Weapons, engines and mods, Oh my!

[Fyron]

He may have been refering to things like maintenance penalties on large ships, which realistically do not make sense. Why would something cost more to maintain just because it is housed in a larger hull? It would not.

Also, with proper QNP, small ships do not actually go faster, they go the same speed with the same fraction of hull space devoted to engines. They use the same fraction of total fuel per turn for that movement too. They do use more supplies per sector of movement, yes. But, they also store more supplies. A ship 2x the size uses 2x the supplies. But, it also stores 2x as many supplies, so it evens out. The advantages of small ships are that they require fewer resources spent on engines to get the same speed and they require fewer solar collectors to get infinite range (or fewer solar collectors to extend range by the same amount), although again, the same portion of hull space is required to get the same effect on max range of the ship.

Here is an example:

2 ships size 300 and 600 require, say, 10% of hull space to get 6 movement from engine type X.

6 engines x 10 supplies used = 60 supplies per sector
6 x 500 supplies stored = 3000 supplies
3000 / 60 = 83.3 sector range

12 engines x 10 supplies used = 120 supplies per sector
12 x 500 supplies stored = 6000 supplies
6000 / 120 = 83.3 sector range

So as we can see, you can get the same speed and range out of any two different size ship hulls in a QNP system. Of course, there will be very slight variations due to rounding in integer math, but those are not significant in the big picture.

[PvK]

I'd like to hear what Andres meant.

Fryon, your two points are just insisting on simplifications where I intentionally added more detail:

Small ships are cheaper to maintain because that's how they are in real-world engineering, which is massively more complex than SE4. Maintaining a massive vehicle is more expensive than maintaining a bunch on smaller vehicles. This is one of the major reasons why smaller ships are more common in real-world naval and commercial fleets. Large ships are more powerful, and can win battles by their presence and over-powering the enemy large ships and then stomping on the smaller ones, but a fleet that only builds large ships is probably going to be less efficient on a cost basis.

As for speed, yes a simplified system could do that, but it's not by mistake that I made smaller ships capable of greater speeds. It's entirely reasonable that engineering limits would, for any level of technology, be able to make something smaller go faster than something larger. That is, if you accept the premise that building a working enormous ship is an engineering problem (the existence of the Ship Construction tech), then it is reasonable to assume that if your technology lets you make the largest ship you can build go at speed X, that you could use engineering trade-offs to achieve a higher speed with a ship that isn't so large. Again, there are tons of real-world and sci-fi comparisons where the same is true, and I think most consistent and detailed physical models would bear this out.

PvK

Edit: Oh, and Fryon, Proportions does meet your criteria for "proper" QNP. The only difference is that the maximum proportion of engines allowed to ship mass is greater for smaller ships, for the reasons mentioned above.

[ June 16, 2003, 01:31: Message edited by: PvK ]

[Fyron]

The first "point" was just positing an example of what the problem might be. If you take a look at Adamant Mod, you will see that larger ships have increasing maintenance penalties. I believe that speaks for itself as to my position on that issue.

Actually, with QNP, there should be no limit on how many engines you can put on any ships. This is why Proportions does not use QNP, it uses pseudo-QNP (wow, that name is getting really really clunky... ). I don't recall saying that that was a bad thing at any point... although, the term "proper QNP" does connote that if you take it the wrong way, so I can see where the problem arises.

[ June 16, 2003, 03:18: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[Andrés]

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.

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.

[oleg]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:

...
Actually, with QNP, there should be no limit on how many engines you can put on any ships. This is why Proportions does not use QNP, it uses pseudo-QNP (wow, that name is getting really really clunky... ). I don't recall saying that that was a bad thing at any point... although, the term "proper QNP" does connote that if you take it the wrong way, so I can see where the problem arises.

Sorry, IF, but IMHO, the Proportions have proper QNP. The system you are advocating is IMHO, the pseudo-QNP for reasons outlined very clearly by PvK.

[Phoenix-D]

"Actually, with QNP, there should be no limit on how many engines you can put on any ships."

QNP..quasi newtonian propulsion. Why would there not be any engine limits? the Shuttle runs under newtonian system, and you can't go strapping 30 engines on. Engineering limits.

[Suicide Junkie]

That's cause the shuttle is a really small ship. That's where the engineering difficulty lies.

Check out the shuttle on launch... its a little teeny bridge, a cargo bay to make it useful, and the rest is all engines.

There is no reason why you can't have a ship that is a little bridge/lifesupport/crewquarters combo, sitting on top of a huge pile of engines.

Just look at any Earthly launch vehicle these days. 95% engines.

Even with a low-surface area ship, you can put the fuel tanks in the middle and have lots of tubes running to the nozzles at the back

[Fyron]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
QNP..quasi newtonian propulsion. Why would there not be any engine limits? the Shuttle runs under newtonian system, and you can't go strapping 30 engines on. Engineering limits.

Limits past the size of the ship...

Oleg:
See SJ's post. Specific hull-based engine limits are counter to the goal of QNP, as they strictly limit the possibilities for propulsion designs for your ships.

[ June 16, 2003, 20:03: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[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