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[Detros]

Hah, I'm glad I roped you in.  I enjoy the short range play because it makes your warship design so much more critical.  You have to know you're going to be under heavy fire long before you can return it, and it makes fleet positioning so much more important, since if you can get an enemy in a pincer you know you'll spend that much less time chasing and getting shot with missiles.

Also, not having to deal with the logistics of missiles is nice. 

I feel that missiles take so much challenge out of the war aspect of the game.  It's not hard to design fancy mirvs that annihilate whole enemy fleets in a couple of salvos.  Plus size 1 missiles are disproportionately powerful, although the NPRs do take advantage of that sometimes.

On the other hand, once your fleet has enough PD capability to get through one flock of missiles without being hit once it can just keep going forward, disregarding any amount of more missile flocks. With missiles you eventually run out. With beam weapons the fuel is the limit.

[Damiac]

True, once you've got enough PD to overwhelm the opponents missile quantity, it doesn't much matter how long it takes you to close.  But it's not always that binary.

A more typical situation is one where I can shoot down a good percentage of each incoming salvo, for example, when the NPRs are shooting salvos of 100 or 200 size 1 missiles.  Putting a dent in that is good, but odds are some will get through.  Those size 1 missiles aren't too bad individually, since they take forever to get through armor, but they add up.  You want to take as few hits as possible before you're in range to blow up those missile ships.  You certainly don't want to keep eating missile hits until they run out, and having enough PD to take out hundreds of size 1 missiles isn't always feasible. 

Having given it some thought, I've realized I should have some long range spinal lasers on probably all my fast fighting ships.  Even if they only fire every 30 seconds or whatever, it would be good to be able to do some damage while closing, plus I might be able to cripple ships through a few layers of armor.   That would also give me the opportunity to kite opponents who use shorter range weapons. 

[Dorsidwarf]

True, once you've got enough PD to overwhelm the opponents missile quantity, it doesn't much matter how long it takes you to close.  But it's not always that binary.

A more typical situation is one where I can shoot down a good percentage of each incoming salvo, for example, when the NPRs are shooting salvos of 100 or 200 size 1 missiles.  Putting a dent in that is good, but odds are some will get through.  Those size 1 missiles aren't too bad individually, since they take forever to get through armor, but they add up.  You want to take as few hits as possible before you're in range to blow up those missile ships.  You certainly don't want to keep eating missile hits until they run out, and having enough PD to take out hundreds of size 1 missiles isn't always feasible. 

Having given it some thought, I've realized I should have some long range spinal lasers on probably all my fast fighting ships.  Even if they only fire every 30 seconds or whatever, it would be good to be able to do some damage while closing, plus I might be able to cripple ships through a few layers of armor.   That would also give me the opportunity to kite opponents who use shorter range weapons.

low-level shields might help mitigate the wearing-down effect of 1 or two missiles slipping through every other salvo?

[Damiac]

Heh, yeah shields are a good idea, but early on that could be 10-25 missiles out of a 100 missile salvo, before I've hit the critical mass of enough PD to shoot anything down.

[Hanzoku]

With the introduction of Spinal lasers, I always build one into every fighting ship possible for that very reason. I sort of wish he'd give more love to other weapon types - I'd love the option for spinal rail guns, for example, or a spinal plasma cannon for that special, loving form of die burning in plasma, xenos scum.

I also tend to build in shields from early on, but that's purely a RP choice. They are great if you're only seeing a few leakers, but if you're getting battered with waves of 200 AMM every 5 seconds, they're probably less effective then putting the tonnage into more layers of armor, especially since AMMs can't inflict shock damage.

[Detros]

I sort of wish he'd give more love to other weapon types - I'd love the option for spinal rail guns, for example, or a spinal plasma cannon for that special, loving form of die burning in plasma, xenos scum.

Next version should offer something in that way too: Particle lance.

[Alastar]

Spinal railguns would need some unique benefit; large railguns with a firing rate >10s are generally not very good weapons (multiple small lasers do the job better for a fraction of the research effort).

[Man of Paper]

If it's a large enough round, perhaps it'd alter a ship's trajectory? Dunno how easy that would be to include though. You'd need to take momentum of the round vs the target into account, which would be calculating the mass and velocity of both. Carrying a ship off course or dead-stopping one coming right at you would be neat. Probably not impossible, may be easier than I think, though I'm no coder.

[Sirus]

That would probably be useless. Ships in Aurora have inertialess drives, they can adjust speed and heading almost instantaneously. If you somehow did manage to knock an enemy ship off course, it would readjust with almost no time lost.

Probably not worth the effort of coding in momentum, projectile mass, and the interplay between the two.

[Damiac]

Well, trying to use realistic physics calculations against such unrealistic physics is only going to give nonsense answers.

For example, travel is done in 5 second steps.  Non missile weapons hit on the same round they are fired, so in a sense, they travel instantly.
F=MA.  Mass is a known quantity (we'll ignore the bizarre relativistic effects on mass).  But acceleration? It's infinite! 

The same this with the ships themselves.  They can go from 0 to 16000 km/s in an instant.  You can't apply real physics to this, because all your answers are going to be zeros and infinities. 

That's not to say the lore couldn't be adjusted to be more compatible with real physics without really changing the underlying simulation.  But it'd be a lot of work, and then you'd actually have to code the damn physics too.


Speaking of lore, there's something that bothers me about it.  If these trans-newtonian elements have existed all along in the earth's core, along with lots of other stellar bodies, why are those bodies following newtonian physics?  Why isn't the earth slowing down as it orbits the sun due to the drag of the trans-newtonian elements against the viscous media that makes up the dimension they're partially in? 

Also, as wonderful as trans-newtonian tech is in many ways, it would be nice to be able to build fully newtonian ships, for things like very long distance scouting.  In real life, you only need to apply force to accelerate.  Object in motion stays in motion and all that.  So if I want to shoot a probe over five systems, it'd be nice to only have to use fuel to adjust trajectory and accelerate.  Of course... the fuel itself is made of a trans-newtonian element...

[Flying Dice]

My headcanon has always been that the T/N minerals aren't fully in phase with conventional reality and require special infrastructure to detect, extract, and manipulate-hence pre-TN industry being godawful at all of the above, as well as the non-linear scaling effectiveness a lot of techs have/had.

Likewise, Sorium isn't a fuel in the sense of an ICE's fuel being gasoline, it's a T/N additive that makes conventional drive techs markedly more effective. Remember that pretty much all of the tech is based on either real-world tech or at least semi-plausible extrapolations thereof. We've already built a stellarator plant in Germany, it's just inefficient and impractical. We have proposals and the theorywork for nuclear pulse and ion drives. We have railguns, coilguns, and lasers.

They're just not particularly efficient or practical right now. T/N tech is functionally a way of short-cutting a few thousand years of R&D and avoiding potential hard-limits on how efficient we can make some of this stuff.

[Hanzoku]

My head-canon for how the drives work is that they create a bubble around the activating ship that allows it to partially submerge in an alternate dimension, where different newtonian rules apply. Weapons fire and missile explosions causes ripples or dents in this bubble, and hull damage comes from the external pressure grinding the bubble of reality against the hull. When the drive fails entirely, the ship is deposited fully in real space, drifting at close to 0 km/s... until the next volley of missiles blows it apart.

[StagnantSoul]

Got my other laptop to work with this game, and now working on some missile design. How's this missile, for an antiship one? This is using tier 1 tech, except the engine which is magneto pulse.

Missile Size: 10 MSP  (0.5 HS)     Warhead: 20    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 24000 km/s    Engine Endurance: 50 minutes   Range: 72.2m km
Active Sensor Strength: 0.3912   Sensitivity Modifier: 60%
Resolution: 100    Maximum Range vs 5000 ton object (or larger): 230 000 km
Cost Per Missile: 8.6261
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 240%   3k km/s 80%   5k km/s 48%   10k km/s 24%

[RAM]

That would probably be useless. Ships in Aurora have inertialess drives, they can adjust speed and heading almost instantaneously. If you somehow did manage to knock an enemy ship off course, it would readjust with almost no time lost.

Probably not worth the effort of coding in momentum, projectile mass, and the interplay between the two.

You could have a gimmick instead. Like, it could reset weapons to a state as though they had just fired, drain reactors and unload missiles and such... Or add a modifier to their heading that is applied when next they move?

drifting at close to 0 km/s... until the next volley of missiles blows it apart.

But what if the next volley doesn't blow it apart, would not the detonations impart velocity? Most likely the effect is universal to all T.N. materials and constant(perhaps with the exception of Sorium which perhaps requires activation and expenditure) it just gets expressed differently.

[Android]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Got my other laptop to work with this game, and now working on some missile design. How's this missile, for an antiship one? This is using tier 1 tech, except the engine which is magneto pulse.

Missile Size: 10 MSP  (0.5 HS)     Warhead: 20    Armour: 0     Manoeuvre Rating: 10
Speed: 24000 km/s    Engine Endurance: 50 minutes   Range: 72.2m km
Active Sensor Strength: 0.3912   Sensitivity Modifier: 60%
Resolution: 100    Maximum Range vs 5000 ton object (or larger): 230 000 km
Cost Per Missile: 8.6261
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 240%   3k km/s 80%   5k km/s 48%   10k km/s 24%

In my opinion, and I am far from an expert in Aurura, not that good. For TL1, the range on this missile is absurdly long. Cutting that in half would probably still be pretty long for that early tech, because you would be needing to design a very inefficient (large) sensor suite for TL1. Further, your hit chance at targets you'll likely be facing this early is fairly poor around 50% at best. Putting something into agility would be highly advised. Damage on your missile is good, but I believe most players design missiles around 9 damage this early in the game. Speed is fine for TL1. Finally, and this is more of my personal take, but having an active sensor on an early missile doesn't seem like a good use of size around TL1. Perhaps for a planetary based defense missile maybe.

If you are looking to field a missile right away, I would aim for a size 6 or size 7 missile if you really want high damage. And maybe I'm wrong about all of this.