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[Metalax]

hmmm... interesting idea. I'll have to try that out.

[Micro102]

does anyone else question the wisdom of pulling shipyard twice the size of your biggest ship around at fast speeds in space?

[MrWiggles]

does anyone else question the wisdom of pulling shipyard twice the size of your biggest ship around at fast speeds in space?

Its doesnt apply Newtonian physics, so its not as bad it normally would be.

[Metalax]

The tractor beam tech is assumed to also incorporate means of maintaining structural integrity from the forces of the tow. As long as that is the case there is no real problem with having your shipyards flying around at high speed.

[Paul]

Haha, you would burn fuel like crazy with a fleet like that. The tug alone would burn about 17647 liters of fuel a day. At the base fuel production technology, you would need about 322 fuel refineries on a world somewhere working full time just to keep the ship flying, not to mention the sorium you would use up.

[Metalax]

Yep, a lot of fuel will be used for the fleet. Though it's not quite as bad as it seems as large parts of the fleet won't be moving around once you stop to stripmine a system. Also these are built with no fuel efficiency techs researched, which you would have researched by the time you actually start construction of the ships. For the vast majority of the fleet, when you are going to conduct an exodus, you don't really need the speeds of these designs so you could strip out a good proportion of the engines, which would also help reduce consumption.

[MrWiggles]

Oh yea, once you get to the last efficiency tech, 50k liters can last for ever.

[Paul]

It would be interesting to use the SM to make a huge "generational" ship with high tech stuff and cargo holds full of enough engineering teams and minerals and such to set up a colony and start building things as well as some bonus cargo holds with high tech ship components (military stuff, since making the big ship military wouldn't be feasible due to maintenance problems). It would be jump capable, but badly damaged. Then you make a second empire with low tech and gift the ship to them, getting rid of the initial empire. You could include a few small scout ships with which to fly ahead and scan things while the big one slowly moved along. Using the other empire you would load it with colonists and whatever before moving it into position and nuking the starting sector.

The story could be that you are a fleet sent off from some distant place to escape from some big disaster or enemy - something went wrong along the way and it took way longer than you expected, so it turned into a generational ship and you lose all knowledge of your old technology by the time you get there. You still have parts left from scrapping ships along the way that stopped functioning, but actual tech levels are minimal.

You'd start the game in an empty sector with a couple jump points mapped, so the actual gameplay after the start would be totally random. One game you might luck onto a rich system and plant roots immediately, another you might wander for years seeking a good place to live. After you did set up a colony you could either use the ship parts in the hold to build some good ships, or take them apart and try to get all the tech you could from it to build more later. The same thing with the ship itself - take it apart for the technology, or try to patch it up and keep using it.

It would take some setup, but it would be a fun scenario

[umiman]

Oh crud. I have no idea what happened. My jump capable survey ship met *some* 50+ hostile alien ships called... "Nightsky" exactly one jump away from Earth. 2 days later, it's a smouldering wreck.

It wasn't missiles as the event report tells me it recieved damage from an energy or kinetic weapon and it took around 30 hits to destroy my pretty small ship. So does this mean there are some 50+ unknown alien ships size 800 tons (fighters?) travelling at 4410km/s and thermal signatures of 160 on their way to Earth?

I only have 3 military ships.

edit: Looks like they used meson cannons with a range of 10000km and rate of fire of 1 (damage 1). Estimated speed is 10000km/s. Since there is only one meson cannon per ship, I think it's safe to say these are fighters. I should be able to nuke these fuckers but this isn't looking good for earth as there are A LOT of them.

[Micro102]

Stall them....Fighters use up more fuel.

[umiman]

I created 3 new battlecruisers using my leftover fast OOB equipped with 3x 20cm laser turrets 6 times the fighters' effective range (5 second fire rate) and 15,000km/s tracking and specialized sensors just for those fighters.

I figure if they can close the distance under that kind of sustained fire, I'd be totally boned anyway.

[Emperor_Jonathan]

umiman: They are Fast Attack Craft, fighters are only under 500 tons.

[umiman]

Combat is a fricking pain. I have to manually set the targets for everything? Can't it just automatically select targets?

Also, these frigging Fast Attack Craft are cheating so badly. Damn you!!!! 3 armor? 10,000km/s speed? What on earth am I fighting?

Edit: BAHAHA! Eat dirt, you cheating scumbags!

They decided to stay out of my PD range the whole time (where I actually have weapons that can hit their super speed) and punt me with mesons so I flew into them and now their 50+ size fleet is turning to rubble from all the rail gun and super speed laser fire.

Edit edit: Oh great. Just as I finished wiping out their silly 50 FASes, here comes a single alien ship with strength 18000 shields and 30 ECM. Active sensor S336/R100. Is this some kind of sick prank?

Edit edit edit: Argh?! Another 50 FASes?! While I'm fighting this crazy behemoth?

Edit edit edit edit: Okay, what the hell. I've killed over 200 enemy ships now and it's only the year 2029. I'm getting sick and tired of clicking the combat targets every single time I kill something. There really needs to be some way to automate target selection because this is ridiculous.

[Aldaris]

Why am I suddenly reminded of Freespace 2 when I read your story?

Anyway, my missile design for my little alien empire, 5 years in.

Spoiler: S-S-CM-1 Bolt (click to show/hide)

(Ship to Ship Conventional Missile 1)
Missile Size: 5 MSP  (0.25 HS)     Warhead: 8    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 15
Speed: 14400 km/s    Endurance: 52 minutes   Range: 45.0m km
Cost Per Missile: 3.325
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 216%   3k km/s 60%   5k km/s 43.2%   10k km/s 21.6%
Materials Required:    2x Tritanium   1.55x Gallicite   Fuel x2500

Development Cost for Project: 332RP

[umiman]

Huh, you're right.

The best similarity I guess comes from how I pulled back all the civilian ships I can from the system back to Sol and destroyed both the jump gates. There's no way I can fight them. I don't even know where they are coming from other than they have insane sensor ranges and shielding, so they can pinpoint me wherever I am.

On the bright side, I haven't needed to build a single colony ship as the private sector is very willing to go colonize planets on my behalf.