15000 km/s with a 1 metric ton missile would have 26.8 billion megatons of TNT worth of kinetic energy
That’s why we have Aether lore: ships and missiles cannot move in Aether close to the gravitic mass. Out of the Aether they lose the projected velocity.
Frankly I don’t like this lore, and tried to rename as much of objects according to something like Poul Anderson’s micro-jump psevdo-velocity engines, yet Aurora is not much castomizable in this aspect and hardcoded naming breaks the story again and again.
My complain is just for better understanding of my line of thought.
The point is, while we have this general set of mechanics, which is hard to change (and it’s unlikely Steve will change it), it’s better to not suggest things that inflict more disbelieve after you start playing with it and cannot un-see and un-remember anymore how it corresponds with other current mechanics.
We play Aurora, not Chess or other abstracted-rules game. Why? What is the difference? The answer is - Aurora rules are not abstracted out of reality, they are as much realistic as Steve thought he can make and still keep it playable, especially with those aspects of reality that are the most fascinating for him, so it’s possible while playing Aurora to pretend temporarily that it’s a reality, not a computer game. That’s what “to play” means when we do not mean some form of abstract puzzle or competition. We are here because we share Steve’s fascination with space and industrial era warfare, and so it’s interesting for us to play in a set of rules that is as much realistic about these aspects of reality as it’s possible for a game.
I think, that air forces should be powerful. But they should must be forced to behave as a “non-combat class” dynamically. Depending on if there are STO on the defender’s side, and if there are enemy military ships in orbit.
Any STO will suppress enemy military ships. But unless suppressed, any 1000+ ton enemy military ship in orbit will force conventional air forces to hide.
How exactly would an STO go about suppressing ships in orbit?
There is no cover in space, that those could be convinced to hide behind to enter a suppressed state.
A player decision to get out of range is something else completely.
Creating an EW environment to allow air forces to operate in spite of an orbital threat present is something else yet again and the only way that I can think of right now to enable the effect you are going for. Entirely feasible too, because any planet is big enough to mount Jammers that are themselves bigger than any battleship that may come calling.
One (among a few others) side effect would be, that all ground forces become immune to pinpoint bombardment and any attacker could not do anything but genocidal and climate-wrecking devastation from orbit.
The only way I can think of suppression is forcing the enemy ships to stay further away from the planet but that runs into mechanical problems as ships cannot provide close-in OBS without being in low orbit of the body in question.
Do I come in close and shove the muzzles of my guns down the other guy’s throat, thereby exposing my nice and shiny dreadnoughts to potentially catastrophic retaliation or do I hang back and let my grunts on the ground take their chances?
You’ve sorta answered your own question about what “suppressed” means. Basically, STO combat takes place on a much shorter timescale than ground combat. This means that if a ship wants to come into orbit, the tiniest PD STO will still shred them before a single ground combat phase ocurrs. This “suppresses” the ship from doing anything to ground forces or air forces.
Meaning that all STO must be destroyed if a ship even wants to get into orbit and be able to affect ground combat. This is basically already how the game works at the moment. But if a planet does not have any STO, then any military ship is free to enter orbit, perform bombardment, and now, also perform air-denial to enemy air forces.
STOs don’t cause interruptions when they’re reloaded, they just fire at the end of a turn if they can fire. That is, you can simply press the “8 Hours” button, and if nothing interrupts the game during this time, STO will make only 1 shot. This also applies to player’s STO.
It looks a bit strange, but it allows for ground combat involving both ships and STOs. Like in Helldivers, for example.