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[vaaern]

have no clue on how to mine,

Well, you've got mines on Earth that should be already mining. The basic procedure is to have ships with geological survey sensors survey planets, moons, comets and asteroids to find the minerals; and then to put automatic mines or ships with asteroid mining modules (they can do comets too) on the body and dig up the minerals. You'll need freighters or mass drivers to deliver them back to earth or wherever your industrial center is.

find jump points (and make gates, made a ship with the module but it's AFR is 20500 something ),

You have to build ships with gravitational survey sensors and then they survey places around a star to find jump points, similar to how geo-survey ships find minerals. The jump gate construction module is huge and expensive, so you need to place it in a ship with civilian engines and all other components, because civilian vessels don't require maintenance.

Also several of my ships are just staying at a certain planet with message "sp needed:244".

That would be survey points. You've ordered the ships to perform a geological survey, but if they don't have geological sensors, they won't make any progress.

Raaah, I finally got this thing working the way it should. Though now I'm so confused  I followed the tutorials but still have no clue on how to mine, find jump points (and make gates, made a ship with the module but it's AFR is 20500 something ), the fire control and other weapon design is even more confusing and I have a sorium harvester but no clue on how to use it.

Also several of my ships are just staying at a certain planet with message "sp needed:244".

HELP?

PS: also reading NATO vs Soviets (after action report), this sounds so cool, but is it really worth it? I'm trying distant worlds too.

1. Build mines (or automines for locations where you don't want to support a population); ship where they're needed. There was an explanation of cargo movement a few pages back.

2. Build a ship with one or more gravsurvey modules, give it permanent orders to survey the nearest survey point. (Design a ship with a JG construction module and no military parts. You likely added military engines or something; commercial shipping doesn't suffer breakdowns.)

3. Move it to a gas giant with Sorium deposits and it should start automatically collecting it. Note that you'll need fuel tanks to hold the refined Sorium and tankers to move it to your colonies.

4. "SP Needed: #" indicates the number of survey points the vessel needs to complete the geosurvey of that system body. With the base geosurvey module, you gain 1 SP per hour per module.

5. Luna, yes it is.


Darn space-ninjas are at it again. Or would it be space-ninja?

Thanks for the info (I'll restart and try this), should I then try and build all geo and grav survey vessels and cargo ships as a commercial vessel? And what about the fire control, do I need only one that covers the max distance of my furthest laser? or 2 for both lasers?

[forsaken1111]

You cannot build grav survey vessels as commercial, the gravity sensor is a military device and will always reclassify any ship its added to as military.

For fire control, you will need a beam fire control which has an equal or higher max range than the longest ranged weapon you intend to use with it. It will also need a maximum tracking speed equal or faster than the fastest tracking speed weapon you intend to use it with.

[Another]

Build everything you can commercial but grav-survey modules make a ship military (apparently it is not a bug but a design decision).

You can link any number of assorted beam weaponry to a single fire control but it all will only be able to fire at a single target at a time. That may be an issue against enemy FACs/fighters or for point defence (PD). It is common to use 1 fire control per 3-5 turrets and may be a good idea to have 1 longest possible range fire control for sniping and several small cheap but with good tracking for PD.

[Hanzoku]

Steve didn't want your curious civilians going off and mapping ~150 systems, activating multiple larger, more advanced and vicious civilizations and bogging your game to a crawl without your permission as those civilizations get into endless skirmishes.

[forsaken1111]

Steve didn't want your curious civilians going off and mapping ~150 systems, activating multiple larger, more advanced and vicious civilizations and bogging your game to a crawl without your permission as those civilizations get into endless skirmishes.

I think the thinking was more that expansion is a military action and military ships should be doing the exploration of unknown potentially hostile new systems. Even if grav sensors were civilian, there is no civilian AI coded to explore randomly.

[EuchreJack]

For fire control, you will need a beam fire control which has an equal or higher max range than the longest ranged weapon you intend to use with it. It will also need a maximum tracking speed equal or faster than the fastest tracking speed weapon you intend to use it with.

To clarify that a little bit, the tracking speed of beam weapons is equal to either the speed of your ship or the tracking speed of the turret housing the beam weapon.

So tracking speed of unturreted weapons will vary from ship to ship, and especially fast vessels might even have higher tracking speeds than your turreted weapons.

[Another]

And if your ship is very slow - unturreted weapon tracking speeds are also limited from below by your raw fire control speed rating technology level. At mid technology levels that may be enough for anything but PD.

[Flying Dice]

Also note both that turrets take substantially more mass than spinal-mount EW, and that railguns cannot be turreted. Particle beams are also spinal-mount only, and IIRC plasma carronades aren't turretable but have some sort of built in turret/tracking angle. So basically turreting is a choice you'll make based on the role of the weapon; you don't need turrets on fighters or for heavy EW, but you do need them for PD and (generally) secondary batteries of EW.

Gauss weapons can be spinal-mount or turreted, but are also used in CIWS, which is essentially a self-contained PD system with twin(?) gauss cannons, a FC, and a turret mount; they're completely automatic but only operate in final defence mode (not that gauss cannons have the range to do anything else). I don't recall the exact cutoff point where they're more/less efficient than normal gauss turret PD, but they're much handier for things like troop transports that just need a bit of protection in case they take a few stray shots.

[Sheb]

CIWS are also civilians (Like troop transport module I think) so you can just plop a few on all your ships.

[darkrider2]

CIWS can be used on any ship and is technically a commercial component, it won't make the ship suffer from military maintenance (little different for me I turn overhauls off and by extension maintenance, still put the engineering spaces in all my designs though). And compared to the size of commercial vessels, CIWS are tiny.

Anyway I tried using plasma carronades recently, but I kept getting the message that 'her weapons are not ready to fire' after assigning all the fire controls to targets and hitting open fire. How long does it take after leaving a jump point for your weapons to be useable again?

Also I've kinda been wondering, is it better to spam Gauss Cannons with small cannons in quad turrets or use the big ones with better % chance.

[Tarran]

I'm pretty sure it's the Fire Controls or perhaps the Active Sensors that are temporarily disabled when going through a Jump Point, not the weapons. And I'm also pretty sure, based on my experience, that beam weapons take a while to be ready to fire each time you cease firing and resume firing regardless of Jump Points.

As for Gauss, it's your choice: Higher potential hits but lower minimum hit rate, or lower potential hits but a higher minimum hit rate.

[Flying Dice]

CIWS can be used on any ship and is technically a commercial component, it won't make the ship suffer from military maintenance (little different for me I turn overhauls off and by extension maintenance, still put the engineering spaces in all my designs though). And compared to the size of commercial vessels, CIWS are tiny.

Anyway I tried using plasma carronades recently, but I kept getting the message that 'her weapons are not ready to fire' after assigning all the fire controls to targets and hitting open fire. How long does it take after leaving a jump point for your weapons to be useable again?

Also I've kinda been wondering, is it better to spam Gauss Cannons with small cannons in quad turrets or use the big ones with better % chance.

When a ship goes through a JP, sensors and FC are disabled for a while (IIRC to simulate the disruption in normal perception for the crew that the transit causes).

I seem to recall working out the numbers and that gauss cannon will have the same general percentage of success regardless of what size/accuracy rating you use, if you use equivalent numbers of them. There isn't too much point to making the smaller, less accurate ones unless you're trying to fit them on fighters. I tend to use larger numbers of single gauss turrets for PD, as (with sufficient FCs) they're able to engage more simultaneous salvos. I tend to do 4:1 or 5:1 turret:FC ratios for that setup. This also means that losing a single turret or FC is less damaging to efficiency, as you've only lost 1/4 of the firepower you'd lose if a quad turret was hit, and you can feed the stray turrets into other FC groups without seriously degrading PD coverage.

[Metalax]

Smaller gauss cannon do outperform their larger brethren, as long as you have a trained crew.

The maximum crew grade you can get through training alone is 2000 which equates to a +34% accuracy for your beam weapons, tihs is applied additively not multiplicativity. Ignoring range penalties to hit for the purposes of the comparison and comparing a full size cannon to a 50% size, 50% accuracy cannon, with an untrained crew you will score the same number of hits with each. However with a fully trained crew the smaller cannons now have twice the number of shots at 84% to hit, or scoring an average of 1.68 hits for every hit by the larger guns.

In practice you wouldn't achieve quite such a improvement due to range penalties, but you can see the general idea.

As I recall some time back someone over on the aurora forum ran the detailed calculations for all the permutations of the cannons. The size 4, 67% accuracy cannons worked out as the optimal size for fully trained crews.

[Flying Dice]

Of course, that assumes that the player is going to (be able to) take the time to run crews through long periods of training while also manually optimizing officers. Honestly I usually just fire every naval officer without training bonuses, crank the training level up to five (while building enough academies to keep up with my fleet's needs), and give new task groups a couple months of training to put the edge on. That, or I turn off inexperienced fleets and do training on my own terms (in the same way that I often deal with maint. reqs.). If I haven't already made it obvious in the past few hundred pages, I tend to remove the (to me) tedious bits of micromanagement in order to get to the meaty tactical combat and in order to make my internal RP less grindy and more interesting, usually compensating by cranking up the difficulty multiplier, doing conventional starts (also just because those are more fun), and starting with all three of the specials on. Mostly I'm just eagerly awaiting the version where we'll see NPR combat AI that's a challenge for reasons other than massive tech and numbers advantages, but until then I'll have to settle with giving them a big economic bonus, thirty years or so of head start, and an unfortunate tendency to get too into the small-scale RP. 


Aaaand I've finally got my shit together in my new campaign, with my first frigate class out of the gate after... 16 years. Time to have fun throwing Precursors out of some systems with crappy little things.

Code: [Select]

Wolf class Frigate    4,250 tons     347 Crew     699.4 BP      TCS 85  TH 360  EM 0
4235 km/s     Armour 4-23     Shields 0-0     Sensors 40/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 2     PPV 12
Maint Life 4.2 Years     MSP 206    AFR 72%    IFR 1%    1YR 19    5YR 280    Max Repair 80 MSP
Magazine 156   

Ion Engine E6 (6)    Power 60    Fuel Use 60%    Signature 60    Armour 0    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 265,000 Litres    Range 187.0 billion km   (511 days at full power)

Size 4 Missile Launcher (50% Reduction) (6)    Missile Size 4    Rate of Fire 300
Missile Fire Control FC68-R20 (1)     Range 68.7m km    Resolution 20
Sabre-4 I (39)  Speed: 23,100 km/s   End: 36.1m    Range: 50m km   WH: 4    Size: 4    TH: 154 / 92 / 46

Active Search Sensor MR53-R70 (1)     GPS 5600     Range 53.5m km    Resolution 70
Thermal Sensor TH5-40 (1)     Sensitivity 40     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  40m km

Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes


[darkrider2]

Ramming Attempt - An alien ship has attempted to ram Pilgram 004

I just received this message. And despite my surprise, this is pretty awesome, how can I do this.