Fractal Softworks Forum
Starsector => Suggestions => Topic started by: Serenitis on January 02, 2015, 10:40:27 AM
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I've been playing this for a while now, and while it is definitely one of the most fun things I've played in ages it does have a few bits which I feel could stand to be a little different.
Open/Close Panel
Pressing a key to open a panel not closing the panel with the same key has caught me out so many times, and continues to do so.
The map can be opened and closed by same keypress, it would be a pretty nice 'quality of life' improvement if all the others worked the same way.
CR Timer
I understand that this degrading performance thing was introduced to stop people from kiting whole fleets with a single ship. It even makes sense from 'realism' standpoint.
The gripe I have with it is that it wastes the players time and gets in the way of playing the game - all it does is force you to run away, re-engage and repeat the previous battle. This one thing more than anything else makes me dump frigates asap just to be rid of this hassle.
As this will probably be staying in the game anyway and covering even more ship types, it would be nice if there were an option to play without it for those inclined to do so.
Map Pause
Many times I've opened the map to try and determine which way fleets are moving but have become frustrated as opening the map pauses the game. You can fudge it by holding down the time accelleration key and repeatedly open/close the map, but it's something that you shouldn't need to do to get pretty basic functionality.
Map Clutter
Another map issue is that it can sometimes get so cluttered with objects that it becomes impossible to select a planet/station at that location.
A possible way around this would be to have a 'navigation menu' somewhere, maybe on the tab-map which would allow you to select an object in that system and fly right to it. This could also work for hyperspace with systems. (Bonus points for only having nav links available for systems you have enough fuel to reach.)
Storage
The ability to see where each of your storage bays are and what is in them would be a very welcome feature.
Travel Speed
There can never be too much of it. I care nothing for the wasted cargo/fuel space, put extra engines on everything. No exceptions.
You could probably give every ship a boost to burn speed and leave the engine mod for combat speed only, or boost everything and get rid of the mod.
Crawling around really isn't fun.
Boarding
It's far too random for something that could be a really fun mechanic.
All you need to do to swap the frustration for fun, is to allow the player to choose a ship to board from those that are still intact enough to do so. Randomise all you like about how well defended it would be and what there is left of it, but that one change would make a world of difference.
Disabled Player Ships
Nothing puts a downer on things more than losing a ship that you can't replace, it makes you want to just keep these rare shiny things in storage and never use them. Which kinda defeats the whole purpose of having them.
If a player ship gets disabled and is still intact at the end of the battle, then it should always be salvageable. The repair skill could then be used to determine how much of a wreck it is and what equipment survived.
Missile Pods
Probably not going to happen, but personally I'd really like the option to single-fire these things.
Pursuit
Not pursuing ships makes for an incredibly tedious early game as it takes so long to accomplish anything because you can't actually fight probably 3/4 of the battles you'd like to.
Maybe removing the pursuit = never trade ever might be something to look at, for the pirates at any rate so the player isn't hamstrung trying to find something they can actually fight without locking themselves out of a ton of places.
Keep it for factions though.
Starting a Game
One of the things that I've found is that only one of the start options is in any way fun, and that's the bounty hunter start.
The Wolf is a lot of fun to derp around in (but gets boring for the 100th time), while both the Hound and the Cerb do have thier uses I find them both beyond tedious to actually fight in.
Perhaps a different approach migt be considered?
Maybe giving a new player a pool of 'points' and allowing them to pick thier starting ship and equipment based on this.
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Pursuit: this one's made particularly egregious by the fact that you actually can fight ships that want to flee, without taking the rep hit, it just requires that you harry them over and over and over again until they're out of CR and try to make a last stand.
Disabled Player Ships: I'd suggest combining this with use of some of the (D) variants or hull mods, and adding a (very expensive and time-consuming - as in, it will take the shipyard maybe a month to a year to finish an order) way to refurbish a ship back up to full quality.
And I'd add one more: dial back on the rep losses for trading with a faction's enemies. The numbers that are in are probably reasonable for someone tooling around in a few frigates and a destroyer; they are utterly unreasonable when you have even a single atlas and are going around single-handedly ending food shortages.
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Disabled Player Ships: I'd suggest combining this with use of some of the (D) variants or hull mods, and adding a (very expensive and time-consuming - as in, it will take the shipyard maybe a month to a year to finish an order) way to refurbish a ship back up to full quality.
It would be interesting if all types of ship production (note: not buying a ship that's already been produced) took months or years in-game.
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I like all of these suggestions; hey has anyone here (surely everyone) played space rangers 2? I don't know if starsector is planning on modeling the campaign system something like that, however for me, it is the pinacle of a space trader/combat game; there are just so many things that you can do in that game; and the mini-games (choose your own adventure style) are brilliant. Seriously I could write a small thesis on how many features that game has; and they all work so well together, virtually no mechanic feels useless (The RTS battles were a bit of a sore point for me, but they reward well, so it's worth it to complete them, if only for the money and experience).
I guess I thought of space-rangers 2 when someone was mentioning the bribe system; that is pretty much how it works, if a pirate finds that it is not going their way, they will offer ever increasing bribes the closer they are to becoming space-dust (you can refuse the first bribe, and if they survive the next barrage of fire, they might offer you a larger bribe to let them keep their lives and the commentry change from when they first engage you changes drastically as they realise you're one bad SOB >:) ).
I especially like the idea Wyvern had on salvaging all player ships (that are disabled, but not destroyed; if the computer decides to turn that wreckage into dust, then you are still out of a ship) but with damaged sub-systems. Rather then have a skill which gives you a %chance to recover a lost ship, have that same skill determine the chance and how many sub-systems can be repaired after battle. Those faults are permanent like the D-class, but can be repaired to 100% given time and enough money (so in some cases, it may not be worth it to repair if the ship isn't particularly hard to come by). Apply this to weapons as well (I noticed that even when I managed to recover a ship from combat (Sunder), some or all of the weapons are lost for good. I had a very hard time finding small-needlers in game (I buy any I see) so the weapon loss was actually more of a blow then losing the easily obtainable Sunder destroyer). I reloaded (shame on me!) as I could not deal with the loss of my small-needlers (I only had found 2 and I was level 37 and they both were on that sunder).
Still there should be some loss in combat, perhaps when the AI disables a ship, depending on how busy it is, it may choose to finish the job and vaporize that wreck. This could make combat a bit more interesting as you try to manoeuvre forces to create a wall between yourself and the disabled ship to prevent it's complete destruction. It would probably be difficult to implement, but perhaps depending on the damage that the disabled ship takes during combat, increases the chance of damage to the sub-systems/structure that will occur after salvage operations.
I like the idea of making the CR timer part of the difficulty options, rather than a built in part of the game. If you want to solo the game in your frigate, perhaps give that choice to the player, no harm done (I did watch that video with the guy in the Tempest taking on that entire fleet, it was pretty cool, and if players just want to have direct control of one ship through the entire game, why not?)
Map clutter is something I agree with, but I'm pretty certain the developer already knows this and is working on it; it's impossible for me to target most stations as they are often hidden under fleets; so I agree with this.
The Storage bay idea is good as well; in another post I made i was thinking about accounting for supplies/equipment that are lost if a ship is disabled/destroyed. I would also like to extend this to being able to assign crew of certain veterancies to ships in your fleet. At the moment depending on the order of them in the fleet screen is how they are assigned; but this means that there can be a bigger discrepency between CR of ships due to the mixed crews (and you have no control over this). It would be nice to be able to assign crew members of different veterancies to each ship so that you could bring all your ships up/down to the same level of Combat Readiness.
I think the Travel speed option isn't too bad, but if there was higher time compression would that make slower ships easier to deal with?
In one other post (I feel a bit embarrassed about that one actually), I thought about having the Augmented engines bonus reversed and applying a +1 burn speed per size of ship class (ie +4 burn speed for captial ships). At the moment Augmented engines cost a huge amount of Ordinance points and benefit larger ships the least (who need it the most). They would still be slower (especially with regards to acceleration and manoeuvering), but they could start to keep up a little better with faster ships.
I would like to see a more interactive boarding mechanic; leave it text based as it is at the moment, but have certain actions increase your chance of successfully taking over the ship. Space Rangers 2 did this with a lot of the mini quests that were quite well done and it only required a bit of text and in some cases numbers; no tactical system with xenonauts level of detail need be implemented; just a well written interractive dialogue.
If we consider the earlier suggestion that disabled player ships are always salvageable, this should also be done with enemy ships as well. Perhaps at the end of combat allow the player to select from the disabled ships which ones to board (Perhaps have it so that soldiers becomed fatigued and can only be deployed once, so choose carefully), in some cases the ships will only have dead crew members, but a great deal of damaged systems which makes them almost garbage anyway. However during this process, a less damaged ship may be repaired and take the time to escape (that would be the ship that normally appears in the dialogue) and since you are distracted, you miss the chance to engage a ship that is in better condition and lose some of the resources you might otherwise acquire (as well as a better, less damaged ship; though if the ship you chose was fairly rare, then it likely did not matter).
The starting the game option will probably change i'm guessing. I think the wolf-class is probably too good a ship to start in; so perhaps having that ship should give you some sort of other disadvantage to make up for it; less credits, change in relations between factions (Space Rangers 2 does this fairly well, though some of the starting ships are just slightly too good to pass up).
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Travel Speed
There can never be too much of it. I care nothing for the wasted cargo/fuel space, put extra engines on everything. No exceptions.
You could probably give every ship a boost to burn speed and leave the engine mod for combat speed only, or boost everything and get rid of the mod.
Crawling around really isn't fun.
I think ships are too slow all-around, both combat and burn, and would like to see ships sped up and the engine hullmods removed. I put Augmented Engines on everything, with few exceptions (usually Hyperion or Atlas when hauling food).
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Pursuit: this one's made particularly egregious by the fact that you actually can fight ships that want to flee, without taking the rep hit, it just requires that you harry them over and over and over again until they're out of CR and try to make a last stand.
I didn't know about this. But then again it does sound a bit like gaming the game in order to play it, which is something you shouldn't have to do.
And I'd add one more: dial back on the rep losses for trading with a faction's enemies. The numbers that are in are probably reasonable for someone tooling around in a few frigates and a destroyer; they are utterly unreasonable when you have even a single atlas and are going around single-handedly ending food shortages.
This. How could I have forgotten this?
Why is this such a huge deal anyway? I can totally see faction A being a bit miffed that you bought 1297 supply boxes from faction B instead, but does it have to be quite so... Severe?
Buying a few hundred supplies from Ragnar Complex got me -50 Tachyon points. (http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a224/Tifi78/Smilies/toot_zpscbc5f935.gif)
Another thing that isn't all that important, but would be a nice touch is having a bit of variety with the 'D' variants.
Currently everything is broken on every one of them. What would be nice is having 'D' ships when they're spawned have a randomly assigned set of negative mods so it doesn't feel like the pirates are flying a fleet of identical clone ships, and the player might actually be tempted to board/buy a 'D' ship if it has liveable downsides.
Might be worth adding a few more broken things at some point as well - eg: less cargo, slower turn speed, increased maint. costs, increased shield costs, broken shields.
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Harry until last stand only works against combat ships. It does not work against civilians. If you want to destroy freighters and tankers, you must pursue and destroy... and eat a relations drop that can extend into Vengeful if previous relations were low enough.
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Fighters seem to be rather expensive support wise.
Each wing costs roughly as much as a frigate, and to get anything approaching usefulness out of them you need to field a carrier on top of that.
If you're bringing a carrier which is eating a load of supplies you might as well actually use the thing and get some kind of value out of it, so more fighters.
And then you need a whole fleet of freighters to carry all the supplies these things eat, which themselves eat yet more supplies.
Every time I try to use fighters I just end up getting drowned in logistics. So I just avoid them now.
I don't suppose it matters all that much when you have millions to spend, but it just seems like a whole portion of the game which is just for want of a better description, locked behind an artifical barrier. (And balancing a game solely for it's end content creates other problems.)
Making fighters just flat not consume as much supplies might make them rather too good.
Maybe some kind of skill tree to increase their efficiency and/or add other abilities like reduced costs for having free flight deck capacity?
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I agree, fighters do cost rather large amout of supplies, so much that you have to bring cargo ships with you, then, you might as well forget the fighters and carrier and just grab a cruiser.
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Map Pause
Many times I've opened the map to try and determine which way fleets are moving but have become frustrated as opening the map pauses the game. You can fudge it by holding down the time accelleration key and repeatedly open/close the map, but it's something that you shouldn't need to do to get pretty basic functionality.
Was thinking about that too. You call it map but mean the tactical map as both the universe and the tactical are maps ;). My question would be more what would we win if there would be only the tactical map. Loosing some grafic with the universe map isn't that much of a problem or argument as the universe map isn't that much of a beauty. I consider it more as a huge win if there would be only the tactical map as the tactical map is actually what your decision making comes from (what size of fleets you want to engange with or what objects / base u would want to go to) Its just bad design having to switch constantly forth and back... wastes time and is annoying.
When there is only the tactical map then give it a checkbox to switch off showing fleets and bam you can target planets.
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I don't support having only the tab-map and not the graphical map. Unpausing on the tab-map, sure, but not eliminating the graphical map. I like to look at the various pretty sprites in motion.
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Map Pause
Many times I've opened the map to try and determine which way fleets are moving but have become frustrated as opening the map pauses the game. You can fudge it by holding down the time acceleration key and repeatedly open/close the map, but it's something that you shouldn't need to do to get pretty basic functionality.
The best thing about this is that you CAN unpause the TAB map! in dev mode that is... Which means you get spammed by info about AI fleets having accidents, running out of supplies and so on. I don't understand why this isn't in the main game
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I agree, fighters do cost rather large amout of supplies, so much that you have to bring cargo ships with you, then, you might as well forget the fighters and carrier and just grab a cruiser.
You kidding? Fighters need constant mantainance and flight crew works in shifts (as does all crew). There should really be bonuses/penalites to crew numbers that goes beyond just the minimum. Minimum crew is overworked.
Also, carriers need a LOT of crew.
The Iowa Battleship had 1600 crew max. A Nimitz carrier has 6000+
So fighters generally are logistics-heavy.
If there's one thing fighters eat, it's FUEL.
That kinda makes little sense to me, given that when traveling FTL they aren't traveling using their own engines anyway, they are riding on carrier.
I guess you could abstract constant patrols and training (which DOES happen and eats a lot of fuel), but I don't think it happens in HYPERSPACE.
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You kidding? Fighters need constant mantainance and flight crew works in shifts (as does all crew). There should really be bonuses/penalites to crew numbers that goes beyond just the minimum. Minimum crew is overworked.
Also, carriers need a LOT of crew.
The Iowa Battleship had 1600 crew max. A Nimitz carrier has 6000+
So fighters generally are logistics-heavy.
If the numbers on Wikipedia are at all accurate, you're exaggerating the difference to a fairly large degree. The numbers listed for the Iowas are ~2700 in WWII/Korea and ~1800 in the '80s, while the ship's complement for the Nimitz carriers is listed at ~3600 and the total complement only reaches ~6000 if you include the air wing (which presumably includes support personnel, minimum required aircrew, and surplus aircrew for each fighter group carried, the latter two of which would, in Starsector, certainly be credited to the fighter wing crew requirement rather than to that of the carrier). Beyond that, the ships are hardly comparable in size; the Nimitz-class carriers are almost double the listed displacement of the Iowa-class battleships and are about 30% larger in beam and keel dimensions.
Moreover, the two ships are not of the same era or of the same design generation. It would be more reasonable to compare the crew requirement of an Essex-class carrier (according to Wikipedia, ~2200 for the ship's complement and ~900 for the air wing, of which probably ~250-300 would have been air crew for the fighters and bombers, so in Starsector terms we'd probably be looking at a ship with a crew requirement of ~2800 and a set of fighter groups with a crew requirement of ~250, compared to the battleship's crew requirement of ~2700) or a Midway-class carrier (according to Wikipedia, ~4100, though it doesn't specify if this includes the air wing or, if so, how much is ship's complement as opposed to air wing), as these, particularly the Essexes, are ships of the same era and of about the same size as the Iowas are. Another comparison would be between the Midway-class carriers and the planned Montana-class battleships, which were to have been the successors to the Iowas and thus more similar in time of design to the Midways than the Iowas are, and also more similar in scale; the Montanas would have had a complement of about 2300 to 2700 compared to the ~4100 on the Midways.
Carriers and the battleships designed around the same time had roughly similar crew complements, at least in the late interwar period and WWII. Carriers designed ~20 years after the battleships? Well, I'd point out that the difference in crew (and ship) scale there is not altogether different from the difference in crew complement (and ship scale) between the Iowa-class and the Colorado-class, or between the WWII-era King George V-class and the Revenge-class, or between the Nelson-class and the Dreadnought. Would you look at that - it's almost like comparing classes of capital ships to significantly older, smaller classes of capital ship isn't a particularly appropriate way to show how much more a carrier-type capital ship requires than a battleship-type capital ship of the same generation! After all, as far as I can tell the difference between a type of carrier ~20 years more modern than a class of battleship is about the same as the difference between a class of battleship ~20 years more modern than another class of battleship.
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Bunch of stuff about manning aboard warships
As a sailor on board an amphibious assault ship, I can concur with this. Crew counts are shrinking by a considerable factor as we cram more jobs into single billets -- my ship has something like 400ish crew, yet can carry more than twice that in Marines. So you could say that our manning is around 1200 people, but realistically it's 400 people to run the ship plus however many it takes to make an embarked MEU effective.
So it stands to reason that in this high-tech world, where starfighters are literally churned out in seconds by on-board autofacs, that maintenance as a whole is probably fairly automated -- so realistically, the crew count would probably be something like enough pilots to account for all available chassis (plus a few 'spares'), and a handful of guys to watch over the autofacs.
I know it's pretty handwavy of me to say it like that, but let's just be realistic, here, about how unrealistic SS's world is, at least within our current bounds of physics, materials science, and mechanics knowledge.
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Carriers and the battleships designed around the same time had roughly similar crew complements,
Except they didn't.
Air crew IS part of the carrier crew. You can't not count them.
Carriers always have and always will require more crew than other ship types.
Hell your own examples proves it.
New carriers have even bigger crews than old ones, while other ships crew complements went down! Aircraft are maintainance hogs. ESPECIALLY modern ones.
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Carriers and the battleships designed around the same time had roughly similar crew complements,
Except they didn't.
Air crew IS part of the carrier crew. You can't not count them.
Carriers always have and always will require more crew than other ship types.
Hell your own examples proves it.
New carriers have even bigger crews than old ones, while other ships crew complements went down! Aircraft are maintainance hogs. ESPECIALLY modern ones.
Yes and no. Take, for example, my ship, an LPD. You might say "oh, well, without Marines it's useless!" Except we can still embark an air squadron (which requires considerably less than the Marines), and with the 'normal' crew, still engage threats, as a last resort, with our cannons, LMGs, and RAMs, not to mention the capability of embarked Ospreys to bring a decent amount of firepower themselves. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Boeing_V-22_Osprey#Armament)
In SS, this is even more accurate, as many of the game's carriers have passable combat capability in and of themselves. Like the LPD I serve on, you wouldn't want them in the frontlines against a true warship, but they can still DO things.
And I posit once again that you are far too focused on current standards for the requirements of SS's theoretical air wing personnel. In fact, Aeson made a great point in that an Iowa-Class battleship -- ostensibly the SAME SHIP -- plummeting by 1/3 by its lattermost days of service, given more and more automation and newer technology reducing the number of positions to fill. Yes, we're talking about a combatant ship, and aircraft require far more personnel per chassis then, say, per gun on an Iowa, but I say once again that in an era of Autofacs churning out chassis like there's no tomorrow, I can't reasonably believe that we need to account for having dozens of personnel working for days on end on repairing a single fighter, as is the case for something like an F/A-18.
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Carriers and the battleships designed around the same time had roughly similar crew complements,
Except they didn't.
Air crew IS part of the carrier crew. You can't not count them.
Except that they really actually did have roughly the same crew sizes. USS Essex (CV9), 2600 crew, commissioned 1942; USS Iowa (BB61), 151 officers + 2637 enlisted = 2788 crew, commissioned 1943; USS Hornet (CV8), complement 2217, commissioned 1941; USS North Carolina (BB55), complement 2339, commissioned 1941; HMS Ark Royal, complement ~1500, commissioned 1938; HMS Nelson, complement 1361, commissioned 1927; HMS King George V, complement ~1300-1600, commissioned 1940; HMS . USS. Crew size is not all that significantly different, especially if, as Starsector does, you do not count fighter and bomber crews and pilots towards the carrier's crew. Yeah, I guess you're right, those look like completely, entirely different crew sizes for carrier-type and battleship-type capital ships of the same eras and commissioned by the same nations. Perhaps you shouldn't compare capital ships which were new in the 1940s to ships which were new in the 1970s? Especially when one of the ships (conveniently, the one which is of the type that you're trying to argue requires significantly larger crews) is significantly larger than the other?
You've also missed one of the points of my post - you went "gee, look at that, a Nimitz-class carrier has roughly three times the crew complement of an Iowa-class battleship," and neglected to recognize that the battleship was a lot smaller than the ship you're comparing it against. Based on the beam and keel dimensions that Wikipedia lists for the Nimitz-class carriers and Iowa-class battleships, the Nimitz-class has about 70% more deck area at the water line than the Iowa-class does. Based on the displacements that Wikipedia lists, the Nimitz-class carriers have at least 72% more mass, and may have more than double the mass depending on which displacements you choose to look at, suggesting that the Nimitz-class carriers have significantly more internal volume since the battleships in all likelihood have a greater average density. Beyond that, you haven't looked at how capital ship crew sizes seem to be related to the size of the ship: Iowa-class battleships at the time of introduction had crews of about 2700 people; Nimitz-class carriers have crews approximately twice that size, but the ship's beam and keel dimensions are roughly 30% greater and its displacement is roughly double that of the Iowa-class battleship. If you look at the HMS King George V and compare it to the HMS Revenge, you will see something rather similar - HMS King George V has roughly 41% greater displacement and ~18% greater beam and keel dimensions, and has a listed crew complement roughly 40% to 70% larger than that of the HMS Revenge. HMS Nelson had nearly 90% greater displacement with beam and keel dimensions each roughly 30% greater than those of the HMS Dreadnought, and had a crew complement one and a half to two times larger than that of the HMS Dreadnought. USS Iowa (BB61) had roughly 40% greater displacement and was nearly 42% longer and 10% wider than the USS Colorado (BB45), and carried about 2.6 times as large a crew. Would you look at that? Four pairs of capital ships which all entered service roughly 20 years apart, all of which show similar increases in dimensions and crew requirements to your comparison between Nimitz-class carriers and Iowa-class battleships! It's almost like bigger ships have roughly proportionately larger crews! Who would have guessed?
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Except that they really actually did have roughly the same crew sizes. USS Essex (CV9), 2600 crew, commissioned 1942; USS Iowa (BB61), 151 officers + 2637 enlisted = 2788 crew, commissioned 1943; USS Hornet (CV8), complement 2217, commissioned 1941; USS North Carolina (BB55), complement 2339, commissioned 1941; HMS Ark Royal, complement ~1500, commissioned 1938; HMS Nelson, complement 1361, commissioned 1927; HMS King George V, complement ~1300-1600, commissioned 1940;
Older aircraft carrier are smaller than those of today - even thought the number of aircraft they carry didn't change much (60-70, and today we have 70-80).
The Iowa itself was the biggest battleship the US had, almost the size of a carrier. 276 meters in length, that is a LOT. And yes, carrier have a lot of volume and mass. They kinda have to since internal hangars require a LOT Of space. All that hull and structural support, plus all the equipment and supplies, and aircraft - of course a carrier is gonna have a huge tonnage, even a small one.
I'm not sure where you get your numbers.
Midway has a 4,104 complement, Essex has 2,170 (ship), 870 (air wing), 160 (flag) = 3000+, Forrestal has 4378, Wasp (small carrier) has 2,167
Oh, look at the Nimitz:
Ship's company: 3,200, Air wing: 2,480
I bolded for a comparison with the older carrier. So even tough the number of aircraft carrier barely increased, the number of air crew required skyrocketed!
It's almost like bigger ships have roughly proportionately larger crews! Who would have guessed?
You are honestly telling me that ship size is the only crew indicator? That purpose, equipment and other factors are irrelevant?
You DO realize that the biggest tankers in the world, bigger than Nimitz in length, have a crew of roughly 40 people?
You also do realize that modern aircraft like the F-22 spend more time in maintainance then in the air?
"The United States' top fighter jet, the Lockheed Martin F-22, has recently required more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in the skies, pushing its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000, a far higher figure than for the warplane it replaces, confidential Pentagon test results show. "
Seriously, go talk to air maintainance crews. They will all tell you how older aircraft are in terms of work-load and logistics far better.
I have yet to see that high-tech has ever caused reduced maintainance. If anything, cutting-edge tech is fickety, temperamental and prone to failures even at best of times. Your old car could be quickly fixed in any old car repair shop. These fancy new ones? You need to bring them to a special, authorized and certified shop and then wait for days for them to repair it. Diagnostic tool can help, but only up to a point.
I for one don't believe in a magical technology wand that will undo maintainance.
So when you tell me that aircraft carriers don't require more crew than battleship, I can only laugh.
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High tech cars do have reduced maintenance. My dad owns and operates a preventive maintenance business for cars (AKA oil changes and things like that). It used to be that cars could safely go 3,000 miles on an oil change, but now they can go 10,000 miles or more. Other things like improved gas mileage mean cars are cheaper to operate.
The problem with new cars is that they have numerous extra features the dealers convince you to buy. Obviously that drives the price up. Sure, they still have a lot of hard-to-work-on computers even without that, but many of the expensive high tech stuff that often needs to be repaired is simply convenience stuff. GPS, Bluetooth for your phone, and other things that are luxuries.
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Older aircraft carrier are smaller than those of today - even thought the number of aircraft they carry didn't change much (60-70, and today we have 70-80).
The Iowa itself was the biggest battleship the US had, almost the size of a carrier. 276 meters in length, that is a LOT. And yes, carrier have a lot of volume and mass. They kinda have to since internal hangars require a LOT Of space. All that hull and structural support, plus all the equipment and supplies, and aircraft - of course a carrier is gonna have a huge tonnage, even a small one.
And it entered service 30 years before the Nimitz-class carrier, which was 23% longer and 133% wider in maximum dimension; even using the waterline dimensions for the Nimitz, it's still more than 17% longer and nearly 24% wider, which puts the minimum difference in bounding area at about 44% more area for the Nimitz-class. Meanwhile, the type of fleet carrier that entered service at the same time as the Iowa-class battleship, the Essex-class, had a crew complement which was comparable to that of the Iowa, whether you use my numbers from Wikipedia or your numbers from wherever the hell you got yours. ~2800 men on an Iowa is not significantly different from 2600, 2170 + 870 (~9% more total personnel), 2170 + 870 + 160 (~15% more total personnel), or 3100 (~11% more total personnel) on an Essex, when the Essexes were up to ~36% wider (but ~16% narrower at the waterline) and ~2% shorter than the Iowas were. The Essex-class carriers are far more comparable in size to the Iowa-class battleships than the Nimitz-class carriers are, they're far more comparable in terms of the era in which the ships were actually both modern capital ships, they're far more comparable in time of introduction and service, and they show little significant difference in crew size. There is little evidence within Starsector that the ships of each era are of significantly different scales; in fact, the vast majority of Starsector's ships within any given class are very similar in scale and especially sprite bounding area.
If the argument were over the degree of logistical support that Astrals require as opposed to Onslaughts, then your comparison of the Nimitz-class carriers to the ~40% smaller and ~30 years older Iowa-class battleships might be appropriate (though even that is debatable; the sprite sizes of Starsector vessels make it seem likely that the size of any given type of ship has remained roughly constant throughout the entire period for which we have example vessels, whereas real-world modern naval vessels have been growing in size for more than a century, with plenty of examples of capital ships roughly doubling the size of ships in the same category and two decades older, and this growth in scale hasn't been restricted to capital ships - modern US Navy destroyers are comparable in size to WWII-era cruisers, and if you want to go back far enough they're also comparable in size to capital ships such as the 1906 HMS Dreadnought). However, the argument is over the degree of logistical support all of Starsector's carriers require to all of Starsector's other ships, including those vessels which are of the same design era or generation, and there's no way in hell that I'll buy that Astrals are to Paragons what Nimitzes are to Iowas. As far as size goes, the sprite bounding area for the Astral is only 17% greater than that for the Paragon, whereas the bounding area for the footprint of a Nimitz is ~69% greater than the bounding area for the footprint of an Iowa, which suggests that the Nimitzes are relatively much larger compared to the Iowas than the Astrals are to the Paragons; the mass attribute listed in ship_data.csv also supports this conclusion, as while the displacement of the Nimitz-class carriers roughly doubles that of the Iowa-class battleships, the mass of the Paragon-class battleships is listed as 3500 to the Astral-class carriers' 3000. As far as time of introduction goes, Astrals and Paragons appear to be of the same design generation, with each ship having many of the features characteristic of the late high-tech period, such as highly-efficient shield generators with deep flux reserves and excellent venting for the armament, relatively thin armor and weak hulls for ships of their class, and somewhat better speed and maneuverability than older ships in the same class (not that there's that much to compare against, as the Onslaught is the only battleship to compare the Paragon against and the Astral is the only carrier at the capital level). As far as crew levels go, the Astral-class shows little difference between itself and the other heavy capital ships in terms of capacity in combination with significantly lower levels of required crew even if a significant fighter group's requirements are added to that of the carrier, with 50 less crew required than is necessary for the capital ships with the next-smallest minimum crew (both of which are battlecruisers), and 100 or more fewer crew required than either of the battleships; the minimum difference of 50 crew is sufficient for 8 wings of Tridents and Piranhas and Warthogs, or 25 wings of Thunders and Longbows, either of which seems to me an ample fighter group for an Astral's six flight decks.
All of this suggests that if you're looking for real-world capital ships which are analogous to Starsector's capital ships, you should be looking no later than the end of the second world war for your examples, as the Astral and the Paragon appear to be contemporary designs built on a very similar scale, similar to the USS Essex and the USS Iowa, or the HMS Ark Royal and the HMS King George V, or the HMS Courageous and the HMS Hood, or the USS Yorktown and the USS North Carolina, all of which are examples of ships built at about the same time, all of which are of about the same size by bounding rectangle when compared to the other class in the pair, and all of which have similar crew requirements to the other class in the pair. The USS Nimitz and the USS Iowa are very much not contemporary designs and are very much not built on a similar scale, and, as might be expected, have very different crew requirements.
You are honestly telling me that ship size is the only crew indicator? That purpose, equipment and other factors are irrelevant?
You DO realize that the biggest tankers in the world, bigger than Nimitz in length, have a crew of roughly 40 people?
Certainly the ship's role is a factor in its crew size, and that factor can potentially be significant. However, comparing modern cargo ships to modern warships instead of comparing one type of modern warship to another type of (vaguely) modern warship is taking this to a ridiculous extreme, as cargo ships do not typically have even remotely the same purpose as warships and as such have very different requirements for the amount and type of equipment, and relatedly the size of the crew, required to serve adequately in their designed role. Comparing cargo ships to warships to estimate crew requirements based on ship size is like comparing eighteen wheelers to main battle tanks to estimate crew requirements based on vehicle mass - it's entirely by luck if you arrive at vaguely the correct number, as the types of vehicles being compared are entirely unrelated.
Beyond that, the difference in crew size between the Nimitz-class carriers and the Iowa-class battleships is roughly the same as the difference between two types of battleships whose dimensions differ by similar degrees. As such, ~100% more men on a carrier ~70% larger than the battleship whose crew you're comparing against is not a particularly unexpected result - you see similar increases in crew sizes when comparing types of battleships with similar disparities in size. As soon as you come up with a rational explanation for why I should pay attention to your example of two ships which are not even remotely contemporary designs and which are not particularly similar in size to one another rather than my examples of contemporary designs with similar dimensions, I'll listen. Until then, though, I regard your argument as being based on a flawed analogy.
I'm not sure where you get your numbers.
All of my numbers came from Wikipedia's pages on the ship or ship class mentioned.
Older aircraft carrier are smaller than those of today - even thought the number of aircraft they carry didn't change much (60-70, and today we have 70-80).
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Midway has a 4,104 complement, Essex has 2,170 (ship), 870 (air wing), 160 (flag) = 3000+, Forrestal has 4378, Wasp (small carrier) has 2,167
Oh, look at the Nimitz:
Ship's company: 3,200, Air wing: 2,480
I bolded for a comparison with the older carrier. So even tough the number of aircraft carrier barely increased, the number of air crew required skyrocketed!
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You also do realize that modern aircraft like the F-22 spend more time in maintainance then in the air?
Would you mind providing a reason for why I should care that modern aircraft carriers carry ~30 men per aircraft while WWII-era carriers carried ~10 men per aircraft, or that modern aircraft spend significantly more time being maintained than WWII-era aircraft do, or that modern aircraft are typically significantly larger than WWII-era aircraft are, when Starsector is based on the WWII-era warships and aircraft, when Starsector's fighters appear for the most part to be the same size over all eras by sprite bounding area (okay, fine, the Xyphos is a bit large at ~15% larger than the Gladius and ~50% larger than the Broadsword, but the Wasp is only 65% the size of the Talon and the Dagger is only 87% the size of the Piranha; if you classify the Xyphos, Wasp, Longbow, Dagger, and Trident as high-tech, the Gladius, Thunder, Warthog, and Piranha as midline, and the Broadsword, Mining Pod, and Talon as low-tech, the average midline fighter sprite bounding area is 1058, the average high-tech fighter sprite bounding area is 1037, and the average low-tech fighter sprite bounding area is 810, and if you shift the Piranha to low-tech the midline average increases to 1071 and the low-tech average increases to 865, so it's not at all clear that the high-tech fighters are in any way as significantly larger than the midline fighters as modern fighters are relative to WWII-era fighters), or when it's not at all clear that the discrepancy in the age of the designs of the Astral and Paragon is at all similar to the discrepancy in the age of the designs of the Nimitz and Iowa (as I said earlier, visual cues and ship statistics suggest that the Astral and Paragon designs are contemporaries of one another, whereas the designs of the Nimitz and Iowa are separated by 30 years, a power plant of a type which didn't exist at the time the first was designed but which had been used in a preceding design at the time the latter was designed, and a significantly different fleet doctrine).
Beyond that, the Astral is the oldest (and only) known capital ship which is a dedicated carrier; the next newest dedicated carrier design known in the in-universe history of Starsector is classed as a cruiser, and the only other dedicated carriers are both classed as destroyers, which suggests that the Astral was the first carrier designed to serve as the centerpiece of a major fleet in the Starsector universe in much the same way that a Paragon or an Odyssey might serve as a centerpiece of a major fleet. The other carriers all appear to be intended for secondary roles, providing fighter cover and scouting for the more traditional heavy warships which form the main part of the fleet or serving as convoy escorts while more valuable warships are employed elsewhere. This is not at all dissimilar to the situation in the late-interwar period and WWII, where carriers were just starting to be the centerpieces of fleets while the more traditional heavy warships shifted towards becoming escorts. Earlier carriers had been viewed as support units for more traditional heavy warships, but by the end of the second world war it would be the heavy warships which were the support units for carriers, and this, it seems, is about where things stand in Starsector - prior to the Collapse, naval doctrine was shifting to a carrier-centric model from a battleship-centric model, and as technological development appears to have, for the most part, frozen since then in the universe of Starsector, or at least in the region of the universe covered by the game, naval doctrine is stuck in something not terribly dissimilar to late-interwar and WWII-era real-world naval doctrine, where some favor the battleship as the primary capital ship, others favor the carrier, and others favor whatever they have or can afford to build. The Essex-class and Iowa-class are of such an era, whereas the Nimitz-class came during an era in which the carrier had clearly won.
Please, enlighten me as to why I should acknowledge your analogy as the superior analogy when, as far as I can tell, everything about the carriers of Starsector favors my own analogy more than yours.
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Hey you guys!
I've been reading the conversation and really enjoying the insights into naval operations and thoughts on crew - the relationships between combat personnel, maintenance and operations, handling of bleeding-edge technology, and the like!
But, also, you're totally arguing, and it'd be awfully nice if you'd stop.
We're talking about a setting in which humanity has ships that travel faster than light and where we have transformed entire planetary ecologies. Moving from the surface of a planet to orbit is so trivial that it's never even mentioned, huge chunks of machinery can literally teleport from place to place or even just disappear from reality for a bit, and millions upon millions of people live on worlds build by the little dude from Dig-Dug. We're practically knife-fighting with million-ton dreadnoughts and fighting WWII-style fighter rat-races with ships carrying power sources powerful enough to do that IN ZERO GRAVITY. None of these things have much in common with real life, at all.
A little bit of consistency is a good thing because it makes us feel like we're there a little bit, and - forget guns, who wouldn't want to bring a million-ton dreadnought to a knife fight? But any shred of total-organizational-unity went *pliff* when the gates went down and the chaos started. Maybe some carriers have tiny crews because they consist of vast caverns with one dude with a megaphone in the middle yelling "OK, ROBOTS, LAUNCH FOUR HUNDRED FIGHTERS FROM THE AFT TELEPORTER!" and maybe some have huge-ass crews because it takes a group of 20 people in fancy helmets to initialize the neural-nets built into each of the fightercraft so that they can perform ridiculously well, and also there's a whole group of guys with anger issues talking to the missile guidance systems to make them SO DAMN ANGRY that they will practically exceed the laws of nature just to BLOW SOMETHING UP DAMMIT.
Maybe you've got battleships with a single crew-member because he was wired into it 150 years ago and spent a century out in an Oort cloud making it respond as if it were literally his own flesh, and maybe you've got battleships crammed full of eager torpedo pilots who get teleported back to the ship moments before the antimatter bomb they used their 30 years' experience to fly through PD without a scratch hits someone's hull. Maybe some drones don't land for servicing at all but fly directly into a grinder connected to a high-speed autofactory that spits a brand new one out the other end and into a launch tube? Maybe Luddic AI-targeted turrets perform astounding feats of superhuman accuracy as long as each has a 20-person choir filling their electronic brains with beautiful inspiration and purity of purpose?
Analogies are great for starting points but they make terrible and uncompromising slave-drivers who pit friend against friend for twisted s**ts and giggles if you give them a chance. Don't try to figure out which ship takes how much crew based on how its size compares to something in a similar way that something else's size compares to yet another something else's size. The real world is not the boss - nay, not even the advisor - of Future Space Awesome. Figure out what works for balance and fun, and then figure out what AWESOME reason explains it.
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Older aircraft carrier are smaller than those of today - even thought the number of aircraft they carry didn't change much (60-70, and today we have 70-80).
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Midway has a 4,104 complement, Essex has 2,170 (ship), 870 (air wing), 160 (flag) = 3000+, Forrestal has 4378, Wasp (small carrier) has 2,167
Oh, look at the Nimitz:
Ship's company: 3,200, Air wing: 2,480
I bolded for a comparison with the older carrier. So even tough the number of aircraft carrier barely increased, the number of air crew required skyrocketed!
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You also do realize that modern aircraft like the F-22 spend more time in maintainance then in the air?
Would you mind providing a reason for why I should care that modern aircraft carriers carry ~30 men per aircraft while WWII-era carriers carried ~10 men per aircraft, or that modern aircraft spend significantly more time being maintained than WWII-era aircraft do, or that modern aircraft are typically significantly larger than WWII-era aircraft are, when Starsector is based on the WWII-era warships and aircraft,
So the numbers don't fit your idea/notion, therefore, why should you care?
Ok, I'll bite.
Tell me why *I* should care about anything you written above? You just seem to be repeating the same old "but Nimitz is bigger and made later". Who the frak cares? The Iowa was modernized and in active service untill recently. And you got other ships to compare to, not just the Iowa.
You are going so far as to use SPRITE LENGTH in a game as to make an argument.
Also, where is your proof that SS is based on WW21 and thus only that maters? What, you think technological progression doesn't matter? You think the history of changing requirements doesn't matter?
So even tough big ship = big crew (generally. You acknowledge that, but then immediately downplay the tanker example.)
so even tough aircraft becoming more complex and advanced has produced more requirement for maintaiance, and thus the AIR CREW numbers have been increasing - you want to ignore that too "because SS is WW2". Well ,when you point out high-tech fighters with energy beams and complex electronics in WW2, you can make that argument.
Please, enlighten me as to why I should acknowledge your analogy as the superior analogy when, as far as I can tell, everything about the carriers of Starsector favors my own analogy more than yours.
It does? Only in your head.
Let me quote you back "I regard your argument(s) as being based on a flawed analogy."
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We're talking about a setting in which humanity has ships that travel faster than light and where we have transformed entire planetary ecologies. Moving from the surface of a planet to orbit is so trivial that it's never even mentioned, huge chunks of machinery can literally teleport from place to place or even just disappear from reality for a bit, and millions upon millions of people live on worlds build by the little dude from Dig-Dug. We're practically knife-fighting with million-ton dreadnoughts and fighting WWII-style fighter rat-races with ships carrying power sources powerful enough to do that IN ZERO GRAVITY. None of these things have much in common with real life, at all.
Because Space Magic?
Frankly I hate space magic. It's lazy and dishonest and does not make for great depth.
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EDIT: removed the rudest stuff
Ugh, this thread is a textbook example of how to ruin a true point with rudeness and illogical arguments for it. The most egregious examples:
You are honestly telling me that ship size is the only crew indicator? That purpose, equipment and other factors are irrelevant?
You DO realize that the biggest tankers in the world, bigger than Nimitz in length, have a crew of roughly 40 people?
- Huge strawman.
- The fact that battleships and carriers both require more crew than supertankers does not say anything about whether carriers require more crew than battleships.
- Comparing a warship of any kind to a civilian bulk carrier is so obviously apples-to-orangutans that you should be ashamed for even making it.
I have yet to see that high-tech has ever caused reduced maintainance. If anything, cutting-edge tech is fickety, temperamental and prone to failures even at best of times. Your old car could be quickly fixed in any old car repair shop. These fancy new ones? You need to bring them to a special, authorized and certified shop and then wait for days for them to repair it. Diagnostic tool can help, but only up to a point.
I for one don't believe in a magical technology wand that will undo maintainance.
- Conflating specialisation/tools required with maintenance required
- Conflating time taken for repair with maintenance required, and not even controlling for things like the workshop's workload against capacity or using a more direct metric like man-hours spent
- How do you account for the Iowa-class losing a full third of its crew as it was modernized?
And you got other ships to compare to, not just the Iowa.
Since Aeson is the one posting comparisons other than Nimitz : Iowa and not you, how do you get away with making this demand?
Now, I did some back-of-envelope comparisons involving more modern ships (not to battleships, since they haven't been built for a long time, but to cruisers) - Liaoning, Clemenceau, Charles de Gaulle, Giuseppe Garibaldi on the carrier side and Ticonderoga, Kirov, Slava on the cruiser side - that do in fact support your point (IIRC the carriers had something like 0.05X people per tonne of standard displacement inclusive of air wing, Ticonderoga and Slava were 0.04X, and Kirov was a mere 0.029). You could, you know, do such a thing and post the results instead of snarking at others.
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Because Space Magic?
Frankly I hate space magic. It's lazy and dishonest and does not make for great depth.
Just about anything involving space in entertainment is fiction and/or fantasy, like it or not. People who want to write a story or game that aims to be realistic should avoid space unless it is a simulator.
Starsector breaks reality in enough ways, but that's okay. All that matters is firing flashy weapons and watching ships go boom!
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You are going so far as to use SPRITE LENGTH in a game as to make an argument.
Why do I bring sprite size into it? Because sprite size is the only thing we have indicating the relative size of the ships as compared to one another, aside from the vague categorization of various ship types as 'battleships' or 'heavy cruisers' or 'light carriers.' I will grant that the sprite sizes are not necessarily a good indication of the actual sizes of the ships, or potentially even the relative sizes, if they are not done to scale with one another, but weapon sprites have the same scale regardless of the ship mounting them unless I am very much mistaken, which suggests that the ship sprites are at a constant scale, and that therefore the relative sizes of the sprites can give a general idea of the relative sizes of the ships in question.
The Iowa was modernized and in active service untill recently. And you got other ships to compare to, not just the Iowa.
It is true that the Iowa was modernized. It is also true that even after its modernization it was an obsolete unit which could have been mostly replaced by lighter, more modern units with little loss of capability.
Histidine helped slightly with providing examples; I'll help a little bit more: California-class cruisers entered service with the US Navy in the mid-1970s (1974, according to Wikipedia), making them contemporaries with the Nimitz-class carriers (which also entered service in the mid-1970s). The Nimitz-class carriers have ~0.054 personnel (ship's complement + air wing) per ton of displacement while the California-class cruisers have ~0.055 crew per ton of displacement. The Californias are considerably smaller than the Nimitzes, of course, at ~half the length and a little less than half the beam (using the waterline dimension for the Nimitz) or a about a quarter the beam (using the flight deck dimension for the Nimitz) and a tenth the tonnage. Nevertheless, this continues to suggest that the crew for a battleship contemporary with the Nimitz and built on a similar scale would have been largely similar to that of the carrier, as does Histidine's number for the Ticonderogas (based on the Ticonderoga number it'd be more like a ~20-25% discrepancy in crew size than the ~10-15% difference in crew size between the Iowas and the Essexes, but this is still far short of your ~200% larger total complement apparently simply because "it's a carrier and they require more stuff than battleships do," with no consideration apparently given to the size of the ships in question).
So even tough big ship = big crew (generally. You acknowledge that, but then immediately downplay the tanker example.)
so even tough aircraft becoming more complex and advanced has produced more requirement for maintaiance, and thus the AIR CREW numbers have been increasing - you want to ignore that too "because SS is WW2". Well ,when you point out high-tech fighters with energy beams and complex electronics in WW2, you can make that argument.
Directional radar is an "energy beam" and requires relatively complex electronics, especially for the time period, in order to function, and yet there are several types of fighter equipped with one or more varieties of airborne radar which were in service during the second world war, on both sides of the conflict. Look up the night fighter variants of many aircraft from the mid-1940s onwards, and they'll be equipped with airborne radars. Examples include variants of the Messerschmitt Bf-110, de Havilland Mosquito, Junkers Ju-88, Lockheed P-38 Lightning, Gruman F6F Hellcat, and Northrup P-61 Black Widow, among many others.
Of course, if by "energy beam" you mean a weaponized laser or science fiction's "plasma" weapons, I would point out to you that your vaunted modern fighter jets fail to meet this requirement just as much as the WWII-era aircraft do.
Beyond that, "high-tech" is relative. P-51 Mustangs and B-29 Superfortresses were "high-tech" at the time of introduction and are "high-tech" relative to older types; so too were all-metal monoplanes and aircraft which used control surfaces rather than wing-warping, or which could even get off the ground, at various times. F-14 Tomcats are "high-tech" relative to F-86 Sabres and obsolete by comparison to F-22 Raptors. Where is this magical marker which distinguishes that which is "high-tech" from that which is not?
Also, where is your proof that SS is based on WW21 and thus only that maters?
From http://fractalsoftworks.com/2013/12/30/ships-stories/:
"When I was first drawing up spaceships for Starsector we determined what to make based mostly on what felt right according to the conceit of idealized WW2-era naval combat in space."
It's right there in the first sentence of the blog post.
However, I would not say that only WWI-WWII matters - in that, you are placing words into my mouth. (As for why I said that you should look no later than the end of WWII for capital ships to compare to one another - have any non-carrier capital ships similar in size to contemporary carriers in service with the same nation entered service with any navy in the past ~60 years? The Kirovs are a lot smaller than the Kuznetsov, and the ballistic missile subs tend to be even smaller relative to contemporary carriers, and I cannot really think of much else which might qualify as a capital ship; you could scale the cruisers like Histidine suggests of course, but you've already objected to that with your cargo ship "counterargument.") I would, however, say that WWI-WWII era naval combat and naval doctrine, rather than modern naval combat and naval doctrine, would appear to be the dominant inspiration for Starsector's combat model. Missiles are a specialty weapon rather than a primary armament. Carriers have not yet become the dominant capital ships, though it would appear that they might have been moving towards such a position. Fighters tend towards the more specialized types typical of the WWII era rather than the more generalized fighter-bombers typical of modern navies, and for the most part only the bomber types are a serious threat to capital ships and other heavy warships. Warships can actually expect to engage one another with non-missile weapons, often not long after they enter missile ranges of one another. Guns (including the various PD lasers), not missiles, are the standard anti-fighter and anti-missile weapon at all ranges, rather than the modern model where missiles are preferred for medium and long ranges and guns are reserved mostly for very short range defense.
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We're talking about a setting in which humanity has ships that travel faster than light and where we have transformed entire planetary ecologies. Moving from the surface of a planet to orbit is so trivial that it's never even mentioned, huge chunks of machinery can literally teleport from place to place or even just disappear from reality for a bit, and millions upon millions of people live on worlds build by the little dude from Dig-Dug. We're practically knife-fighting with million-ton dreadnoughts and fighting WWII-style fighter rat-races with ships carrying power sources powerful enough to do that IN ZERO GRAVITY. None of these things have much in common with real life, at all.
Because Space Magic?
Frankly I hate space magic. It's lazy and dishonest and does not make for great depth.
OK - to rephrase, then: it's not "space magic", it's that vessels in Starsector have about as much in common with the ships and concepts you're arguing about as an F-22 has with a paper airplane. Yeah, future tech should be consistent as much as possible to make for a realistic-feeling setting. However, having a heated argument about how well that consistency holds based on your own theory about which fruit is better analogy for a model T is pointless and - frankly - very rude to a community that overall gets along very well. If you just want to bicker, please take it outside.
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We're talking about a setting in which humanity has ships that travel faster than light and where we have transformed entire planetary ecologies. Moving from the surface of a planet to orbit is so trivial that it's never even mentioned, huge chunks of machinery can literally teleport from place to place or even just disappear from reality for a bit, and millions upon millions of people live on worlds build by the little dude from Dig-Dug. We're practically knife-fighting with million-ton dreadnoughts and fighting WWII-style fighter rat-races with ships carrying power sources powerful enough to do that IN ZERO GRAVITY. None of these things have much in common with real life, at all.
Because Space Magic?
Frankly I hate space magic. It's lazy and dishonest and does not make for great depth.
A better term would be "Space Materials Sciences".
Ask people from 1900 to show you a container that's about as thin as paper, weighs not much more than that, is made of a translucent material, and is totally air-tight. They'd look at you like you've gone mad. Someone from 2014 (or more accurately, the late 40s/early 50s) would show you a Tupperware (or similar) container. Something far beyond the comprehension and capabilities of that past technology is an every-day, easily-produced commodity in the modern day.
The real kicker, here, is that the technology is a shifting scale.
To better attach this to the debate at hand... consider a handgun. Prior to the early 1800s, you would have had to find a trained blacksmith, who would have had to put forth dozens of man-hours (let's put this into an efficiency metric, rather than the "IT ONLY TOOK ONE OR TWO GUYs!" argument) to construct parts for a gun. They've gotta melt down the metal, shape each part into its respective shapes, and form the final shape. THEN, they need to take those parts and match them together, including some fiddly little internal bits (although not nearly as much as modern trigger groups, for example). At the end of it, you'd have something like a flintlock, a simple, one-shot weapon that didn't have rifling, and was unable to handle great chamber pressures (and thus, powerful cartridges). Now, sometime in the 1800s, during the Industrial Revolution, the concept of interchangeable parts came to pass, and suddenly we were able to quickly die-cast dozens of gun parts in hours, and finishing the weapon a few hours on top of that. And even through to today, that standard remains present. Call it 20-ish hours from start to finish, you can manufacture anything from a piddly little .22 to a .30-06 or similar, given the equipment.
Now, with the proper equipment, a fully-functional M1911-style pistol (http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/11/14/245078880/plastic-guns-made-with-3-d-printers-pose-new-security-concerns) can be constructed in just about 10 hours, 18 hours at the outside, and being constructed by a precision machine, you don't need to go back and do a lot of finishing on it to get everything lined up just right, provided your initial blueprint was sound.
And, to bring it all back to SS: yes, the initial design and construction of that equipment took a long time, sure. But do you think that, in a world (by canon) full of autofacs, that you have to have SO many people on-board... what, building new autofactories every time they need to use it? Nope, it's already made, all you need is someone to run it. You call it "Space Magic" derisively; well, I bet an 18th century gunsmith would say much the same of a 3D Printer, but for all they decry it as "impossible" and it involving technologies they don't understand, it does do the job MORE efficiently than that same gunsmith.
And similarly, saying that modern aircraft require a huge complement of crew is assuming automation literally stops, right now, at its current rate of progression. For your vaunted modern-carrier statistics, you're assuming that a future spaceship is going to need:
- ABHs to guide aircraft around a crowded flight deck -- you're telling me a futuristic spaceship doesn't, say, have its fighters tucked in racks hanging on the bulkhead, slotted into their launch positions by a crane system? No, Alex didn't either, but it sounds as logical as anything else
- ABFs to drive the bowsers and/or put the fuel into the spacecraft -- Unless fighters need a stock of promethium (and, as far as the game tells us, it's only needed for hyperspace fuel), this entire rating is nixed
- ABEs to setup, repair, and operate the launch and recovery systems -- presumably, these spacecraft probably launch via some magnetic impulse system. Nix the guys who have to calculate cat power and arrestor tension. Well, that's pretty much all of them.
- AOs to arm the fighters -- yeah, you might have one or two managing payloads, but I'm taking a guess here that you don't need groups of a dozen or so dudes manhandling a 500lb bomb into place anymore, yeah?
About the only aviation rates, actually, that would probably still be extant would be AMs (aviation mechanics), the guys who maintain the fighters' integrity (probably really important given the whole "vacuum of space thing"; AE (aviation ETs) for maintaining the no-doubt sophisticated sensor suites aboard these craft; and MAYBE ACs (air controllers), assuming some smart computer system doesn't do all the work for the airboss.
So with ABs completely cut out, and thus the vast majority of any modern carrier complement cut out, you have a handful of technical ratings left. I'd even posit that, despite someone (can't remember who) saying it quite cynically (once again, I'm discovering a pattern here), it might just be easier for the crew to feed fighters that are sufficiently busted into the autofacs for the sake of acquiring raw materials, and they DO try to hand-repair slightly-less damaged craft (accounting for being able to, in certain situations, see a fighter wing with one or two damaged craft).
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it might just be easier for the crew to feed fighters that are sufficiently busted into the autofacs for the sake of acquiring raw materials
If we assume the Starsector game mechanics match the lore, they go even further: fighters seem to be one-use disposable items, like paper plates. A fighter that's launched and flies around for a bit without taking a scratch or firing a single shot costs the same amount CR (and thus supplies) as one that gets blown out of space (and not replaced by a carrier in the same engagement). Also note that fighters never have to undergo repairs.
I suppose making the fighters good enough to last for just one sortie does help a lot with reducing the logistical/economic impact of replacing frequent fighter losses in battle (I think a good analogy would be the Liberty ships from WWII, taken to the furthest possible extreme), but you'd think they'd at least recycle the ones that make it back for materials.
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So with ABs completely cut out, and thus the vast majority of any modern carrier complement cut out, you have a handful of technical ratings left. I'd even posit that, despite someone (can't remember who) saying it quite cynically (once again, I'm discovering a pattern here), it might just be easier for the crew to feed fighters that are sufficiently busted into the autofacs for the sake of acquiring raw materials, and they DO try to hand-repair slightly-less damaged craft (accounting for being able to, in certain situations, see a fighter wing with one or two damaged craft).
Nah, not cynical, just tickled by the idea of a ship where the drone fighters ALWAYS just fly directly into great big grinders on recovery, and then at the other end of a churning/bubbling/clanging autofactory new ones just go "ptoo!" out into space. And hey, if you and two hundred generations of your ancestors have been on a generation ship for centuries, maybe that's exactly how you'd do it! My point was who knows, and there are much more interesting ways of explaining crew counts than getting into nasty personal arguments over who has a better understanding of the "One True Model For All Naval Operations Ever Anywhere In Water Or Space" or measuring relative sprite sizes or something. :)
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So with ABs completely cut out, and thus the vast majority of any modern carrier complement cut out, you have a handful of technical ratings left. I'd even posit that, despite someone (can't remember who) saying it quite cynically (once again, I'm discovering a pattern here), it might just be easier for the crew to feed fighters that are sufficiently busted into the autofacs for the sake of acquiring raw materials, and they DO try to hand-repair slightly-less damaged craft (accounting for being able to, in certain situations, see a fighter wing with one or two damaged craft).
Nah, not cynical, just tickled by the idea of a ship where the drone fighters ALWAYS just fly directly into great big grinders on recovery, and then at the other end of a churning/bubbling/clanging autofactory new ones just go "ptoo!" out into space. And hey, if you and two hundred generations of your ancestors have been on a generation ship for centuries, maybe that's exactly how you'd do it! My point was who knows, and there are much more interesting ways of explaining crew counts than getting into nasty personal arguments over who has a better understanding of the "One True Model For All Naval Operations Ever Anywhere In Water Or Space" or measuring relative sprite sizes or something. :)
That's what I was getting at, you know? Maybe manufacturing/fabrication has advanced so insanely that all you need is raw material to feed in what is basically a 3D printer millennia ahead of our tech level. Or... maybe it's just that Alex didn't want to make Carriers, already a niche-y ship when direct combat is so prevalent, even less useful by doubling or tripling its in-game crew requirements. No matter how futuristic a game might be, gameplay and balance always trumps technical accuracy -- for good games, at least.
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Because Space Magic?
Frankly I hate space magic. It's lazy and dishonest and does not make for great depth.
Just about anything involving space in entertainment is fiction and/or fantasy, like it or not. People who want to write a story or game that aims to be realistic should avoid space unless it is a simulator.
Starsector breaks reality in enough ways, but that's okay. All that matters is firing flashy weapons and watching ships go boom!
Black and white fallacy that ignores the area between extremes. Realism... actually believability or versimilitude is something on a scale. A fiction/fantasy world can be more or less believable.
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It is true that the Iowa was modernized. It is also true that even after its modernization it was an obsolete unit which could have been mostly replaced by lighter, more modern units with little loss of capability.
Actually, the navy didn't (and still doesn't have) a more effective artillery platform. Bullets are far cheaper than missiles and the Iowa can fire a LOT of them.
Carriers do need (and always needed) more crew than another ship of similar size. This is a iron-clad fact. If anything, SS ships are carrier/battleship hybrids, having a lot of weapons and armor to boot, meaning they would require even MORE crew. After all, it does the job of two different ships.
While a carrier would have less crew for manning guns (since it has less of them) it would require a large air crew; vice-versa for the battleship.
So even tough big ship = big crew (generally. You acknowledge that, but then immediately downplay the tanker example.)
so even tough aircraft becoming more complex and advanced has produced more requirement for maintaiance, and thus the AIR CREW numbers have been increasing - you want to ignore that too "because SS is WW2". Well ,when you point out high-tech fighters with energy beams and complex electronics in WW2, you can make that argument.
Directional radar is an "energy beam" and requires relatively complex electronics, especially for the time period, in order to function, and yet there are several types of fighter equipped with one or more varieties of airborne radar which were in service during the second world war, on both sides of the conflict. Look up the night fighter variants of many aircraft from the mid-1940s onwards, and they'll be equipped with airborne radars. Examples include variants of the Messerschmitt Bf-110, de Havilland Mosquito, Junkers Ju-88, Lockheed P-38 Lightning, Gruman F6F Hellcat, and Northrup P-61 Black Widow, among many others.
Of course, if by "energy beam" you mean a weaponized laser or science fiction's "plasma" weapons, I would point out to you that your vaunted modern fighter jets fail to meet this requirement just as much as the WWII-era aircraft do.[/quote]
You got a point, or you just love to nitpick?
Beyond that, "high-tech" is relative. P-51 Mustangs and B-29 Superfortresses were "high-tech" at the time of introduction and are "high-tech" relative to older types; so too were all-metal monoplanes and aircraft which used control surfaces rather than wing-warping, or which could even get off the ground, at various times. F-14 Tomcats are "high-tech" relative to F-86 Sabres and obsolete by comparison to F-22 Raptors. Where is this magical marker which distinguishes that which is "high-tech" from that which is not?
Again? You know de-rail by going after word definitions?
Geez Cpt. Obvoious, no, I didn't know high-tech is somewhat relative to the moment. Tell me more.
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It is true that the Iowa was modernized. It is also true that even after its modernization it was an obsolete unit which could have been mostly replaced by lighter, more modern units with little loss of capability.
Actually, the navy didn't (and still doesn't have) a more effective artillery platform. Bullets are far cheaper than missiles and the Iowa can fire a LOT of them.
Carriers do need (and always needed) more crew than another ship of similar size. This is a iron-clad fact. If anything, SS ships are carrier/battleship hybrids, having a lot of weapons and armor to boot, meaning they would require even MORE crew. After all, it does the job of two different ships.
While a carrier would have less crew for manning guns (since it has less of them) it would require a large air crew; vice-versa for the battleship.
This fixation on crew numbers of archaic ships based on tasking is kind of... layman, in actuality.
My ship has two 30mm cannons on board, and two RAM launchers. Both are fully autonomous pieces of gear, and are basically run by the computer; true, the 30mms have a place for personnel in the barbette itself, but it is NOT needed for functionality, and full functionality at that. However, by your metric, you'd expect that we require, what, a guy per gun for the actual shooting, a loading crew, a rangefinder, fire controlmen guiding its shots, etc... when all of it can be done by a single FC in Combat. No, a 30mm might not be equivalent to a battleship's primary guns, but it's certainly an analogue to, say, the 40mm AA guns of WWII... and here, we see each gun needing 3 people (visible) per mount, plus there's probably a few chaining the ammo from the mags out of sight of the picture. (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Bofors_firing_USS_Hornet.jpg) Once again: On board my ship, we have these (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/US_Navy_090929-N-2515C-443_The_amphibious_transport_dock_ship_USS_Green_Bay_%28LPD_20%29_fires_a_surface-to-air_intercept_missile_from_the_Rolling_Airframe_Missile_%28RAM%29_launcher_during_Combat_System_Ship_Qualification_Trials_off_t.jpg), and we don't need 4, 5 people manning the gun, loading it manually, etc. etc., and it is a hell of a lot more accurate (given more modern fire control systems) than a Bofors would have been. Ergo, more capability for less manpower required.
Please, PLEASE stop pointing at historic, or even more modern, levels of manning and using that as proof of your claims. Or, if you do, then have the wherewithal to accept the rebuttal that, while you are situationally right, you also ignore technological advancement, and as I said a few posts ago, seem to assume that all advancement has stagnated in an era where we somehow figured out FTL flight.
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It is true that the Iowa was modernized. It is also true that even after its modernization it was an obsolete unit which could have been mostly replaced by lighter, more modern units with little loss of capability.
Actually, the navy didn't (and still doesn't have) a more effective artillery platform. Bullets are far cheaper than missiles and the Iowa can fire a LOT of them.
Hence 'mostly replaced' rather than 'entirely replaced.' However, I would point out that there is an ongoing debate as to whether or not that role is worth keeping battleships or battleship-like vessels around for, with many feeling that the greater accuracy of modern weapons can adequately replace the greater volume of fire offered by the battleships without necessitating the added expense of keeping battleships in the fleet or in the reserves. I would further add that it seems as though most or all other modern navies and states have decided that the role of heavy naval gunfire support is not sufficiently valuable to justify keeping battleships in the fleet.
You got a point, or you just love to nitpick?
You requested an example of a WWII aircraft equipped with 'complex electronics' and 'energy beams.' I gave you several examples. Granted, 'complex' is relative; certainly, the radars used at the time would no longer be considered advanced and would not use electronics which are complex by modern standards, but at the time, they were state-of-the-art.
Carriers do need (and always needed) more crew than another ship of similar size. This is a iron-clad fact. If anything, SS ships are carrier/battleship hybrids, having a lot of weapons and armor to boot, meaning they would require even MORE crew. After all, it does the job of two different ships.
While a carrier would have less crew for manning guns (since it has less of them) it would require a large air crew; vice-versa for the battleship.
You are insistent that this 'carriers require more crew than other ships of similar size and always will' belief you hold is factual, and yet you have offered little solid support for this belief, aside from a single comparison between a battleship which was 30 years older and considerably smaller than the carrier to which you compared it. Meanwhile, you ignore counterexamples showing that battleships and carriers which were contemporaries of one another and similar in physical size had crews of similar size. You ignore that modern cruisers have crew sizes which, if the crew size were scaled by tonnage to match the carrier, tend to place the cruiser crews at about the same size as the carrier crews.
Beyond that, you seem blind to the fact that there are other carriers in the world aside from the US Nimtiz-class carriers, several of which, such as the Russian carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, have crew sizes which fail to support your claim (at least, assuming the crew complements on Wikipedia are accurate). The USS Iowa was 887'3" in length and 108'2" in beam with a standard displacement of 45,000 tons, and as originally commissioned carried a crew of 2788 men (151 officers and 2637 enlisted, according to Wikipedia). The Russian carrier (sorry, "heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser") Admiral Kuznetzov has a crew complement of ~1700 men with an air wing of about ~650, and is listed as 1001' in overall length (890' at the waterline) and 236' in overall beam (115' at the waterline), with a displacement of 43,000 tons standard. Look, an example of a modern carrier which is larger than the battleship and has a smaller crew than the battleship originally carried; even with your ~1800 crew number for the modernized Iowa, it still doesn't have that much larger a crew. Or we can consider the British HMS Ark Royal (Audacious-class, 1955-1979; numbers given are from Wikipedia and are listed as 'as built,' though the ship was apparently enlarged significantly shortly before it was decommissioned), which was 804' in length and 112' in beam with a displacement of 36,800 tons, and carried 2640 men (including the air wing), which looks like it should scale rather nicely given that the crew of the HMS Ark Royal is ~95% that of the USS Iowa while the ship dimensions imply that the HMS Ark Royal is about ~94% the size of the USS Iowa (by the rather simplistic and likely not terribly accurate measure of multiplying the ship length by the ship beam).
I will also add that there are some sets of ships you could use as examples which might better suit your argument. For example, if we were to compare the British Invicible-class light aircraft carriers to the US Ticonderoga-class, we would see that the Ticonderogas have crews of about 400 men, a length of 567', a beam of 55', and a displacement of about 9,600 long tons at full load, while the Invincibles have crews of about 1000 men, a length of about 686', a beam of about 118', and a displacement of 22,000 tonnes (~21650 long tons); if you scale the Ticonderoga's crew up by the ratio of the ship lengths, the Ticonderoga crew becomes about 484 men for the scaled-up cruiser, while if you scale by the ratio of the beams you get a crew of about 858 men for the scaled-up cruiser; if you scale by the ratio of the bounding areas suggested by the length and beam dimensions, you get a crew of 1038 men for the scaled up cruiser; and if you scale by the ratio of the displacements you get a crew of 902 men for the scaled-up cruiser. Scaling by the ratio of the displacements or by the ratio of the length-beam products are probably more reasonable, but there is at least a logical path that can be followed for the beam-ratio and length-ratio scaling, and the length-ratio scaling suggests ~50% less crew for the scaled-up cruiser than the carrier would have (of course, the beam-ratio scaling suggests ~15% less crew and neither of the other scalings produce more than a 10% difference in crew size, and I rather suspect that the later two scaling methods are more likely to scale the cruiser to a similar size as the carrier than the former two methods are). Similarly, the length scaling and displacement scaling for the Russian Kirov-class battlecruiser to the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier's size could be used to argue for significant differences in the crew sizes, though the beam scaling and the length-beam product scaling suggest perhaps a ~10-15% differences in crew sizes.
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Hey you guys!
I've been reading the conversation and really enjoying the insights into naval operations and thoughts on crew - the relationships between combat personnel, maintenance and operations, handling of bleeding-edge technology, and the like!
But, also, you're totally arguing, and it'd be awfully nice if you'd stop.
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And the rest. +10
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Please, PLEASE stop pointing at historic, or even more modern, levels of manning and using that as proof of your claims. Or, if you do, then have the wherewithal to accept the rebuttal that, while you are situationally right, you also ignore technological advancement, and as I said a few posts ago, seem to assume that all advancement has stagnated in an era where we somehow figured out FTL flight.
Indeed.
To go back to the point that sparked off this whole kerfluffle: Fighters do take a large amount of supplies to deploy, but they also have significant advantages. In particular, they have an absolutely miniscule logistics footprint - you can make an exceedingly large fighter fleet very easily. One of my favorite strategies if I have the money and fighters is to simply turn my CR recovery off outside of combat and bring extra wings - if you aren't recharching CR, you don't need to bring the supplies.
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This fixation on crew numbers of archaic ships based on tasking is kind of... layman, in actuality.
Please, PLEASE stop pointing at historic, or even more modern, levels of manning and using that as proof of your claims. Or, if you do, then have the wherewithal to accept the rebuttal that, while you are situationally right, you also ignore technological advancement, and as I said a few posts ago, seem to assume that all advancement has stagnated in an era where we somehow figured out FTL flight.
Archaic ships? Pick any ship. I don't care.
You have modern small carriers and other modern ships for comparisons.
Automation CAN and does reduce crew numbers, but only up to a point. You're always need people, if nothing else, then as a failsafe and backup.
So yes, carrier would see reduced crew number - but so would other ships. So carriers would still require more.
Or if you want a comparison, a fat man and a normal man both go on a diet. Both loose 20kg. The fat man is still fatter.
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You are insistent that this 'carriers require more crew than other ships of similar size and always will' belief you hold is factual, and yet you have offered little solid support for this belief, aside from a single comparison between a battleship which was 30 years older and considerably smaller than the carrier to which you compared it. Meanwhile, you ignore counterexamples showing that battleships and carriers which were contemporaries of one another and similar in physical size had crews of similar size. You ignore that modern cruisers have crew sizes which, if the crew size were scaled by tonnage to match the carrier, tend to place the cruiser crews at about the same size as the carrier crews.
Weren't you are the one asserting that size isn't a direct indicator? What makes you think that crew scales up exactly like that?
"Scaling up" doesn't work, because that's now how ship designs work.
Remember that tanker? Yes, I know it's not a military ship. And I don't care, because that's exactly the point - purpose defines crew more than size. It's WHAT THE SIZE IS USED FOR (In the case of an aircraft carrier, carrying, servicing aircraft)
Beyond that, you seem blind to the fact that there are other carriers in the world aside from the US Nimtiz-class carriers, several of which, such as the Russian carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, have crew sizes which fail to support your claim (at least, assuming the crew complements on Wikipedia are accurate). The USS Iowa was 887'3" in length and 108'2" in beam with a standard displacement of 45,000 tons, and as originally commissioned carried a crew of 2788 men (151 officers and 2637 enlisted, according to Wikipedia). The Russian carrier (sorry, "heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser") Admiral Kuznetzov has a crew complement of ~1700 men with an air wing of about ~650, and is listed as 1001' in overall length (890' at the waterline) and 236' in overall beam (115' at the waterline), with a displacement of 43,000 tons standard. Look, an example of a modern carrier which is larger than the battleship and has a smaller crew than the battleship originally carried; even with your ~1800 crew number for the modernized Iowa, it still doesn't have that much larger a crew.
Aren't you the one now comparing ship from different periods?
Modernized Iowa does show a significant difference 1800 << 1700+650. I'd say that's significant enough.
If you want to believe that everything in SS is fully automated on ships, then what's the point of crew?
Why is crew required to work on the ship and maintain it, but magically NOT required to maintain fighters?
Look, we clearly won't agree on this matter.
So let's just agree to disagree.
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This fixation on crew numbers of archaic ships based on tasking is kind of... layman, in actuality.
Please, PLEASE stop pointing at historic, or even more modern, levels of manning and using that as proof of your claims. Or, if you do, then have the wherewithal to accept the rebuttal that, while you are situationally right, you also ignore technological advancement, and as I said a few posts ago, seem to assume that all advancement has stagnated in an era where we somehow figured out FTL flight.
Archaic ships? Pick any ship. I don't care.
You have modern small carriers and other modern ships for comparisons.
Automation CAN and does reduce crew numbers, but only up to a point. You're always need people, if nothing else, then as a failsafe and backup.
So yes, carrier would see reduced crew number - but so would other ships. So carriers would still require more.
Or if you want a comparison, a fat man and a normal man both go on a diet. Both loose 20kg. The fat man is still fatter.
There is only one limit to automation. Zero. A ship can be run by only an AI and any repairs and the like are either done by mobile robots or integrated nanobots. You could even have 1 AI controlling multiple ships, even further "reducing the crew".
Obviously Starsector doesn't use fully automated crews, since AIs as intelligent as people were banned by the Domain.
I'm pretty sure that if two people of different weights started on the same diet, the fatter person would lose more weight/mass.