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[RedKing]

I usually have classifications that vary by purpose, with size only secondary. For instance, a frigate and a destroyer might be the same size, but a frigate will be specialized for PD/anti-fighter, whereas a destroyer is fast and armed with anti-ship weapons.

I'm the same way -- designations are more an indication of role rather than size, and I try to stick to the historical definitions:

Corvette: Small, fast, often single-weapon design. Roughly equivalent to the old "Gunboat" classification, pre-6.x

Monitor: Large, slow, lots of long-range weapons, no jumpdrive, low fuel/maintenance duration. Intended for in-system defense.

Destroyer: Small-medium, fast, sufficient weapons to outgun enemy ships of equal or smaller tonnage. Obviously this means destroyer designs vary based ono who they're meant to face off against. Anti-Swarm destroyers are very fast (>10000 km/s) but a bit lighter on the guns. Anti-Precursor destroyers will be a bit larger, considerably slower, have built-in AMS, and more guns. Bear in mind that the name "destroyer" evolved from torpedo boat destroyer, and that their role called for a ship fast enough and manueverable enough to intercept small but potent vessels which posed a threat to capital ships. In Aurora terms, any kind of defensive escort vessel should probably be a destroyer/destroyer escort.

Cruiser: Medium-large, decent speed, long fuel/crew/maintenance duration. Cruisers were originally meant to ply the shipping lanes looking for trouble, and/or be "the face of the Empire" in far-off stations. Initially was not a class of ship, but a role which certain classes could fill.

Frigate: Similar mission profile to cruisers, but smaller. Ideal for patrolling backwater systems or providing colonists with a reassuring military presence overhead.

Battleship: Large, heavily armed and armored, requires support vessels to remain "on station" for any length of time.

Battlecruiser: Essentially a fast battleship, trading armor/shields for better speed and longer duration.


Because I loathe the micromanagement of colliers, tankers, etc. needed with fleet support, most of my designs are frigates, cruisers and battlecruisers, although I will custom-build integrated fleets if I'm expecting a big dust-up with someone. And tend to rely on PDCs and monitors to provide in-system defense.

[Bremen]

Similar for me, but I do a few things differently. I already mentioned I use frigates as PD/anti-fighter escorts, designed to match the speed of capital ships and have very little else (I more or less consider them strap on PD).

Battleships I mostly use as command ships; flag bridge, big sensors, lots of defenses, good fuel and maintenance supplies. A mixture of defensive and offensive weapons, but all the other stuff usually means that a battleship doesn't have room for as many guns and missiles as I'd like.

While I know battlecruisers were historically fast battleships with less defenses, I don't use them as such in Aurora; in my experience being faster than your escorts and having minimal defenses is a great way to get torn up by missiles (and for chasing down poorly armed or civilian ships, there are already destroyers). Instead, I developed a new doctrine that uses battlecruisers as the big guns of a fleet; compared to a battleship they cut down a lot on the defenses and support stuff, and have minimal PD, but mount large numbers of missile and beam batteries. Sort of a scaled up, slower destroyer. As a rule they never operate on their own, but a battleship and two battlecruisers often compose the core of a fleet.

[Flying Dice]

I've always preferred to use class designators as indicators of tonnage rather than in the same way as their wet-navy equivalents, mostly because I use ships of radically different tonnage for similar roles. So, for example, I could have a missile corvette, missile destroyer, and M-variant battlecruiser; I would know that each was a missile platform, as well as the relative tonnages and battery size of each vessel.

[RedKing]

The way I use them, they're both role and tonnage guides.

Example: frigate-> cruiser-> battlecruiser (similar roles/design philosophy, just increasing weight)

For loadouts, I often use class/vessel names as a quick guide.
Missile designs get names that reference archery or historical artillery (Longbow, Archer, Artemis, Agincourt, Strela, Katyusha, Ballista, etc.)
Railgun designs get names that reference firearms/cannons (Winchester, Remington, Marksman, Gunslinger, etc)
Laser designs get names that reference light, fire or stars/sun. (Solaris, Icarus, Phaeton, Helios, etc.)

Mixed designs are rare for me, but would get names that are drawn from a different pool.


Which brings up a good discussion: are there certain class names that you find yourself reusing, game after game?

For instance, my initial survey ships always seem to wind up being either Explorer, Galileo or Pathfinder.
My troopships (transports, not combat dropships) have a three-tier system that's been consistent:
Dieppe (battalion-level troopship)
Dunkirk (company-level troopship)
Normandy (division-level troopship, and yes I do actually make such monstrosities)

Jumpgate construction ships are always Janus-class.

[Flying Dice]

Atlas freighters, Titan superfreighters, Genesis terraformers. My survey ship designs are usually named after geologists and astronomers. I tend to draw pretty heavily from the list of Royal Navy ships for class and individual ship names.

[Tarran]

In my current game at its current state with my extremely limited navy, 2K is a corvette, 4K is a frigate, 12K is a cruiser, and 46K is a light carrier (though I might want to change this because it's so much bigger than every other military ship I've got).

Which brings up a good discussion: are there certain class names that you find yourself reusing, game after game?

I use US names and rarely if ever rename classes, so yes, I do find many things reused.

[Karlito]

Gaia terraforming platforms, Mayflower colony ships, Discovery is usually the first generation grav survey ship.

[Culise]

Conestoga colony ships, and my geosurvey and gravsurvey ships are traditionally the Marquette and Hudson classes, respectively (and each ship gets named for a land or sea explorer).  Thanks to an...interesting sense of humour, my cruise liner designs used to be named Lusitania and my first freighter class the Exxon Valdez, though both of those changed with the new civilian designs that came with the engine change.  Other than that, my names go as my will takes me.  I tend to specify ship class by role rather than tonnage, but I don't tend to detach individual ships often, so certain classes don't get seen as often. 

[Metalax]

I tend to reuse the same set of names for classes for most ships except combat ships, they tend to get a class name bassed on their particular design.

Surveyor class  - geosurvey ships
Discovery class - gravsurvey ships
Gaia class - terraformers
Hauler class - freighters
Sleeper class - colony ships
Oasis class - fuel harvesters
Drinker class - tankers
Dwarf class - asteroid miners
Sentinel class - orbital weapon platforms
Longshot class - missile pods
Turtle class - planetary fighter base

[foarl]

My brother got into Aurora a little while back, and just recently installed the latest version for my on my Win7 computer.

Sorry if this is the wrong place for this (waiting on word about aurora board account activation), but the game is starting me off with <100 minerals of every type on earth. Surveys return nothing (after 12x30 days searching). I literally can't afford a single geosurvey ship.

Has anyone heard of this bug before?

[Karlito]

That's pretty weird. Do you do a Spacemaster start?

You can run the homeworld mineral generation routine with spacemaster mode to give yourself proper mineral levels. It's a button in the System Information Window.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah. I've honestly never heard of anything like that.

[Metalax]

Yeah that is wierd. Homeworlds have a special generation for minerals that results in smaller quantities than you find on other worlds but guarantees the presence of all minerals. This is intended to encourage a need to expand. I think the lowest I've ever seen it generate is 10,000 tons of a mineral.

Stilll this is one of the situations SM mode is for, just activate it from the toolbar, open up the system information panel(F9), select Earth, and hit HW Minerals in the lower right.

Also Earth starts off fully surveyed since version 6.0, so survey teams won't find anything extra there.

[RedKing]

Hah....amusing that a lot of us use similar names.
My terraformers are usually either Gaia (with ships named after Earth goddesses) or Genesis (Biblical books) class.
Colony ships are frequently Mayflower, Pinta or Pioneer-class. (Although I like Conestoga...might have to start using that)
Freighters are usually Starhauler-class (after the initial expansion burst, I rarely build freighters and just use civvies)
Tugs are Rover or Bulldog-class.
Fighters typically use the same nomenclature as US helicopters (i.e. Native American tribes like Chippewa, Comanche, Apache, Huron, etc.)
Asteroid miners are Mountain-class (Everest, Fujiyama, Matterhorn, etc.)

[foarl]

That actually doesn't help me, here's why.

When I run the HW minerals, I keep getting values between 10 and 250 or so. When I go to "specify minerals" I see that those values are actually representing thousands of minerals from the generation code, but the game is only seeing "70".

Specifically if I force enter 700, I get 700 minerals. But If I put in 7000, I get 7 minerals. This clearly looks like a decimal point issue, but I'm using the "." as requested by the game so I don't know how to fix it.

Edit: Well I decided to insert "," for "digit" seperator and that seems to have fixed the issue. I coulda sworn I saw you had to use "."

Thanks guys!