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[NullForceOmega]

I'm not sure about the current release, because I last updated over a year ago, but I most certainly could do it then.  At thee beginning I set one military shipyard to self-upgrade forever, and by the time my super-caps are obsolete (it really doesn't matter if your guns and targeting are ancient when you have so many of weapons everything that gets close just dies), I have large enough capacity to overhaul to the newest insanely overblown mega-ship.  The downside to my approach is that even one vessel is a MASSIVE investure of resources, and losing them really, really hurts.  (tho' I've only ever lost one, and that was due to a hive queen too stupid to die, less than an hour after she wasted my prototype, the finalized units rolled in like the wrath of an ancient god.)

[Lord Shonus]

With a quick check, it still works. It also proves to be an even bigger waste of resources than I expected it to be, unless you think that a 275,000+ ton ship (note, I didn't add more engines to compensate for the bulk, just threw a OH on an existing design,so it realistically would be in the 300,000+ range) with the armament of a 12,000 ton ship is somehow viable. In the same time it would take me to build the thing, my current shipyards could pump out 40 ships with equal-or-better weapon loadouts, which not only gives me far better destructive power, but could engage multiple targets simultaneously instead of being restricted to a single underpowered ship.

[RedKing]

True, but challenge mode.


I think I may start a game like this. Say, for whatever reason this culture only fields massive arkships that take population with them. Could be fun if done in conjunction with a dying star scenario (btw, has anyone ever actually gotten those to work -- the +/- 1% solar output options at the game creation?)

[NullForceOmega]

Just throwing a hab module on a small ship and expecting it to be effective is silly, I build in the dozens of millions of tons range; like 19-60 MILLION tons of armor, weapons, shields, sensor systems, fuel storage, engineering systems, and anything else I can cram into it.  I even set a personal rule that the ship has to have adequate housing for three times the crew requirement and large enough docking to take aboard any of its support ships (with maintenance facilities to match).  It was a fun way to play for a while, but the inevitable slowdown that makes 5 second turns take an hour of processing tends to drive me away.

[Flying Dice]

Wasn't there a functional hard limit on how ships can get before they start generating errors, anyways? It was either around 20 or 40 million tons, IIRC.

[Metalax]

Yeah, someone over on the aurora forum went through and tested for where all the overflow errors started for various things around a year ago.
*searches* ah yes here in the "end of everything" thread. Some figures from that thread;

Designs have a maximum armour limit of 350k boxes, before the game crashes. Which directly gives a limit to the maximum tonnage of the design dependant on number of armour layers.
~7.75 million tons is the last ship size that can have the full 100 armour layers.
~7.75 billion tons is the the largest ship/station that can ever be built, with a single armour layer.

1.25 million tons is the maximum size for a military jump-capable ship.
9.375 million tons is the maximum size for a commercial jump-capable ship.
Maximum fuel is 2^31(2.14748 billion) litres or roughly 429 Ultra Large Fuel Storages. This can result in a smaller size cap on viable ship designs if you want any degree of speed/range.
Cargo space is limited at ~22 million tons of mineral capacity or 1770 standard cargo bays.

[EuchreJack]

Just throwing a hab module on a small ship and expecting it to be effective is silly, I build in the dozens of millions of tons range; like 19-60 MILLION tons of armor, weapons, shields, sensor systems, fuel storage, engineering systems, and anything else I can cram into it.  I even set a personal rule that the ship has to have adequate housing for three times the crew requirement and large enough docking to take aboard any of its support ships (with maintenance facilities to match).  It was a fun way to play for a while, but the inevitable slowdown that makes 5 second turns take an hour of processing tends to drive me away.

Agreed.  Note that with the massive bulk and habitation modules being basically damage sinks in combat, the design doesn't need much armor.  The most effective design would use missiles en mass.  Beam weapons with enough speed to actually close would be...interesting.  Probably looking at turrets.

[NullForceOmega]

I don't use missiles...  Every one of those mega-dreads was outfitted with turreted and spinal energy weapons (with gauss thrown in for fun), they were really really damn effective, and missiles were rather irrelevent to the number of CIWS I loaded onto them.

[varsovie]

The real limiting factor IMHO is the fuel. You need mastodon refueling ship in the same task force or a duo design with a fighting part and a tug part to get any rage or speed. (also I think you can still add 2 small fuel storage after the big ones)

I also thing pas the few million tons, more than 3-5 armor isn't worth it. That amount is usually enough to block most direct damage and subsequent shots have very low change of hitting twice the same spot, not counting the inherent system redundancy. At that size few shields starts to be interesting though.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, the new (well, "new" at this point) drive mechanics are another major factor behind not using large ships: they're incredible fuel hogs for relatively minor incremental improvements to combat effectiveness. Not to mention the maintenance space you'll need to keep them running, the refit times (and repair times when they take armor damage), &c., assuming you don't play with maintenance off and don't SM-repair after fights. That also butts into another issue, one of limited resources and logistics: if you're not cheating in massive Sorium deposits in pretty much every system you settle, you're going to have to devote a massive amount of infrastructure to finding, exploiting, and transporting Sorium from all over.

[SlyStalker]

You guys seem to be so good at the game! How into the game does it take to reach a level where you can build such heavy ships, both time spent in one save and also overall time spent playing the game?

[Flying Dice]

In terms of overall time? It doesn't really matter. I've been playing Aurora for years and I've never felt inclined to build ships larger than a few hundred thousand tons for military, or a few million tons for commercial, for a variety of reasons with "it's a massive pain in the ass that doesn't do anything smaller ships couldn't" at the top.

In-game it depends on a number of things:
1. Your starting point. A conventional start with 5 million people is a vastly different ramp-up process than a T/N start with 4 billion.
2. How much you cheat.
3. How many difficulty-added features you turn on.

If you put everything into ramping up your shipbuilding, started with a few billion people, and turned off all the external threats, you could easily be making million ton+ vessels in years or decades. That's also really the only viable way to do it; the standard start or a conventional start would take long enough to start running into campaign-killing slowdown unless you turned off all the enemies.

[MarcAFK]

It doesn't take long in real tine to make massive ships as long as you don't get 5 second increments.
If you started with no NPR's and haven't explored any systems that have NPR's then you can just turtle 3- day increments while expanding shipyard and factory and mining capacity.

[Flying Dice]

The issue with turtling in Sol is that, if you get poor mineral rolls, you might run out on something along the way.

[LoSboccacc]

Forget the vessel, do a terraforming station and tow it there. You can even strap hab modules to kickstart the colony.

Forget the vessel, drop installations and enough population to kick start economic trade, let the private sector profit of delivering infrastructure, works better if you have captured some planet so you can drop them as slave, imperial population complains a lot