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[Gamerlord]

Yeah, but it's annoying. I'm fairly certain that big ones with box launchers can reload themselves.

[Azated]

I seem to be lacking fuel. And raw sorium. SORIUM HARVESTERS, ACTIVATE! Use ~strip solesystemgasgiants of sorium~~

Problem is, building them with engines is expensive and I don't think a tanker on cycled shipping duty will do what he's told. Any suggestions?

Also, how do these ship designs look? I'm not sure If the sensors are designed properly.

Spoiler: Carrier (click to show/hide)

Scipio class Carrier    63,650 tons     1685 Crew     10167.6 BP      TCS 1273  TH 3000  EM 0
4713 km/s     Armour 4-142     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 110     PPV 275
Maint Life 1.73 Years     MSP 5998    AFR 3241%    IFR 45%    1YR 2430    5YR 36448    Max Repair 105 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 60 months    Flight Crew Berths 0   
Hangar Deck Capacity 10000 tons     Magazine 275   

120 EP Ion Drive (50)    Power 120    Fuel Use 54%    Signature 60    Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 1,000,000 Litres    Range 5.2 billion km   (12 days at full power)

Size 15 Missile Launcher (10)    Missile Size 15    Rate of Fire 115
Size 5 Missile Launcher (25)    Missile Size 5    Rate of Fire 40
Counter missile fire control MK1 (1)     Range 12.0m km    Resolution 1
Longrifle fire control MK1 (5)     Range 33.6m km    Resolution 100
Size 5 Anti-missile Missile (25)  Speed: 20,200 km/s   End: 19.9m    Range: 24.2m km   WH: 1    Size: 5    TH: 181/109/54
Blockbuster MK1 (10)  Speed: 13,400 km/s   End: 32.7m    Range: 26.3m km   WH: 26    Size: 15    TH: 93/56/28

Active Search Sensor MR30-R60 (2)     GPS 4800     Range 31.0m km    Resolution 60

Strike Group
20x Pyrrhus Fighter   Speed: 8400 km/s    Size: 10

Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes

Spoiler: Fighter (click to show/hide)

Pyrrhus class Fighter    500 tons     2 Crew     105.8 BP      TCS 10  TH 42  EM 0
8400 km/s     Armour 1-5     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 0     PPV 4.2
Maint Life 3.81 Years     MSP 13    AFR 20%    IFR 0.3%    1YR 1    5YR 21    Max Repair 16 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.1 months    Spare Berths 8   
Magazine 28   

Fighter Ion drive MK1 (4)    Power 21    Fuel Use 240.65%    Signature 10.5    Exp 17%
Fuel Capacity 5,000 Litres    Range 0.7 billion km   (24 hours at full power)

Size 7 Box Launcher (4)    Missile Size 7    Hangar Reload 52.5 minutes    MF Reload 8.7 hours
Fighter missile fire control MK1 (1)     Range 0k km    Resolution 10
Fighterwork MK1 (4)  Speed: 14,400 km/s   End: 49m    Range: 42.3m km   WH: 9    Size: 7    TH: 115/69/34

Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s

This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposes

[Gamerlord]

What levels of fuel consumption and engine power modification are you up to? P.S That carrier has crappy maintenance life. Plus too much hangar space and not enough magazine space.You can fit two hundred fighters in that thing.

[Zeebie]

Is there an easy way to see all the contacts I have at the moment? I suspect I have an NPR ship running around somewhere, but going through every single system on the map is a little tedious.

[Jacob/Lee]

Yeah, but it's annoying. I'm fairly certain that big ones with box launchers can reload themselves.

Nope, box launchers can only be reloaded while the ship is in a hangar. Think those missile pods on combat helicopters.

[Metalax]

I seem to be lacking fuel. And raw sorium. SORIUM HARVESTERS, ACTIVATE! Use ~strip solesystemgasgiants of sorium~~

Problem is, building them with engines is expensive and I don't think a tanker on cycled shipping duty will do what he's told. Any suggestions?

I usually build them without engines and use tugs to move them into position as they need to move so infrequently. Setting up an order loop to have a tanker move the fuel to a colony works fine from my experience, you can even use the order delay setting so that the tanker isn't making more trips than needed.

Also, how do these ship designs look? I'm not sure If the sensors are designed properly.

Fighter first.

Something is up with your firecontrol as it definetely shouldn't be showing a range of 0. I'd redesign it and SM instant the new design in case something got corrupted when making the previous design.

I'd design a new single fighter engine to replace the 4 you are using, as you will get better fuel efficiency. The difference may be small enough to deal with if you are restricting the number of engine designs for RP reasons.

You will want to build a sensor fighter to accompany your missile fighters if they are not going to carry their own active sensors.

Now for the Carrier.

You really need to add more fuel storage to your carrier. Not only is it only carrying a pittiful ammount for it's own use, but the fighters it carries will need to refuel from it as well. Similarly maintainance supplies, although thats not too bad if a supply ship is along to resupply.

What size engines are you using? If you are using less than size 50 on a ship that size, go back and design some as you will see a big reduction in fuel useage.

Size 5 antimissiles? You are severely reducting both your rate of fire and weight of fire using them instead of size 1 launchers and missiles. Also only one antimissile fire control leaves you very open to being swamped under multiple salvoes.

Size 15 missiles are also rather too big for practical use. Most don't go over size 9 for use in anti-shipping roles, with size 3-6 being most commonly used, unless being used as a launch stage for a multi-warhead missile.

You also appear to not have added any magazines, leaving you with only a single shot. This renders your antimissiles very ineffective as you need to carry sufficient numbers to shoot down multiple incoming salvoes. You also need magazines to carry missiles to rearm your fighters as well.

You currently have no real active sensor to pick up inbound missiles, you need one at resolution 1 for that.

You need to add additional crew quarters to provide flight bearths for your fighters crew, while they are docked. Otherwise they are forced to use their own deployment time.

Can you list what your missile techs are? warhead, agility, fuel efficiency, max power multiplier. That would help to see where your missile design needs improvement.

You can fit two hundred fighters in that thing.

Only if you were somehow using 50 ton fighters. 20 fighters is a quite reasonable load for a carrier of this size.

Yeah, but it's annoying. I'm fairly certain that big ones with box launchers can reload themselves.

Nope, box launchers can only be reloaded while the ship is in a hangar. Think those missile pods on combat helicopters.

They can also be reloaded at a colony with maintainance facilities although it takes considerably longer.

[Azated]

Here are some screenshots of my various designs.

Spoiler: Cruiser engine (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Fighter engine (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Missile engine (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Blockbuster missile (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: AMM (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Fighterwork missile (click to show/hide)

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, but it's annoying. I'm fairly certain that big ones with box launchers can reload themselves.

If they're stationed directly on a planet, they'll always be able to reload from the planet. Size has nothing to do with it; any carrier with a sufficiently large hanger or planet (with a missile stockpile) can rearm box launchers.

[Mini]

Spoiler: Cruiser engine (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Fighter engine (click to show/hide)

I prefer using the lower powers for my fleetcraft engines, the gain in endurance outweighs the lower speed IMO. Note that this is only really viable to do if you make sure to outrange your enemies, since you'll probably end up slower than them and so won't get in range if they don't com towards you. I don't really have anything to say about the fighter engine, since I've not used fighters in the new version yet, but it seems good.

Spoiler: Missile engine (click to show/hide)

Again, I don't think the highest power thing is worth it, just bumping it down one notch gives you such a huge range increase (from 22x fuel consumption to 8x iirc) for what I recall as being a pretty small decrease in speed. For AMMs it doesn't matter so much, since I only give those a 2ishm km range.

Spoiler: Blockbuster missile (click to show/hide)

Bloody huge. You really don't need 26 damage/missile, cut that down to 9 or so. In combat it's much better to have a lot of smaller missiles than a few large ones, since the smaller ones give more targets for the enemy PD, which means more are likely to get through. If there aren't any missiles getting through it doesn't matter how much power each one has, since it's not being used. That's also a fairly shot range, I'd try for closer to a 80m km range at that tech level. If you can spare the RP I'd develop an engine specifically for each type of missile instead of using the same one for all of them, AMMs need a small powerful engine while ASMs can take a larger engine with a bit more fuel efficiency.

Spoiler: AMM (click to show/hide)

That's a really, really long range for an AMM. Unless you're building gigantic sensors to detect missiles at that range most of that range is being wasted. It's also huge, make it size 1 so that you can fire a lot of missiles for each incoming missile, your ASM goes at slightly above 10km/s, which your AMM has a ~50% hit rate for, so you would need at least 2 missiles in the air for each incoming ASM (I'd go with 3 to be on the safe side) otherwise there's going to be leaks, which since your ASMs have such powerful warheads will mean losing ships if you can't fire them quickly enough, and with a size 5 missile you won't be able to. Having smaller AMMs also means you can fit more in your magazines, which means you'll run out much less quickly

Spoiler: Fighterwork missile (click to show/hide)

This is what your standard ASM should probably be looking like, although I recommend experimenting a bit with how big exactly to make your engine to get the optimal hit chance, or just sticking all of the agility space on engines to try and get past the enemy's PD. Since this is meant to be a fighter missile you might want to take into consideration making it smaller so you can have faster fighters, but since you have box launchers it probably wouldn't make that much of a difference.

[RedKing]

Is it possible to build orbital box missile platforms?

Basically just a stack of box launchers held together with superglue and duct tape, and controlled by a single fire control. Fires a barrage of small missiles, then gets rearmed in a small carrier later.

Totally possible. Think of it as a small missile boat with no engines or fuel tank. You could carry them around in a hangar bay, or use tugs with tractor beams to tow them into position. If they're stationed in orbit over a populated world, you don't even need to futz about with crew morale. And if there's maintenance facilities, then even that's not an issue. Could drop the deployment time down 0.1 months, and stick just enough maintenance on it to keep it from instantly exploding.

Now the question becomes, is there a point to doing this instead of a missile PDC? There could be, in terms of providing frontier defenses. Even prefab PDCs require some construction capacity and a smattering of minerals to finish the build in its new home. This orbital missile station, by contrast, could be deployed to planets with no construction facilities needed. If the planet has just a light scattering of minerals and a few maintenance facilities (and at least 10,000 population), it can be left indefinitely. The real benefit you're getting is the ability to redeploy. Once built, PDCs are immobile. A cluster of these could be dropped in a "problem" area to provide extra defensive firepower in a pinch, or even brought in to act as extra offensive firepower if a major battle is expected.

Because they'd likely have a very low thermal/EM profile, they could even be used to spring a trap, if designed with a bit more deployment and maintenance life. Quietly tow several of them into position and lure an enemy task force into range.






I've been playing around with making non-mobile "space platforms" to do a lot of long-duration stuff like asteroid mining and terraforming, and then using tugs to tow them into position. I like the results. Saves a lot of resources for all those engines I don't have to build, and it means that I never really need to upgrade my miner or 'former designs. Downside is....SLOW. Especially because I built my tugs for duration so they wouldn't run out of fuel while towing a massive platform three or four systems away. Also doesn't help that my terraformers clock in around a quarter of a million tons. Towing speed is around 250 km/s. 

The good thing is that when I get newer engine tech, I just need to upgrade my tugs rather than a host of ships.

[Metalax]

I mostly agree with Mini's points, some additional observations below.

Spoiler: Cruiser engine (click to show/hide)

There is not a lot of point in using 50% thermal reduction on engines for a ship this big, you are still going to be showing up on reasonable passives at fairly long range.

Increasing the engine size makes it much more efficient. If you also strip out the thermal reduction this gives.

Spoiler: 600 EP Ion Drive (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

Engine Power: 600     Fuel Use Per Hour: 180 Litres
Fuel Consumption per Engine Power Hour: 0.3 Litres
Engine Size: 50 HS    Engine HTK: 25
Thermal Signature: 600     Exp Chance: 10
Cost: 300    Crew: 50
Materials Required: 0x Duranium  300x Gallicite
Military Engine

Development Cost for Project: 3000RP

This burns 180 fuel per hour compared with 5*64.8=324 fuel per hour for the same tonnage using your size 10 engines, 80% more efficient while also being 33% cheaper.

I'd agree using lower engine power multipliers for elements that are part of the fleet train is a good idea, although I almost never drop the power below x1.0 for any ships I expect to actually fight.

Spoiler: Fighter engine (click to show/hide)

Thermal reduction may actually be of use here as a fighters thermal signature is small enough that sneaking in close is a reasonable prospect.

If we replace your 4 size 1 engines with a size 4 engine we get.

Spoiler: 84 EP Ion Drive (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

Engine Power: 84     Fuel Use Per Hour: 196.01 Litres
Fuel Consumption per Engine Power Hour: 2.333 Litres
Engine Size: 4 HS    Engine HTK: 2
Thermal Signature: 42     Exp Chance: 17
Cost: 63    Crew: 7
Materials Required: 0x Duranium  63x Gallicite
Military Engine

Development Cost for Project: 630RP

Fuel use is 196.01 per hour versus 4*50.54=202.16 per hour slightly over 3% more efficient. This is small enough that multiple fighter engines remains a viable choice.

Spoiler: Missile engine (click to show/hide)

Unlike Mini I'd recommend keeping the maximum power multiplier. Speed is king for missiles, and fuel usually remains a fairly small size required as long as you are not trying for extremely long range. If you do want long range instead make a two stage missile,  with a low power, long range first stage and a max power, low range second stage with the warhead.

You definetely want to design specific missile engines for each size of missile though, as the diffence in fuel efficiency is enormous.

Spoiler: Blockbuster missile (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: AMM (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Fighterwork missile (click to show/hide)

You really don't have high enough tech sensors to be putting actives on AMM's, I'd even be doubtful about putting them on ASM's. Research up your EM sensor tech to at least 11 and another couple of levels of active sensor strength before putting active sensors on your missiles, it is currently crippling them.

By not placing a sensor on the missile you can create

Spoiler: Size 1 Anti-missile Missile (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

Missile Size: 1 MSP  (0.05 HS)     Warhead: 1    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 22
Speed: 21000 km/s    Engine Endurance: 4 minutes   Range: 5.6m km
Cost Per Missile: 0.7425
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 462%   3k km/s 154%   5k km/s 92.4%   10k km/s 46.2%
Materials Required:    0.25x Tritanium   0.4925x Gallicite   Fuel x26

Development Cost for Project: 74RP
Using
Warhead 0.25
Fuel 0.0104
Agility 0.2396
1 size 0.5 engine

Slightly faster, slightly less accurate, shorter range but still perfectly sufficient for an AMM and 1/5th the size. A size 1 launcher for this will also be firing every 10 second instead of every 40, so improved rate of fire as well.

You fighterwork missile is pretty good as a standard ASM. I'd personally use a size 6 missile like this.

Spoiler: Size 6 Anti-ship Missile (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

Missile Size: 6 MSP  (0.3 HS)     Warhead: 9    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 19
Speed: 17500 km/s    Engine Endurance: 49 minutes   Range: 50.9m km
Cost Per Missile: 4.5826
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 332.5%   3k km/s 95%   5k km/s 66.5%   10k km/s 33.2%
Materials Required:    2.25x Tritanium   2.3326x Gallicite   Fuel x468.5

Development Cost for Project: 458RPUsing
Warhead 2.25
Fuel 0.1874
Agility 1.0626
1 size 2.5 engine

Which is somewhat faster and longer ranged, but more importantly fits neatly into a capacity 18 magazine, which can be fairly easily researched.

As has already been said, your blockbuster missile is only likely to be effective against targets with no anti-missile capabilities.

[RedKing]

Couple of things I mentally noted comparing the 4 size 1 fighter engines against 1 size 4 engine:

1. Crew requirement actually goes up (7 vs. 4)
2. Total HTK goes down (2 vs. 1x4). Additionally, if you lose that engine, you're dead in the water vacuum. If you have 4 and lose a couple, you can hope to limp back to base/carrier.
3. Research cost obviously goes up.

For those reasons (especially #2), I prefer multiple small fighter engines vs. a single larger thruster. It's a hair less efficient, but fighters aren't designed for efficiency, they're designed for high-speed, adrenaline-junkie, suicide-in-a-box type missions. Fire all of your guns at once and explode into space.

Though, I am heavily considering redesigning my tugs with a few massive engines rather than 15 standard commercial (size 25HS, -50% power) engines.

[Cockyy]

Turns out i've been a few versions behind, despite grabbing what was listed as the latest version from the official forum.

So I upgraded to 6.20 and I don't seem to have the choice to build Commercial engines now. No drop down menu, all engines are Military. Something seems broken.

[10ebbor10]

Turns out i've been a few versions behind, despite grabbing what was listed as the latest version from the official forum.

So I upgraded to 6.20 and I don't seem to have the choice to build Commercial engines now. No drop down menu, all engines are Military. Something seems broken.

You need to increase size to 25+ and efficiency above/ below a certain level before it switches to commercial.

[USEC_OFFICER]

It's based on size/efficiency now. I think that they have to be at least... 25 HS in size to be classified as commercial? Something like that.