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[Bronimin]

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[10ebbor10]

Extra maintenance supplies + Extra crew quarters, I believe.

Not sure.

[FritzPL]

In Ship Design window, in the top left corner, there's a Deployment time thing. Type in months - it will increase crew's morale.
To increase the maint life, add engineering spaces.

[10ebbor10]

I think the Hyperdrives were bugged and therefore disabled. Not sure.

[Tobel]

I'm having a bit of a problem with fighters. Most of the forum posts I see mention that going box launchers is a good idea, but I can't keep my build under 500 tons. My missile launcher sensor is massive. Also, is there a special fighter engine size? What tech tree is that under? A lot of the posts on this thread talk about the use of fighters but not the barebones design.

[Gamerlord]

Make a tiny missile launcher sensor. Also the 'special fighter size' is 1 HS. I could post up my fighter design if you wanted it, but it's pretty early and it's gauss-based, so I don't know how useful it would be to you.

[Flying Dice]

I think the Hyperdrives were bugged and therefore disabled. Not sure.

They were. They didn't work with the new AI navigation mechanics, IIRC.

I'm having a bit of a problem with fighters. Most of the forum posts I see mention that going box launchers is a good idea, but I can't keep my build under 500 tons. My missile launcher sensor is massive. Also, is there a special fighter engine size? What tech tree is that under? A lot of the posts on this thread talk about the use of fighters but not the barebones design.

You should probably have a dedicated variant of fighter missile with a larger warhead/speed and lower range. This allows you to keep the size of the FC down and increase missile performance. One of the key features of fighters is that they're small enough to go undetected until they're very close, so it makes sense to build missiles to be shorter ranged even without size constraints.

There used to be special fighter and FAC engines, but they were removed in favor of the unified drive mechanics of 6.0. The method now is essentially to make 1HS or 2HS (50 or 100 ton) drives with the highest power modifier you have researched.

[Metalax]

A few things on saving space for fighters.

Remember you can remove the bridge component, it is not needed for any ship of 1000 tons or less.

Fighters are usually on very short deployments so remove the default engineering space and add a fighter sized engineering space. Similarly you will usually want to use small or tiny fuel tanks.

You can reduce the space required for crew quarters by reducing the deployment time. At 0.5 months(15 days) the total crew requirements are cut in half saving you more space and at 0.1 months(3 days) are reduced by another 2/3rds to a total of 1/6th the normal crew required.

You don't need to put active sensors on each fighter, either use fleet sensors from your main ships or design a dedicated sensor fighter craft to accompany your armed fighters.

Research at least a few levels in armour tech. The minimal 1 layer of armour can take up quite a lot of space at very low tech levels.

As an example here is a fighter-bomber built using the initial tech at the beginning of my most recent game.

Code: [Select]

Outreach class Fighter-bomber    500 tons     4 Crew     92 BP      TCS 10  TH 84  EM 0
8400 km/s     Armour 1-5     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 0     PPV 3.6
Maint Life 9.85 Years     MSP 23    AFR 10%    IFR 0.1%    1YR 0    5YR 6    Max Repair 21 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.5 months    Spare Berths 2   
Magazine 24   

Military S-01 x1.75 Ion Drive (4)    Power 21    Fuel Use 280.76%    Signature 21    Exp 17%
Fuel Capacity 20,000 Litres    Range 2.6 billion km   (3 days at full power)

Size 3 Box Launcher (8)    Missile Size 3    Hangar Reload 22.5 minutes    MF Reload 3.7 hours
Missile Fire Control S-01 R-020 FC-30 (1)     Range 31.0m km    Resolution 20
Bolt S-3 Anti-ship Missile (8)  Speed: 15,400 km/s   End: 31.7m    Range: 29.3m km   WH: 4    Size: 3    TH: 118/70/35

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 Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposes

[Tobel]

Cheers to everyone for the fighter help. Last question for maybe a day; is there a guide on how to set up a multi-empire game? I love the idea of having two empires sharing a solar system competing for resources, but I wind up crashing my game when I create an empty start.

[Karlito]

I'll just quote RedKing from a month ago.

Is there a guide anywhere to making your own solar system with your own race?

Quick and Dirty guide:

1. Start a game in SM Empire mode.
2. Turn Spacemaster on.
3. Go to System Details and generate a system.
4. Does it have either a Nitrogen-Oxygen world with no contaminants, or a Methane world with no contaminants?
5a. If not, gen up another system.
5b. If so, do you like the look of the system? If not, see 5a. If so, go to 6.
6. Select that world and click HW Minerals. This ensures the planet will have sufficient reserves of everything, otherwise you could be screwed in getting off the planet.
7. Click Create Empire.


More generally, I find that if you're doing an Oxygen race, you might actually be better off choosing on with somewhat lower gravity and temperature than Earth, because the majority of N-O worlds you're liable to run into are going to be snowballs of around -20 to -50 C and maybe 0.7G gravity. Especially in a Real Stars setting, where you get LOTS of red dwarfs which are hard pressed to give you worlds warm enough for bog standard humans. Non-Real Stars, you get a lot more A, B and even O stars which can have higher temps.

If you go Methane breathers, you're almost locked into having a temp range below -100C. Gravity can be highly variable, as you can get cold Methane worlds ranging from tiny moons to large worlds in the outer orbits of systems.

[Son_of_Orion]

Finally making progress. Sol's been surveyed, been setting up asteroid miners, as well as sorium harvesters around Saturn. Now I'm focusing on Mars, building infrastructure, mines and construction factories for it on Earth. 'Course, I've used SM a little more okay, a lot more often than I should've, but I didn't want to wait forever to learn the game mechanics.

Still haven't left the solar system. This game is mentally exhausting, but at least I'm making some progress!

Edit: And now I've jumpstarted two shipping lines. Holy shit, I love the private sector. Makes expansion and managing the economy so much easier. I think I'm finally starting to grasp the basics. Now I just need to work on designing warships and learning how warfare even works...

[Crimson]

So my small fleet at the NPR's system got sandpapered to death by AMM's. I wasn't using any CIWS during that time, exchanging it instead for some twin gauss cannon turrets. However, those missiles were moving at 68k km/s which is faster than the absolute maximum range of gauss cannons so they couldn't even fire a shot before the AMM's hit my ships.

In other news, the space bugs are in Sol. Didn't even knew they were on the other adjacent system. With my ships being only as fast as the Bug Queen, I'm not even sure I can take on them right now.

[MarcAFK]

I was under the impression that under final defensive fire even if badly outranged beam defence would still get in at least one shot, as long as your fire controls had enough range to pick up the missiles for the whole 5 second firing increment.

[Flying Dice]

I'm nearly certain that you don't even need FC range, just an active sensor lock, as FDF functions somewhat differently than interception PD. I could be wrong, of course.

[gimlet]

Another thing to do is to put a bunch of your gun point defense ships in a group, and move them a bit "ahead" (closer to the enemy along the expected line of missile fire) of the likely targets (big ships spamming out lots of long-range sensors/fire controls).  That effectively doubles their range, since they can fire at a missile that has gone past them too.  If you want to get really fancy, have multiple groups spread out just enough so their fire doesn't overlap - that will give you multilayer defense with less overkill, later groups can concentrate on the leakers missed by the earlier groups.   2 downsides - maneuvering all those groups is kind of a pain, and since you've concentrated on one axis, if your ships start taking unexpected missile fire from another direction it's not gonna be pretty...