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[Dutchling]

It's somewhat hilarious how refitting a shipyard costs about the same time as researching new ship technology, assuming you focus on building research labs.

My ships are outdated before I've even begun making one -.-'

[Sheb]

Seems pretty close to real life honestly. That's why you can also refit ships rather than build new ones.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, real-life military R&D cycles are much the same. IIRC it's basically a 10-30 year gap between the most recent developments and what's actually out in the field.

[Sharp]

Yeah it annoyed me for a while that most of my ships are outdated when they launch but as long as they aren't outdated by enemy ships then it's ok.

I wish fighters and bombers had more of a role in the game but they are both pretty much superseded by anti-missiles and missiles respectively. In the end fighters are very niche role ships and only really useful if you don't have a shipyard but your better off investing in shipyards and missile factories then building fighter factories.

[Sheb]

Fighters are great as re-usable first stage for missiles, but that's pretty much it.

[Flying Dice]

Fighters are great as re-usable first stage for missiles, but that's pretty much it.

More directly, fighters are a great way to deliver missiles without your own ships being damaged.

[JOKER_G]

Fighters also work well as FAC hunters.

[nogoodnames]

Just did some rough calculations for laser beam diffraction. Been wanting to know for a while but was finally driven to look up the necessary formula while playing Aurora.

Anyway, I calculated that an ultraviolet (50nm wavelength) laser with an initial beam diameter of 1m (in this case, a wider diameter ensures a tighter beam over distance. Don't ask me why) would spread to 10m over about 300,000 km. Naturally the intensity of the laser would affect how far it can go before becoming useless as a weapon. The spread is directly proportional to distance to the target, so at 3M km it would be 100m, etc.

Meanwhile an X-ray (1nm) laser with the same properties would travel about 25M km before spreading to 10m.

Most likely I've vastly oversimplified and/or am completely incorrect about these things since I don't actually know the physics behind lasers. Nevertheless, I thought it was interesting enough to share.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, it's always been rather unfortunate how Aurora deals with non-missile weapons by restricting their ranges so heavily to deal with the conflict caused by non-homing weapons which take more than a five second tick to reach their target. The lightspeed/near-lightspeed weapons at least should really have something like a wavefront indication when fired at longer ranges -- I think that most of us are willing to deal with an obvious mechanical stand-in for the sake of lasers and particle beams being able to use their longer ranges. The kinetic weapons could probably be managed with something where there are projectiles which continue on after the first 5-second tick towards the location where their target would be if it maintained the same velocity.

[Pwnzerfaust]

Hey, Flying Dice, I followed the steps in your sig to get the game to work on a small screen, but now I've got an issue where menus are bugging out. Like, the checkboxes in them are missing. Especially bad on the system map screen, where the Minerals tab and Display tab aren't showing the check boxes. Any fix for this?

The program is a pretty rough hacky way of dealing with the size issues and it tends to screw up the menus if you squish them too much. Pretty much the only way to deal is to close the window and open a new one, then try resizing it again until you strike a balance between visibility and being not-fucked up. Basically, find the point where things start disappearing from the windows, then open a new one and stop compressing just before that.

That said, just out of curiosity, what resolution are you running on? I never had a visibility problem with the system display window even on my 1080x768p craptop. o.0

Two different laptops, both 13", but one 1366x768, and the other 1920x1080. Both have the same issue. Former is Windows 7, latter is Windows 8.1.

[MarcAFK]

The 1920x1080 one should be perfect..... but ugh, windows 8....

[Pwnzerfaust]

Honestly, I think it has to do with the 13" screen size and possibly DPI scaling? The game might not be built to handle such small screens, regardless of resolution. I don't know.

[Flying Dice]

Hm. Possibly, but IIRC my 1080x768 was 13'. I might be wrong, though.

The 1920x1080 one should be perfect..... but ugh, windows 8....

Fun fact: otherwise identical computers list for hundreds of dollars cheaper if they have Win8 rather than Win7. Of course you can just get a shell, so hey!

[Gentlefish]

Win8 isn't all that terrible. It's just a big change from what they usually do because they thought tablets were The Next Big Thing. They were wrong, but whatever

[guessingo]

Is this game still being developed or is it finished?