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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Messages - Temstar

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1
General Discussion / Re: seeds?
« on: December 11, 2018, 03:28:06 AM »
MN-5890021258720290279
Spoiler
[close]

Two 75% terran worlds right next door to the core worlds with only a few days of clear hyperspace lane between the two. +2 food production on both and both also has ruins, organics, and some ore. With both size 4 colony I already control 16% of the food and 21% of organics in the sector.
Vanilla 0.9a-RC10 seed.

2
General Discussion / Re: Feedback on 0.6.2 (long)
« on: January 25, 2014, 04:44:05 AM »
All this talk of technical "superiority" remind of of a certain short story by Arthur C. Clarke, particularly relevant in our case since it talks about the dangers of applying cutting edge technology to space battle:
http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html
This story by the way is required reading for industrial design courses at MIT.

In my view what makes CR brilliant is that it is a perfect reflection of this "wunderwaffe" vs "stubborn conservatism and complete lack of imagination" dilemma. Hyperion for example is exactly what you would call a "wunderwaffe". When it works (that is, when it's freshly refitted from a station) it is a frighteningly effective weapon. But once its blown its load, for the vast majority of the time it just sits around eating up resource. On the other hand we have the old rust bucket known as the Enforcer with terrible shield and breathtakingly boring design. Yet you can count on this junk pile to rumble into battle every time (thanks to its low CR per deployment cost) and smash face without fan fair.

3
General Discussion / Re: Feedback on 0.6.2 (long)
« on: January 24, 2014, 09:49:27 PM »
Frankly the excuse that high tech ships require more maintenance is BS.

Why? Makes perfect sense to me. I mean look at the space shuttle, it was an extremely capable manned spacecraft compared to all other other ones around but required an army of people and month of down time between each flight for maintenance.

4
General Discussion / Re: Feedback on 0.6.2 (long)
« on: January 24, 2014, 03:08:26 PM »
30 fights is way too many, might as well get rid of CR altogether. I feel that the current CR restriction is about right. Large player fleets hunting Armadas, Security Detachments and SDFs have to wait for them to respawn so you have plenty of time between major battles for R&R. Smaller, faster fleets have lower cargo carrying capacity so they're heading back to station after each fight anyway so CR recovery is moot either way.

I feel that some of the problem people have with CR has to do with the kind of ships they keep in their fleet. I'm a fan of mid-tech so my fleet consists of mostly cruisers like Eagle, Heron and Apogee with most of them having 12% CR per deployment. Apogee tops the list at 15% CR but since Apogee is the flagship it has a deeper CR pool to start with. If you're a fan of all late tech then you're going to have to pay the price in CR. Most late tech ships have 20% CR per deployment which translate to less deployments and more down time in between fights to service their more complex components. It's the admirals job to make sure he's got a balanced fleet and not a fleet of hanger queens. And in the event that he has to have a fleet of hanger queens he has to work around that specific weakness of his fleet.

I do feel that cargo capacity could get a look at. Of course supplies are just falling out of ships like they grow on trees these days so if you don't take all that supply you could easily hang out in deep space forever and never need to head to a station to offload. What I would like to see is more auxiliary ships that could make some use of the over-abundance of supply. Say an Underway Replenishment auxiliary, something like a Construction Rig, but instead of repair it burns extra supply to speed up CR recovery.

5
General Discussion / Optimum flight deck to fighter ratio
« on: January 23, 2014, 10:54:33 PM »
In the old days where fighter squadrons repair and replenish in whole flights someone worked out a rough optimum ratio of flight deck to squadron ratio of something like 1:4. Nowadays with fighters landing one at a time and wider selection of carriers I wonder if anyone has worked out a new ratio.

I'm guessing this new ration will depend on number of actual fighter craft instead of number of squadrons, with larger wings like Wasp needing comparatively more flight deck time. My fleet currently runs two Broadsword and two Thunder squadrons of total 10 crafts on a Heron with two flight decks and it seems to work out fine. Heron can pump out fighters fast enough that Thunder squad can run out of plane pretty quick against big fleets. What's everyone else's experience?

6
General Discussion / Re: Best feature of 0.6.2a
« on: January 22, 2014, 04:09:43 AM »
Heron. I absolutely love that ship, it's exactly what I've been dreaming of for a long time. Now we have a full house of carriers in game to match up with WW2 carrier class:

Condor - Bogue class escort carrier
Slow, civilian cargo ship converted baby carrier. Good for adding some teeth to convoys. Slow speed and lack of defence limit its usability in major fleet actions.

Heron - Independence class light carrier
Military grade small fleet carriers based on cruiser hull design. Fast and capable of fleet action. Can be massed to create full on carrier task forces when large fleet carriers are not available.

Astral - Essex class fleet carrier
Full sized fleet carrier designed to work as heart of a carrier battle group.

Odyssey - Ise class battleship (after 1944 reconstruction)
Hybrid battleship / carrier

7
General Discussion / Re: Ballistic weapons generating Flux?
« on: August 13, 2013, 01:25:30 AM »
In effect the energy shield is a region of enormously accelerated time – so much so that when solid matter is submerged in this field it immediately becomes liquid like due to the rapid motion of its atoms from vastly accelerated quantum tunnelling.

Wouldn't a field of accelerated time also mean that matter passes through the field much faster? It would effectively stay unaffected for the outside observer (or the target's hull).

I suppose you could say only the part of a projectile in contact with the field would accelerate, which has the cool affect of ripping up an incoming projectile into impossibly thin slices before each slice then undergo proton decay.

8
General Discussion / Re: Ballistic weapons generating Flux?
« on: August 12, 2013, 08:40:57 PM »
Time for some TLDR space magic:

Throughout history the goal of physics has always been to build better and more intricate models to fit the world that we know: from Newtonian physics to Relativity to our current model of Brane Cosmology. Nevertheless student of physics should be reminded of a simple fact: all the theories and models are wrong!

Newtonian physics failed us when we looked at things moving at relativistic speed, Relativity failed us when we looked at things in the sub-atomic scale, and today Brane physics continue to fail us when we try to peer into the universe below the planck scale.

However, evidences do exist that hint at even higher theories possessed by the Domain of Man during the height of mankind’s progress – the lost theory of Quantum Gravity.

To the casual observer, the ubiquitous energy shield that allows such thing as high velocity Brachistochrone orbital manoeuvre and deep space warfare appears to be nothing more than a solid wall manifested by energy. However, latest experiment involving bombarding target shields with all manner of source material reveals a much more complex structure. The flash of gamma radiation seems to display incomplete physical information corresponding to the incoming material before destruction by shield. The incompleteness of the data can only mean one thing – violation of Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Since no known theory allows violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, yet it’s clear now that it happens every day around us there is no choice but to accept that all of our current brane physics is wrong and is only an approximation of certain truer laws of physics possessed by the Domain under which the same results can be derived in narrow cases – the same way that Newtonian physics and Relativity derive the same results at anything below relativistic speed. This theory, which we will call Quantum Gravity for the sake of giving it a name does indeed allow violation of Second Law of Thermodynamics. Or rather: our brane physics and the laws of thermodynamics are all good approximations of Quantum Gravity under certain narrow conditions.

We know that before The Collapse, Domain’s research efforts focused on “The Final Question” - that is reversing of entropy on a massive scale. I postulate that they succeeded with Quantum Gravity and were finally able to penetrate the planck scale to look upon the very foundation of the universe. Energy shield then was just the first practical use of this technology. Rather than using some kind force field, shield actually destroys incoming matter by proton decay – a process that would normally take around 10^34 years. But of course armed with Quantum Gravity and control over entropy it would be a simple matter of accelerating this process. In effect the energy shield is a region of enormously accelerated time – so much so that when solid matter is submerged in this field it immediately becomes liquid like due to the rapid motion of its atoms from vastly accelerated quantum tunnelling. Within fraction of a second nucleons would decay into gamma ray photons and leptons – the well observed shield flash.

Logically, if the arrow of time could be speed up, it should be possible to slow it down too. This explains the small field generators embedded into weapons churned out by autofactories. By submerging the most vulnerable components such as the rails of liner accelerators in a “reverse” shield you protect it from the ravages of time and so all the other forces of the universe.

Obviously running these two systems incur a cost as observed in ship’s flux system. If the fields are entropic in nature then it stands that the “flux” they generate is also entropic. Normal shield and negative shields would generate different types of entropic flux that cannot be simply combined to annihilate each other (no more than trying to mix a pile of ash with a bag of sugar and expecting an unburnt tree to reform out of the mix). We observer that the shower of highly energetic particle released by flex vents, particularly during crash venting has a signature unlike any other particle source in nature of in physics laboratories.  This must mean that flux capacitors operate on Quantum Gravity principles. The requirement of large volume of very cold helium hints at the workings of the capacitors. At those temperatures the helium would form Bose-Einstein condensate displaying macroscopic quantum phenomena, if subtle teased in various ways whole different family of exotic virtual particles could be produced. It may well be that Domain has discovered a way to arrange suits of virtual particles in such ways to as to create bubbles of metastable false vacuum. Each bubble would be a completely alien universe with entirely new set of “laws of physics” that can arise under the more general Quantum Gravity. Entropic flux could then be directed into the bubbles to be stored until a later time where they could be dissipated safely by flux vents. If a bubble were to be overloaded, then the potential wall between the false vacuum and the “true vacuum” we live in will be breached and our universe will aggressively attack the less stable bubble universe until it’s destroyed in a violent burst of high energy particles capable of shorting out a ship’s system.

Venting of flux then acts as “closing of the loophole” caused by shield’s violation of the second law, entropy is not decreased when shield swallows some matter, rather it’s only stored in bubble universes until a later time when it is safe to release it back into our universe.

Phase generators can then be logically linked to the progression of this technology – by refining the generation of false vacuum, at the end of its days Domain was able to create a machine that could tunnel macroscopic objects (ie: a whole ship) intact into a false vacuum bubble. P-space must be one of the countless possible configurations of universes possible. The laws of physics in P-space must be different so that the analogy of “matter” in that universe does not interact with each other via the electromagnetic force (and possibly strong/weak forces too). So in effect all matter in P-space are similar to the ghostly dark matter that exist in our universe.

The progression of this technology also offers a hint at the cause of the Collapse. Domain wanted to reverse entropy, not just speed it up or slow it down. In their bid to do this they may have discovered something truly horrible beyond comprehension – that the universe we know is not a “true vacuum” at all but another false vacuum. A long lived false vacuum sure but metastable nevertheless and not the ground state of the universe. In trying to reverse entropy Domain may have tunnelled through the potential wall between our universe and a “truer vacuum”. Once generated this bubble of universe that is more stable than ours will immediately expand in all direction at the speed of light, fuelled by the fabric of the universe itself. Thus the closing of gates may be a safety measure aimed to protect the Colonies from the approaching true vacuum, at least for a time.

9
You have to be careful when testing because fighting with no shield requires a unique fighting style. The trick is to position your ship so that damage is evenly spread out on the front and the two flanks. Taking everything on the nose will get you shield holed and then sunk very quickly.

Paragon is actually one of the most difficult ship to fight against with shield down because the lances do EMP damage which kill your weapons without needing to punch through your armour first.

10
Actually it's not irrelevant if you put 2 ships against 1... there is no way that you can maneuver in a way that both can't vent safely
If you have 2 ships vs 1 you're already winning, but that has nothing to do with shield usage and is not what's being discusses here.

 

it's kinda like putting a lasher against a tempest...
See, i agree speed is a part of a ship's defence, but how is that relevant to a discussion on shields? We're not comparaing slow vs fast ships, we'rd comparaing shield up vs down. If two Paragons meet, one with shield up and one with it down who will win. That's what we're discussing.

11
Maneuver is irrelevant to this discussion though. You can't assume you can get away with impunity to vent, you have to assume the ship winning the flux race will actively maneuver to prevent you from venting while taking no damage. Yes a human is better than an AI to judge how and when to maneuver, both offensively and defensively but that has nothing to do with the ships themselves. Even the AI understands that it needs to chase you if you back away and it will fire all his strike weapons at you if he catches you venting.

12
All but the smallest opponents have enough HE weaponry to make pretty short work of armor - there are a few ships that I fly armor primary, but not many.

Nah, not Onslaught and Dominator. These two are pretty much designed to fight with their shield down. For one, they shields suck and they have low base flux, so with shields up you're seriously cutting your fire power. Two these two ships can hold outrageous amount of PD (For my Dominator I use 2 dual flak and 11 light machineguns, for Onslaught I use 7 single flaks) and have some serious armour. In fact two Onslaughts trading HAG fire takes ages to bring down each other's forward flank armour, and since Onslaught have two of those nose horns you can just do a roll and change it to take fire on the undamaged half once you lose one. On top of this Onslaught's broadside is powerful enough that when fighting cruisers you can just not use the hard point guns and fire only on broadside and turreted missile, thereby taking hits on the broadside armour and save your nose armour for front on battleship slugging matches.


13
Enforcer - 3 flak cannons (two on either flank, one center), 2 heavy machineguns, 4 swarmer SRM.
You may want to swap out some swarmers for Harpoons if you want ship killing power.

14
Suggestions / Re: Hardpoint only hullmod/weapons
« on: March 27, 2012, 12:39:45 AM »
From what I hear this will be implemented, but it will be fixed weapons for specific hulls that can't be removed.

For example the Omen. That sphere is supposedly a scalar weapon that when fired knocks out all enemy missiles and bombs in a wide area around it. Hence why Omen is a point defense frigate.

15
General Discussion / Re: Conquest Outfitting
« on: March 26, 2012, 04:35:04 AM »
MIRV launchers are 10 salvos each, 17 with extra missile ammo. That's a lot of missiles, I hardly run out even with 10 pairs.

The thing is I feel HE damage is all about burst. Onslaught aside, most of the time you spend fighting another ship you spend it on lowering its shield again and again and in those brief moments when the shield is down you want to do as much HE as possible to the armour. Hence I feel guns which are more about sustained damage is less suited for this role compared to missiles which are all about huge burst damage.

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