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[Micro102]

Has anyone thought of using SM to make a massive mothership and destroy the solar system, leaving that ship as the sole chance for humanity? It would have to be pretty much capable of everything, or contain ships that could do everything. You would have to take it and seed colonies on other systems, harvesting gas giants and minerals along the way.

[gimlet]

A sort of Battlestar, leading a rag-tag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest?

[Shooer]

Lots of people have, basically.

[Sheb]

Yeah, the thing is that you do need industry for a bunch of things. You can't produce ammo or fighters in space for example. You also could not repair your mothership.

[Flying Dice]

Yep, there are a number of issues which keep it from being practical without habitual SM-cheating to keep the mothership operation.

That said, I have done something similar, which is to SM in a tiny colony in a system near Sol (I used ~5 million people, 1x lab, 10x automine, 10x construction factory, and that was it) with a massive conventional-tech mothership rotting in orbit, and then delete Sol. You can also do the same thing but with a higher starting point on your tech if you don't want to take a century+ to leave the system.

[RedKing]

Has anyone thought of using SM to make a massive mothership and destroy the solar system, leaving that ship as the sole chance for humanity? It would have to be pretty much capable of everything, or contain ships that could do everything. You would have to take it and seed colonies on other systems, harvesting gas giants and minerals along the way.

*coughs*

Yeah, I ran a Let's Play of Aurora as a Battlestar Galactica-type simulator. One heavily armed mothership and a shitload of civvies. Plus Mafia-style shenanigans as some players were Cylons. Woulda been fun but RL intervened in a big way.

[iceball3]

What about a massive >commercial< mothership with a tractor link to a rather huge engineless carrier, loaded with gigantic hangar space, loads of maintence storage, and possibly some point defense? The commercial mothership leading part would have a recreational module, a orbital habitat, and quite a lot of fuel and engines.
Unless you reap colonies in your path or settle down every so often though, fuel and maintence supplies can easily run scarce. Otherwise though, it shouldn't be too hard to sustain otherwise.

[Culise]

What about a massive >commercial< mothership with a tractor link to a rather huge engineless carrier, loaded with gigantic hangar space, loads of maintence storage, and possibly some point defense? The commercial mothership leading part would have a recreational module, a orbital habitat, and quite a lot of fuel and engines.
Unless you reap colonies in your path or settle down every so often though, fuel and maintence supplies can easily run scarce. Otherwise though, it shouldn't be too hard to sustain otherwise.

So, a Ramilies Starfort?  As long as you don't hit the "universe goes kaboom" space limits (1770 holds, give or take), that could work out pretty well. ^_^

[Micro102]

Ok, I need help with missile design. So far I've got this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Missile Size: 12 MSP  (0.6 HS)     Warhead: 4    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 15
Speed: 27700 km/s    Endurance: 19 minutes   Range: 31.0m km
Cost Per Missile: 6.6583
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 415.5%   3k km/s 135%   5k km/s 83.1%   10k km/s 41.5%
Materials Required:    1x Tritanium   6.7833x Gallicite   Fuel x4125

Development Cost for Project: 666RP

I'm having trouble deciding when speed becomes more valuable than chance to hit. Should I aim for 100% chance at 5k km/s? I am aiming for these to be in box launchers on fighters, so I am worried about the size as well. If it's any help, my enemy seems to have high rail-gun tech.

[Flying Dice]

That's honestly not a bad balance. The specifics basically depend on what your current enemies have; if they don't have much that can fly in that 6-10km/s range or faster, you're good. If not, you can probably finagle the CTH @ 10km/s up to 55-60% without hurting the speed too much, it's just a matter of fiddling with the agility numbers. If they aren't already at a much higher WH than your standard ASMs, they should be, since you only need a small fraction of the fuel space.

Here's an example of the balance between my standard ASMs and FMs in the game I'm running right now:

Code: [Select]

Missile Size: 4 MSP  (0.2 HS)     Warhead: 9    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 42
Speed: 60000 km/s    Engine Endurance: 38 minutes   Range: 136.0m km
Thermal Sensor Strength: 0.16    Detect Sig Strength 1000:  160,000 km
ECM Level: 0.3
Cost Per Missile: 8.216
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 2520%   3k km/s 840%   5k km/s 504%   10k km/s 252%
Materials Required:    2.25x Tritanium   0.096x Boronide   0.31x Uridium   5.56x Gallicite   Fuel x2500

Development Cost for Project: 822RP

Code: [Select]

Missile Size: 4 MSP  (0.2 HS)     Warhead: 16    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 41
Speed: 60000 km/s    Engine Endurance: 19 minutes   Range: 68.0m km
Thermal Sensor Strength: 0.16    Detect Sig Strength 1000:  160,000 km
Cost Per Missile: 9.7136
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 2460%   3k km/s 820%   5k km/s 492%   10k km/s 246%
Materials Required:    4x Tritanium   0.096x Boronide   0.16x Uridium   5.4576x Gallicite   Fuel x1250

Development Cost for Project: 971RP

Obviously the CTH and speed are rather absurd since I'm on solid-core AM drives, but that actually makes it more clear: they're virtually identical save for WH and range. Going the other way (increased range, decreased warhead size) gives you a LRM for sniping, though with that route you can also up the size and use specialized launchers, since your standard missile platforms likely won't have the sensor/FC range to use the LRMs effectively anyways. You can do a similar thing with your FMs as well, since they're unlikely to be ship-launched at lower TLs: pump up the warhead at the cost of increased size, since you're unlikely to mount more than 1-3 box launchers on your fighters anyways.

[RedKing]

What about a massive >commercial< mothership with a tractor link to a rather huge engineless carrier, loaded with gigantic hangar space, loads of maintence storage, and possibly some point defense? The commercial mothership leading part would have a recreational module, a orbital habitat, and quite a lot of fuel and engines.
Unless you reap colonies in your path or settle down every so often though, fuel and maintence supplies can easily run scarce. Otherwise though, it shouldn't be too hard to sustain otherwise.

Fuel wouldn't necessarily be a problem. Carry some survey ships and some fuel harvesters, and check out gas giants when you pass through a system. Maintenance supplies could be a different story. Replenishing lost crew if some die in combat could be a problem too.

[Flying Dice]

What about a massive >commercial< mothership with a tractor link to a rather huge engineless carrier, loaded with gigantic hangar space, loads of maintence storage, and possibly some point defense? The commercial mothership leading part would have a recreational module, a orbital habitat, and quite a lot of fuel and engines.
Unless you reap colonies in your path or settle down every so often though, fuel and maintence supplies can easily run scarce. Otherwise though, it shouldn't be too hard to sustain otherwise.

Fuel wouldn't necessarily be a problem. Carry some survey ships and some fuel harvesters, and check out gas giants when you pass through a system. Maintenance supplies could be a different story. Replenishing lost crew if some die in combat could be a problem too.

Yeah, crew is honestly the biggest danger with that. Gotta keep it gorram safe, and even then you'll need to stop and settle on a planet for a decade every so often both for crew and to resupply. Though you could abstract a lot with SM if you wanted to bother calculating production and research rates for carried facilities and assume that they're active while in transit (and possibly also ballparking mineral use and mining -- though not loading -- it). Still a ton of micromanagement for semi-verisimilitude, natch.

[Micro102]

I cannot find a good guide for combat. I read that active sensors are off by default, but when I click the enable button I don't notice a change. How do I know if the active sensors are on?

I can see the ships, but no targets appear for me to direct their fire controls. Is it range based?

EDIT: I noticed an "active sensor on" command in the task group orders. Problem is, it needs a location, and I have no idea why it needs a location to turn sensors on.

[Micro102]

Ok, managed to drudge my way through the controls, but am having a problem. The enemy has missiles and my guys don't seem to want to shoot them down. It seems that they only bother to fire if they are being targeted, but that stopped to. It went from all 6 ships firing, one taking damage, then all the ships from the main fleet ignored missiles that passed by targeting the damaged ship. Then when missiles targeted the main fleet again, only one of the ships bothered to shoot the missiles. It just got worse.

All the ships were the same and yes I manually set the fire controls to target the missiles.


I'm also under the assumption that they have absurdly higher tech level than me, as their ships are launching 5 missiles at a time with level 9 nuclear warheads with a speed I calculated at around 30000 km/s while the ships themselves are capable of over 5300 km/s. There were about 15 waves of missiles. I didn't have missiles fully researched yet, but trying to build a similarly sized ship seemed like I was tossing on a ton of engines, engineering, and crew support, more than doubling the size of the ship for the sake of less than double the speed. And I'm not even counting the kinetic weapons I'm sure they have which have a range of 3 times the original.

I'm hoping that they just have pushed all of their tech into combat and once I figure out what is wrong with the point defense targeting, their missiles will stop destroying my fleet.

[Flying Dice]

Ok, managed to drudge my way through the controls, but am having a problem. The enemy has missiles and my guys don't seem to want to shoot them down. It seems that they only bother to fire if they are being targeted, but that stopped to. It went from all 6 ships firing, one taking damage, then all the ships from the main fleet ignored missiles that passed by targeting the damaged ship. Then when missiles targeted the main fleet again, only one of the ships bothered to shoot the missiles. It just got worse.

All the ships were the same and yes I manually set the fire controls to target the missiles.


I'm also under the assumption that they have absurdly higher tech level than me, as their ships are launching 5 missiles at a time with level 9 nuclear warheads with a speed I calculated at around 30000 km/s while the ships themselves are capable of over 5300 km/s. There were about 15 waves of missiles. I didn't have missiles fully researched yet, but trying to build a similarly sized ship seemed like I was tossing on a ton of engines, engineering, and crew support, more than doubling the size of the ship for the sake of less than double the speed. And I'm not even counting the kinetic weapons I'm sure they have which have a range of 3 times the original.

I'm hoping that they just have pushed all of their tech into combat and once I figure out what is wrong with the point defense targeting, their missiles will stop destroying my fleet.

It sounds like you've got them set for Final Defensive Fire (Self Only). What you want is Final Defensive Fire. If you're actually trying to target the missile salvoes individually in the Combat Assignments window, don't. It also sounds like your PD weapons don't have sufficient range (or your PD FC doesn't pick up their missiles soon enough) to engage them before they strike.

So what's happening is your PD is set for FDF (Self Only) and the enemy missiles can cross your engagement envelope in a single 5-second tick, meaning that the only PD fire going out will be from the ship that's targeted firing in FDF (which always works -- once -- regardless of how fast the enemy missiles are). At least, that fits everything that you've described.