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[iceball3]

I would not mind if there was a small "mineral refund" for removed systems as a consequence of refit, even if refits were made slightly more difficult to compensate (extra cost for tonnage difference or what have you).
It'd make refits for ships with the exact same hull and total size (copy design, with same armor type, final tonnage, and thickness as the prior. For example.) a lot cheaper, depending on what you're swapping, while making refits that actually change the size of the ship more difficult.

[RAM]

Or they could just remove the parts and stick them in storage...

[Madman198237]

Darn illogical mechanics. Ah well. Guess I'll go amp up that ship real quick.

[Salmeuk]

I have a question for those that have used the Spacemaster [?] feature, where you can edit the systems, planets, and races at startup or midgame.

Have you ever set up a scenario where the player race begins in the same system as a non-player race, and the two sort of fight it out at an early tech level? Might that actually pose an interesting situation? I don't know enough about the game mechanics since I wouldn't call myself an active Aurora player, I just have a morbid curiosity for the game and it's potential as a story generator.

[Detros]

I have a question for those that have used the Spacemaster [?] feature, where you can edit the systems, planets, and races at startup or midgame.

Have you ever set up a scenario where the player race begins in the same system as a non-player race, and the two sort of fight it out at an early tech level? Might that actually pose an interesting situation? I don't know enough about the game mechanics since I wouldn't call myself an active Aurora player, I just have a morbid curiosity for the game and it's potential as a story generator.

Yes, there are some parts catering specifically for such scenarios, like that Truce countdown in game settings. See Solarian Empires Campaign by Steve himself. It is described as "A second test campaign for v6.40 to try multiple NPRs on different planets in the same system". Note current version is 7.1, though.

[hostergaard]

That's already taken into account, up to a point, with size changes being really costly. When swapping systems, you're mostly paying for the cost of the new system after all.

I nearly always get a "would cost more to refit than build new" when I all did was replacing the engines. Or some other system. Refits are rarely a viable option when really, it should be a common thing.

But, its also more in consideration of additional eligible classes for shipyards. It seems that even the smallest changes makes them not eligible. Replace engines with similar engines of exact same size? Nope. Can't produce it here.

Really, shipyards and which ships they can produce should be based on hulls, not internal systems.  We should be able to design hulls for the shipyards too tool to, and then we can build ship variants based on those hulls in that shipyard.

[Rince Wind]

I think engines and armor are pretty massives changes (not counting mass changes).

Especially as engines often take up 25+% of a ship, so you basically have to take apart most of the ship, then put it together again.

[Flying Dice]

Drives are pretty much always the most costly part of a ship.

[hostergaard]

Not if I am replacing the engines with one of exact same size. Take a car, you can take out and replace the engines relatively easily without modifying the casis even tough its a large part of its mass. Hell, the same factory can produce the hull, it would be easy to set up a factory that produced two models with different engines. My point remains that the game should differentiate between modifying the hull and modifying the internal systems.

And armor is pretty much the hull.

Really, we should design ship hulls that then have to researched.

[Rince Wind]

A car is a pretty bad comparison. And of you want to stay there you are probably exchanging a gas engine for an electric one, not just for another gas one.


Try changing the reactor on a carrier, only that the reactor is a lot bigger on the spaceship. Then, as it is a completed different tech more often than not when you refit change the drive train as well. Also a big chunk of the hull where the new engines use different sized holes to put their power to good use.

Because they are of a different design you might have to change the complete fuel setup as well.

[Flying Dice]

Not if I am replacing the engines with one of exact same size. Take a car, you can take out and replace the engines relatively easily without modifying the casis even tough its a large part of its mass. Hell, the same factory can produce the hull, it would be easy to set up a factory that produced two models with different engines. My point remains that the game should differentiate between modifying the hull and modifying the internal systems.

And armor is pretty much the hull.

Really, we should design ship hulls that then have to researched.

Bad comparison. Drives not only account for anywhere from 15-50% of the tonnage but also 30-70% of the cost of the ships most people build. You are drastically underestimating the effort and cost involved in replacing something that integral on such a large vessel. Moreover, they're not stuck in an empty box with an easy-access panel, they're buried in the guts of the ship and run through a good portion of it. Replacing the engines on contemporary surface vessels is already a time-consuming, difficult dry-dock process, and they're vastly smaller and simpler than starships.

[RAM]

I would hazard a guess that starships are simpler. You can access them from any angle, there are no issues with gasses getting into where they ought not, all the problems with operating in a no-gravity vacuum ought to be pretty much solved by a T.N. civilisation, the ship needs neither to be dried as the medium and its contaminants are not an issue nor docked as there is basically no gravity concerns, which again solves a huge pile of weight-bearing issues. If people are having as difficult a time with extraplanetary vessels as they are with naval vessels then someone has probably stuffed things up in a huge way.

[Sirus]

You've still got the problem of sheer size and the fact that at least part of the engines will be buried inside the hull. Look up images of cruise ship engines sometimes; they're far more than a (rather sizable) propeller sticking out the bottom of the vessel. Those things are huge and take up a good deal of space.

[Flying Dice]

Spoiler: Here's a good example of what I'm talking about. (click to show/hide)

You basically have to dismantle a good part of a starship just to access the drives on the scale necessary to replace them. The larger the ship, the greater the trouble.

And remember, this isn't just about ease of access. The complaint was about cost. An Aurora ship's drives are almost always the flat majority of its cost, often closer to 2/3 than 1/2. If your only design change is the drive teching up that spikes even more. So just building the drives as components will cost almost as much as building the whole ship, and then you have to account for the fact that the refit process requires you to bring in outdated ships, almost completely disassemble them, strip the old drives and dispose of them, fit the new drives, put them back together, and finish the rest of the refit maintenance overhaul.

If you're building new, you skip half of that since you're putting the ships together around the drives. That means lower time, lower cost in wages, tools, materials, transport for all of the above, and only somewhere from 25-50% increased cost over building the drives alone.

Basically, it's often the case that the labor, material, and associated costs of the full refit process of outdated ships exceeds the production and assembly cost of the minority of a new ship. Which is actually pretty sensible and true-to-life. Notice how in real life we don't endlessly refit old hardware? How modern navies aren't full of refits from the world-wars period? How we tend to decommission or mothball hardware that's too out of date rather than taking it apart and sticking a bunch of new tech in? There's a certain amount of leeway when systems aren't actually that different or the refits are relatively minor, but past a point it's more cost-effective to purpose-build new stuff.

And again, return to the reference. It's cheaper to replace smaller and less expensive components not only because they're usually easier to replace (pulling out surface installations like turrets or getting access to relatively small internal areas) but also because they cost less to produce relative to the price of a new vessel. If it were cost-effective to endlessly refit (compared to building replacements), why aren't we using Steam Age wet-navy ships that've been through a dozen iterations of refits?

[Madman198237]

The refit process reminds me of the oft-repeated suggestion to take a WWII battleship, such as the USS Missouri and make it a guided-missile warship. By removing some of the triple 16-inch gun turrets.

Those things weigh in at roughly the size of an entire destroyer. The turrets alone. There's a reason that the Missouri is a museum ship, and it's because it was built around the machinery (To make it keep pace with the Navy's 33-knot carriers) and the guns, and thus you can't really make it do anything but go that fast, with that powerplant, and shoot those guns, because it's too prohibitive to change it.