Weapons, engines and mods, Oh my!

[PvK]

Originally posted by Andres:

IMHO Proportions overcompensates this lack of roles for small ships forcing the player to use small ships to make his as massive as possible combat fleets.

Seems to me Proportions just makes small ships a valid choice, but doesn't force players to use them. What am I missing?

PvK

[Andrés]

I just don't like arbitrary unrealistic rules that make large ships a poor choice only to make smaller ships more used.

As I had tried to explain smaller ships are not used because there is no role for them in late game, and that cannot be changed without chaging the whole game structure.

[PvK]

What's arbitrary or unrealistic about Proportions' settings for ship sizes?

I still don't see why you wouldn't use large ships in Proportions - I know I do when I play.

PvK

[Taera]

i think hes saying the other thing, that smaller ships are useless

[oleg]

I think there is some misunderstanding here about small and big ships in Proportions/AIC mods. PvK simply made smaller ships harder to hit than bigger ships - perfectly sensible idea ! Also, Proportions uses QNP, hence smaller ships can run faster and use less supplies. Otherwise, large ships are still better than smaller ships. It is just there are some roles that smaller ships would perform better even in late game !

[Fyron]

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

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

Here is an example:

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

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

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

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

[PvK]

I'd like to hear what Andres meant.

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

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

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

PvK

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

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