(Pocket) Battleship within a military hangar station within a commercial carrier

General Discussion
1

There has been some discussion of this topic on this forum and for me this was all so many polish villages.
That prompted me to lift the ban on firing up the game before 3.0 and see for myself.

Baseline: A virtual fictional empire with all tech projects researched, if a cost of 20k points or less per project is not exceeded (just shy of particle lance technology).

This is what I came up with:

Commercial Carrier class Freighter      161,000 tons       1,529 Crew       6,884.7 BP       TCS 3,220    TH 5,120    EM 0
1590 km/s    JR 3-50(C)      Armour 1-263       Shields 0-0       HTK 190      Sensors 0/0/0/0      DCR 1-0      PPV 0
MSP 6,656    Max Repair 322 MSP
Hangar Deck Capacity 33,000 tons     
Captain of the List    Control Rating 1   BRG   
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    Flight Crew Berths 660    CDE 50%    
Maintenance Modules: 13 module(s) capable of supporting ships of 32,500 tons

JC161K Commercial Jump Drive     Max Ship Size 161000 tons    Distance 50k km     Squadron Size 3
Commercial Magneto-plasma Drive  EP1280.00 (4)    Power 5120.0    Fuel Use 2.21%    Signature 1280.00    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 1,000,000 Litres    Range 50.6 billion km (368 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as a Carrier for auto-assignment purposes

The baseship.
I

Military Hangar Station class Carrier      32,498 tons       119 Crew       3,224.7 BP       TCS 650    TH 0    EM 0
1 km/s      Armour 1-90       Shields 0-0       HTK 132      Sensors 0/0/0/0      DCR 1-0      PPV 0
Maint Life 0.01 Years     MSP 62    AFR 8449%    IFR 117.3%    1YR 8,283    5YR 124,241    Max Repair 100 MSP
Hangar Deck Capacity 30,000 tons
Captain of the List    Control Rating 1   BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 3 days    Flight Crew Berths 600    CDE 50%    Morale Check Required

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as a Carrier for auto-assignment purposes

The military hangar station.

Particular class Destroyer      30,000 tons       468 Crew       6,898.5 BP       TCS 600    TH 3,840    EM 10,710
6400 km/s      Armour 9-86       Shields 357-476       HTK 138      Sensors 28/28/0/0      DCR 12-4      PPV 153.8
Maint Life 0.58 Years     MSP 1,724    AFR 600%    IFR 8.3%    1YR 2,993    5YR 44,899    Max Repair 960 MSP
Tractor Beam
Captain of the List    Control Rating 2   BRG   AUX
Intended Deployment Time: 15 days    CDE 50%    Morale Check Required

Magneto-plasma Drive  EP1920.00 (2)    Power 3840.0    Fuel Use 14.43%    Signature 1920.00    Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 274,000 Litres    Range 11.4 billion km (20 days at full power)
Epsilon S119 / R476 Shields (3)     Recharge 476 seconds (0.8 per second)

Particle Beam-6 (18)    Range 240,000km     TS 6,400 km/s     Power 15-5    ROF 15
Triple Gauss Cannon R400-100 Turret (2x12)    Range 40,000km     TS 20000 km/s     Power 0-0    ROF 5
Direct Fire Control R160-TS20000 (SW) (20%) (2)     Range 160,000 km   TS 20,000 km/s    ECCM-3
Direct Fire Control R320-TS6400 (20%) (1)     Range 320,000 km   TS 6,400 km/s    ECCM-3
Stellarator Fusion Reactor R91 (1)     Total Power Output 90.6    Exp 5%

Active Search Sensor AS115-R100 (20%) (1)     GPS 14000     Range 115.9m km    RES 100   ECCM-3   EH-80
EM Sensor EM2-28 (20%) (1)     Sensitivity 28     Detect 1000:  41.8m km
Thermal Sensor TH2-28 (20%) (1)     Sensitivity 28     Detect 1000:  41.8m km

Electronic Warfare Jammers:   Sensor 4    Fire Control 4    Missile 4

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as a Warship for auto-assignment purposes

A basic beam combatant. Just to get a feel for the concept.
Hotter engines might be a good thing.

I put the destroyer into the military hangar station and that into into the commercial carrier ship.

The destroyer will be kept at 0 deployment and won’t need maintenance because it is in a military hangar.
When the destroyer does sortie forth it will accrue deployment and consume MSP.
The deployment will be reduced once it is back in its hangar and the MSPs will be refilled by the nearest supply ship (the Commercial carrier most likely).

The military hangar station will be kept at 0 deployment and will be maintained by the modules mounted in the commercial carrier. It will stay in the commercial hangar at all times.

The Commercial carrier will not need MSPs and will not care about deployment because it is a Commercial ship. It needs to be flagged as a supply ship to take care of its parasites.

The total maintenance cost per year of the three ships in standard configuration (nested doll) is that of the military hangar station (816.175 points - its construction cost/4).

The complete combination runs roughly 2.5 times the construction cost of the destroyer alone. It is a lot cheaper to maintain though (a bit under half for the displayed beam combatant, a missile component will mean less savings due to being cheaper to begin with), so with a long enough service life (about 12 years in this case) you will eventually break even.
You will need a lot of crew too - 2116 versus 468 for the destroyer alone.

The destroyer takes 1.97 years to build, the ComCarrier 1.5 and the hangar station takes 0.86 years. I need a military yards of 32.5kton capacity, another one of 30ktons and a commercial yard of 161ktons.

If 6650 points (8 years if the Destroyer is never launched) prove too few it is no big deal to modify the carrier to hold more.

Having a tanker or two in the vicinity is never wrong and some kind of sensor capability would be nice too.

Of course the fighting component is up for debate, but that debate would be slightly off topic. It is included only to get a feel for the operational characteristics of this concept.

Is that about right?

What did I miss?

2

It is actually better to count the maintenance cost of any ship as its build cost divided by 16, not 4. The reason for this is that each point of MSP costs 0.25 TN minerals to produce (0.1 duranium, 0.1 gallicite, 0.05 uridium). In theory, you could argue that a divisor of 4 is useful when MSP is limited by production rate, but I have always found resource scarcity to be the bottleneck, not rate of production.

In that case:

this analysis probably needs to be re-done. For the examples shown:

  • Cost of DD only: 6899 BP (maintenance 431 BP per annum)
  • Cost of Freighter: 3225 BP (maintenance 202 BP per annum)
  • Cost of all 3, less DD: 10,010 BP
  • Maintenance of DD, less Freighter = 229 BP per annum
  • Time to break even on maintenance: (10,010 BP) / (229 BP per annum) = 44 years

This might be worth it if you play with really low research rates, but for most players I think after 40 or so years you’d like to have upgraded the fleet, so the build cost is probably the most important factor. You can reduce that to about 30 years for successive cycles if you keep the carrier the same, even lower if you only upgrade the Freighter’s engines, but it will take 44 years for the initial build to break even either way.

Additional considerations:

  • This approach becomes much more efficient at higher tech levels, since hangar bays don’t go up in cost over time. Your combat vessel will represent an increasingly larger fraction of the cost at ever-higher tech levels, especially if you also use more efficient engines on the commercial carrier.
  • Not all minerals are created equal. In many cases, duranium and especially gallicite can be quite scarce, so the BP spent on MSP may be more valuable than the BP spent on ship components that use more plentiful resources. On the other hand, if duranium and gallicite are readily available and the empire faces other resource crunches, the MSP savings of the carrier approach are correspondingly less valuable.
3

Your military hangar vessel has an IFR of over 100% you need to lower that.

4

Thanks.

What would be a good target for the IFR, given that the hangar station is not supposed to leave its mothership ever but still retains the option in case shit really goes sideways?

5

Thank you for that. The point is well taken.

I don’t quite agree with your interpretation of the numbers though.

Each build point of the destroyer costs about 0.17 tons of Duranium and the average across the whole thing is 0.22 tons of Duranium per BP.
Gallicite runs to 0.28 (only DD) or 0.19 (all of it), Uridium is 0.1 or 0.04.
That runs to a factor between two and three (whichever mineral is your bottleneck) plus the opportunity costs of the other minerals. Not quite 4, but still significantly worse than I initially put it.

6

Under 5% at the most, under 2% if you can. It also does not have enough MSP on hand to cover its own largest repair should that happen to malfunction. But the MSP would get covered when you lower IFR with Engineering. In or out of the commercial hangar does not matter, it is still rolling every 5 days (default) to see if something malfunctions.

Another bonus of the military hangar is the ships inside it can use its damage control rating when trying to repair components. I get mine up to at least the mid 40s.

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7

5% IFR on a 32kt ship requires that ship to be ~3.5% eng spaces by tonnage.
That’s already pushing the marginal savings per additional eng space very low, possibly even negative over the lifetime of the ship (depends on many factors, primarily actual length of deployments).

2% IFR on a 32kt ship requires that ship to be ~8.8% eng spaces by tonnage.
That can’t be a worthwhile investment, just in simple terms of BP cost vs MSP saved, without accounting for the mission effectiveness lost by devoting that much tonnage to engineering.

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8

You’ve taken a 32kt, 3.2kBP engineless military carrier and given it infinite deployment time by nesting it inside a 161kt, 6.8kBP commercial carrier.

I don’t think it’s a worthwhile trade.

Copy your carrier design and change the deployment time to, I don’t know, 24 months.
Add enough MSP storage for a maint life of 3 years.

Copy your “freighter”, take off the commercial hangars and the maintenance modules, add a tractor beam, and reduce the engines and fuel until you get back to the same speed and range (when tugging the carrier).
Then reduce the size of the jump drive to match this smaller ship.
[EDIT/CORRECTION for future readers: a tug thus designed will actually be smaller than the station it is tugging. You’ll need the jump drive to be large enough for the station, even if the tug is smaller.]

See how much less this new combo costs.
The carrier will be a smidge more expensive, for the added deployment time.
The tug will be much, much cheaper than the freighter.
My hunch is you can probably build two of these carrier/tug combos for less than the cost of a single carrier/freighter combo.

What does it cost you?
Maintenance failures over time while the carrier is away from base.
The strategic limitations imposed by your deployment time. (And you can always choose a longer deployment time. It adds some tonnage and up front cost, but it makes longer deployments less worrisome.)
[EDIT TO ADD: Also the extra micro needed to manage the deployment/maintenance clocks of the carrier station. On a long deployment, you’ll need to bring a fresh carrier every two years or so, and take the tired one back for overhaul. That’s not a lot of micro in isolation, but the accumulation across your empire of tiny bits of micro such as these can become unexpectedly onerous at larger scales. For this reason many players discuss the design tradeoffs between material efficiency and operational simplicity as one of the core aspects of advanced Aurora gameplay.]

To me, the cost of those maintenance failures, and the strategic limitations of a 2+ year deployment time, are not so severe that I’m keen to pay twice as much for the same mission capability in order to eliminate them.

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9

You tug-life guys make me give an oath that I’d join your mob immediately after Steve uploads The (The!) Patch with a game option “Civillian Shipping Tug-Life”.

10

Not everything needs to be worked out to 0.1 units of Duranium you know. And do you know what is a worthwhile investment, not having to worry about cycling my combat ships for overhauls and being able to repair them super easily on site.

2 Likes
11

I have not done it yet but it sounds like the best of both words is a space station commercial carrier pulled by a tug with the battleship in the commercial carrier.

12

Why the sarcasm? At no point are my observations above remotely as minute as 0.1 Duranium.

You gave your advice. I countered it, and provided reasoning.

1 Like
13

Thank you.
Thank you also for not providing the designs. The point of this thread is a learning exercise for me after all.

Here is what I came up with (same tech baseline as before):

Tug Life class Fleet Tug      35,000 tons       394 Crew       2,029.5 BP       TCS 700    TH 4,800    EM 0
6857 km/s    JR 3-50      Armour 1-95       Shields 0-0       HTK 77      Sensors 14/14/0/0      DCR 1-0      PPV 0
MSP 7,536    Max Repair 350 MSP
Cargo Shuttle Multiplier 1    Tractor Beam     
Captain of the List    Control Rating 1   BRG   
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months    CDE 50%    

J35000(3-50) Military Jump Drive     Max Ship Size 35000 tons    Distance 50k km     Squadron Size 3
Commercial Magneto-plasma Drive  EP1200.00 (4)    Power 4800.0    Fuel Use 2.28%    Signature 1200.00    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 878,000 Litres    Range 197.9 billion km (333 days at full power)

Active Search Sensor AS51-R100 (20%) (1)     GPS 2800     Range 51.8m km    RES 100   ECCM-3   EH-80
EM Sensor EM1.0-14.0 (20%) (1)     Sensitivity 14     Detect 1000:  29.6m km
Thermal Sensor TH1.0-14.0 (20%) (1)     Sensitivity 14     Detect 1000:  29.6m km

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as a Tug for auto-assignment purposes

The design is flagged as a supply ship, because I can. The maintenance savings may be minuscule, but over a thousand ships you will notice (as if I’d ever build that many).
It also has a nominal sensor suite (something I could have given the original ComCarrier as well).
Tugging the hangar station below its speed drops to ~3425 km/s and its range goes down to ~98.5 billion kilometers.

The new iteration Hangar station:


Military Hangar Station class Carrier      35,000 tons       500 Crew       3,712.3 BP       TCS 700    TH 0    EM 0
1 km/s      Armour 1-95       Shields 0-0       HTK 179      Sensors 0/0/0/0      DCR 27-7      PPV 0
Maint Life 3.69 Years     MSP 2,909    AFR 363%    IFR 5.0%    1YR 332    5YR 4,983    Max Repair 100 MSP
Hangar Deck Capacity 30,000 tons     
Captain of the List    Control Rating 1   BRG   
Intended Deployment Time: 24 months    Flight Crew Berths 600    CDE 50%    Morale Check Required    


This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as a Carrier for auto-assignment purposes

I decided on a deployment time of 24 months and corresponding maintenance life covered by engineering space (5.0% IFR, yay me).
When deployed to deep space posts it will need periodic overhauls though, so consider having a few spares to hotswap.
I considered a big honking passive sensor, but that drove the maxFail cost through the roof.
I still need a dedicated sensor platform for guard deployments.

The combat component stays the same.

The support components combined now cost 5741.8 BP as opposed to 10109.4 for the ComCarrier group above (43.2% savings or 25.7% if you include the combat component) while making the whole triad more than twice as fast (extravagant yes, but the Gallicite cost still is slightly less than with the ComCarrier above).
I could come up with a cheaper (and slower) tug, but the 35kton jump device is a fixed requirement anyway (Tug+tugged do squadron jumps IIRC), so why not fill the space with engines?

Edit: Minor consideration - The whole triad now needs 1362 crew as opposed to 2113 for the ComCarrier group.

Conclusion: They lied to us in Sunday school. Tuggery does pay.

2 Likes
14

I concur with skoormit. Please keep discussion civil and courteous.

In other words, you mean to say that the efficiency gains from tug life are not worth the sacrifice in the administrative overhead.

I agree. That’s why I don’t use tug life at all, and all of my vessels have at least 10 years of deployment and maintenance.

Is it inefficient? Yep. But it is also much easier on my young and impatient mind.

15

Very astute point about the jump drive size being fixed based on the size of the carrier.
Reducing the power of the engines will also make the tug cheaper and slower, if you are keen to make that tradeoff.

16

My limited knowledge makes me think different.

-You loose the maintenance savings of the military carrier station.
-The commercial hangar station costs about the same as the military one.
-It is much bigger (50kton+ range) and thus much slower. The tug will also need a bigger jump drive.
-You either build maintenance modules into the carrier (making it bigger still - 110kton+ range -and thus slower and more expensive)
or you have to make the combat component long-maintenance, loosing mission efficiency and strategic flexibility (having your combat components in overhaul rather than the much cheaper hangars)

The only thing you retain are smaller crew quarters on the combat component.

I may be wrong about that (and I’d love to be corrected), but from where I stand, this looks like a very bad idea.

17

10 years does sound excessive. When I tried to design a naked combat component conforming to that requirement I ended up loosing more than 1/2 of weapons and defenses as opposed to what’s supposed to live in the hangar in this thread.

Out of curiosity - tonnagewise a ratio of ~3 engineering to 2 maintenance looked good to me.
What do you usually build?

18

That is amazing. It serves as a salient reminder that there are as many ways to play Aurora as there are players. More, even.

1 Like
19

If you have the patience and interest, maybe we can do a simple case study at this point?
Copy your design, reduce the eng spaces by half, and add enough MSP storage to get back up to the reported maintenance life of this design (3.69 years).
I’m really curious to see the comparison (in size, build cost, and long-term maintenance cost).

20

Here you go - that’s 14 engineering spaces versus 27 in the original design, balanced by 462 tons of MSP-storage:

Skoormit Study 01 class Carrier      34,602 tons       435 Crew       3,590.5 BP       TCS 692    TH 0    EM 0
1 km/s      Armour 1-94       Shields 0-0       HTK 164      Sensors 0/0/0/0      DCR 14-4      PPV 0
Maint Life 3.69 Years     MSP 5,527    AFR 684%    IFR 9.5%    1YR 632    5YR 9,483    Max Repair 100 MSP
Hangar Deck Capacity 30,000 tons
Captain of the List    Control Rating 1   BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 24 months    Flight Crew Berths 600    CDE 50%    Morale Check Required

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as a Carrier for auto-assignment purposes

So what has happened?
Over the course of 3.69 years the design is expected to use 2518 extra MSP (189% of the original).
That’s 251.8 tons each of Duranium and Gallicite, as well as 125.9 tons of Uridium.

Building it costs 122.8 tons less Duranium (12% savings, which will on average be eaten up after 1.8 years).
Both designs don’t use Uridium and Gallicite in construction, so that is a loss from day 1.

It is marginally smaller, however - which would be a consideration in the combat component, where space is at a premium and better than 1% hull size extra can make a significant difference in performance.
For this design, the only thing that comes to my mind is using the extra space for 2 Improved Damage Control facilities (and an extra 7.5 tons of MSP), like so:

Skoormit Study 02 class Carrier      34,942 tons       455 Crew       3,697.8 BP       TCS 699    TH 0    EM 0
1 km/s      Armour 1-95       Shields 0-0       HTK 170      Sensors 0/0/0/0      DCR 54-15      PPV 0
Maint Life 3.69 Years     MSP 5,620    AFR 698%    IFR 9.7%    1YR 641    5YR 9,619    Max Repair 100 MSP
Hangar Deck Capacity 30,000 tons     
Captain of the List    Control Rating 1   BRG   
Intended Deployment Time: 24 months    Flight Crew Berths 600    CDE 50%    Morale Check Required    


This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as a Carrier for auto-assignment purposes

I lack the experience to gauge how significant DCR 54-15 against 27-7 (original design) actually is and if it is worth the extra maintenance cost against the original design.
Compared to 12-4 for the combat component alone, that is.

Interesting.
My doctrines usually emphasize long deployment cruisers with ~2.5 years maintenance life.
For those I like to live frugally and get maintenance out of engineering spaces.
I also usually declare that the marginal DCR those provide has to be good enough.
Since I have yet to fight an actual war in Aurora that is subject to revision if and when it happens.

With Tuggery I’d keep designing like that for the Hangar component in triads with cruiser-type missions, where long deployments outside the umbrella of a dedicated base facility are expected and slugging matches are not.
Dedicated battle hangars with improved damage control and reduced deployment times are a thing to keep in mind.
̶i̶̶n̶̶ ̶̶e̶̶a̶̶c̶̶h̶̶ ̶̶c̶̶a̶̶s̶̶e̶̶,̶̶ ̶̶t̶̶h̶̶e̶̶ ̶̶f̶̶i̶̶g̶̶h̶̶t̶̶i̶̶n̶̶g̶̶ ̶̶c̶̶o̶̶m̶̶p̶̶o̶̶n̶̶e̶̶n̶̶t̶̶ ̶̶c̶̶o̶̶u̶̶l̶̶d̶̶ ̶̶b̶̶e̶̶n̶̶e̶̶f̶̶i̶̶t̶̶ ̶̶f̶̶r̶̶o̶̶m̶̶ ̶̶t̶̶h̶̶e̶̶ ̶̶m̶̶a̶̶s̶̶s̶̶ ̶̶s̶̶a̶̶v̶̶i̶̶n̶̶g̶̶s̶̶,̶̶ ̶̶s̶̶i̶̶n̶̶c̶̶e̶̶ ̶̶t̶̶h̶̶o̶̶s̶̶e̶̶ ̶̶a̶̶r̶̶e̶̶ ̶̶n̶̶o̶̶t̶̶ ̶̶e̶̶x̶̶p̶̶e̶̶c̶̶t̶̶e̶̶d̶̶ ̶̶t̶̶o̶̶ ̶̶f̶̶l̶̶o̶̶u̶̶n̶̶c̶̶e̶̶ ̶̶a̶̶b̶̶o̶̶u̶̶t̶̶ ̶̶i̶̶n̶̶ ̶̶d̶̶e̶̶e̶̶p̶̶ ̶̶s̶̶p̶̶a̶̶c̶̶e̶̶ ̶̶a̶̶n̶̶d̶̶ ̶̶b̶̶u̶̶r̶̶n̶̶ ̶̶t̶̶h̶̶r̶̶o̶̶u̶̶g̶̶h̶̶ ̶̶m̶̶s̶̶p̶̶ ̶̶w̶̶h̶̶i̶̶l̶̶e̶̶ ̶̶d̶̶o̶̶i̶̶n̶̶g̶̶ ̶̶s̶̶o̶̶.̶

Edit: Or not. I forgot how I already cut the maintenance life of the “Particular” class example destroyer.

What’s your take?

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