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[Flying Dice]

I am trying very hard to judge based on my own shipbuilding doctrine. 

[Alehkhs]

So... that nice little Google Documents tutorial I had been following is never going to be finished, is it?

[Flying Dice]

Most likely. I'd recommend watching lavender's tutorials, combined with messing about in the game yourself and asking questions here.

[LoSboccacc]

So... that nice little Google Documents tutorial I had been following is never going to be finished, is it?

sorry 

I think I'll get back to it, but I'm having some troubles in RL.

[forsaken1111]

Question: can you tow an orbital habitat? I want to build my terraformers as orbital habitats (cheaper to build terraforming modules than terraforming installations), but all my factories are on Earth.

Yes but you need a rather large tug.

[MarcAFK]

Yes but you need a rather large tug.

Oh, that's what she said! (actually a smaller tug is fine as long as you have patience,Question, can tugs pull each other so you could daisy chain a few smaller general purpose tugs together for hauling larger ships?)

[Flying Dice]

I believe that you can no longer do that.


As for terraformers: It really is much easier to build them as ships; you can usually get early ones down to ~150k tons and churn them out without too much difficulty, if you set one commerical shipyard to continuous capacity expansion early on after giving it a second slipway, and just let it keep running forever. At the moment, my top two commerical yards have 2 slipways and over 1m ton capacity, and can turn out a pair of these

Code: [Select]

Genesis III class Terraformer    843,700 tons     8110 Crew     21190 BP      TCS 16874  TH 17500  EM 0
1037 km/s     Armour 1-795     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
MSP 16    Max Repair 500 MSP
Terraformer: 30 module(s) producing 0.036 atm per annum

Internal Confinement Fusion Drive E0.5 (70)    Power 250    Fuel Use 5%    Signature 250    Armour 0    Exp 1%
Fuel Capacity 2,700,000 Litres    Range 115.2 billion km   (1285 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes

in 16 months.

[RedKing]

Exercise in frustration: Coming up with names for the 14 Gliese, 3 Groombridge, 5 Luyten, 5 Ross, and 7 Wolf designated stars, so I can tell where things are happening without consulting my galmap every time I take a 5-day turn. 

I feel your pain. A large part of what's been holding up my campaign is system naming. I tend to break things up into "arms" and then name things in each arm based on a different mythology or language. One game I had the Norse Arm, the Graeco-Roman Arm and the Sino-Japanese Arm. My current game has the Leo-Virgo Sector, the Ceti-Eridani sector, and the Ursa-Draconis sector. LV is European with lots of Classical allusions and various "New XXXX" worlds (Nueva Espana, Neu Deustchland, etc.), CE is American and Indian (the prerequisite "Liberty", "Freedom", etc. plus a lot of systems named after Presidents, mixed in with systems named in Sanskrit); and the UD sector is Russian, Chinese and Japanese. Not so much mythology as just linguistic.

Also, if a system has a lot of jump points, I try to give them names suggestive of that: Nexus, Gateway, Junction, Vorota (Russian for "gate"), Xingmen (Chinese, "star-gate"), etc.

[PTTG??]

Why bother giving that ship engines? Just make them orbitals and build a tug. It's cheaper and faster!

[Flying Dice]

My current terraformer fleet consists of 19 ships (2x Genesis III, 8x Genesis II, 9x Genesis I), representing a total tonnage of 3,415,850 tons, with another four III's (another 3,374,800 tons)  on the way, and I don't want to deal with the micromanagement of that many tugs. I've already mentioned before that I tend to prefer a fleet system that doesn't rely on heavily interconnected relations between various elements, both to reduce micromanagement, and to make each individual component more self-reliant. Not to mention that producing enough tugs to conduct a transfer of my terraforming fleet through the 12 connections to their next target in any sort of reasonable timespan would be a fairly large drain on my mineral income and shipbuilding capacity.

So basically, if I wanted to replace the engines and fuel with a single orbhab module on each of those, I would end up with slightly lower tonnage on the IIIs, and substantially higher tonnage on the IIs and Is, for roughly the same tonnage total, and would have to come up with enough tugs to move 6,790,650 tons of ship through dozens of billions of kilometers. Not worth the effort, at least IMO, when I can strap some engines and fuel tanks on and call it a day. Added bonus: they can also act as a refueling station for ships operating further up whatever warp chain they're working in.

[PTTG??]

Why put orbhab modules on? They work just fine without 'em. Anyway, you only need a handful of tugs... but hey, whatever you like.

[forsaken1111]

Why put orbhab modules on? They work just fine without 'em. Anyway, you only need a handful of tugs... but hey, whatever you like.

So he can build them with industry rather than in a shipyard

[Grendus]

Why put orbhab modules on? They work just fine without 'em. Anyway, you only need a handful of tugs... but hey, whatever you like.

So he can build them with industry rather than in a shipyard

Basically this. If you build them as ships, you have to have a shipyard for them, which means you have to invest in extra slipways and massive expansion that might be more useful for a different ship (say, a super-freighter). If you build them as orbital habitats, you can build them with your multi-purpose industry. It's a matter of preference. Personally, I put engines on my Nutcracker class asteroid miners because I didn't want to have to mess with tugs, but I built the terraformers as OH because I didn't want to invest in the massive shipyards required to build it as a ship. Plus, since you're going to be parking them in orbit for a long time anyways it's easier to tug them out and forget about them.

Building them as habitats has the added bonus of them being, you know, habitats. Park a few orb-habs, drop some regular mines on the surface of a habitable planet, and let the military terraform while the civilians strip-mine anything valuable out of the planet.

[PTTG??]

Well, I'd just have something like 35% of my industry making terraforming modules. Then the ship, which is made of nothing but terraforming modules, gets built in a couple months. I guess it's the micromanagement that's the problem.

[RedKing]

BTW, how big do you guys tend to go with OH's? I've drawn up a prelim design for an "outpost" orbital habitat, that would work as a mining/resupply base, so that I could maintain a 3000-ton system defense boat at each one as the local police/military. But it's really damn big, and I've never worked with OH's before to know if this is just ludicrous or not:

Zion class Orbital Habitat    25,235,250 tons     5151 Crew     70125 BP      TCS 504705  TH 0  EM 0
1 km/s     Armour 6-7663     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
MSP 2    Max Repair 200 MSP
Habitation Capacity 5,000,000   
Maintenance Modules: 15 module(s) capable of supporting ships of 3000 tons

Fuel Capacity 1,000,000 Litres    Range N/A

Goalkeeper II (12x8)    Range 1000 km     TS: 25000 km/s     ROF 5       Base 50% To Hit
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as an Orbital Habitat for construction purposes