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[MrWiggles]

Only if you want to use an exploit.

[Alastar]

Divide by zero error.

You will get nothing going anywhere at an appreciable rate. You want your tugs to be as large as you can get them given current shipyard capabilities and made entirely of max power commercial engines. Which is to say 50 HS x.5 power multiplier.

For really big things, I'd rather use minimum power and even throw in another orbital habitat if I must... fuel use can get very high with 0.5 engines.

[Rolepgeek]

It can, but it really depends on how fast you need it getting there. *shrug*

I don't thijk it's an exploit, though...I do know the way speed is calculated is the sum of engine power of all involved divided by the sum of tonnage of all involved.

Speaking of which, has anyone considered modular ships, made of powerful military grade tugs and battle platforms that can be tractored to one another?

Also, Missile Pods; 500 ton fighters with maybe six or so ASM box launchers of an appreciable size, no engines, and a Missile Fire Control, carried by a mothership with the sensors and defenses. The math tells me you get about 4x as many missiles in return for having to stop for the couple of minutes it takes you to release them, find and assign targets, fire(one missile per fighter per five seconds, for extra salvos, presumably), and then bring them in again, as well as a x15 reload rate. Which doesn't seem like a bad deal to me. Missile Fire Control might be too small to be effective though, I'm not sure.

[Culise]

It can, but it really depends on how fast you need it getting there. *shrug*

I don't thijk it's an exploit, though...I do know the way speed is calculated is the sum of engine power of all involved divided by the sum of tonnage of all involved.

Speaking of which, has anyone considered modular ships, made of powerful military grade tugs and battle platforms that can be tractored to one another?

Also, Missile Pods; 500 ton fighters with maybe six or so ASM box launchers of an appreciable size, no engines, and a Missile Fire Control, carried by a mothership with the sensors and defenses. The math tells me you get about 4x as many missiles in return for having to stop for the couple of minutes it takes you to release them, find and assign targets, fire(one missile per fighter per five seconds, for extra salvos, presumably), and then bring them in again, as well as a x15 reload rate. Which doesn't seem like a bad deal to me. Missile Fire Control might be too small to be effective though, I'm not sure.

Modular ships are indeed extremely powerful, ranging from missile pods up to a full-on segmented "warship".  They're especially useful for reducing upgrade times (just swap out the relevant module instead of refitting the entire ship), keeping shipyard sizes low (since you only need to construct up to the size of your largest module), and reducing maintenance costs (since you can offload key commercial components to modules that will never break down).  On the flip side, you do have extra tonnage costs in terms of tractor beams, bridges, and armor, but those don't really compare.  If I recall properly, these were in fact a significant part of the reason for the fact that the only way to daisychain modules is a bit of an exploit (that and the fact that you could crank these bad boys up to appreciable fractions of c using the no-longer-available hyper drives)

If you're curious, you might like to see this and this, though there isn't really much extra to be added that you haven't already noted.

[Lord Shonus]

Since I include a tractor beam on every ship already (making it much easier to bring back a ship that was badly damaged in combat or suffered bad luck by having both engines break down), adding engineless FACs that are bristling with weapons (my favorite variants are either filled with AMM box launchers, a massive sensor array, a few capital-ship box launchers, or a couple of heavy beam turrets) is a natural evolution, and works quite well.  I've also experimented with the SpaceTruck concept, where you have all the cargo bays and similar equipment (that never goes obsolete) in one module, and the engines in a smaller seperate module with a tractor beam. It works well.

[Rolepgeek]

Daisy-chaining is an exploit?

I thought you just had them each attach to the same ship, then have that ship move.

Also, anyone use massive, cheap, armored/CIWSed decoy vessels? Hangar Bays are pretty cheap and pretty big, and pretty useful too...especially with commercial magazines now.

[Alastar]

It can, but it really depends on how fast you need it getting there. *shrug*

For a given speed, with freely scaleable power multiplier below 1.0, disregarding overhead like armour,
50% engines is cheapest to build
60% engines is most fuel-efficient

So when we want to build moon-sized things where throwing in an orbital habitat is small fry, and we want a tug to move them at a reasonable speed, we want an equally ginormous tug. Even with  dead weight from another habitat, it'll be cheaper in BP and fuel than a (comparatively) small shipyard-built tug that needs much more stressed engines to haul it at an acceptable rate.

Also, anyone use massive, cheap, armored/CIWSed decoy vessels? Hangar Bays are pretty cheap and pretty big, and pretty useful too...especially with commercial magazines now.

Hangars are fragile for their size and cost.
For ships cheaper to build than to shoot down, I use 50-60% low-power engines (see above) and base-tech railguns. 500BP for a 10000k with 100 (slow-tracking, only every 3 ticks) shots.
Only 1-2 armour layers because armour is more expensive than low-tech junk per HTK, can't be repaired as easily in space, and doesn't do anything but absorbing hits.

[Rolepgeek]

Right, so while you're going over to look at and figure out the armament of my massive cheap carrier ship and maybe blow it up, my FACs are sweeping around on the other side and hitting your other stuff. That's the point of the decoy; if you have to get close to see what's up, it's done it's job.

[Culise]

Daisy-chaining is an exploit?

I thought you just had them each attach to the same ship, then have that ship move.

Also, anyone use massive, cheap, armored/CIWSed decoy vessels? Hangar Bays are pretty cheap and pretty big, and pretty useful too...especially with commercial magazines now.

Daisy-chaining and clustered tractor beams are an exploit, I think, but not a very big one; it's more of a design philosophy than anything.  It's also useful enough for any game where you want to design missile pods akin to the Honorverse or the like, f'rex, that I'm not about to call myself "above" using them.

Actually, the AAR that got me into Aurora used these sorts of decoys; the player was new to the game as well, but is rather clever at finding ways to break games.  The problem there, and the reason it's a worse exploit than daisy-chaining, is that the AI can't tell the difference between a decoy and the real thing.  A player, if confronted by a handful of gigantic ships that keeps tanking blow after blow but do nothing else versus a whole fleet of smaller ships that are laying down the missile fire that's blowing up their own ships, will eventually think to switch targets from the former to the latter.  The AI, by contrast, will sink an entire planet's worth of missiles into a decoy if you let it, and if the decoy doesn't blow up first.  I'd feel better about it if I knew the AI had some way of target prioritization that could change over the course of a battle, but otherwise, it's a little gamey. 

That said, if you want to build them, Alastar offers a military solution for cost-effectiveness, while a purely-commercial solution (given your mention of CIWS) would use massive armor and CIWS rather than hanger bays.  Commercial drives are also not only more fuel-efficient, but they also burn hotter, so your decoy will be spotted by the enemy before your main battle fleet for better AI abuse.  A military solution should probably use purpose-built point-defense turrets instead of CIWS; final fire is useful, but being able to cover the rest of your fleet against any missile fire is better, I think. 

[Rolepgeek]

Hangar bays are commercial modules now; I was thinking of commercial stuff indeed.

And the priority the AI makes of really big ships is part of the reason I was thinking of using it. With the expectation that it would die as the sacrifice I would make, whereas a player might just leave it be and go elsewhere since he now knows to be unconcerned.

Which is when the supermassive dreadnought, fine-tuned to have the same thermal and EM signature as the decoy(until it's too late, at least...), makes it's way towards their base using the same tactics that the decoys normally do.

[Flying Dice]

Of course, mindgames only matter if you actually manage to get a multiplayer game arbitrated and running for a meaningful period of time. AI is ultimately pretty dumb and very exploitable in Aurora once you understand how it operates, which is a big part of why I play on 500-1000% difficulty and avoid a lot of the popular exploits and gamey quirks that go beyond optimizing CTH, sensor range, warhead strength, &c.

[Dramegno]

here is my wip commercial tug I am thinking that if maintenance doesn't become to unbearable that I will make an battle tug version of it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Allosaurus class Tug    5 277 100 tons     47550 Crew     304313 BP      TCS 105542  TH 199500  EM 0
5400 km/s     Armour 1-2700     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
MSP 36    Max Repair 131.25 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 120 months    Spare Berths 0   
Habitation Capacity 50 000    Tractor Beam     

Heavy 300 EP ID Engine (1900)    Power 300    Fuel Use 5.3%    Signature 105    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 25 050 000 Litres    Range 16.1 billion km   (34 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as an Orbital Habitat for construction purposes

In other news I finally got the next version of my AMM's for review

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Missile Size: 1 MSP  (0.05 HS)     Warhead: 1    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 15
Speed: 36000 km/s    Engine Endurance: 5 minutes   Range: 10.1m km
Cost Per Missile: 0.8056
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 540%   3k km/s 180%   5k km/s 108%   10k km/s 54%
Materials Required:    0.25x Tritanium   0.5556x Gallicite   Fuel x100

Development Cost for Project: 81RP

[Girlinhat]

You may consider lowering the fuel and raising the agility, so it hits targets more easily.  The biggest problem with AMM seems to be their miss rate.  So you should aim for a very high to-hit chance.

[Alastar]

Review for the AMM would be better if we knew the relevant techs.
At first glance I'd probably increase agility a little at the expense of engine. With AMMs you care mostly about hit rate, speed in itself is less valuable as you don't care about enemy point defence.

[Metalax]

Eh. Basically the way it works is it allocates damage, I think the totals of damage for that round are added up, and all of them are applied to a single location 'type' (like crew quarters, or engines, or cargo holds, and so on), and applies as much as it can there. If it's lower than the HTK for the module there, the damage does nothing. More useful for preventing knockouts here and there than utter destruction, or for slowing down engine death. I might be missing something here, but I don't believe so. *shrug*

Nope. The way it works is first determine how much internal damage a weapon impact causes after shields/armour may block some of it.

Then roll on the Damage Allocation Chart(DAC) to determine which component is hit. (or the electronic DAC if using a microwave weapon)

If the internal damage is higher than the HTK of that component, the component is destroyed and subtract the components HTK from the internal damage and reroll on the DAC.

Continue this until either 20 rerolls have occurred in a row, which triggers the ship as destroyed(again unless using a microwave weapon which can't cause ship destruction), or you hit a component that has more HTK than the remaining damage.

At this point the component has a chance to be destroyed equal to internal damage divided by HTK of the component.

Any components that were destroyed that have a chance to explode now roll in the order they were destroyed to see if that causes a new set of damage to be applied and worked through in the same way.

Finally this whole process is repeated for each weapon impact that occurs.