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[RAM]

I would like a weapon and more transport craft. Or armed transport craft. My missiles ought to operate in space if they have a space-suit... The first turn seems like a big grab-bag, to try to initialise combat in as many places as possible so we have choices later-on.

I HAVE pplayed Aurora 4x and DO know that engines is best! but I am not convinced that we want to jump to fusion when our gear is quite this terribad.

[VoidSlayer]

We kinda need things to move around before we upgrade the transports.

[Taricus]

Kevlar plates aren't that practical. And jumping to fusion means we have a ready power source to develop lasers and other energy hungry weapons.

[RAM]

I figure that we can get cheaper transports from a revision. At preent we only have three transports, so can presumably only hit three planets. It'd be nice to have more... If we get a good fursion tech we could revise the transports to be more efficient, but I don't see that hapenning...

[Taricus]

MAybe, but we coudl also get better guns or armoured spacesuits in a revision too.

[chubby2man]

I think fusion engines are a good goal to start working towards, +1 to that.
I think more transport ships are also going to be a priority, as we will need them to transfer back the resources from the many worlds we conquer

[S34N1C]

Fusion Engines (3?): Taricus, chubby2man, S34N1C

[Azzuro]

Fusion Engines (4): Taricus, chubby2man, S34N1C, Azzuro

Bandwagon?

[RAM]

Bandwagon?

4 Fusion Engines: Taricus, chubby2man, S34N1C, Azzuro
0 Happenstance missiles
0 Iron Turtle Hardened Space Suit

More like a one-horse race. Please try to make an attempt to keep all the items on the list.

I like fusion engines, but it is the wrong time. Missiles give us a basic understanding of manoeuvrability and suicidal docrtines. They ought to be able to kill hardened enemies 20-1, damage enemy transports, and sow disorder in enemy organisation. All with existing technology so I can throw in an attempt to make an extremely simple piloting A.I.. We NEED some way to gain ground on the first turn, otherwise we just let them roll over the planets and we hav precisely zero resources. I one hundred percepnt support fusion engines as our first big project, nand getting it soon, but we NEEEED! inter-ship weaponry and somethign mildly effective on the ground first. And we need more transport capacity too. Missiles lead into better transports, letting us do that with a revision, and we end up with ground, space, and transport combat all raised to competent. THEN we can jump onto fusion while we have eneough to stall their advance.

[Taricus]

Something effective on the ground is something we can revise. They only have three transports so we're fine on that front for now. As for missiles leading to better transports that is a VERY wrong assumption. It might lead to better chemical thrusters but with PD being present they are a dead-end tech.

[RAM]

Missiles are not a dead-end, and the A.I. for massed P.D. is a while off. You can do serious damage with a very small missile, and a small missile can random-walk to evade P.D. fire at a decent range, at which point it splits into micro-missiles that can overwhelm any sane P.D.. And if they invest in P.D. then they have to compromise on main-guns and enlarge their ships, makign them easier targets for our own main guns.

And I am not talking about long-term shuttle improvements. I am talking about getting a couple more shuttles from this turn(Although chemical boosters and atmospheric handling are releavant to long-term goals). We really need a strong first-turn and a universal and capable weapon combined with a small increase in transport numbers means that we can secure the resources that we will need in order to embark on the fusion technology that we all want.

The best technology that we currently possess is rockets. Our chemical rockets are superior to real-world. Our everything else is sort of lame. This lets us put our best technology into a useable platform to get immediate gains. It wouldn't even matter if it WERE a dead-end, the first turn is worth it.

A revision for ground-combat gets us a slightly better gun, probably some sort of rifle if we are really lucky. It gets us absolutely nothing for shuttle-to-shuttle combat(Unless we want to invoke the "Drive the interplanetary shuttle closer so I can shoot it with my gun" meme...) and leaves us with barely any hope of exceeding enemy performance in any field.

Instead we do the missiles, we then revise our transports to launch missiles in space and try to use our rocketry experience on the missiles to improve the shuttles generally enough to lower their cost without reducing their capacity. Or maybe we just cheese the system and slap a new designation on it so that we can get two production lines of shuttle...

With that up our first turn can be to attack more than one planet and hafve some hope at all of surviving when their shuttles start shooting at us...

[Chiefwaffles]

Missiles wouldn't be hard to make. Both colonies have enough knowledge of rocketry and explosives to make a reliable missile.
Things like tracking, further explosive power, and any other special features you may come up with are the main issues in design.

In fact, basic missiles can be included as a part of another design, but it will add complexity.

[RAM]

On reconsidering, missiles are not just not dead-end, but actualy the only viable late-game ordnance. The only factor in interplanetary ship combat is agility. The sole issue is how effectively you can dodge, because if the enemy knows where you will be when their shot has covered the distance between you then you die. You can only get so much agility on an interplanetary craft. Missiles can take many froms, from laser-drones to kinetic clouds, but the key factor is that they have mass optimised for combat, which means that they can close to a much closer distance before the probability of being hit rises to critical levels, and they mass is low enough that expected losses are tolerable. It is the absemce of missiles, things like massive spinal lasers that can crack a ship in half, or mass drivers that require a big ship to provide a launching platform, that are the dead-end technologies.

[Taricus]

I dunno coilguns and railguns will boost a projectile to far higher velocities for far less cost per shot. Shuttle to shuttle combat is... well, we just don't have the space for missiles on them. A small cannon at most is basically what we can put on them.

[Chiefwaffles]

Design: Fusion Engine
6-3, 1-2, 2-4

The first thing decided when starting the Fusion Engine project was to limit the scope - no matter how lucky the design teams are, we wouldn't be able to create anything other than extremely unwieldy prone-to-critical-malfunction "working" prototypes at best. So we set upon this project with the goal to make as much progress as possible in the field of fusion engines, and preferably even cold fusion.

Cold fusion was a noble idea, but it simply wasn't possible to explore at this point. With more knowledge of fusion we can look into it, but for now we have to focus on simply creating a positive-energy controlled fusion reaction. And we did.
The Tokamak concept was taken from our data archives and fiercely worked on by Amaok's best engineers. The latest advancements in material and energy-based sciences both on the colony and made on Earth before our departure were applied, and after quite a while of working, we managed to produce an actual working prototype.

The Fusion Engine is a very large device - roughly 1 mile in radius - currently located on Amaok. It's been found to produce notable amounts of energy after being turned on for very long periods of time and significant energy costs to keep it running before it's outputting power. Its power output when on is still very small compared to other existing power generation techniques of the same size, but is still enough that it could be considered a power plant.

As it stands, the Fusion Engine is in a very isolated part of Amaok and kept off at all times. It was discovered that the Fusion Engine's containment field is... exaggerated. As soon as the device begins outputting power, the automated containment protocols make some kind of misjudgement and over-expand the containment field to a 10-mile radius around the Fusion Engine. In addition to essentially stunning the personnel inside the radius, the over-expanded containment field inside the Engine starts to cause the device to begin ripping itself apart while it wreaks havoc on anything remotely magnetic, including electronics, in the 10-mile radius. It's only through the sacrifice of a brave guard at the control room that the Fusion Engine didn't suffer a complete critical failure and was successfully shut down.

Central Command is disappointed with the apparent failure of the project, but still realizes it has potential.


It is now the Revision Phase of 2206.