Weapons, engines and mods, Oh my!

[geoschmo]

We likely could strap 30 engines on the shuttle if we assembled it orbit.

Actaully in reality I think their would be no concrete limit to the number of engines you could put on a ship. Although what would happen, and I think this is what Fyron and SJ were trying to say, is that putting an engine on a ship by itself increases the mass of the ship. In SEIV terms there is a limit to the number of engines for a specific hull size becasue once you reach a certain number of engines you have in effect changed the hull to the next size up.

Geoschmo

[ June 16, 2003, 20:10: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[PvK]

Originally posted by Andres:
Yes it was something about those lines.
It may be related the only time I tried to play in proportions I went bankrupt under the manteinance of my ships and the micromanaging hell pf my colonies.

Yeah, many players get surprised/disappointed by the smaller fleet size that is maintainable in a standard Proportions game. Ideally, there should perhaps be two Versions, or altered settings for people who want to be able to have massive fleets. Actually it's a simple change which I did mention in some long-lost thread: just increase the planet values by say 10x, or whatever increased bankroll you want everyone to have. (Ideally, the resource storage values would be increased similarly, but that's not that big a deal, nor hard to do).

But no, larger sizes should REDUCE, not increase cost and manteinance.
Of course that building and mantaining large ships cost much more than building a small one.
And in many cases using a ship only as big a needed is a good way to save.
But in real-world economies, large scale does significantly reduce costs. For example jumbojets and supertankers.
Why do you think they keep trying to make those things even larger?
They may be harder to build, require more technical refinenemts than smaller vessels, and of course each one needs a much larger inVersion to be built, but in the large picture they save money.

Larger ships can be more efficient in Proportions too, in the same way they can in real life - by being able to do more. Many of the same factors that multiply the ability of larger ships in the unmodded game are still present in Proportions. Large capital ships can be quite devastating, and larger transports can carry multiples of what smaller ones can, etc. In Proportions though, the attributes of larger hulls aren't ALL advantages.

Mainly, reality is much more complex than SE4, and it seems to me from considering real-world examples, that one of the constants is that bigger is almost universally more expensive per unit measure rather than less - it's up to the larger and more expensive designs to realize their worth through even better performance.

Detailed rambling musings on same, for those interested:

Smaller ships can use many more standard components, while larger ones require much more specialized large-scale equipment and infrastructure to build and maintain, as well as special skills and technologies developed to deal with their special problems.

For example, when the US re-commissioned WW2 battleships in the 1980's, there were many specialized skills for using their equipment which had been completely lost.

Building and maintaining a brand new fleet of gunboats of equal mass to a single battleship would be much less expensive, because it can be done with relatively standard industry and equipment. Whole new facilities and technologies need to be developed and supported in order to build and operate massive ships, in part because many of the required items (materials, facilities, know-how, and technologies) don't exist for any other purpose. Also, in reality, the more times you build the same device, the less the total effort, and not only are small ships generally built in more numbers, but there would be more of the required items that duplicate with existing non-military items. Such things can't be directly represented in SE4, but the maintenance cost seems like the most applicable place to me.

PvK

[PvK]

Well yes, that's sort of my view, as well. Ship classes don't just represent to me the ability to build a ship of a certain size, but the ability to build a certain design, or which size is only one part. I have 1800kT colony ships available from the start, but I don't think that includes the ability to build a 1700kT propulsion system for a 100kT command module, and have it be linearly efficient compared to a more reasonable design.

I did consider adding a "Faster Ships" tech area, to allow developing engineering for ship designs with more propulsion capacity. I also considered other tech areas for other types of ship classes. However SE4's interface starts getting clunky when there are tons of ship classes, so it seemed like more clunk than it was worth, although I did add a couple of areas for specialized "Fast Colony Ships" and carriers, due to fan requests.

There are also issues to consider from the very abstract SE4 movement and combat systems, as well as from a game balance perspective. Most basically, if a ship design has enough of a speed advantage over its enemies, it can do silly things in combat compared to weapon ranges. This can cause imbalances with unrealistic tactics that take advantage of the lack of opportunity fire in the combat engine, such as ramming or hit-and-run without the enemy being able to fire back at all. Moreover, it can imbalance the need for research into (and ship design related to)propulsion if speed increases can be acquired by tacking on an extra engine for 10kT, compared to having to do extensive research and costly deployment of advanced engines.

Now, there might or might not be a way to re-design the entire set of values for combat and propulsion components in order to address all of this in a different way, for the purpose of satisfying a desire for more flexibility in the number of engines that can be stacked on a design, but that wasn't what I was trying to do.

PvK

Originally posted by geoschmo:
We likely could strap 30 engines on the shuttle if we assembled it orbit.

Actaully in reality I think their would be no concrete limit to the number of engines you could put on a ship. Although what would happen, and I think this is what Fyron and SJ were trying to say, is that putting an engine on a ship by itself increases the mass of the ship. In SEIV terms there is a limit to the number of engines for a specific hull size becasue once you reach a certain number of engines you have in effect changed the hull to the next size up.

Geoschmo

[Fyron]

PvK, in mods like P&N and Adamant (those that use full QNP), researching more propulsion technology is certainly necessary. It takes a large chunk of hull space to even go 6 movement. More propulsion means you can lower the amount of space needed to get going at 6 movement, or you can make the ships go faster, while still taking up as much space for engines. Just tacking on one more 10 kT engine often has no effect because it requires several of them to get one movement point on all but the smallest of ships. In P&N, a Destroyer requires 12 Ion Engine Is to get 6 movement points, which takes up 120 kT (40% of the hull). Researching Contra-Terrene Engines means that you only need 9 of them to get 6 movement. So as we can see, researching more propulsion technology is certainly a very good idea. With large ships, the amount of kTs freed up only gets larger.

[PvK]

Thanks. I haven't really absorbed much of what P&N does, though I think it's really a wonderful mod. I haven't yet studied much of Adamant mod either, though I will one of these days. What you say demonstrates that yes, unlimited QNP engines can avoid some of the issues I mentioned, with certain values.

Certainly that sort of system has some advantages, but I think using engine limits also has some of its own, as I've rambled about enough.

I still like the trade-offs and limits created by Proportions. I'd probably sooner add more engine types and variants, or go to a scale-mounted engine system, rather than unlimited QNP, because that would allow me to retain more appropriate to-hit modifiers for engines. Scale-mount engines is a cool alternative, but not entirely perfect either. Ah well.

PvK

[Fyron]

Well, P&N and Adamant use small numbers for Standard Movement (3-7 or so), whereas Proportions uses big numbers. Engines per move for a ship size is equal to tonnage structure / 50 (which you have in Proportions). If you double (or triple) both of these sets of numbers, you can get slightly more precise movement scales for ship sizes, but you hit the 255 cap on max standard movement points much more quickly. Basically, it boils down to whether you want to require a handful of engines to go "fast" or if you want to require a lot of engines to go "fast".

[Suicide Junkie]

I have 1800kT colony ships available from the start, but I don't think that includes the ability to build a 1700kT propulsion system for a 100kT command module, and have it be linearly efficient compared to a more reasonable design.

Of course it dosen't... after putting on the colony module, and all the required cargo bays, how much space do you have left?
40%? ... 20%? How much will you use for engines, supply tanks, defenses?

Most basically, if a ship design has enough of a speed advantage over its enemies, it can do silly things in combat compared to weapon ranges. This can cause imbalances with unrealistic tactics that take advantage of the lack of opportunity fire in the combat engine, such as ramming or hit-and-run without the enemy being able to fire back at all.

The thing to note is that, yes, speed should be an advantage! In tactical, it may be abused vs AI, but not vs humans. In strategic its AI vs AI, and thus perfectly valid, IMO. The second thing to note, is that in order to get a really good speed, you will have to strip out almost all of the armor/shields and guns...

Sure, you can fly circles around the enemy, but you can't do much damage, and your ships will drop like flies as soon as the enemy gets a chance to fire on you.
PS: Don't expect super-speedy rammers to be very effective, since you'll have no armor to bulk up your impact damage, and you just spent thousands of radioactives to build those precious engines.

In any case; I played many games like this at home with two other people... Each liked their own tactics, and are solidly convinced theirs is best.
(Me = big on defenses - if you can't kill me, I can't lose)
(Brother = Big on Weapons - boom, you die, I win)
(Father = Big on engines/speed - weak attack, and no defense, but if you can't hit, it don't die.)