Cargo/launch bays

[wingte]

I previously noted that Satalite and fighter bays on transports labled as TYPE Weapons Carriers were treated by the Population Transport minister as regular cargo pod and filled with colonist,, Well I have now used Sat, Fighter, Mine Layer pods in colony ships and the Colonization Minister fills them with additional colonists when it send them off to a new planet.

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Wingte

[wingte]

Along this same line. Why require that every "transport" ship have a minimum of 50% specifically "cargo pods"???

In reallity there are many different kinds of specialized cargo ships. This is particularly true of military support vessels. Seagoing Navys and presumably space Navys are always going to need ships with specialized cargo areas for specialized cargo.
You don't usually carry fuel in general cargo ships and weapons are rarely carried in general cargo spaces. Unless we are also going to have a cryogenics tech area ,, then people and troops are not going to fare well in general cargo holds. Planes (read fighters) are a very specalized cargo that basically cannot be carried in anything not specially equiped or must fly individually to new locations.
Almost all si-fi predictions about space travel envision "freighters" as being more like tugs (a very well built engine and control vessel) that can be connected to specialized cargo containers.
In the real world this means that as cargo capacity goes up,, speed and manurability go down.
Because of the low speed and manuvering ability, cargo vessels rarely had expensive attack weapons but often had cheap defensive systems. It must be noted that almost all great Naval powers have created specalized decoys using Cargo/freighters during time of war though. (Both the Japanese and the British used specially fitted freighters as submarine hunters. The US experimented with a freighter that was actually an anti-aircraft platform and almost every Navy has used freighters and cargo vessels for spy/sabatoge missions.) There have long been international treaties that have limited the "offensive" weapons that "civilian" vessels could carry. No reason why the game cannot be set up the same way.
A limit of say 10% of total space used for offensive weapons would be acceptable and in keeping with the spirit of being able to creat "decoys" and "surprises".
Adding an "anger" factor into the AI regarding how alien races react to these "decoys" would be a nice touch too...


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Wingte

[Fionn]

The Q-ships idea is a great one, IMHO, especially for multi-player (nasty tricks are even more fun when there's a real pair of human teeth grinding together over them <smirk> ).

I think it'd work better once the proposed ability to see your opponent before deciding on combat is in place.

"A transport? Easy prey! Charge 'em, boys!"

<a moment passes>

"What the . . . ?!? ARGH! <squeak of teeth>"

[Jeb]

I would imagine the rule that cargo ships must have 50% of their space devoted to cargo bays is a play balance issue. When everyone else is flying around in escorts, a small transport hull filled with weapons would be extremely powerful, even if it would be a tad slower than military ships. That said, it is too bad that satellite bays and minelayers don't also count as cargo. This isn't much of a problem, though, because you can also put mines and satellites in regular cargo bays, so you really only need one mine layer or satellite bay per ship.

I also like the idea of Q-ships, which would be especially nasty against someone who has a "don't fire on" order about transports. Still, since transports are cost half as much per kT of space as military ships, there needs to be some restrictiont that prevents all of a player's transports from being Q-ships. A limit on spaces that could be devoted to offensive systems would prevent you from building Q-ships just as much as the current system, and in fact might be even more restrictive.

[wingte]

Well,, the game balance should be maintained since a transport with a lot of weapons should have prohibitively high maintanance costs.

The other way to achieve game balance is to follow the real world example. Until very recently ,, warships were almost always larger than merchant ships during time of war. The super tankers and super container ships didn't become technically feasable until the military had build the first super carriers. A war would likely result in the military ships again surpassing the merchants.



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Wingte

[Jeb]

quote:

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Originally posted by wingte:
Well,, the game balance should be maintained since a transport with a lot of weapons should have prohibitively high maintanance costs.

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I don't know about you, but I don't pay much attention to maintenance costs. At least so far, I don't usually have much trouble getting enough resources to pay for my fleet. (Sometimes, my problem is to use them all up because I don't have room to store the excess!) Nowadays I avoid this by turning all but the best (140-150%) mineral planets into research stations and the like.

At any rate, if there were no component restrictions, a heavily-armed transport would still be cheaper to maintain than warship of equal tonnage and armament, because the transport hull is cheaper. Admittedly, the transport is a tad slower than a warship. However, as I said, in the early game when you otherwise wouldn't be able to build a ship that big, being able to make a transport that's armed to the teeth would make it hardly worth the effort to build escorts.