>We waste 6 month researching shields instead of translating the archive of all knowledge of the race from whom we got dimensional travel and other cool shit.
>Enemies arrive to root us out.
>We must fight them or lose opportunity forever to acquire priceless knowledge.

I MOTHERFUCKING TOLD YOU SO!
Goddammit, I warned about this, other warned about this... But no, who the fuck cares if this is our one and ONLY chance to loot the mother fucking archive of all the knowledge of super advanced race. Who cares if they could find us at any minute... No we want to waste our fucking time on useless shit.

Well I hope you guys are happy.

Hey, what are our infantry using for armor, other than ceramics? Is it still Kevlar? if not (or if it still is) how much stronger is it?

>>357259
yes, because we now have weapons that can break their shields and have shields of our own.

The shields don't completely protect us. They only lessen the damage. Also, I'm just curious.

>>357267
by a moderate amount. so turns heavy damage into normal damage, normal into light, and light into negligible. if we encounter only medium size vessels we can outfight them easy as our ships will not take much damage.and if we wipe out the fleet then we gain the most valuable resource, time. the longer we can stay at one spot the better.

Wasn't talking about ships, but okay...

>>357266
1. We had those weapons before you.
2. The shields were gonna be done either way, if we did archive first then the shields would be done 4 months from now.
3. While it is true I misunderstood and thought they are coming at the archive (which would have been ruinous). We now must now fight prematurely and WIN... because if we escape or lose (and then escape) we would (in either case) disrupt our research progress and must remain there longer, which potentially exposes us to losing it before we decipher it.

Either way it is a critical danger we could have avoided by doing archive followed by shields.

However, we can still make it.

>>357270
We would've avoided jack shit by doing the archive first. We JUST built that colony, do you really think the citizenry would react well to uprooting already?

That's the main reason I want to try to fight. Not because we have to, but because I want to avoid a huge public outcry. Also because I think we have a chance of winning with recoverable losses.

>>357271
indeed, a victory against a breaker fleet is just the thing we need to boost moral.

Not only that, but we could scavenge some scraps from the remains. Even if it is mostly unusable by us, we could possibly use remnants from their shields to upgrade our own or find more effective means to pierce theirs. Heck, if we are very lucky, we may even find their black boxes if they have them.

>>357274
yeah, a single intact shield generator would go a LONG way for science. a central computer would also be great, let us figure out their protocols and be able to engage in electronic warfare.

>>357233
Er, I'm sorry for nagging but I'm going to request more clarifications on the shields. Because to me it seems that there are... inconsistencies.

First of all, a collection of canon descriptions of the shields:
>reducing sudden forces and energies that pass through it by a moderate amount
Whatever this "moderate amount" is is subject to debate. More on this point further.
>equally effective against kinetic and energy weapons
Looks like some kinetic energy sapping effect.
>cannot be deactivated by firepower
This means that the shield effects all simultaneous incoming attacks equally.
>Infantry shields make small arms much less deadly but do little against heavier munitions, while naval shields can significantly weaken powerful shots from enemy ships.
This means that the shields act not like "multiply attack force by the disruption coefficient" but "subtract a certain amount of potency from the attack".

Now, returning to the first quote. Note the word "sudden". It implies that a gradual buildup of the attacking force will bypass the effects of the shield. That means that, while a bullet or a railgun shell will be subject to the effects of the shield, a laser that gradually increases its potency from "red dot on the wall" to "burn right through said wall and whatever it hides" might go unimpeded.

Now remember the communications. When you said that comms are not effected, did you mean radio? Because if "energy attacks" get affected then "lasers" are too (as a subclass of said energy attacks), and that in turn means that tight-beam communications carriers (laser- or infrared-based) might be affected.

Is all of this correct?

Next, on to inertia compensation issue. What I actually meant was not inertia compensation per se, but providing cushioning for loose objects in a suddenly accelerating vehicle.
Quoting you:
> [shields] do not help much at all when trying to reduce a collision with a massive body.
This is subject to relativity. The shields help quite a lot when trying to reduce a collision of a bullet with a (relatively) massive soldier. I was thinking that maybe we can implement such "interceptors"/"cushions" to help with, including but not limited to:
- Amortization of cargo and/or passengers and/or drivers.
- "Ballistic" transport systems: shoot the crate/cabin/landing pod from one side, catch it on the other side. Experimentation (read: your sanction) needed to determine if the shield on a lighter moving object (landing pod) significantly/noticeably affect collision with a more massive stationary object (planet).
- An extension of the previous is such a "cushion" helping with fighters landing on a carrier. If we can help with braking at the end of the way, we could shave some seconds off by reducing the need to brake along that same way (when approaching the carrier).

But wait, there's more!

Looking at your designs, the shield effect volume is actually a thin "sphere" around the shield generator.

(This is actually quite strange when coupled with your assertions that the shields 1) can't be extended farther from the hull and 2) can't be oriented. On one hand, such proximity requirement implies emitters being situated all over this hull, as otherwise (in the case of a single central generator) the shield radius is only determined by said generator's hardware parameters and/or power, both of which can be altered to increase the radius, contradicting (1). On the other hand, if these are indeed emitters, each individual one is responsible for only a little patch of the whole shield sphere, and that means inherent orientation, contradicting (2). Does not compute.)

Now, suppose a long solid object (say, a long missile) is entering into a hole on a big shielded object (say, a hole previously blown into the side of a ship). Suppose also that its entering velocity is such that the time in which the object intersects the shield effect volume (SEV) is non-negligible (say, a second or two).
Q1: Is the object affected by the shield for the duration of the whole time period when it intersects with the SEV?

Q2, which I should have asked sooner: How thick is SEV?

Q3: Am I right in assuming that this shield does not break physics and affects only the matter that is directly within the SEV?

Now, another thought experiment. Suppose we are throwing a small object into a strong shield with a very small initial velocity.
Q4: Is there a threshold for kinetic energy of the entering material below which the shield does not affect the object? And, generalizing this,
Q5: What is the (at least approximate) dependency of shield effect from entering matter's kinetic energy?

... Actually, now that I've written this wall of text, I'll understand if you just say "stop trying to apply your already defective physics knowledge to a sci-fi future tech and just have fun already dammit!". However, I feel that this discussion will help all of us understand and invent more uses for these shiny new exciting technologies.

>>357282
dot laser power up may bypass it, but are you really going to stay still and let that happen?

>>357283
If the target is big enough (like a tank), it isn't too hard to just keep that target in sights for a bit, even while both of you are maneuvering. Modern tanks can do that already.

>>357284
i mean, what's stopping us from shooting them before the laser gets strong enough?

>>357285
Their shields. The fact that there might be many of them and only few of us. It all depends on the circumstances.

>>357286
if there are enough that we can't focus fire on the ones doing the laser show it wont matter because there are enough to destroy us anyway.

>>357239
Upgrading the Interplanetary Railgun to warpslug tech will take 45 SC, 75 BP and 5 RP. The cannon will no longer consume SC to fire, will be more powerful and can attack enemy ships in the planetary system.

>>357263
Most infantry armor consists of ceramic plates over a tough synthetic fabric. This makes them resistant to small arms fire, tearing and environmental hazards.

>>357282
I understand your inquisitiveness and your questions have given me a lot to ponder about.

Hopefully this attempt at implementing the shields will suffice for you.

Ignore the designs, the bubble extends only slightly around the hull. The shield settles on the mass around it, which is why you don't need to cover the hull with emitters (also it means ground units don't get shielding on the parts that come in contact with the ground)

The shield itself is pretty soft on the sci-fi scale. When a sudden impulse hits the shield, the energy (mechanical or electromagnetic) is distributed across the particles in the shield, which then disperse into harmless radiation. The particles are 'refreshed' rapidly by the emitters. The shield doesn't help much against impact with larger bodies in the same way metal armor won't help much against falling off a bridge. The shield doesn't slow you down at all, and you cant really use the shield to disperse a massive body you collide with.

The reason slower/less energetic things can go through easily is because of the way its calibrated. It's designed to let low level energy like visible light, dust particles, or various methods of communication go through it.

You bring up a good point with the missiles, but as of now there are no missiles that go slowly enough not to activate the shield. The gradual laser, at a certain energy level, would activate the shield, but its continuous nature would cause it to overwhelm the 'refreshing' of the shield. Fortunately, all energy weapons we have seen are pulse-based.

Long story short: The shields conveniently (or unconventionally) tend to only react to things like weapons fire.

If there is something I missed or misunderstood, please let me know and I'll try my best to satisfy your questions with an explanation.

>>357336
Tough luck, sorry :p
>The shield settles on the mass around it, which is why you don't need to cover the hull with emitters (also it means ground units don't get shielding on the parts that come in contact with the ground)
This is kinda unclear. How does the shield generator determine where the shielded object ends and the planet starts? Because short of hovering vehicles, everything else is ultimately in contact with the ground.

Next, about missiles, am I to understand that if there's a hole in an otherwise solid hull, the shield won't cover this hole but will instead cover the insides of this hole? Or, in layman terms, no soap film thingy for us? Like, for example, hangars in Star Wars?

Also, what are the effects of the shields on living beings?

How does gravity work on ships? Is it done by rotation or do they have some form of artificial gravity that somehow has no other scientific applications?

>>357367
most likely it doesn't and spreads in a very small puddle around the shielded thing.

>>357370
If that's the case, our MBTs will be known throughout the universe as the Slime Tanks.

Yes, the warpslug doesn't have enough range to snipe them from half a turn away or anything.

>Also, from the Demise we have no idea about how the planet buster even looks like, which suggests that it's not that distinctive from other Breaker ships, which in turn suggests that all our moon-based defenses might be annihilated with one strike and we'll know about that only when the Moon Cannon shells start raining upon our planet-side base.
Um... hang on, don't get all paranoid now. We may not know what the planet buster ship looks like, but you can bet it'll be recognizable since it'll have a huge fuckoff gun on it.

Also there are probably other planets in the system with moons; we won't have to worry too much about attack angles. Besides, unless the planet is really close to the moon there's not a very large blind spot. They'd probably have to know ahead of time to use that angle of approach. Oh, and we'd definitely know if the moon's defenses get destroyed since we have instant communication devices and also sensors.

And yeah the ships we had during the Demise weren't any good against the Breakers. We have waaaaay better weapons now tho! Like, way way better. Also shields. Though we have to build them first.

>>357464
>don't get all paranoid now
You know, I think I really might be paranoid and/or panic-y. On the other hand, it's not really paranoia if someone's out there to get you. On the third hand, if it drives me to increase our development rate/mobility/otherwise improve, then why not?

Also, this link might be relevant.
http://qntm.org/destroy

You know, if position for the moon cannon is a problem, why not make a rail system for it? Have a set of tracks that run on the latitude and longitude of the moon so we can re-position the cannon for any direction. Heck, we could likely make a battleship and attach a moon cannon instead of a orbital bombardment array to use as a ship killer.

As for paranoia or being worried about this and that, we have honestly never fought in a capital ship fight like this. We have no idea how powerful OR weak our current armaments are and I consider that more of a problem. Right now the enemy is relatively small. 3 destroyer class ships with breaker tech. Now, we have seen breaker tech before. Mainly for ground units, but we have none the less. We can assume that breakers have the same style of weaponry on their ships as they do on their ground forces. In that regard, we have the better weapons. We do not know the true strength of their shields, but we can solve that with several pot shots.

As for the whole they will come back in bigger numbers? Yeah, that's a given. However, they are not fast compared to our ships and to mobilize an entire fleet of high class ships would not only take a lot of time, but the sheer girth of them will have us see them a mile away.

In short, it's not a feasible strategy for the Breakers right now. A feasible one is to HAVE us continue moving. We have a set limit on what we can take with us as stated before and if we continue to move, we can't build big ships that can take them down. The three ships we have right now will take many turns to finish. Many, MANY turns. We flee and we can't take them with us. Even a modular ship would have to be made piece by piece and it would still take time for each piece. Further more, if we ever run into a Totus aligned planet, then we may be boned.

Running in a dire situation is OK, but we need to build up our army and fleet if we want to last in the long term. That means we need to bunker down, build stuff, train our workers, military and professionals, and build alliances with other alien races so they don't ally with Totus. If we don't try, we won't win.

>>357471
>rail system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwerer_Gustav
That'd be cool.

Also yeah, can we design a ship that is one giant cannon with (some smaller ones for point defense and) engines? Sheer kinetic energy of a shot from such a thing could probably rip a breaker ship a new one.

Or an orbital weapons platform/battlestation.

Also, suppose you're a Breaker fleet slowly chugging through the warp towards the unholy Splinter planet, when suddenly a blip appears on your scanners, indicating a ship (or a fleet; is that discernible?) approaching you and de-warping a short distance before you. Would you de-warp too to destroy this ship/fleet?
Counter-question: how much armor and explosives do we have to stuff into such a ship for it to be able to suicide-bomb a Breaker fleet stupid enough to de-warp? Are there any ways to forcibly de-warp them, or just explode with enough force to affect those in the warp?

>>357367
The shield slightly extends to the area around the treads/boots/whatever of the shielded unit, but the material we use as armor is a better "conductor" of the shield than the ground, so it doesn't extend far.

There is no "soap-bubble" effect with the shields.

The shield does not interfere with living beings at all.

>>357369
Living and command quarters of the ship rotate.

>>357464
>>357471
Just to clarify, the Interplanetary gun can easily bombard other planets in the system, but the speed at which starships move makes it much more difficult to hit ships that are not at least in the same planetary system as it is in, even considering the extremely high-velocity Warpslug rounds. Still, it will garner plenty of free hits before the enemy ships get in range, and can make life somewhat more uncomfortable for enemy ships orbiting around a different planet.

There is no need to worry about placement of the Moon Cannon if you just want to defend a base and the fleet above it: place it in the city you want to defend. This wont stop hostile fleets from dropping troops on the other side of the world, however.

>>357487
Give some specifics for an orbital defense platform and I'll throw you an RP estimate.

Ships are indiscernible to fleets when not in roughly the same point on the map. The composition of a fleet becomes known when inside the same star system or in combat range.

Anything capable of FTL can force other ships out of FTL to engage it in combat. In star systems, this is a bit longer than maximum effective range of our guns, which generally extends a little beyond than a planetary system's radius. Ships can also intercept each other in deep space.

Ships actually in FTL transit cannot be targeted or damaged by any means.



To answer Juroko's request for a Diplomat-mine in the main thread, the cost would be 7 RP to research. The mine would automatically attack any ships within combat range, but as it lacks an FTL drive it cannot attack ships in FTL transit.

>>357492
>Anything capable of FTL can force other ships out of FTL
Can this effect be targeted, and if so, how precisely? I'm thinking of seeding the star system (its outskirts) with sensors/de-warpers (maybe accompanied with automated weapons platforms, like the diplomat mines) in order to automatically give our Moon Cannons a head start on shelling the enemy, but I'm worried that this might interfere with our own ships.

>>357492

what if we gave it an FTL drive?

Hmmmm... in terms of what we talked about, why not make a 'fake' ship? A decoy of sorts? Have it appear as a smaller ship on the radar but make it nothing more than what is needed to fool it. We could set up a few mines near the decoy as well. If it works, the enemy may spend some time searching for other ships in the area and buy us some time if not have them search a different area in hopes they found us.

If we do make this decoy though, I say we name it the S.S. Troll Face.

>>357506
Yeah, that was about my general idea. Although if it proves effective, the "Trollface" will have to be its class name, like Test Patterns and the like.

As an aside, are the galt a manufactured race or another naturally occurring one like the humans?

Considering the obvious social and behavioral similarities, it's entirely possible that they will get genocided as well.

The Galt are natural and very likely skirting the edge of Breakers popping up to ruin their shit. However, they have been bros to us and we may want to help them construct a means to protect themselves and escape.

Right now, they have a thriving industry. We could possibly trade raw goods and luxury items for labor. Maybe make more ships?

>>357560
Their labor force would only be able to supplant the need for workers and maybe some materials, while we'll have to provide professionals. And that's a scarce resource for us. Although the negotiations on this should definitely be started.

On a totally unrelated note, the recent discussion gave me an idea: we should totally steal the Necrons' Great Warding.
(For those not familiar with WH40K, The Great Warding is a set of installations built by Necrons that prevent all access to the Warp in a radius. There are many such installations, so the total exclusion volume is measured in light years. Necrons themselves have an alternative fast transport system that doesn't rely on the Warp, unlike everybody else in that setting.)
The relevant tech should be somewhere down the Warp Tech subtree, research of which would (in more immediate future) give us the speed to catch up with those stealth transports. And probably some teleport tech is in there too.

Although that's such a megaproject that we should at least finish those getting-professionals-fast techs (tac implants and memory mods).

Yeah, this is another iteration of "what to research after the archive" discussion. IIRC we've pretty much agreed that next should be tac implants (upgrade for troops + no risk of death on implanting), followed by memory mods (fast profs). Then a quick skim of the thread gives two suggestions:
1) comp systems V, then whatever comes from that and memory mods (I'll hazard a guess that it'll be true AI);
2) warp 3;
3) custom projects from posters, like that Juroko mine, or the Trollface decoy, or something else.

The CS-5 might give us something for those automated DIPLOMAT caps for indicating that it's a missile, not a profession stations we've discussed. Warp 3 is likely to get us another speed upgrade, and might open paths to what I've described above.

Which do we want more?

>>357562
except we use the EXACT SAME method of FTL just have better speed with it.

and we need to wait until archive is done before deciding what next because it is linked into a lot of new research options.

>>357563
Well duh. Obviously we'd need another FTL method before we do that, just like the ones we're ripping off.

>>357565
what?

>>357567
We will obviously need another way to go FTL before we begin construction of permanent anti-warp wards. So that our own ships are not affected. Because that would be counter-productive.

>>357568
well, see, the reason the necrons could use the other method is they were ROBOTS. they don't need inertia compensation. a living thing on a necron ship would of been turned to paste from the G-forces involved.

>>357569
Who says we can't have inertia compensators? (Or a fast cloning system + consciousness uploads.)
Also, portals. (Maybe that's what that tech that needs Warp3 and Archive is about...)
And, finally, this doesn't have to be exactly the same method as used by necrons; this is not WH40K, after all. This universe can, with the blessing of Ed, have an alternative FTL drive.

>>357571
i'm saying you are getting presumptuous and making super detailed plans for something that may not even exist.

Honestly, we should try and have the 'fast' techs done first. The ones with low tens or single digit RPs. They are mostly defensive/delay objects that can aid us in dealing with future foes.

After that, memory mods and tactical implants, followed by the other stuff.

HOWEVER, we should also wait to see what the archive unlocks first. For all we know, it may offer us a few good items.

>>357572
Yeah, you're right. However, the side-effect is that I'm giving ideas to the OP.

>>357578
except he already has most of this planned out before.

Question time!
Do the Juroko mines have sensors?
If yes, what's their range?
If it's smaller than ships', can we haz Automated Remote Surveillance and Interception Vessels (proposed codename Beholder, open for discussion) that have several missiles and sensor arrays and are remote-controlled from HQ via insta-com? Please give us estimates for RP and BP costs both with FTL engines included and excluded.

Hey Ed, what would be the RP cost for a Juroko-like structure that uses a Warpslug cannon instead of Diplomats?

>>359958
that is a order of magnitude above a juroko. would be defense platform.

Can't we use modern astronomic methods to get at least approximate maps of far-away stars? Build (radio)telescopes, including orbital ones...

>The End
Our airship isn't docked at the tower we're currently in, is it?

Speaking of modular designs, can we build a ship in separate sections then join them together, like this : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship

Presumably, such technique is already in use, emulated by using ground BP to assist orbital BP, but can we expand on it using recently developed technology?

>>63544
Earlier in some part of the discussion threads or something I think Ed said we could build carriers/battleships from the engine forward so that we could partially complete them and still have them able to fly, with like a small bridge attachment, although not combat worthy.

If we really want to gain in efficiency we are pretty much limited to looking at stuff on the ground at this point. We could get a fair amount of benefit from researching massive versions of some of our most worker intensive building types, since they are like 20% more efficient to build and run than large buildings, and right now we can't afford to implant everyone with neural implants anyways, even if we had the infrastructure set up to do so. Costs like 12000 sc to get everyone implanted, or in a more conservative number about 1800 to implant all our nonworkers not currently in training. So even though we can have casualty free neural implants with memory mods in 6 turns or so, we might want to consider putting some research into Massive Derricks or Factories, maybe Massive Luxury Complex for housing, since we still need a lot of resources for implantation. And then we also need implantation points from hospitals to do the actual implanting, and currently we have...1 small medical outpost. So with medical districts, the large version of hospitals, we get 9 IP per turn which means 90 people can be implanted. We probably need Massive Medical Districts if we intend to ramp up implanting, in addition to the superconductors we need to build the things. I'm rambling but basically we need more resources to turn our nonworkers into productive members of society. We should reevaluate our research path after this next update comes up and we find out what we can learn from the Breaker ships.

We should probably have the Contemno head over to Conrix to be refitted with Warp 3 and then send it out to scout Incipient, since that's the only universe available to us we haven't been to that isn't either dangerously close to Totus' primary universe or completely exhausted of usable resources ('Home'). We know that the Breakers outnumber us in this universe given the information our new alien friends gave us. I want to help them but I don't think we can safely take on what, four capital ships? And a handful of destroyers and escorts. We need either a bigger tech advantage or a lot more ships.

MINOR AUTOMATION - You can reduce the amount of workers (not professionals) a building needs by up to 10%, at a cost of 2 SC and 10 METAL for 10 workers.

Is this tech actually being used or did we just research it forever ago and then forget we had it?

>>63617
I believe we used it a couple times then wound up with more Workers than we needed, and so it's not worth the SC anymore. Professionals are our bottleneck.

Mobile orbital factories are still 50 RP, right?

How fast massive OF will be?

So I just noticed the little bit of text from when we got Disruptive Shell describing how many shells ships actually require. I thought we needed like 16 shells to cover everything but actually we need like 60. That's a lot of shells! Shells for our buildings would cost even more than that, although if we researched massive buildings we could cut that number down a lot, potentially.

I'm thinking we might want to send the Galts a few hundred SC. We have a couple SC derricks coming online next turn so we could probably spare them some to get some actual spaceships online so they could actually start some SC mining operations of their own. I think that volcanic planet isn't that far from them? It has SC. We could make up what we sent them in a few turns and it could speed up their transition to a war footing by a LOT more than that. If we want ships to fight the Breakers guarding the colonial organism guys we should probably do SOMETHING to speed up the rate at which the Galts can help us build ships. Given how effective our weapons were, it looks like we wouldn't even need that many more ships to have really good odds against the Breaker guard fleets, if they had Shells. Also we can have them build Diplomats for us. Those are really effective and we are going to need a lot of them.

these we only small ships, we have no idea how their shield tech scales. it could be exponential for all we know, and a breaker battleship is thousands of times tougher then a frigate. if we are lucky it's linearm but it would still need a significantly larger amount of firepower to punch through. at the moment the only thing i have a reasonable hope of punching through a the shields of the battlehship is a moon cannon. if we could make an even bigger gun, and mount it to our own battlehship, THEN i will let us fight a larger fleet and not be scared as hell.


also, the battleship would be named the yamato.

>>64700
About the soonest we could get a new battleship is 4 years, and that's sort of optimistic since we probably don't want to start building a battleship on a planet they already found. We will know how their shield tech scales a lot earlier than that...given our current rate of research we will have another 3000 RP by the end of those four years. Somehow I doubt the breaker shields are a 2000 RP tech.

Also I didn't really mean attack now, I meant finish more shells, get more diplomats (we can swap out a warpslug cannon for a diplomat pod on any of our ships) probably get some more bombers for our Carrier to launch since each bomber can launch a single diplomat and a single diplomat can be very significant...but do we really want to wait 4+ years to help these guys? And if we are waiting that long, we definitely need to send the Galts some SC aid, because otherwise they are likely going to lose their homeworld. I really don't want to be responsible for that.

Also we have some options for making the battle go more in our favor. The stealth bombing ship that was proposed a while ago would be able to potentially cripple some Breaker ships before we actually engaged in a full scale battle, and from what we have seen it doesn't seem like the Breakers actually know how to repair their own tech...apparently they leave that sort of thing to a different species in their group...Makers? So any damage we do ahead of time could potentially stay around. We also have Jurokos and Decoy Ship tech, which could be used to set a trap for Breaker fleets, although we would need to actually build some of those.

I do really want a battleship with a really big gun though. Just like build the whole ship around one really big warpslug lance. Is that possible? Also larger ship classes than the battleship potentially would be much more durable because of the way Disruptive Shell scales. I wonder how big a ship would need to be to be immune to the Breaker ship to ship weapons we have encountered so far with Disruptive Shell.

>>64715
Oh boy, my ideas are getting revisited! Yay! Feels like years.

Well, the reason why I developed Juroko mines was as a means to protect key strategic spots. Either as a boost to military might, or as a basic defense for planets. We can very easily set up a 'asteroid belt' mine field around places we want to protect. Decoys can also serve as this. Just set mines up in them.

When it comes to our alien buddies, we should not wait TOO long. Enemies will keep coming and we need to make sure we are able to free them while they still take us lightly and before they use scorched earth tactics. Get the Galt protected, then try freeing one or two of the weakly guarded planets. Shore them up, and continue.

Also, NEVER skimp on making ships. They still have a numbers advantage so we need to keep up the assembly line. A lost ship in a small fleet is too big a lost and the time where they send everyone down on us may soon come. Anti-ship ships are important and I did pitch a few ideas like that before. I can likely find them again and tweak them a bit. I believe they were the Eden-Class Cruiser and the Yamato-Class Battlecruiser.

>>64699
I disagree about the Galts building Diplomats for us. That's currently our strongest technology and having it in the hands of anyone else is risky. Our Warpslug weaponry was comparable in effectiveness anyway, and they have that already.

Right then, since people will likely not remember(or look in the actual thread), here is the design for the Yamato-Class Battle Cruiser and Eden-Class Carrier. Also, because I am nice, have a new idea- the Overlord-Class Carrier

Features: The Yamato is a anti-space battle ship. Spacing the cannons out to deal with enemies from any angle and designing the cannons' mountings to focus more on piercing and penetration power, the Yamato would be designed to smack the ever loving crap out of enemy ships. To drive this home, the Yamato gives up it's orbital bombardment array for the ability to mount a Lunar Cannon Class Cannon (or as many as Ed will allow) on the bow of the ship. After all, why keep the big guns at home? The down side is the specialty piercing rounds would do little damage to ground forces and cause reduced splash. Not only that, but due to the position of the guns, not all of them can fire on the planet effectively. Still, in a battleship vs Yamato fight, the Yamato would have the upper hand... with a big stick in it.

Pros: 1.5x efficiency in space combat.
Better ship armor penetration.
Able to mount Lunar Cannon to ship for combat.

Cons: Can only use half the ship's guns for orbital bombardment.
Splash and area damage of the bombardment is reduced.
No nuclear bombardment array.
-------------------
Simply put, the Eden class would be like a small portable colony by using and modifying the carrier's base design meant for carrying large ammounts of goods and using said space as modular points for buildings. Better climate control, state of the art tech to make it a relatively nice place to live on, and maybe some built in apartments so the crew can live comfortably. I can see this sort of ship hold pretty decent sized buildings or a bit of every type. However, I can also see this thing guzzle gas like a old mini van which would mean any weaponry that uses energy by the buckets or uses alot of space for ammo would be a bad idea. Hell, probably would have a lot less guns too for additional space. It's no planet ship, but it would be better than stuffing a few labs on a couple of ships.

Pros: Designed for the crew to be pretty well cared for so it would likely have a moral boost. Possibly able to deal with larger groups of people without being over crowded.

Modular set up inside so that it can fit various buildings. Not sure how many but likely a good number of mediums or a Large or two.

Cons: Would need gas to move, gas to make power for the buildings, and gas to maintain the living standard. This is NOT a fuel friendly build.

Reduced space to put in more buildings. Got to give and take.

Weaponry would likely be cut back a bit and even then, the reduced space would mean weapons requiring lots of space would be rather unwise to equip.
------------
Overlord- Cruiser Class ship.

Where the Eden is a ship designed for comfort and production, the Overlord is the opposite. Use it's large holds to hold fighters, mobile weapon platforms, and tons of troops for your invasion/boarding needs. This is the sort of ship that does well with robotic... well, EVERYTHING. It's not designed for comfort, mundane storage, or even standard combat. It's a mobile deployment center and it's built for it. Hell, we could likely develope a sort of drop pod for Robotic units(or possibly very strong units) to be rapidly deployed onto the battle site. For the man who loves to rush!

Pros: More Hangers for fighters, mobile weapon platforms, and other such things.
+Designed for rapid release of fighters, and for boarding enemy ships.
+Drop pods for Robots and sturdy units to allow rapid deployment.

Cons: Little space for regular storage.
Not designed for comfort. Will likely annoy and lower moral in civvies.
Space for hangers and boarding zones will likely take up some weapon space.

>>64740
I have a bunch of ship and vehicle ideas but we are about to have access to a Breaker ship for the first time ever and I don't want to spend RP on something that might be obsolete in a few turns if we learn something important from the ship so I'm waiting for a tech tree update very impatiently. bluh

On another note, for some reason we have a TON of unemployed workers on the Archive planet, and I think at some point those guys were on Conrix but were moved over to Hothouse??? Does anyone know why that was done? Because if not they would probably be more useful on Conrix digging up metal/SC or manning another ground factory to produce diplomats/shells.

since plasma is the most effective against shields but not too good against armor.
Would it be possible to make a hybrid weapon that places a small shield breaching amount of plasma in the path of the warpslug slug? (either integrating it into the slug, or making an integrated cannon?)

>>64928
alread had that idea, and went one step further. this is obviously only for extra large shell used by the moon gun but. take a slug, hollow it out and put in magnetic stabilizers. in the core place as much anti-matter as you can. then wrap the whole slug in plasma, when fire the plasma sheath will burn a hole throw the shields for the warpslug to breach, it will then embed in the enemy hull, the pressure of impact will warp it's shape a little breaking the magnetic confinement of the anti-matter letting it free to contact normal matter causing a detonation. being embedded in the enemy ship it would cause massive damage.

>>64932
sounds awesome
... we have anti matter manufacturing and containment tech? since when?

we have anti-matter tech sitting on the tech tree. just need to get it.

>>64938
Not yet. Rudimentary antimatter fab is a 650 RP tech. Still quite a ways away. Probably pretty good, though. Warpslug was only 150 rp, and diplomats another 30.

how many RP for Gester wizards

do we have to catch elves first lets catch some elves

>>66200
Well, magic is apparently powered by Totus so I doubt we'll be able to do much with it unless we can figure out how to hack whatever mechanism he's using to send out the energy. If we do that and start using it in mass quantities, Totus might wind up shutting down all magic.

Which is okay if you ask me.

>>66202
That would be pretty funny, AND render all the Space Elves and Snarrens totally useless.

Man we should research some kind of chemical gas grenade. Also can we use plasma tech to produce some kind of satchel charge? Like an alternate option to the light vehicle rockets maybe?

>>66242
we have gas genades and stuff. we just didn't have any on the ships. cause they are in space.

next time they are back in port we should update their loadouts so they are standard. also large tanks to flood the whole ship with so if the breakers manage to board us instead we can just fill the ship.

>>66244
We don't have a light slot or heavy slot option for chemical weapons, and as for grenades I don't know if we have any that infantry can carry. Probably the Commandos have explosives, but those are spec ops guys and too valuable to risk in direct combat. I also am not sure how heavy a weapon our cyborgs can carry. Can max strength cyborgs carry medium weapons? What about light? Can power troopers carry light slot weapons?

>>66247
We DESPERATELY need some kind of light, automatic chemical weapon. Like, some kind of armorpiercing round that leaves traces of nervegas in wounds or something.

>>66248
We have an infantry slot gasser, but our heavier infantry can use light slot weapons, I think, and we don't have a light slot chemical weapon.

i mean , we HAVE gas grenade BLUEPRINTS but we haven't BUILT any yet. when we get the chance we need to build some.

Ed Pastry 2013/01/26(Sat)11:44 No. 66564 ID: bf45bb
File 135922948920.png - (3.59KB , 259x152 , SHC6.png )

I'd figure I'd clear things up about combat accuracy.

Nearly all infantry and the lightest vehicles only have 1 HP. Commandos/Nightmares, BRICs, MLRS, SPAAGs, Light Gunships have 2 HP. MBTs, APCs, Heavy Gunships have 3 HP. Dropships have 6 HP.

Most infantry and light vehicle weapons, and some medium vehicle weapons, do 1 damage. The rest do 2-3 damage.

The base chance for a unit to avoid weapons fire is %50. There are things that can greatly vary this chance, however.

Things that increase evasion chance:
-Elite soldiers have better evasion
-Having Armor and Shields higher than the Armor Penetration and Shield Penetration of the firing weapon. If the Armor and Shield is high enough, the accuracy can be reduced to less than 0 (e.g. using a basic assault rifle against a tank)
-Taking cover (I noticed I did a poor job of displaying cover in the last combat, I'll improve on this to make it clearer)
-The unit firing upon the target has been fired upon by more than one enemy last turn (i.e. suppressive fire)
-The unit firing upon the target is using Fire on the Move
-The unit firing upon the target is engaged in melee combat
-The unit being fired upon is stealthed or concealed
-The unit being fired upon is moving quickly
-The unit being fired upon is not taking any actions (it is assumed they are spending the time to take cover)

Things that decrease evasion chance:
-The unit firing upon the target is an elite of some kind
-Weapons with specific bonuses against certain targets reduces targets evasion (e.g. flamethrowers vs infantry, auto-targeting missiles vs fast enemies)
-The unit firing on the target is within 2 hexes (this bonus is overridden if it is engaged in melee combat)
-The unit being fired upon is caught off guard
-The unit being fired upon is really big.

Things that don't effect evasion chance:
-Having more Armor Pen. or Shield Pen. than the target has Armor and Shields doesn't further increase the accuracy. (e.g. a railgun shot doesn't have more accuracy than an assault rifle against a totally unarmored opponent)

For aerial combat, fixed wing craft move too fast to really put on the battlefield. Instead, if you bring them to a fight, they are on standby and can be called to perform an operation on the battlefield. You can bring a squadron of Interceptors to clear the skies, or make a bombing run on a certain part of the battlefield. They are not invincible, however. Each enemy AA unit on the battlefield has a chance to gun down operating aircraft. This chance increases if the target operates closer to the AA unit.

Gunships and Dropships are treated mostly the same as ground units.

>>66247
Standard Light Infantry can carry their primary Infantry weapon and one piece of equipment. The light anti-armor missile launcher is the default, but you can ask them to bring whatever you can think of. Grenades, another Infantry weapon, explosives. Whatever you want, let me know what you wish them to carry and I'll tell you what its good for. You won't need to worry about research or producing standard equipment like basic frag grenades, satchel charges or low-tech special guns like sniper rifles. If you want them to bring more exotic things like plasma-based explosives, you'll need to have them built and researched first, though as infantry equipment they'll be rather cheap.

Max strength implanted soldiers and Power Troopers can both carry at most a Light vehicle weapon (miniguns and light plasma cannons). They also can carry the same kit as Light Infantry if you want. If the infantry carry around a Light Vehicle weapon, they don't get to carry around any special equipment due to the large quantity of ammunition they must bring. (This also is makes Light Infantry still viable due to their flexibility in combat, despite their weaker armor and weapon)

>>66564
So Apex Troopers are really good, then, since they get an upgrade to the backup equipment they carry?

Also plasma-based explosives sound pretty good, since even if we later pick up the antimatter fab tech antimatter explosives would probably be really prone to high collateral damage. What sort of RP cost would we have for plasma based explosives?

>>66564
Well that explains why our gunships got shot down so much. They're about as durable as power troopers.

>>66588
same HP different armor.

>>66607
Not seeing anything about power troopers having 2 hp, just Commandos and Nightmares. So I think gunships actually have twice as much HP as power troopers? And also more armor.

>>66650
Oh, dur. You're right.

BRICs have 2 HP... Maybe we should use them more.

>>66663
BRICs seem pretty good with these rules, so yeah we should probably use them more. They are cheap and they have 4 medium weapon slots. Not sure if they can fit onto a boarding mission, though.

okay now that that is over and we havea good chance of galt construction assistance, what do we want them to build? if we can get a mobile ship-yard, then a fair chunk of a battleship done would be good. get built from the ground up with all our new techs. those thick shields and heat-shell armor would mean any attack below a certain threshold would just singe the paint. aka, it could handle just about any number of small ships, or medium ships with smaller guns. if the capture of this breaker ship provides any new info about how to negate the ship sized weapons it may even upgrade to medium attacks do jack squat against it.

>>66925
Well as of right now our real problem is getting ships into the field. Even WITHOUT the OBP penalty ships are made incredibly slowly.

We really need Massive Orbital Shipyards. Even being only 2x as fast would be a huge boon. I don't even care if they're less efficient professional/worker-wise for each OBP we get.

yes, said mobile yard so the galts can dump the mass of BP into it and get a lot of it done, then we ship it out to our planet and continue work there.

>>66936
We researched massive orbital factories, and we have one being built at the moment. It comes up in two turns. They are more efficient than large but when we built our large orbital factories we didn't have massive ones researched yet.

>>66942
Oh shit, I did not realize that. Oh, that's where our spare profs are going! Shit!

>>66925
Disruptive Shells are basically just SC and BP, so if we provide them with the SC we can just have them manufacture those for us WAY faster than we could make them ourselves. Infantry shells are kinda impractical for us to build for ourselves except maybe a few for our commandos, but if we just ship SC to the galts they could outfit basically our whole force with them. Naval shells I'd like to have enough to cover our current fleet, our ships currently under construction, and in addition like, enough for a battleship, maybe? We can also use naval shells to guard buildings from like orbital bombardment or whatever but that would require a LOT of shells. Especially if we don't use massive buildings exclusively.

>>67018
Something to keep in mind is that in order to ask them to build something, we have to share that tech with them.

I dunno if that's something to be worried about, but it's worth paying attention to at least.

>>67028
We should probably share Disruptive Shell, even if we don't intend to share future shield techs. I mean, they need SOME kind of shields, unless our goal is just to get them into a war with the Breakers and then ditch them, which seems both kinda scummy and also probably not the most practical decision. Breakers still outnumber the Galts, even if we give them superior tech.

While agree with making a battleship, we should definitely specialize it for Naval combat. As is, we are going to face more and more enemy ships and in the short term, orbital bombardment would be a bad idea since we are trying to liberate other planets or protect our own.

>>64740
This has the basis for the Yamato design and a few others and would likely cost little to create. Not only that, but in terms of sheer range, the Lunar Cannons are our best bet and having a mobile one could save us a lot of grief by softening targets/removing shields so the diplomats and heavy hitters can strike them down.

Let's talk implants. The idea of implanting the population with neutral implants once we get integrated tactical implant system and memory mod research is attractive but the problem is the logistics. All data here is going off the info here http://tgchan.org/wiki/The_Icon_Construction_Data and the numbers given in >>/quest/315189

Implants costs SC equal to half of the implants produced. Implanting our entire current population will cost 11,159 SC. 69 turns of our current SC production, and that's not mentioning everything else we'll want to use it for. We probably need more SC production anyway.

As for implant point throughput, a medical distract (our largest medical building) would put out 9 implant points per turn, apparently. That's 90 implants per turn per medical district. Which means if we wanted to finish implanting our entire population within, say, the 69 turns it’d take to produce enough SC at current production, we’d need 4 medical districts. (By the way we need 1 and 2/3 large derricks to keep up to 1 medical district or 0.6 medical district per large derrick.)

But what if we only implanted, say, the training capability of a single university? It'd cost 900 SC and 180 implant points per batch of 1800. The main unknown here is just how long memory mods’d shorten that training time to, and thus how quickly we’d need to pump those implants out.

Speaking of, a gestation tank will pop out 600 nonworkers per 6 months. That'd cost 50 SC per month to implant and require 2 medical districts to keep up with the output.

>>68446
Yeah. We could potentially save some time/resources by researching massive buildings appropriate to getting implants for our guys, but the secondary benefits of massive buildings are pretty much impossible to know until we research them. Not sure whether some buildings have massive versions or not, either, like Gestation Tanks, or the Interplanetary Cannons(cannons take 4 turns to build so they are basically a large?). Still, massive versions of derricks, medical districts, maybe universities, and probably ground factories should probably be on our list of things to pick up at some point.

Correction: it's 300 nonworkers per 6 months per gestation tank, not 600. So make that 25 SC per month and 0.55 medical district per gestation tank (decided to be a little more exact there). And, yeah, research into massive derricks and medical buildings would probably be worthwhile.

>>/quest/498478
Is the 8x acceleration given here correct? If so, that means that including the 6 months reduction given by neural implants and assuming no other training time reducers (I'd have to hunt back through all the threads to find out), memory mods'd let us train in 5.25 months. Which matches up surprisingly close to the time it takes for a gestation tank batch.

Anyway, implanting and then training a batch of 1800 every 5.25 months would take 172 SC a month (rounding up) and 35 implant points a month (again, rounding up). So, the output of 6.37 large derricks and 3.88 medical distracts (so we'd need 4 districts, and more derricks in general).

While it's premature to discuss such things in the main thread due to the current crisis, I think in the long term we should set up a training intrastructure consisting of 1 University, 4 medical districts, and enough derricks to produce 172 a month (7 assuming no other modifiers like low/high SC density). Then once the entire population has been converted from nonworkers and some professionals trained (though we want some military, too, of course), we can build 6 gestation tanks to keep the output up. Or possibly less depending on how other sources like natural reproduction and recruitment of aliens increases our numbers. We might end up having to build more universities/derricks/medical districts, but that means we're growing.

Anyway, just a look at some numbers and what it'd take to keep implanting and pumping out university batches.

Addenda: this is based upon the 4 years training figure that I dug up out of the earlier threads. If some factor's changed that number, the math'd have to be redone.

>>68620
It might be 8x acceleration without taking the 6 month reduction into account, so just 6 months. That wouldn't be a huge difference, though.

So implants should still be on our short list of things to research, but we might want to find out what breaker navy/plasma weapons unlocks, since that's probably some kind of naval offensive or defensive tech and we could use something to give us a little more edge against the breakers in space. We need to build up a force capable of freeing the Individual's homeworld, so something capable of taking on 3 Breaker Capital ships, and 10 Escort ships without taking major losses. If we can do that, we can provide the Individual with military tech it can use to hold off the Breakers while we build up ourselves and the Galts. Also the Individual mentioned something about 'Splinter-like' aliens who were 'supernatural' and we might want to track down a couple of those for capture purposes. There is other stuff related to magic on the tech tree we can't access yet that could be very useful against the supernatural worshippers of Totus, and the Individual implied that they had been part of the conflict that ended in it being conquered.

Also gonna dump a bunch of random RP costs for various things here for easy reference.

Massive buildings(DOES include Interplanetary Cannons)40 RP, although Ed said 30 RP the other day? Basing the 40 on the original mention of massive buildings after researching Large Buildings.

Drone Starships that could be used to scout: 35 RP

Stealth Diplomat Ship(Stealth is risky):90 RP

Mobile Orbital Factories: 50 RP

Dryad and Gester Power Armor(so we could train them as Power Troopers): 8 RP each

is Ed dead

>>80551
I haven't seen him in quite some time...

I was considering making a java app that would calculate stuff for The Icon but I was delayed for quite some time because I didn't know how to make a GUI. I think I might be able to manage it now but if Ed isn't interested in questing anymore there's no point.

Miss you, Ed! I love your quests. Hope you come back some day. <3