of Minnesota, I must inform you President Mondale took great offense to all those weather jokes
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Oct 30, 2020 02:55
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Alright, design submissions closed! We won't bother with voting, obviously, and we'll continue on with this year. There won't be an update tonight because it was another long day (and I shredded my hands with safety wire), but I'll have one up tomorrow night. These new designs should really drive home just how revolutionary even very low-level Trans-Newtonian tech is - in particular, the freighter, despite being less than twice the size of the Luna, has four times the cargo capacity, and is over twice as fast. For reference, the fastest a real-life human spacecraft has ever travelled was 192 km/s, very briefly, during a gravity assist. The Apollo astronauts, the fastest humans to have ever lived, barely broke 11 km/s. 500+ is, by pre-TN standards, so ridiculously fast it's difficult to comprehend - and that's the speed we can achieve with a freighter, using literally the lowest-tech TN engine possible. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Oct 30, 2020 |
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Oct 30, 2020 05:59
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A question for people familiar with the game system: What techs or designs would help in creating self-sustaining Craftworld-esque ships of 1 million+ pops. My guess is that would be at least mid-game tech but I want to start moving in that direction for the NOMAD Space Caravans. In the shorter term I'd like to know if a self sustaining caravan of several ships (of much less population than 1 million) would be even feasible
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Oct 30, 2020 19:24
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You can't have population living permanently on mobile ships, unfortunately. Orbital habitat modules can hold 200k people, but they are loving massive and basically impossible to fit in a shipyard, they're only practical on engineless space stations built with planetside industry. They're very useful for doing something like colonizing Venus or similar very high colony cost bodies, you can build some habitats at your nearest industrial center and tow them into orbit of a body so all your colonists working the Venusian mines can live there instead of wildly expensive surface bunkers, but I don't think you can deploy them in deep space and even if you did there's very little for the population to do in deep space. You could maybe get around that by building a flotilla of tugs and dragging your habitation stations around between planets but I believe (not sure) that habitats can't be towed while there are people living in them so you'd need another attendant fleet of cryo storage barges to hold the whole population in transit. There's definitely no economic reason to do any of that, but it could mostly be kludged together at great expense. Crazycryodude fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Oct 30, 2020 |
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Oct 30, 2020 19:37
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re:venus specifically, Wouldn't it be cheaper to build multiple terraforming stations for the price of an orbital habitat? You also don't have to worry about the civiliian economy dumping too many colonists on the planet either.
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Oct 30, 2020 19:44
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You can deploy a space station anywhere, and a space station with a habitat module can function as a planet for the purposes of R&R (or at least, that was the original plan going into the C# rewrite of the game code, dunno if it ended up being implemented).
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Oct 30, 2020 19:52
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Terraformers take time to make a planet habitable (and for Venus it can take a LONG time) while an orbital habitat is ready to receive workers the second it arrives, plus terraformers only change the atmosphere, if the gravity is what's loving up the colony cost then there's nothing you can ever do so orbital habs are always good for high gravity bodies.
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Oct 30, 2020 19:52
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This thread is excellent! How advanced is the Roswell craft? Is it in the "basically magic" range or does the Comintern understand what technology they are lacking to be able to duplicate it? For example, is it made of the same armour which was just developed? Darkrenown fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Oct 30, 2020 |
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Oct 30, 2020 19:54
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Cannot be that high since the us was described as making crude copies of it in the backstory. It's engine is probably an ion-drive at most since if they could copy any of the crazier stuff they'd have economical fusion.
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Oct 30, 2020 20:07
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