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[Iosyn]

That sound

In my current campaign, I call a 10,000 ton ship a Cruiser. Some people do build multimillion ton super-dreadnaughts though, so it's definitely possible to have different design philosophies.

Well, there's my next megaproject right there. Multimillion tonne ship? oh damn 
And here I was only thinking about maybe a few hundred thousand tonne Damacleses from the G-Police intro movie.
Fit it with nothing but point defences and guided box missiles... It'll be ridiculous.

@Metalax thanks for the tips man, I need em lol. The engineering spaces were just there to strip down the AFR from about 4000% or so-- and yes, I stuck a second reactor in for redundancy so I may as well lose the smaller one and just get another big one. As for the lasers, the twin 10cm turrets are for PD and the 12cm are anti-ship. I just stuck with a single type of fast-tracking FCS for both types. As it stands there's a lot of stuff for me to think about now lol. Back to the drawing board o7

[Girlinhat]

I've always wanted to make a planet basher.  Missiles with a 0 flight time are able to function as orbital bombs, and can be used against planets.  Just load 300 box launchers and wipe the whole damn planet.

[Karlito]

The engineering spaces were just there to strip down the AFR from about 4000% or so

Yeah, AFR isn't the number you want to watch- maintainane life is the important one. You aren't the first person to be tripped up by that (especially in earlier versions when it was listed first) and I'm sure you won't be that last.

[Flying Dice]

Well, maintenance life and the maximum repair value. You can easily come up with a ship with a 3-4 year ideal deployment time which is incapable of repairing its active sensor even with full supply stores.


Re: the ship itself:

1. You're going to have a bloody difficult time fighting FACs and Swarm Soldiers with that sort of resolution on your AS and MFCs.

2. There's no point to using multiple classes of laser when the difference is that small and they aren't optimized for a specific role.

3. You've got a 36 pps (power-per-second) requirement for your lasers, but your reactors are generating... 78.97 pps.

4. The maximum velocity is low, even for a TL3 ship in the current version. The range is even worse; even my FACs at a similar tech level are at about the same deployment range.

5. For a ship that large, you've got painfully thin defenses. A 5-layer thick armor belt isn't going to take very much damage, and you've got a single CIWS for PD. Granted, you could slave all of the laser turrets into a dedicated PD network, but that wouldn't do much against anything beyond a handful of hostile ships.

6. Which leads into this: The core design issue at low TLs is balancing performance, more so than at any other time because of the sheer inefficiency of everything. In the vast majority of cases I stick with FACs, corvettes, and frigates (<1kton; 1kton-5kton; 5kton-10kton respectively, by my system) until TL6ish, just because of how inefficient larger vessels are. By the time I start building heavy cruisers and such (25k-35kton), my tech is refined enough that I am able to do everything competently rather than accept sub-par systems. In other words, TL directly affects the level of performance you get per ton of ship, and IMO it isn't worth it to build large until near mid-game (in tech terms).

So the issues that aren't directly related to unnecessary redundancy, resolution, etc. are ones that can't really be solved as such, due to the inherent nature of low tech ships.

[Metalax]

@Metalax thanks for the tips man, I need em lol. The engineering spaces were just there to strip down the AFR from about 4000% or so-- and yes, I stuck a second reactor in for redundancy so I may as well lose the smaller one and just get another big one. As for the lasers, the twin 10cm turrets are for PD and the 12cm are anti-ship. I just stuck with a single type of fast-tracking FCS for both types. As it stands there's a lot of stuff for me to think about now lol. Back to the drawing board o7

At the ranges of your current PD guns, you are realistically only going to get one shot off at incoming missiles so you might as well set it to final fire point defence, at which point there is no need for your PD firecontrol to have a long range. You would likely be better served then by designing a 1x range 4x speed beam firecontrol for use by your PD guns and a 4x range 2 x speed firecontrol for your anti-ship lasers. You could then carry two of each to give yourself some redundancy and still be saving space over your current design. Droping the tracking speed on your anti-ship turrets should also save you a fair bit of space.

For the generators, your large one is putting out a lot more power than you need and you gain nothing from that. Design one that puts out just the power you need and use two of them for your redundancy.

That sound

In my current campaign, I call a 10,000 ton ship a Cruiser. Some people do build multimillion ton super-dreadnaughts though, so it's definitely possible to have different design philosophies.

Well, there's my next megaproject right there. Multimillion tonne ship? oh damn 
And here I was only thinking about maybe a few hundred thousand tonne Damacleses from the G-Police intro movie.
Fit it with nothing but point defences and guided box missiles... It'll be ridiculous.

I've been using something similar to this to beef up my alpha strike when invading a hostile system. A 10k ton engineless ship equipped with a tractor beam, a few firecontrols and stuffed full of box launchers. It gets tagged on to the back of my combat ships which tow it into range before detaching it and accelerating back up to combat speed. As they use the active sensors of the combat ships to pick up targets and are typically dropped off at a fair distance, they very rarely come under attack themselves.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Longshot class Missile Pod    10,000 tons     31 Crew     1090.4 BP      TCS 200  TH 0  EM 0
1 km/s     Armour 1-41     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 180
Maint Life 1.56 Years     MSP 102    AFR 533%    IFR 7.4%    1YR 48    5YR 719    Max Repair 100 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 6 months    Spare Berths 2   
Magazine 1200    Tractor Beam     


Size 6 Box Launcher (200)    Missile Size 6    Hangar Reload 45 minutes    MF Reload 7.5 hours
S-01 R-016 MR-138 Missile Fire Control (4)     Range 138.2m km    Resolution 16
Sparrow III Size 6 Anti-ship Missile (200)  Speed: 44,000 km/s   End: 49m    Range: 129.4m km   WH: 16    Size: 6    TH: 308/184/92

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

Further to the previous discussion on ship sizes, I cleaned up my list of class sizes that I've been using in my current games below.

Code: [Select]

FTR Fighter [250 ton]
FTR-B Fighter-Bomber [250 ton]
FTR-H Heavy Fighter [500 ton]
FTR-HB Heavy Fighter-Bomber [500 ton]
DRP Dropship [500 ton]
AWACS AWACS Craft [500 ton]
 GB Gunboat [1k ton]
COR Corvette [2-9k ton] - applies to any ship between gunboat and frigate
 FR Frigate [10k ton]
 FR-H Heavy Frigate [20k ton]
 DE-L Light Destroyer [30k ton]
 DE Destroyer [40k ton]
 DE-H Heavy Destroyer [50k ton]
 CR-L Light Cruiser [60k ton]
 CR Cruiser [80k ton]
 CR-L Heavy Cruiser [100k ton]
 CR-B Battle Cruiser [100k ton] - Lower amour/weapons, more speed.
 BS Battleship [150k ton]
 DR-L Light Dreadnaught [200k ton]
 DR Dreadnaught [250k ton]
 DR-L Heavy Dreadnaught [300k ton]
 DR-L Super Dreadnaught [400k ton]
MON Monitor [500k ton]
MON-H Heavy Monitor [600k ton]
MON-S Super Monitor [700k ton]
TTN Titan [1000k ton]
LVN Leviathan [1500k ton]

Fighter wings consist of 5000 tons of craft

 CA-P Pocket Carrier [20k ton] - 1 Fighter wing
 CA-L Light Carrier [40k ton] - 4 Fighter wing
 CA Carrier [80k ton] - 8 Fighter wing
 CA-H Heavy Carrier [200k ton] - 20 Fighter wing
 CA-S Super Carrier [400k ton] - 40 Fighter wing
I typically don't actually up to using much above light dreadnaught in size in a typical game, only using the larger sizes for "because we can" ships.

[Dutchling]

I use something similar, although for me the line between destroyers and cruisers is that I always give cruisers decent sensors and some sort of anti-missile system. Not enough to defend them versus a copy of themselves, but a fleet solely consisting of cruisers would be somewhat useful where one consisting of destroyers would not.

[Girlinhat]

In previous versions, the classes were distinct tonnage.  Steve changed it to player-defined, because tonnage-ranks will change as a game goes on.  Your year 2050 game will have different class sizes than year 2200 games - ships naturally start becoming larger as resources become more exploitable.

[Metalax]

In previous versions, the classes were distinct tonnage.  Steve changed it to player-defined, because tonnage-ranks will change as a game goes on.  Your year 2050 game will have different class sizes than year 2200 games - ships naturally start becoming larger as resources become more exploitable.

Thats certainly one way to do it. I tend to go the other way however, ships of a class remain at the same size and heavier classes come into service as tech progresses.

[Bremen]

I usually have classifications that vary by purpose, with size only secondary. For instance, a frigate and a destroyer might be the same size, but a frigate will be specialized for PD/anti-fighter, whereas a destroyer is fast and armed with anti-ship weapons.

I haven't really adapted my doctrine to the new version yet, but I think it opens up a lot more options. Pre-6.0, a warship's speed was based on the proportion of mass devoted to engines, which usually meant a small ship and a large ship were the same speed. But with the thrust changes in the new version I think it makes a lot more sense to have fast (and correspondingly shorter ranged) small ships, whereas your big battleships might be slower but have greater endurance.

I also generally tier my ships by the number of size 50 engines they use, to get the best fuel efficiency, so my ships are generally 7500/15000/22500/30000 tons (and so on; 1/3rd engine each).

[Flying Dice]

In previous versions, the classes were distinct tonnage.  Steve changed it to player-defined, because tonnage-ranks will change as a game goes on.  Your year 2050 game will have different class sizes than year 2200 games - ships naturally start becoming larger as resources become more exploitable.

Thats certainly one way to do it. I tend to go the other way however, ships of a class remain at the same size and heavier classes come into service as tech progresses.

That's what I do as well; my ships increase in efficiency rather than size, and I build ships of a size appropriate to my resource supply and tech level.

[Iosyn]

I also generally tier my ships by the number of size 50 engines they use, to get the best fuel efficiency, so my ships are generally 7500/15000/22500/30000 tons (and so on; 1/3rd engine each).

Yeah. For my old design I was using size 50 engines with about 0.75x power. I've been reworking a few overnight designs and god-- you guys are a lifesaver. instead of my nearly 40kton--jack of all trades, master of none ship I've shaved off about 30ktons.

that means? Everything is faster. Everything can fit more weapons per ton and still be faster. I can either fit in a slow, heavy engine for enhanced fuel efficiency or a fast, smaller engine that burns a bit higher. At least I can use the slower, big engines on my missile frigates (circa 10kt craft) In all cases my speed is back up to above 3k km/s minimum, and my new generation of FACs are topping about 4-5k. Obviously that means any ship I make will be at least able to dodge missiles slightly.

Also, someone said about low tiers having terrible efficiency ratings-- you're right. I really wanted one of those 5 cargo hold freighters, but dear lord the speed would have been pitiful. So I designed a 2 hold one, which has been a lifesaver. it's slower than my old 1 hold design, but it's so much simpler to set up automated mining colonies. Next I need a supply ship for combat duties-- I'm thinking about a jump-capable Tanker/Collier/Maintenance vessel, with some decent sensors. I might even make it a carrier. Ideally it would hang at the jump point with a small area-defence force while my frigates and cruisers move out. If it ends up being ridiculously huge I'll go back to individual vessels though, since my current tankers are pretty damn efficient at the moment.

2-hold Freighter. I could  cut the fuel in half, but there are some juicy comets on the out system.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Sirius class Freighter    64,600 tons     165 Crew     824.2 BP      TCS 1292  TH 1500  EM 0
1160 km/s     Armour 1-143     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
MSP 8    Max Repair 75 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months    Spare Berths 0   
Cargo 50000    Cargo Handling Multiplier 20   

300 EP Commercial Ion Drive (5)    Power 300    Fuel Use 5.3%    Signature 300    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 500,000 Litres    Range 26.3 billion km   (262 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes

Edit: Also, probably the most important thing I've learned is missile defence. I was thinking that with a 90kkm laser I could get 2 or 3 shots on something like a 15000 or 20000km/s missile. Then I remembered the smallest increment is 5s. /facepalm. Yeah, I'm redesigning my Missile sensors now The old kirov design would be able to attempt to intercept three missiles once per 5s. With four turrets. Granted, those first three missiles (assuming they're 20kkm/s) would probably get shot down and MAYBE another one to the CIWS... But dear lord if I was building a 10kt dedicated missile frigate these things would get creamed.

[Metalax]

Obviously that means any ship I make will be at least able to dodge missiles slightly.

Probably not, until you are hitting closer to the 10k km/s mark most anti-ship missiles will still have a greater than 100% chance to hit you.

Also, someone said about low tiers having terrible efficiency ratings-- you're right. I really wanted one of those 5 cargo hold freighters, but dear lord the speed would have been pitiful. So I designed a 2 hold one, which has been a lifesaver. it's slower than my old 1 hold design, but it's so much simpler to set up automated mining colonies.

I've found the easiest way to make sure that you maintain decent speeds regardless of size is to design ships using a percentage of total tonnage as engine mass rather than a specific number of engines. I typically use 25% for most of my ship designs as after fuel, crew quarters, engineering and armour/shields are included that leaves 50% of the ship for mission payload.

Next I need a supply ship for combat duties-- I'm thinking about a jump-capable Tanker/Collier/Maintenance vessel, with some decent sensors. I might even make it a carrier. Ideally it would hang at the jump point with a small area-defence force while my frigates and cruisers move out. If it ends up being ridiculously huge I'll go back to individual vessels though, since my current tankers are pretty damn efficient at the moment.

You are definetly hitting the too many roles for one ship to perform well at any of them point, trying to put that many functions in one ship. Collier really needs to be it's own ship to maximise the available space for magazines as ships can burn through their missiles incredibly quickly during battle. Similarly Tankers need as much space as possible for their fuel tanks due to the increased fuel usage of post 6.0 games. Maintainance supplies and big passive sensors however do go well on a jump ship to bulk it up to it's operating size.

Edit: Also, probably the most important thing I've learned is missile defence. I was thinking that with a 90kkm laser I could get 2 or 3 shots on something like a 15000 or 20000km/s missile. Then I remembered the smallest increment is 5s. /facepalm. Yeah, I'm redesigning my Missile sensors now The old kirov design would be able to attempt to intercept three missiles once per 5s. With four turrets. Granted, those first three missiles (assuming they're 20kkm/s) would probably get shot down and MAYBE another one to the CIWS... But dear lord if I was building a 10kt dedicated missile frigate these things would get creamed.

Lasers, once you research up the wavelength techs a bit to extend their range, work best in PD at thinning out incoming missile salvoes at range or dealing with armoured missiles. General PD should usually be left to gauss cannon turrets, as they are the most effective for equal ammounts of space taken up once you have reached fire rate 3 or higher.

[The13thRonin]

I use something similar, although for me the line between destroyers and cruisers is that I always give cruisers decent sensors and some sort of anti-missile system. Not enough to defend them versus a copy of themselves, but a fleet solely consisting of cruisers would be somewhat useful where one consisting of destroyers would not.

The difference between destroyers and cruisers?

Destroyers destroy...

Cruisers cruise...

[Iosyn]

Had to remake the game, kept getting a bunch of error 94's from a null value entry because two of my GSVs had just () instead of (move order X). Not figured out how to fix it yet. Also error 3021 DAO and error 381, but those have disappeared now, thankfully.

That said, the new game is going well. No military yet, but I've set up a colony on mars and started terraforming it, while my civilian shipping lines have two colony ships and a small freighter. I do have 50 fighters in earth space, just sitting there with all my officers in, (training up crew) but if anything does manage to slip in through a jumpgate I'm sure they'll just die of laughter. I don't even have a PDC yet-- although I'm planning for a set of PDCs in both earth and mars orbit.

It's really strange, the civilian shipping line hasn't created anything like my commercial designs... my first colony ship could store 30k colonists (now refitted to 50k with an extra engine) and theirs carries just 1250. same with the freighter-- it can only carry 10 infastructure and do 972km/s. Also I'm getting tax revenue from luxury cruise ships but there aren't any. lol.

In my last few games I got lucky with jump points, there were usually at least one or two within a few hundred million kilometers-- easy missile range, but the closest one now is a bit longer than that. Personally I'd like anything coming through a jump point to be under attack the moment it arrives, so either picket ships or maybe I can just tow a PDC or Missile base next to them. Hell if it comes to it I'll just build some mines.

[Metalax]

The ships carrying 1250 are luxury cruise ships, thats why your getting tax revenue specified as that. There is a checkbox in the lower left of the class design screen that will allow you to look at the civilians ship designs.