Proportions 2.5.2 mini-patch feature preview

[Fyron]

What is more special about the colony ship than the population transports? There is this great expense and time to get 1 mil pop on an empty world, but then you can send many millions more to it much, much more quickly. Seems inconsistent to me. Yes, setting up the colony is expensive, time-consuming, difficult, etc. But, so is adding more room to the colony to house all those new people.

And why do colony ships always have move 2? Shouldn't they get a bit faster with better engines?

[oleg]

They do, but with gravitic drives. Actually, it makes Propulsion experts trait quite usefull -colony ships move 50% faster ! (3 instead of 2)

[Fyron]

Ok then... why do they only increase in speed with only the most advanced technology? Why can't Contra Terrene engines, or Jacketed Photon Engines, or Quantum Engines make them move faster?

[oleg]

Well, because PvK wants that way !
Technically speaking, it is because better engines do not provide bonus movements but give extra "movement points". They all add up and then diveded by hull's engines/per move number. It is very big for colony ship so the resulting number is rounding up back to 2 rather then 3 even for advanced engines. If you want to mod proportions in a way that better engines help colony ship, edit data data files and decrease max. number of engines and engines per move for colony ship hull. Personally, I would like it too. Itjust does not make sense that even most advanced engines can not push CS any faster then ancient ion engines I ! It is just like putting B-29 propellers on B-747 and expecting it to fly the same 500 mph !

[dogscoff]

I can see the "realism" argument that better engines ought to make the ship faster, but on the other hand I can see PvK's point about slowing down expansion by slowing down colony ships. I guess you could make up some technobabble about the colony component beiong too fragile or something, but it doesn't really matter.

Perhaps a compromise would be to research a seperate tech area (further research in colonisation, starliners, ship construction & propulsion?) to get a better, potentially faster colony hull.

[PvK]

Actually, you can also get 3 base movement by using Quantum engines. I had thought it was actually possible with J.P. engines, but no.

At any rate, it is reasonable to expect a sooner increase in speed with research into standard propulsion tech, and expense. The problem is that SE4 only supports integral speeds, so a 50% increase is the least possible above speed 2 (from 2 to 3). I think I'll add just enough to the max engines value that will make J.P. engines give speed 3, and Q engines speed 4, while ion and C.T. engines are stuck at 2 (if such a number exists). I'll fiddle with it. I might also add a "faster colony ships" specialized tech, not terribly expensive, that gives colony ship hulls that can mount more engines.

PvK

[PvK]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
What is more special about the colony ship than the population transports? There is this great expense and time to get 1 mil pop on an empty world, but then you can send many millions more to it much, much more quickly. Seems inconsistent to me. Yes, setting up the colony is expensive, time-consuming, difficult, etc. But, so is adding more room to the colony to house all those new people.
...

As far as the population transport ability, nothing. The ability to transport population in a colony ship just makes sense. If I were to include a colony module without the population capacity (Does anyone want one? I guess it would be more efficient in some ways (less in others), but at the price of more management for the player. I don't mind adding it.), it would only reduce the cost by about the cost of a starliner module.

Returning to the question, I don't see a problem with building population transport ability in deep space. The problem is the colony module, which requires all the ingredients necessary to support a population on a hostile world. Sustainable large-scale food and atmosphere sources, housing, medicine, clothes, all sorts of factories, power sources, fuel, medicines, machinery, robots, vehicles, etc etc etc. That's a massive amount of stuff, and requires very diverse manufacturing sources, and also organic biological material in self-sustaining quantities (a colonial biosphere that can help keep a large growing colonial population alive and thriving). Even if you're mechanoid or claim you have the tech to colonize mostly with droids, they too require a lot of very diverse material to keep them going and multiplying. All that massive pile of diverse crud essentially requires an established planetary industry to produce efficiently. Hence the organic cost idea to limit construction time deep in space. It could still be assembled slowly by trade and invisible transports, which would be represented by sitting out the long build time to create a colony ship or org-SY at a non-org-SY.

PvK