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[JacenHanLovesLegos]

Well, specially designed missile ships ought to work, as long as they have long enough range and AS. But still, it's better to wait like Flying Dice said.

[Girlinhat]

The issue with missiles is, mainly, fuel and engine.  You end up spending a lot of size towards getting the payload there.  Doing research into engines first will help you get into the wild spaces much easier, as you'll be using less fuel to go faster, and for missiles that means more size for payload.

[Flying Dice]

Yep. Engine and fuel efficiency are by far the two most important techs in the game, as far as I'm concerned. Just about everything you'll be doing in a campaign will depend upon engines and fuel at some level. Most relevant to this is that with higher fuel efficiency and better engines you're able to allocate more tonnage to weapons, sensors, and defenses (within a given size of ship) without decreasing Vmax. I typically have at least M-P drives and 0.5 fuel consumption before I even think about designing real combat ships.


That said, since you're still on a pre-6.00 build, you could potentially build at least a JP-camper with shitty drives and sensors but a fairly heavy (for TL1-2, anyhow) missile load. But again, low-tech vessels have essentially no hope against even a TL3-4 NPR, much less some of the other things that can pop up. Better to funnel the resources into increasing your industrial base and building up your shipyards so that when you do get around to making a navy, you can build big.



On an unrelated note, I'm incredibly disappointed that there still isn't an option to turn off crew morale. Having to manually order my survey vessels back to port every year is mind-bogglingly annoying. Just let me turn it off and I'll happily RP shore leave on my own terms. >.>

[revo]

SO here is what I'm doing with my economy.

25% each :100mines 10 research labs 1 auto mine and 25 construction facility

I've also got 2 freighters in construction that i'm going to use to take the automine to mars and mine there.

how do i get more scientists to research?

and I don't need any colonists on mars to recover the mineral those mines mine right? just need to set freighters to retrieve them?

[Flying Dice]

1. A single automine will hardly produce anything at all.
2. Scientists, like all officers, are automatically recruited. If you want a greater number, build more academies.
3. You probably don't need more at this stage in any case, unless you're spreading your labs out very thin indeed.
4. For automines, no. You can either transport the minerals with freighters or construct a pair of mass drivers and ship one to Mars.

[revo]

anything else i need to be doing currently? I've also got geo and grav surveys going and am researching

[Girlinhat]

Dice - it's obvious now that survey ships need rather massive accommodations for morale.

Mass Drivers are really the way to go.  It's free delivery to any other planet in the same system.  The general theme of the game is simple though, you explore, then you exploit, and you build a bigger ship.

[Flying Dice]

Well, yeah. But that's more than a little bit gamey to me; it doesn't make much sense for any ship except a passenger liner to dedicate as much/more space to crew accommodations than the drives or sensors. I suppose that I'm more than a little peeved that 6.00 pretty much broke the "1k ton mass-survey" model of exploration. I was attached to those little early-warning devices.

[Girlinhat]

I think it makes more sense.  Part of the reason we haven't gone to Mars yet is because the crew would go insane cramped in a tiny ship.  That amplifies a thousand times when you're in a far-off system doing boring work like looking at dead rocks.

[Karlito]

I designed some 900 ton survey ships with a two year deployment for surveying in Sol. They aren't jump capable, so you'd have to design a 900 ton tender to run around with them, but it's still a viable option.

[Girlinhat]

The good thing about survey ships is that they tend to stay in one system for a long time, so a jump tender would only have to be bothered every two years or so.

[Gamerlord]

I usually run 2 geosurvey ships (2000tons) and one gravsurvey ship (2000tons) with a 3 squad jump engine. Using the three of them in concert helps deal with systems faster. Also massive deployment times. Once I had a geosurvey ship with almost 100 months of deployment time.

[Karlito]

I'm experimenting with a drone-based survey ship in my current game. They launch active and geologic sensor drones at likely targets to check the inner system for hostiles, and then they use their on-board gravitational sensors to search for jump-points. Hopefully any hostiles will target the drones first, so my ships will be able to get away clean. I suppose I'll also need dedicated geosurvey ships to do a complete system body survey, but that would come after the initial system scouting anyway.

Also, I appear to have encountered an NPR (or maybe it's the Precursors) who use strength zero warheads on their AMMs .

[Bremen]

I've been experimenting with 500 ton survey ships so I can build them with fighter factories instead of shipyards early in a conventional start game. It works, but it's probably more effective to just use a larger one.

[Wrex]

That moment when you start with 7000 million, and discover you have 30CM lasers in the far x-ray spectrum, it is incompareable.