Structural Shells
A ‘No Armour’ check box has been added to the class window. Clicking this removes the normal armour from the class.
Designs with no armour instead have a new type of armour called ‘structural shell’. This costs 1 per unit and has a strength of 20, essentially making it 5% of the cost of normal armour in terms of strength.
There are severe limitation on ships with no armour:
- They cannot have engines
- They cannot have military systems
- The structural shell does not prevent damage. In effect, weapon fire passes straight through the ‘armour’
This type of ship is ideally suited for orbital habitats or space stations of some type, such as fuel harvesting platforms, mining stations, etc., that require towing to move.
Space Stations
The rules on construction factories building spacecraft are changing in C# Aurora. Any class with a Structural Shell instead of armour is classed as a Space Station. Space Stations can be built by construction factories at any population that includes a Spaceport. Note this means you no longer need an orbital habitat in order to use construction factories, which means you can create huge deep space logistical bases, terraforming stations or small observation platforms, or anything in between, using construction factories.
The downside to this flexibility is no armour, no engines and no military systems, so space stations will require protection from defensive bases (which can be maintained by the space station if it has sufficient maintenance facilities). As an example, if you were channeling Starship Troopers (movie, not book) you could build the following station and deploy in deep space, near the Arachnid Quarantine Zone:
Orbital Habitats
This is a copy of a post in the VB6 7.2 Changes List. I didn’t release the updated VB6 version so this is still a change from the released VB6 Aurora.
The population capacity of orbital habitat modules has been increased from 50k to 200k. In combination with the new ‘No Armour’ option this significantly reduces the cost of building orbital habitats. For example, the habitat shown here supports a population of one million for a cost of 1145 BP. To support one million colonists with infrastructure on a colony cost 2.0 world with acceptable gravity would cost 400 BP, so the colony cost would have to be approaching 6.0 before the Orbital Habitat became cheaper, although it is probably practical at lower colony costs because the ground-based infrastructure would require a larger proportion of population for environment. For low-gravity worlds it is comparable with the cost of low-gravity infrastructure and it is the only option for high gravity worlds or small bodies with low population capacities.
