I've added all of the ships from the Setup thread into an updated database. I plan to make actual allocations during the virtual meetup, with actual play beginning next week. But that means I need actual direction for the fleet, beyond "a Tourville or two". The updated database should make it easy.
Post-meetup, we've added a number of new ships and variants on existing ones. New database.
The French Republic's first trip to another star took place on February 1st, 1960, when GSV Caelum transited to Bernard's Star. I've uploaded a new database here. I also discovered that the jump drive system has been tweaked, and that now military jump drives apparently can't carry commercial-engined ships. To get out of the pickle this placed me in, I went in and gave us the next level of jump drive tech, which actually shrank the ships slightly, so I topped them off with more fuel.
Comments
BTW, it looks like there are some fairly serious bugs with 1.12, like using components in shipbuilding not reducing cost, and rakha populations disappearing on save and reload
I've seen the components work in my own games, and I'm not even sure that Rakha populations are implemented in our game. Don't want to put this on hold just as we're getting some momentum. If it gets bad, I can always reimplement manually in 1.13.
We messed around with the Aurora game during the meetup, and came up with a number of new designs. I've uploaded the new database, which hopefully gives us a better base to actually select our ships from going forward.
I think I've mostly figured out how to read the database (since I can't run the game)... the only anomaly is that I can't figure out what Suffren does.
That aside, here's my proposal—-not the best informed, given my lack of hands-on experience, but should get things started.
Warships (7288 BP): 1x Foch 1x Jeanne d'Arc 2x Toulouse 2x Epee 1x Richelieu 6x Chevalier
Other (35911 BP): 72x jump-capable Baudin (~half being a geo-survey variant) 9x Coureur des Bois 3x Champlain
Comments: * Initial-tech warships probably won't be very good, so I mostly focus on economic expansion with a small fleet mostly for officer development. * Fleet doctrine is that we probably can't do both beam and missile warfare well with such a small investment, so we focus on missiles. * I like the smaller survey-ship approach: each ship can hit fewer survey points and so spend less time in transit. But the really compelling factor is jump drive cost scaling, which actually leaves jump-capable Baudin with better sensors/cost ratio than jump-capable Cartier. * Balance of cargo ships to colony ships is a complete guess (roughly equal spending on each).
Also, if we want more Asterix-themed names I can help with that, this being one of the few areas where I possess a significant paper-book library. (For starters, if we can decide who our main enemy is, we should definitely use the Roman Empire theme on them).
The Suffren was an attempt at a tanker, aborted when we realized that we only had the small size of fuel tanks, which make tankers really expensive.
72 survey ships seems like a lot more than we actually need. We do need a stabilization ship or two, which I can whip up easily.
I think I may do a softer launch of the fleet. We'll start with a dozen jump-capable Baudins and the rest of ADA's fleet, and go from there. Results will be up tomorrow afternoon.
Play has begun! I started us with a fleet of 12 grav survey ships (renamed the Orion class so I didn't have to hunt down French explorer names for all of them) and 6 geosurvey ships, all based on the 3000 ton jump Baudin class. Also 9 cargo and 3 colony ships. The rest will come later. I've played through January 29th, 1960, when GSV Caelum discovered the first jump point in the Sol system, just outside the orbit of Saturn.
We’ve discovered the Bernard’s Star System. I’ve uploaded a new database at that point.
Barnard's Star looks interesting, with two potentially terraformable planets. If either of those comes up with decent mineral resources, I note we have a nice fleet of colony ships ready to go. Unfortunately, there's a shortage of moons and asteroids in the system. Not bad for a start.
But I also note that we don't seem to have done much in the way of geological surveys in even the Solar System. Earth's Mercassium and Boronide reserves are pretty lean, so we're going to need to find someplace we can mine pretty quickly.
The reason for the lack of surveys in Sol is operator error. I made the stupid mistake of copying the Bertin design and not replacing the Grav survey sensor with geosurvey sensors. That's what SM mode is for (I've already fixed it in the master copy, but it's not worth a new database), and we should have data soon.
Looks good so far! Builds and research seem reasonable, and soft-launch of the fleet definitely makes sense. I'd think the next big decision point will probably be picking a colony site once we have geosurvey results.
Next set of play is coming up, and the current plan is to dispatch one of the GEVs through to Bernard's Star, and just keep playing until something happens.
I'm also proposing the following ship be added to our fleet mix:
Dupuy de Lome class Stabilisation Ship 31,369 tons 88 Crew 860.6 BP TCS 627 TH 400 EM 0 637 km/s Armour 1-88 Shields 0-0 HTK 37 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 1 PPV 0 MSP 17 Max Repair 600 MSP Capitaine de corvette Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months
Jump Point Stabilisation: 360 days
Commercial Nuclear Pulse Engine EP100.0 (4) Power 400 Fuel Use 11.18% Signature 100 Explosion 5% Fuel Capacity 400,000 Litres Range 20.5 billion km (372 days at full power)
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
Neither Luna nor Mars has minerals. Do we want to establish a colony on one of them to try and get some civilian trade going? It'll be a couple years before we get a jump gate into Bernard's Star, to say nothing of any other systems.
Dupuy de Lome looks good (once I remembered that the 'intended deployment time' doesn't actually apply to commercial vessels). My fingers are crossed for some good mineral finds!
Oh dear, that's the kind of start I tend to reroll on. But imo moon and mars colonies are always valuable as a place to dump your labs and findom centers, and make better use of pop.
Was surprised you made the jump stabilizer a ship. I always make those stations with a stabilizer module and commercial jump drive. Tugs can drop them off at JPs (or stay permanently attached once you have enough old ones), and they can be built by earth factories without retooling shipyards.
The reason it's not a space station is that I just didn't think of that. A lot of my building habits date back to before we had space stations. I was using barges before then, but that was mostly because I'd figured out a way to cheat on getting ammo to the front. (Commercial magazines were also not a thing back then.) Going forward, we can definitely do that, and I suspect the first of the new commercial shipyards may end up devoted to tugs.
Actually, there's a better reason I didn't do that. We don't have tractor beams yet. Large fuel storage just finished, so I've got our logistics guy working on it, but it will be a few years.