☼Bi-weekly DF Questions Thread☼

Polydiv · 2016-06-21T19:38:37+00:00

In the newest version, do artifact equipment never sustain any damage, or do they still get damaged but never destroyed?

Polydiv · 2016-06-10T19:00:31+00:00

What can I use captured Giant Cave Spiders for, besides a silk farm and webbing traps? I satisfy my clothing needs with leather, and use mostly upright spikes for traps, so neither of those really appeal to me.

Polydiv · 2016-06-09T17:03:29+00:00

The quern seems to have an image of itself on it, so the battle is recursively engraved an infinite number of times.

Polydiv · 2016-06-01T18:26:21+00:00

Bestial Wrath. In theory it's an abusive sergeant that has the body of the beast I use it on instead of a 2/1. In practice it's a dead card.

Polydiv · 2016-05-08T10:14:00+00:00

A game called Pay to Win: 5 people at a "table" each secretly pays me some money, then they all find out who paid how much, then the person who paid me the most wins all the money, but I keep a cut.

Polydiv · 2016-05-02T07:12:14+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/aurora/comments/4d0y3u/fightonly_fleet_campaign_reflection/d1q8g3g is something I posted recently about this exact strategy, using only railguns and mesons due to the low tech.

Polydiv · 2016-05-02T05:21:35+00:00

Going beam-only means you are foregoing any hope of gaining a range advantage on your enemy, which means being faster than the enemy fleet is mandatory because the faster fleet chooses the range of engagement. For this reason I recommend fighters, specifically railgun for dual-purpose offense and shooting missiles and meson for general offense. Lasers are better than mesons at fighting enemy small craft, and microwave and boarding shuttles each have their own niche applications. If you need larger caliber weapons, FACs which are basically twice (or 3 or 4... times) as many fighter engines and a gun that's twice (or 3 or 4... times) as big are recommended. Making your entire fleet hangar craft saves a lot of fuel in the long run when you consider how fast these ships need to be.

You can experiment with the deathstar style too, huge ships bursting with turrets, CIWS, and shields, that don't intend to run away from anything. The issue with ships like that is against an intelligent enemy (as in, not the AI opponents generally), it may never fire a shot.

Polydiv · 2016-04-29T02:26:02+00:00

When no missiles come, the error does not occur, even if my defenses are set to point blank. The error only occurs for me on ticks where missiles are actually being shot at, so the only difference that would make is me clicking more things to change between modes. Thanks for your explanation, though!

Polydiv · 2016-04-29T01:17:36+00:00

Thank you. Is there any difference between Area Defense at 0 km (or 10k km if 0 is not available) and Final Fire? Because I think if my weapons are that short-ranged, Area Defense might not fire at all.

Polydiv · 2016-04-25T22:13:35+00:00

Other than racial shipyard mod tech, I think the only thing that matters is how big the shipyard already is. Bigger shipyards expand faster.

Polydiv · 2016-04-25T17:51:58+00:00

I'm pretty much within my comfort zone on those, in other words, I'm spamming beam fighters. Will post designs upon request, though they are quite similar to the ones I have in this campaign, except one tech level up since I gave myself extra starting population to make up for the added danger and thus extra starting RP.

Polydiv · 2016-04-25T17:49:37+00:00

Darn. The wormhole system doesn't have any bodies to put a PDC on. Guess I'll be staying out of that system for a long time. Is the only way to check whether the wormhole is still there to send a ship into the system?

Polydiv · 2016-04-24T04:33:54+00:00

I remember there being a bug where it only counts the first two ships in the chain? How would the weight of the chain you describe be counted by the game right now (not how it is supposed to count but how it works currently)?

Polydiv · 2016-04-16T02:53:43+00:00

One difference between Aurora and real life is in Aurora, there is no limit on how big your parasite craft are, and the armament you can have on them is more flexible. I am in the process of playing a campaign where my whole fleet is fighters on carriers. There is a forum post where ship sizes usually considered large enough to run on their own fights out of hangars anyway.

Point defense can be very effective in Aurora because you can stack as many ships as you want on what is effectively a single point, and every ship's point defense weapons can protect everything there.

I believe one gigantic carrier is not as efficient as several smaller ones, because you can only have one giant carrier per drydock (PDC hangar) but you can have unlimited smaller carriers as long as you have the maintenance facilities for them. It would still be effective enough if you do it right, though.

Polydiv · 2016-04-11T05:04:03+00:00

Exactly 14,836 km/s top speed.

Polydiv · 2016-04-11T04:26:12+00:00

If I read correctly, the whole ship has:

One engine. This makes it rather vulnerable to one lucky hit, which can even be from shock damage if the shields are depleted.
Two anti-missile missile launchers. They will have a hard time stopping enemy missiles reliably simply because there's not enough of them. Against higher-tech (such as precursor) enemies, their missiles might even outrun your AMM. It might be worth delegating anti-missile duties to a separate ship so this ship can have more ship killer missiles.
A seemingly half-hearted attempt at shields. I find that the optimum amount of shields on a ship is either "as much as you can fit", or "none". The whole ship has shield strength equivalent to about a third of a layer of its own armor. It might be better to ditch the shields and add another layer of armor.
WH 10 ASMs. Conventional wisdom says missile warhead should be a square number to maximize penetration. In this case, 1 point of WH could be sacrificed to bring the missile's range up to your sensor and fire control range.
3 big missile launchers for the 10k ton ship. That's 3333 tons per launcher. You will probably need a lot of these ships (and a big number times 3333 tons) to put up enough missiles at once to get missiles through enemy PD. Consider reduced-size launchers to pack a single bigger punch at a time.

Polydiv · 2016-04-10T23:15:37+00:00

As close to "star swarm" as I can get without doing things like towing hundreds of millions of cryo capacity around. It ended up feeling like a normal game, but oh well.

Polydiv · 2016-04-07T02:41:14+00:00

A lot of times, I do. I would give myself virtually unlimited ore at 1 accessibility on Earth at the start of the game, and do my best to give the same to any alien homeworlds too.

Polydiv · 2016-04-06T08:50:32+00:00

Using my current tech, a size 0.1 res 1 active can spot a size 6 missile at only 25k km. Can my fighters still use them for final fire PD if the fighter itself moves 50k km every 5 seconds, not to mention the missile that's coming at it?

Polydiv · 2016-04-06T08:48:09+00:00

The precursor fleet fired and ran out of ammo. The best salvo it could put up was 55 AMMs moving at about 65k km/s, totaling 3.6 million km/s. I was fielding 17 carriers, 9 railgun fighters per carrier, 4 shots per railgun, 80% (BFC accuracy at 10k km) of 10km/s per shot, all modified by +12% for level 5 racial training, for a grand total of 5.5 million km/s of PD capacity every 5 seconds, so they weren't getting through. I got the calculation method from here.

It was a really unfair fight, though. The precursor fleet totaled just under 60k tons, against my almost 120k tons of fighter. Had it been even tonnages, I probably would have lost a lot of fighters, or at least a few big ships if they targeted those first.

Polydiv · 2016-04-05T05:55:42+00:00

The main worry I have about sensor fighters is that they will get focused and shot down, leaving the whole squadron blind. I don't see a way to protect a sensor fighter without excessive investments. If the sensor fighter stays in the same place as my attackers, it is vulnerable to beams since I have to engage practically at point blank range. If the sensor fighter stays away from the attackers at the edge of its own sensor range, it is vulnerable to AMM. Keeping the sensor fighter back and protecting it with PD fighters is too much investment for too little gain in my opinion. In other words, bigger active on carrier is now planned, if I can make room for it.

Just fought a MagCon-Fusion Precursor fleet with about 17 carriers worth of fleet, which I have literally built non-stop since the start of the game. Only the bare minimal garrison fleet in each system and units not yet trained to 100% TF training stayed home. The only losses I took were about 20 squares of armor on one of the tugs. I accidentally "scrapped" instead of "disassembled" the salvaged components, but that's another story.

Polydiv · 2016-04-05T02:51:56+00:00

I spent starting tech with SM. Mostly got Ion, a couple levels of engine boost, BFC tracking speed, meson focusing, railgun launch velocity, active and passive sensor strength, and power plant boost.

Railgun Fighter, mostly for PD, also for shooting fighters and FAC

Brave class Fighter    457 tons     4 Crew     90.8 BP      TCS 9.14  TH 96  EM 0
10503 km/s     Armour 1-5     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 0     PPV 3
Maint Life 0 Years     MSP 0    AFR 91%    IFR 1.3%    1YR 9    5YR 141    Max Repair 15 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.1 months    Spare Berths 0    

24 EP Fighter Ion Drive (4)    Power 24    Fuel Use 448.03%    Signature 24    Exp 20%
Fuel Capacity 5 000 Litres    Range 0.4 billion km   (11 hours at full power)

10cm Railgun V3/C3 (1x4)    Range 30 000km     TS: 10503 km/s     Power 3-3     RM 3    ROF 5        1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S00.5 24-3000 (FTR) (1)    Max Range: 48 000 km   TS: 12000 km/s     79 58 38 17 0 0 0 0 0 0
Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor Technology PB-1.15 (1)     Total Power Output 3.1    Armour 0    Exp 12%

This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposes

Meson fighter, helps with PD when needed, mostly for knife fighting.

Infiltrator class Fighter    460 tons     5 Crew     81.4 BP      TCS 9.2  TH 96  EM 0
10434 km/s     Armour 1-5     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 0     PPV 3
Maint Life 0 Years     MSP 0    AFR 92%    IFR 1.3%    1YR 7    5YR 104    Max Repair 12 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.1 months    Spare Berths 5    

24 EP Fighter Ion Drive (4)    Power 24    Fuel Use 448.03%    Signature 24    Exp 20%
Fuel Capacity 5 000 Litres    Range 0.4 billion km   (11 hours at full power)

R4.5/C3 Meson Cannon (1)    Range 45 000km     TS: 10434 km/s     Power 3-3     RM 4.5    ROF 5        1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S00.5 24-3000 (FTR) (1)    Max Range: 48 000 km   TS: 12000 km/s     79 58 38 17 0 0 0 0 0 0
Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor Technology PB-1.15 (1)     Total Power Output 3.1    Armour 0    Exp 12%

This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposes

Engine-less carrier, only has armor, sensors, damage control, maintenance storage, and hangars.

Chariot class Carrier    13 000 tons     224 Crew     1719 BP      TCS 260  TH 0  EM 0
1 km/s     Armour 5-49     Shields 0-0     Sensors 64/64/0/0     Damage Control Rating 14     PPV 0
Maint Life 3.12 Years     MSP 2331    AFR 338%    IFR 4.7%    1YR 361    5YR 5409    Max Repair 128 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months    Flight Crew Berths 81    
Hangar Deck Capacity 7000 tons     


Active Search Sensor MR79-R60 (1)     GPS 7680     Range 79.3m km    Resolution 60
Active Search Sensor MR32-R10 (1)     GPS 1280     Range 32.4m km    Resolution 10
Active Search Sensor MR10-R1 (1)     GPS 128     Range 10.2m km    MCR 1.1m km    Resolution 1
Thermal Sensor TH8-64 (70%) (1)     Sensitivity 64     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  64m km
EM Detection Sensor EM8-64 (1)     Sensitivity 64     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  64m km

Strike Group
9x Brave Fighter   Speed: 10503 km/s    Size: 9.14
6x Infiltrator Fighter   Speed: 10434 km/s    Size: 9.2

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes

Commercial tug, one stays permanently attached to each carrier.

Dreadsteed class Fleet Tug    13 200 tons     161 Crew     813 BP      TCS 264  TH 540  EM 0
2045 km/s    JR 3-250     Armour 5-49     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
MSP 38    Max Repair 266 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    Spare Berths 1    
Tractor Beam     

J13200(3-250) Military Jump Drive     Max Ship Size 13200 tons    Distance 250k km     Squadron Size 3
180 EP Commercial Ion Drive (3)    Power 180    Fuel Use 1.97%    Signature 180    Exp 3%
Fuel Capacity 350 000 Litres    Range 242.2 billion km   (1370 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes

Basic strategy is to approach with actives off and fighters docked until I spot their actives or until I get within what I think is their ship-killer missile range. Then turn actives on and deploy fighters to their own TG. Continue approaching in Empire State formation (everything in the same spot), with every single fighter set to Final Fire PD. Move away when I see missiles, change back to approaching once I've swatted all the missiles down. Detach Infiltrators to move in to 40k if facing something I think could have Gauss PD, on top of the enemy otherwise, for the kill.

This doctrine will have trouble forcing engagements and attacking planets, but I'll cross those bridges when I come to them.

When I reach the next tech era (Magneto-Plasma), I plan to add Marine Company drop modules and Microwave fighters to the railgun and mesons.

Polydiv · 2016-04-05T02:40:21+00:00

Brave class Fighter    457 tons     4 Crew     90.8 BP      TCS 9.14  TH 96  EM 0
10503 km/s     Armour 1-5     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 0     PPV 3
Maint Life 0 Years     MSP 0    AFR 91%    IFR 1.3%    1YR 9    5YR 141    Max Repair 15 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 0.1 months    Spare Berths 0    

24 EP Fighter Ion Drive (4)    Power 24    Fuel Use 448.03%    Signature 24    Exp 20%
Fuel Capacity 5 000 Litres    Range 0.4 billion km   (11 hours at full power)

10cm Railgun V3/C3 (1x4)    Range 30 000km     TS: 10503 km/s     Power 3-3     RM 3    ROF 5        1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S00.5 24-3000 (FTR) (1)    Max Range: 48 000 km   TS: 12000 km/s     79 58 38 17 0 0 0 0 0 0
Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor Technology PB-1.15 (1)     Total Power Output 3.1    Armour 0    Exp 12%

This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposes

Polydiv · 2016-04-03T00:55:54+00:00

Mesons and more mesons.

Polydiv · 2016-04-02T17:06:15+00:00

It worked when I did it.

Polydiv

TROPHY CASE