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[Son_of_Orion]

Ah man. Warship design is intimidating as hell. There are so many components I need to design and research. Missiles are the worst, I have no idea what makes an effective missile. Anyone have any tips for me in regards to designing warships? Also, do shipping lines only transfer installations that are already constructed on my homeworld to colonies, or can they build their own facilities? I'm guessing it's the former, and that's kind of inconvenient, because it puts a big strain on my resources.

[Karlito]

Also, do shipping lines only transfer installations that are already constructed on my homeworld to colonies

Yes, provided you set up supply/demand points in the civilians tab.

can they build their own facilities?

Civilians will build their own mining outposts, who's mineral output you can purchase, and they'll produce their own infrastructure and ship it to colonies that need it automatically, but all other installations you have to build yourself.

Anyone have any tips for me in regards to designing warships?

It's more efficient to limit your ship classes to one role, and have that role in mind while designing it. Do you want your ship to launch antiship missiles, launch antimissile missiles, shoot lasers at enemy ships, provide point defense, acquire targets for other ships, launch fighters, or something else? Each one of those designs will require different kinds of sensors, weapons, or engines, so they'll be more efficient if you specialize them.
The other big part of ship design is just making sure that some of the numbers line up. Weapon range and tracking speed should match firecontrol range and tracking speed, sensor range should at least be equivalent to weapon range (and usually it should be several times greater), estimated deployment time should match up with estimated maintenance life, etc.
The best way to learn is to design a ship that you're happy with and then post the design here so you can get some feedback.

[Flying Dice]

Do note, however, that over-engineering your missile fire control modules is a good thing. ECM functions (essentially) by lopping a percentage off of your FC range, so having an extra few million kilometers of targeting range beyond the actual range of your missiles is usually helpful, especially if you have poor ECCM tech.

[Son_of_Orion]

Thanks for the tips, guys. Helps clear things up. Still completely intimidated and baffled by missile design.

Wish there was an IRC room dedicated to Aurora or something. It'd make the learning process so much quicker. Alas, I've found nothing of the sort. Anyway, I'll try to design a warship and post it here in the near future.

[Nightstar]

Aurora IRC:

irc.newnet.net #aurora

It's not exactly easy to find (or very active), but it exists.

[Crimson]

Had to start a new game since the bugs decimated my slow fleet and happily irradiated Earth. As my new game has around 200+ fighters right now with automated assignment, there are currently a lot of officers suffering from the bonus bug.

Other than that, the only thing significant that has happened was an encounter with a lone bug queen which is only after exploring 20 systems. The queen itself was easily dealt with. This is boring me.

[Crimson]

Scratch that. They're everywhere! I mean, I've got 5 Geo survey ships, all in a different system around 2 - 4 jumps away from Sol and each of them except for 1 encountered a hostile.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

All 4 got destroyed by the precursors, 3 by AS missiles and 1 by particle beam spam from a single cruiser sized ship.

My fleet is too small to deal with hostiles right now (not mentioning the design weaknesses I discovered) so I'm planning to first stabilize the economy before trying to expand my fleet then dealing with the problematic aliens. Also, as I've been having some slight problems with my ship designs recently, I would want to know if these '2nd gen' destroyer I've designed is any good?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Corsair class Destroyer    9,000 tons     255 Crew     2776 BP      TCS 180  TH 450  EM 0
5000 km/s    JR 3-50     Armour 4-38     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/60/0/0     Damage Control Rating 46     PPV 29.28
Maint Life 3.49 Years     MSP 1157    AFR 108%    IFR 1.5%    1YR 146    5YR 2184    Max Repair 360 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 6 months    Spare Berths 0   
Magazine 448   

J15S12 Jump Drive    Max Ship Size 9000 tons    Distance 50k km     Squadron Size 3
V15/Plasma Engine (3)    Power 300    Fuel Use 37.12%    Signature 150    Exp 12%
Fuel Capacity 1,100,000 Litres    Range 59.3 billion km   (137 days at full power)

Twin 30mm Mk. II Point Defense Gun (2x12)    Range 50,000km     TS: 40000 km/s     Power 0-0     RM 5    ROF 5        1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
Mk. 30, R7C8 Railgun (1x4)    Range 480,000km     TS: 10000 km/s     Power 21-8     RM 7    ROF 15        7 7 7 7 7 7 7 6 5 4
L-Class Series II FCS (1)    Max Range: 480,000 km   TS: 8000 km/s     98 96 94 92 90 88 85 83 81 79
Mk. II Point Defense FCS (1)    Max Range: 37,500 km   TS: 40000 km/s     73 47 20 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
TK-01/Fusion Reactor (3)     Total Power Output 24    Armour 0    Exp 5%

M20 Missile Launcher (4)    Missile Size 4    Rate of Fire 30
Mardock M-20 MFCS (2)     Range 115.9m km    Resolution 20
Inferno M19 ASM (112)  Speed: 43,200 km/s   End: 45.7m    Range: 118.5m km   WH: 14    Size: 4    TH: 187/112/56

D120 RADAR System (1)     GPS 120     Range 28.8m km    Resolution 1
E-005 Spectroscope (1)     Sensitivity 60     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  60m km

Compact ECCM-2 (1)         ECM 20

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

Edit: I've seen people mention their names directly. Still, spoilered as requested.

[FritzPL]

Spoiler them for a start, before anything - not all know the Aurorian HFS

[gimlet]

I hope you have another ship with gunboat and capital ship size active sensors, because the only one you have is size 1 anti-missile and your offensive missles outrange it by well over 100m km.  Imho, on a ship this size it's really worth putting at least a 1 hull space sized radar for gunboat/fighter sized and capital ship sized, just so they have SOME chance operating away from your AWACS ships.  Get rid of 1 of the missile fire controls if you need room, you really don't need 2 for only 4 launchers, and that's a pretty big magazine for so few launchers, 25 full salvos is a lot - I'd probably have maybe 1/2 or 1/3rd of that and make sure your fleet train carries reloads. (Or add more launchers).   I personally would put a BIT more armor.  Also, I'm pretty sure you have 3x as much power as you need, damn I always forget which numbers to use to calculate so I could be wrong.

[Crimson]

I have a corvette and capital ship with much more larger active sensors and I don't really plan on operating this guys alone. Not sure about the FCS since I often keep an extra one around just in case but I'll see what I can do. Also, gonna fix the excess power. I believe the power needed is the second which is energy required after the first shot though I often put excess that is enough to allow all guns to fire at once. As for the armor, I'm still waiting for my Crystalline Composite Armour to finish which is around a year from completion though I probably won't build any military ships for 5 years at most in game.

Oddly, I remember some weird power problems with one of my lasers before which had a power requirement of 0.5 or lower. They caused my game to throw a zero error every time I try to made turrets out of them which couldn't fire at all when I tested them in combat (didn't try the non-turreted one so not sure if they work).

[Flying Dice]

1. The armor is fairly thin, especially for a ship that's unshielded and not particularly small or fast.

2. Very few launchers. I've had 2kton corvettes and 4kton frigates of a (much) lower TL with 2x or 3x as many launchers.

3. The magazine size is too great if you're intent on such a low number of launchers.

4. The ship is too small and too low tech for multi-role capability to be practical. Ditch the railgun and the reactor, add more launchers and armor.

5. As noted above, far too much power. The power rating is [total necessary to fire]-[total necessary per 5s tick per gun for optimum recharge]; you've got a total power requirement that's 1/3 of what you need.

6. Also as above, an anti-ship sensor. Ditch one of the fire controls; in my own ships I never add more than one until I hit around 12-16 launchers.

7. IIRC reduced-power lasers do cause issues when turreted.

8. Reduced-size launchers are your friend. The keystone of Aurora missile combat is weight of fire, not rate of fire. IMO 0.5x size launchers hit the ideal balance. A trick that I like to use is to add box launchers equal to the number of normal launchers to give a ship a single powerful alpha strike against really nasty things. But yes, enemy PD has a much easier time against large numbers of small volleys than against small numbers of large volleys. 4-missile volleys are essentially wasted minerals against anything with shields or PD.

9. Missiles. Optimize them. There's no reason not to. WH strength should be a square number whenever possible at all times, unless you're deliberately RPing a measure of incompetence into your scientists. This is because of the way armor penetration is calculated; the squares are the points where the missile damage penetrates another layer of the armor belt. So, for example, a WH1 missile will only destroy a single tile of armor. A WH4 missile will destroy a T-shaped section the same size as a point-down T-block from Tetris. So on and so forth. Any WH strength between a square value is being wasted, and considering the TL you're operating with you really should have much better CTH values, even if optimizing CTH is more time consuming now that missile drives are static parts rather than abstracted MSP values.

[Metalax]

My fleet is too small to deal with hostiles right now (not mentioning the design weaknesses I discovered) so I'm planning to first stabilize the economy before trying to expand my fleet then dealing with the problematic aliens. Also, as I've been having some slight problems with my ship designs recently, I would want to know if these '2nd gen' destroyer I've designed is any good?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Corsair class Destroyer    9,000 tons     255 Crew     2776 BP      TCS 180  TH 450  EM 0
5000 km/s    JR 3-50     Armour 4-38     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/60/0/0     Damage Control Rating 46     PPV 29.28
Maint Life 3.49 Years     MSP 1157    AFR 108%    IFR 1.5%    1YR 146    5YR 2184    Max Repair 360 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 6 months    Spare Berths 0   
Magazine 448   

J15S12 Jump Drive    Max Ship Size 9000 tons    Distance 50k km     Squadron Size 3
V15/Plasma Engine (3)    Power 300    Fuel Use 37.12%    Signature 150    Exp 12%
Fuel Capacity 1,100,000 Litres    Range 59.3 billion km   (137 days at full power)

Twin 30mm Mk. II Point Defense Gun (2x12)    Range 50,000km     TS: 40000 km/s     Power 0-0     RM 5    ROF 5        1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
Mk. 30, R7C8 Railgun (1x4)    Range 480,000km     TS: 10000 km/s     Power 21-8     RM 7    ROF 15        7 7 7 7 7 7 7 6 5 4
L-Class Series II FCS (1)    Max Range: 480,000 km   TS: 8000 km/s     98 96 94 92 90 88 85 83 81 79
Mk. II Point Defense FCS (1)    Max Range: 37,500 km   TS: 40000 km/s     73 47 20 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
TK-01/Fusion Reactor (3)     Total Power Output 24    Armour 0    Exp 5%

M20 Missile Launcher (4)    Missile Size 4    Rate of Fire 30
Mardock M-20 MFCS (2)     Range 115.9m km    Resolution 20
Inferno M19 ASM (112)  Speed: 43,200 km/s   End: 45.7m    Range: 118.5m km   WH: 14    Size: 4    TH: 187/112/56

D120 RADAR System (1)     GPS 120     Range 28.8m km    Resolution 1
E-005 Spectroscope (1)     Sensitivity 60     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  60m km

Compact ECCM-2 (1)         ECM 20

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

The fuel levels are a bit odd. If this is going to be operating as part of a fleet drop it down to 250,000 for 30 days supply and have a tanker as part of the fleet train to refuel them. If it is going to be operating independently then you want to up it to 1,450,000 to match it's 6 month deployment.

I wouldn't mix beam weapons(other than PD guns) onto a primarily missile ship. For the vast majority of the time it is simply going to be wasted space and you don't have the armour on this design to be getting into beam slugging matches. If you are ever in a situation where you are out of missiles and have nothing else to throw at the enemy, your gauss guns can be surprisingly effective.

Magazines are a bit oversized. I'd usually put equal tonnage of magazines to (full size)launchers, giving between 14-20 full salvoes dependant on magazine design. You definitely want to have a Collier along carrying reloads though.

I'd create a second variant that drops the jump engine and uses the saved space for a bunch of box-launchers to give you a heavier alpha strike.

Edit: An addendum to Dice's point about square damage warheads, from the next version shock damage is going to be introduced which lets damage from larger hits leak through the armour. Due to this, and dependant on your missile tech levels, square damage warheads are not always going to be optimal.

Edit: I've seen people mention their names directly. Still, spoilered as requested.

The names don't really need spoilering, but their capabilities should be.

[Flying Dice]

Ah,  I'd forgotten that that was coming.

Also, yes. The spoilers are pretty much common knowledge, but their tech and behavior isn't always, even if some of us act otherwise. <.<   >.>

[FritzPL]

Sorry, I was trying to be protective... :<

[Karlito]

Any WH strength between a square value is being wasted

This isn't really true, a strength 5 WH for example will produce a damage pattern that looks something like this

Code: [Select]

XXX
XXAnd a strength 8 WH will produce a damage pattern that looks something like this

Code: [Select]

XXXXX
XXX

Maybe there's more efficiency in square numbers, but typically you'll need more than one missile to penetrate an enemy's armor belt so it's best to just pack as much armor destroying power as you can into one missile.