PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship

[Baron Munchausen]

PvK:

I thought of maintenance, too. I've not only increased the basic costs of large hulls, I've added maintenance modifiers to large hulls to increase even the cost of the components. And given some of the smallest hulls a maintenance cut. This makes it possible to have far more tonnage in small ships vs. large. Too bad you cannot teach the AI to use these sorts of advantages.

But as I was saying and forgot to finish in the previous post... if detection were revamped to have range effects and also take the ship size into account then smaller ships would start to have usefulness for 'special' missions where stealth is important.

[ July 17, 2002, 16:19: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Ed Kolis]

Isn't SJ making Gravitic Sensors in the next Version of P&N so they detect ships based on their size? Hmm, wonder when the next Version of P&N will be available...

[Baron Munchausen]

And just how is he gonna do that? By putting inherent gravitic cloaking on ship hulls? That's still going to be system-wide and unconditional once you get the right level of sensors.

[ July 17, 2002, 21:55: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Suicide Junkie]

Every ship gets grav cloaking based on their size.
Active and passive cloak require the armor components, while psychic cloak involves not having crew (master computers).
In this case, the cloaking devices overpower sensors at max tech.

In order to get undetectable grav cloak, you need frigate or smaller. When you try to apply the other cloaking devices to a frigate hull, you are left with almost nothing for engines and weapons. Larger ships can be detected by massive, base-mounted grav sensors.

So, tiny ships are the only perfect stealth craft, but can be fended off with mines.
Small to medium ships can't be detected except by a huge base, which makes a great target.
The heavier ships can't fully cloak, but can carry enough firepower and defenses to drive their way through with brute force.

[Baron Munchausen]

How many levels of cloaking are you using in your mod? Have you run across any arbitrary limit or does it seem that we can have 10 or 20 levels of cloaking and sensors?

[Suicide Junkie]

Currently, I have only used 3 or 4. But that is 5 separate areas, so it is either 4, 10 or 16, depending on how you look at it.

I currently see no good way to expand all of the cloaking areas equally (some based on master computers, & etc), so I am going to leave it that way for now.

I imagine it would be fairly easy to expand the active and passive to arbitrary depth, and I could have a separate grav cloak level for every hull size, but the racial scanners will still be quite shallow.

[PvK]

Baron, you can "program" the AI to build more small ships if you give them more designs. I do this in Proportions because the small ships don't become "obsolete" the way they do in the standard set, so AI's continue to build a mix of ship sizes even when large ships are available.

This also uncovered another advantage of doing this (which originally was done to get the QNP engines right on AI designs): it allows the AI to upgrade smaller ships. It turns out that the AI won't upgrade a small ship if it has a larger design of the same type that it wants, because it will design the largest ship available for each design type it knows how to make. So, if you have one design per size bracket, it will upgrade the ships even when their size is not the largest the empire knows about.

I also tried out the gravitic cloaking for small ships idea. I kind of liked it except for the need to order to "cloak" small ships. However I decided it was overly complicated to add to the standard Proportions mod. I agree though that it would be nice to add range into the detection formula, although there are higher things on the urgency list.

PvK