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[RAM]

I believe that the "giant hangar" thing is for not spending any maintenance supplies. Just being in orbit with sufficient maintenance facilities and supplies should keep the overhaul clock static so the ships won't increase the rate at which they break, but they still break from time to time and the replacement parts will still nibble at your economy...

[Flying Dice]

TBH that's why I usually play with maintenance off and just design my ships and infrastructure as if it weren't. Especially because of the problems it causes with things like large sensors where the cost to repair once exceeds the MSP capacity of the ship, even if you make it 5% or 10% engineering spaces. It's better now that morale provides another cap on deployment so you can't just quietly forget about those survey ships that've been out in the wilds for thirty years.

[Ozyton]

Everybody wants to become a scientist in energy weapons, even though I'm not using them, yet nobody wants to be a sensor scientist. Surprise surprise, I actually do use sensors...

On the plus side I have a guy who's 50% missile/kinetic now which is pretty cool. How high can the bonus get? Is it more beneficial to have a couple scientists all working one lab each to 'train' them or do they skill up without having labs assigned?

If I want to improve my active sensors is it more beneficial to improve active sensor strength or EM sensor sensitivity?

[Mini]

Is it more beneficial to have a couple scientists all working one lab each to 'train' them or do they skill up without having labs assigned?

They can increase skills while not being used, but it's much slower. Of course, the tradeoff is that you are getting each individual tech slower.

If I want to improve my active sensors is it more beneficial to improve active sensor strength or EM sensor sensitivity?

IIRC the calculation for range multiplies them together, so whichever one would give a bigger increase in that. Strength is (almost?) always going to be higher than EM sensitivity, so if they are both increased the same amount then increasing EM sensitivity would give a bigger bonus from a single tech (I don't think they are though, but it's very little math to figure it out properly).

[Sheb]

Everybody wants to become a scientist in energy weapons, even though I'm not using them, yet nobody wants to be a sensor scientist. Surprise surprise, I actually do use sensors...

On the plus side I have a guy who's 50% missile/kinetic now which is pretty cool. How high can the bonus get? Is it more beneficial to have a couple scientists all working one lab each to 'train' them or do they skill up without having labs assigned?

If I want to improve my active sensors is it more beneficial to improve active sensor strength or EM sensor sensitivity?

While they can increase their skills without being assigned on a project, the skill increase is much higer with a lab assigned. An exploit is to assign a lab, then remove it and leave them on a zero-lab project.

Do note that the bonus also applies to research outside a scientist's field, but is multi^plied by 4 for a scientist within his field. Your 50% MK scientist is as good as a theoretical 12.5% SF scientist at researching sensors.

[Alastar]

Relative increase in sensor range is very close. There are other considerations that make me have EM Sensitivity ahead by 1-2 tech levels:

1) longer range for free, higher Active tech increases build cost.
2) it also has some application for passive sensors.
3) it increases range without increasing emissions.

[Dorsidwarf]

I had a 65% engines lady for a while, which was amazing

[Ozyton]

I didn't think having 0 labs to a scientist would actually increase that skill, I've been doing that to sort of pause their work while I moved labs to more important stuff without having to cancel their project then remember what they were doing later. Would removing their labs then pushing the pause button fix the exploit?

Right now I have a 50% skill energy weapons guy filling in the sensor research role, since he has nothing better to do except maybe turret rotation speed per gear... Why is that under energy weapons anyways? I suppose I should ask if people will increase skills just as fast researching a project not in their field than if they were researching one that was.

As for what's going on in my game, every time I go more than one system away from Sol there's those aliens (I assume precursors) there prepared to exploderize my survery ships. I was pretty excited because I found a jump gate but it just lead to more precursors(?). I have my own jump gate construction ship now so soon I'll have my first populated colony outside the solar system.

Final question, is there a way to get the map to stop auto-focusing or panning when I do a turn? Or is there a way to just unlock from whatever object I had selected so that doesn't happen?

[Flying Dice]

It's a bit silly, the Turret Gear placement. I'm assuming it just got lumped into Energy because that accounts for every non-Gauss cannon turreted weapon.

Jump gates can be randomly spawned at system generation as well as constructed by yourself or aliens. If you just find a single one with no corresponding gate on the opposite end, it's probably a random spawn. Think of them as being part of the whole Precursor thing. My head-canon is that the "gates" are actually a stabilization process which degrades over centuries without upkeep, hence why it doesn't cost anything but time to "build" them and they can't be targeted.

I'm... actually not sure what you mean about the auto-focus. The only time I've ever seen camera control taken over by the game is when it jumps to newly discovered systems-it's actually a bit of a pain in the ass that it doesn't follow selected fleets when I'm zoomed in for close combat to assess distances.

[Ozyton]

Well I was in combat and I had my fleet and the enemy fleet on screen at the same time on opposite ends of the screen. Whenever I moved forwards 5 seconds the screen would recenter either on my fleet or the enemy fleet and I'd be unable to see the other fleet. I guess I could zoom out, but then there'd be a bunch of screen space just doing nothing.

So for my new fleet I'm actually designing some dedicated PD corvettes and I'm mounting a bunch of twin gauss canon turrets on them. My first go using anti-missile missiles didn't fare so well, but I found a neat calculator that will design the best AMMs for you which is a huge boon. I'm still not 100% sure how combat works in the game. Is everyone in a task group bunched up in one physical point? Would it be beneficial to detach my PD corvettes and send them off ahead to intercept incoming missiles, and how would I even do that. Would a formation of some kind where everyone isn't bunched up in one point even help?

Also, the first time around I did not realize that you could have your fleet doing combat drills to gain some experience before going into battle...

Another question, should I just have all of my non-combat ships be manned by conscripts? Would I benefit from having a grav survey ship be manned by naval personnel at all?

[Flying Dice]

Okay, here's how it works, effectively.

If multiple ships are in the same task group, they're treated as a single entity-final defensive PD fire covers every ship in the TG, they travel at either the speed you set or the top speed of the slowest ship, &c. If a ship firing in final defensive fire is on the exact same point as another friendly contact, it'll defend that, but even 100km of difference and it won't. What you mentioned with the corvette screen is one of the uses of area defense PD.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really work with Gauss cannon PD, since missiles tend to cross their entire range in a single 5-second tick. The best weapon for this sort of thing is turreted lasers, which can effectively interdict fire directed at another target once you get their range out enough. Other than that, and maybe screening with E/KW bruisers against enemy E/KW platforms, it's got no real advantage.

IIRC trained crew affects survey rates? But yeah, dump conscripts on all of your commercial shipping.

[MarcAFK]

It annoys me the way different Windows always jump into focus while running updates, I recall Steve mentioning that Visual Basic doesn't give very good control over windows, so he was unable to fix that issue.

[Ozyton]

Okay so I made a bit of a misclick. I must have been in SM mode and hit the wrong button when auto-assigning my commanders. I clicked "replace all" and a window came up so I hit 'cancel' but it must have replaced everyone anyways. Now all of my leaders are gone and my scientists have been replaced with newbies. That kinda sucks. Looking at the tooltip I wonder if I can get similar ranked people back by typing in how long my game has been running.
I need to remember to turn SM mode off when I'm finished with it. The shortcut is CTRL+0 and not CTRL+O like the tip would have you believe.

E: Okay, I'm just going to try rolling with it and pretend everyone got so smart their brains exploded. Getting a scientist or two in fields that I actually want to research should be decent enough compensation I suppose... once I train them up.

E2: okay, progress a few years and I just jumped into a system. The first thing I see is a terrestrial planet with a few wrecks around it. Once again I have a bad feeling about this...
A-ha! I have boueys with sensors on them now so I know where these guys are before blundering into them.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalěs]

How do you guys design ships with both cloaks and jump drives? Each of them can only handle a given ship size, and each of them takes up space. I could make them both ridiculously large, but that would obviously be bad. I personally just make a crapload of tests with SM mode until it's optimized and suitable.

Also, my cloak says it can only handle 7000-size ships, but I'm at 9000. And there's no errors, and it says that it's still cloaking me. Is this a bug, an exploit, or what? Does it actually work, or does it errorlessly fail?

[Flying Dice]

Usually I jump-assist my cloaked sensor ships into systems of interest.