Big ship supremacy... Can little ships keep up?

[JonMacLeod]

Wenin said:
I'm currently playing the Imperium Verus Mod, and it made Solar sails only work for 600Kt (Frigates in the mod) sized ships. You also can't have a Solar Sail with any other engine. The top of the line Solar Sail gives movement of 8, using only 1 supply unit per movement. The other ships use QNP engine system, though their speeds can get up and past 10 per turn they won't have the range.

So in this system the FGs are still nice ships late in the game.

The movement on the ships isn't quite Quasi-Newtonian. I call it Improved Quasi-Newtonian. Quasi-Newtonian propulsion is based on the idea that it takes a proportional increase in thrust to move a proportionally larger vessel (a little artistic license must be allowed as thrust would actually affect acceleration rather than speed directly, impossible given the hard-coding of the game). This premise with the stated license is correct. However, the thrust of proportional rockets only squares as mass cubes, (thrust is largely a function of the cross-sectional area of the rocket nozzle). Thus: proportional, but larger, ships would accelerate slower. I have simulated this by having larger ships require more movement points even relative to their size. The end result is that smaller ships are generally faster, but weaker pound for pound.

I hope that's helpful

[IuchiZien]

Surely the balancing is in the technology costs. If I've spent X hundred thousand researching big hulls my opponent will have used the research to get better guns therefore fight is primitive big ship vs advanced small ships?

[Rollo]

exactly, noone is arguing why APB XII is better then APB V.

Now mind you, I am being a bit provocative here and in my earlier statement. Just like to point out that Ship Con is a tech like any else, and higher levels should bring distinctive advantages.
And while I do realize that the stock SE4 mount system does give a huge advantage to larger ships, I'd be careful to overbalance ship hulls.

In fact the DevnullMod Gold version that I am currently working on (1.80, unreleased at the date of this post) adresses this very thing of big ships and gave them all a defense minus. Battleship are now 20% easier to hit, Dreadnoughts 30%. In the future I may even tone down the stock mounts that DNM Gold still uses.

Within reason I think a better balance between ships is good, but I'd prefer just making the gaps smaller, instead of making LC just as viable as BB hulls.

Now, if a mod made all hulls available from start, that'd be a whole different issue.