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[se5a]

Unfortunately physics just proved recently (2003?) that gravity doesn't work faster than light which a lot of HH plot works around (and maybe the starfire books?).
Pity... I hate it when science gets in the way of a good plot. 

[Flying Dice]

When it comes to Aurora, I've mostly lurked while looking at other people's posts. I've done this on and off, casually, for a couple of years now. Only, as recently as a couple of months ago, I read about ten of the Honor Harrington books. Now, coming back to Aurora, I recognize some similar technology names floating around.

Does anyone know if Honor Harrington was a bit of an influence on this game?

The primary influence was the starfire books, which are very similar

*Bzzt!*

Actually, if I'm recalling correctly, the program that became Aurora was originally developed to act as a data-tracking aid for the Starfire wargame, which is also what Weber based those novels off of. The HH similarities are coincidental and probably exist because Weber only knows how to write Starfire space opera and Thirty Years War-level musket-and-cannon dramas.

For reference, On Basilisk Station was published in spring of '93, while Insurrection was published in '90 and Crusade in '92. Incidentally, I suspect that Crusade is where Weber picked up his fetish for the Catholic Church expies run by evil masterminds deceiving honest people, given that its version of that motif was less refined and came before all the others.

[wer6]

What is Starfire? I never been able to figure it out.

[Flying Dice]

It's a tabletop wargame. Basically the same concept as Aurora, except that as I understand it it has a much heavier focus on the tactical combat and strategic planning as opposed to empire-management.

[miauw62]

So that's why savegames are databases...

[Lord Shonus]

Unfortunately physics just proved recently (2003?) that gravity doesn't work faster than light which a lot of HH plot works around (and maybe the starfire books?).
Pity... I hate it when science gets in the way of a good plot.

Weber immediately wrote in a retcon that fixes the problem - instead of simply propagating faster than light, the massive gravitational signatures (and I do mean massive, an impeller drive is basically a controlled black hole) that make Honorverse FTL sensors and FTL radio work put pressure on hyperspace that can be detected. It's seamless enough that you would take it as just another Weber infodump if you don't know that's what he's doing. It's nowhere near as blatant as the Great Resizing.

[Sheb]

The Great Resizing?

[Lord Shonus]

The Great Resizing?

Weber almost always refers to ships only in terms of their mass, saying, for example, that a given class of pod superdreadnought masses 12 million tons. He did, however, give lengths to a lot of them in throwaway lines of dialogue and illustrations. Problem was, he didn't do the math for these unimportant bits, and when people working on Saganami Island Tactical Simulator (the ship-combat boardgame set in the universe) did, they realized that with those dimensions most of the ships had a density similar to that of clouds. So he had to completely resize every ship to match existing mass in all later works (and reprints of the earlier ones), which is very noticeable if you have the older books.

[Zeebie]

Does anyone know whether you can pre-build components to speed production for fighters the way you do for ships? 

[kingofthescots]

Does anyone know whether you can pre-build components to speed production for fighters the way you do for ships?

I don't think so, as fighters aren't built the same way as ships are. They're manufactured at a specific factory in one go. The only way to speed up construction is to build more fighter production facilities.

[Rince Wind]

And research the tech to speed up fighter production of course.

[RadtheCad]

Say, how do you get a task force to do fleet training?

The wiki says it's a command on the Task Group screen, but I can't find it anywhere.

Also, what do you guys think of an anti-missile area defense ship that uses lots of 1/10 size Gauss cannons?  They're horribly innacurate, but at my current Gauss tech each one will be outputting one shot per second (five in a five-second tick), which is 9x5= 45 shots fired per 5-second tick for the 3,000 ton ship I've built that uses them.  The actual damage of the shots is unimpeded, so only one of the 45 shots actually has to hit a missile to destroy it (unless the missile is armoured).  Of course, the shots are 10x less accurate than they would be if they were fired from 4.5 normal-sized Gauss Cannons, but you get the same average to-hit-ratio, and as I said- all that matters is that ONE of those shots hits per incoming missiles in a salvo, not a significant proportion of them.  The only downside to using the minituarised cannons, as far as I can see, is that they each count as a component- so they each add extra armour colums on to your ships, meaning they're less efficient than bigger cannons, displacement-wise.

Still, I love the idea of what is essentially a flying space-ship mounted area defense shotgun.

[Sheb]

Extra armour columns only depend on mass. As for Task Force Training, its in one of the tab of the task group, window, the one with the default orders.

[Flying Dice]

Some people swear by the scattergun approach to Gauss weapons, I don't; it's mostly a matter of preference.

[Sheb]

I always end up using lasers for PD because they make a decent energy weapon at close range.