Welcome back to my walkthrough of Aurora, a rather unique 4X game. Now that we have our initial colonization of the solar system well underway, it's time to turn our attention to the stars. Aurora's interstellar travel model is built around Jump Points, essentially wormholes that link star systems. Any ship with a jump drive can transit a known jump point or escort other ships through, and jump points can be stabilized to allow all ships to pass freely. But before you can make use of a jump point, you first have to find it.

This is the job of grav survey ships. These work pretty much like geological survey ships, only they go to survey locations in deep space. Each system has 30, and some number of jump points. A few systems have only one, while 2 is typical and 5 or 6 isn't unknown. This obviously requires ships, but before you rush off and build a version of your geosurvey ship with grav sensors, it's worth taking a deeper look at the jump point mechanics. Read more...

Of all the weapons that have entered service over the last 50 years, none have had a greater impact on naval warfare than the Tomahawk cruise missile. This weapon has given destroyers and submarines the ability to strike targets far inland, a capability that was previously the exclusive preserve of the carriers. This dispersion of strike power has proved vital to the surface and subsurface navies in the post-Cold War world, and has given the President new tools for projecting American power.

Iowa launches a Tomahawk

Tomahawk originated in the early 1970s, shortly after the signing of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which didn't cover submarine-launched cruise missiles. The basic idea of such a missile wasn't new. The JB-2 Loon had been test-fired from a couple of submarines in the years after WWII, and the US had followed it with Regulus, which was fitted to five submarines, which conducted deterrent patrols in the Pacific from 1959 to 1964. However, Regulus was large enough that even its specialized submarines could only carry 2-5 missiles and it had to be launched from the surface, so it was rapidly phased out and replaced by Polaris. But in the aftermath of SALT I, which limited most types of nuclear weapons but not cruise missiles, the time seemed ripe to try again. The new weapon would have to fit into a standard 21" torpedo tube and be launched from underwater, giving the fleet's attack submarines a strategic strike capability against the Soviet Union. Read more...

Welcome back to my look at Aurora. Picking up from where we left off last time, it's time to look more at colonization, including terraforming, as well as to discuss civilian shipping lines and how they can benefit you.

Now that you've got a colony on Luna, and a geosurvey underway, let it run for a month or two so stuff has time to build. When you have 100 infrastructure on Earth, create a colony on Mars and order your cargo ships to take it there. This will take a couple of weeks, but you'll end up with two extraplanetary populations. At some point in this, you should get a notification that a shipping line has commissioned a ship of some sort. Shipping lines are semi-autonomous civilian ships that automatically move things around for you. The first vessel is almost certainly either a freighter or a colony ship, both of which you should be familiar with, at least in concept.¹ Colony ships simply pick up colonists from source worlds (in this case Earth) and drop them off anywhere that's a destination with enough space. Anywhere with 10 million people or less is automatically a destination, while populations with more can be set to be a source, a destination, or stable. Freighters will attempt to carry trade goods, which populations automatically produce, from places that have surpluses to places with demand. Particularly when first colonizing, the majority of the demand will be for infrastructure. As your colonies grow, they will produce and demand other trade goods, too, and might set up two-way trade. You get tax revenue from all of this, while the lines get money that lets them buy more ships. Read more...

The USN recently announced the winner of the FFG(X) program, the first major new shipbuilding program for the US in over a decade. It was designed to fill the major gap in the USN's order of battle, a ship smaller and cheaper than the Arleigh Burke class destroyers. The previous effort to buy a ship for this role, the Littoral Combat Ship, produced a vessel that failed on several levels, being too expensive, not capable enough and unreliable. The hope was that by abandoning the high-speed multi-mission design of the LCS and focusing on a conventional frigate, they could produce a useful ship on a reasonable budget.

The FFG(X) as announced by the Navy

Five entries were submitted, a mix of American and foreign designs, all of which were based on ships already in service. Both LCS models were entered, the LCS-1/Freedom by Lockheed Martin and the LCS-2/Independence by Austal. The last American design was from Huntington Ingalls, who came up with a ship based on the Coast Guard's National Security Cutter. Italian shipbuilder Fincanteiri submitted a version of the Franco-Italian FREMM frigate, to be built at Marinette Marine in Wisconsin, while Bath Iron Works partnered with Spanish firm Navantia for a version of the F-100 class frigate. Emphasis was placed on commonality with existing designs, which should help to deliver the ships efficiently and cheaply. Read more...

It's time once again for our open thread. Talk about whatever you want, even if it's not naval/military related.

I apologize for the issues with the captchas recently. There was a software update, and it caused some issues, which I've been in touch with Said Achmiz on. It seems to have been fixed, but I haven't had confirmation of that. As a workaround, I've set up an account named Commenter with password commenter that can comment without captcha. I'll leave it active, at least so long as the spambots don't find it. If anyone wants their own account, email the username and password to battleshipbean at gmail.

Overhauls for 2018 are Main Guns Part 4, my review of Midway, Russian Battleships Part 3, the first part on the Falklands War, So You Want to Build a Modern Navy Part 2 and the Super-Dreadnoughts. 2019 overhauls are my review of Fort Sill, Shells Part 4, Spanish-American War Part 4, Falklands Part 14, Battleship Aviation Part 1, and lastly the first part of Lord Nelson's pictures from Mikasa. I really need to get another set of those up at some point.

Welcome to the third part of my Aurora tutorial. As we built ships last time, it makes sense to start using them, and we'll throw in a look at colonization while we're at it. This is going to mean actually incrementing time in Aurora, instead of just setting stuff up. The game is more or less turn-based, although the length of the turn is variable depending on circumstances. The turn length buttons will each try to advance the game the specified amount, although various events can cause a turn to end sooner.² The most common is a ship completing its orders, although there are other causes, too.³

Not everything is updated every turn. Specifically, construction and other stuff in the economics window only happens when the time interval has advanced by at least a specific value, which defaults to 5 days. This is also when you get new officers, promote existing ones, and check for maintenance failures on your ships. In the early game, you may not even know these are happening, but as time goes on, you're likely to get interrupts as projects finish, ships are built, and research completes. Note that the interval on these cycles is variable, as it only happens at the end of a turn. So if you hit the 30 days button and no interrupts happen, then you're going to end up with a huge build cycle at the end. This might not be a good thing. If you had a construction project which was on track to finish 3 days after the last cycle, you've delayed getting it and preventing the factories from doing something else for the last 25 days. Read more...

The first nuclear weapon to go to sea was arguably Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, about half of whose nuclear material was transported to Tinian aboard the heavy cruiser Indianapolis.⁴ All of the other nuclear components for both bombs were sent to Tinian via air, and while the Crossroads tests gave vital information about the use of nuclear weapons at sea, operational deployment would have to wait another half-decade. The first serious attempt was in the late 40s, as part of the Navy's desperate and ultimately successful bid to break the Air Force's nuclear monopoly. They planned to use Little Boy-type bombs carried by P2V Neptune patrol bombers, a land-based aircraft that was launched from carriers with rocket boosters and ditched at the end of the mission.

An AJ Savage during the test program

This was obviously a stopgap, and it was never deployed operationally. That honor would fall to the AJ Savage, the result of a competition started days after the existence of the atomic bomb was revealed to the public that called for an aircraft capable of carrying a 10,000 lb bomb off a carrier. The Savage, equipped with two radial engines and a jet buried in the fuselage, was twice the weight of any previous carrier aircraft, but development proceeded fairly quickly, with the first aircraft entering service in 1950. That September, the carrier Coral Sea took the non-nuclear components of several atomic bombs along with her on her deployment to the Mediterranean. Read more...

Aurora is an interesting game, and now we'll turn to one of the parts that make it so unique: the ship designer. RTW2 is the only game I've ever seen that comes close to matching it in depth and complexity, and even that is more limited. It's probably best to check out the first installment before you dive into this one. I'm assuming that we're continuing with the game we created last time, although the few changes we made won't actually affect this part.

As our eventual goal is to colonize the universe, we're going to need ships, and the game didn't start us with any. Today, we'll build 3, a survey ship, a cargo ship, and a colony ship. First, we need to turn on Spacemaster mode, the lightbulb on the right of the top bar. This will let us instantly research components for the ship, instead of having to wait for them to be developed normally. Next, open the Class Design window, and hit New Ship Class. If you want to change the name, feel free to do so, although that obviously has no mechanical effect. The block on the right gives all of the important data about your ship, including size, crew, cost, speed, maintenance life, and range. Right now, there's just the default components, but we'll need to change that. Let's do the survey ship first. Open up Geological Survey Sensors in the menu on the left and double-click to add 2. If you add too many and need to take them off, change to Class Components using the radio buttons at the top. Read more...

While doing research for a separate post, I discovered that one of my basic assumptions here was wrong. It turns out that the Nimitz group was not the first deployment of CEC in any sense of the word. In fact, a 4-ship at-sea test was run in 1994, a decade before the "Tic Tac" incident. The first operational deployment was with the Kennedy group in 2002, also before the incident. I'm not sure why Tyler Rogoway missed all of this, and I didn't think to check his assertion.

Despite this, I still think the incident was probably a CEC glitch. The performance of the radars exactly matches what we would expect if that was the case, and it was still quite early in CEC's operational life. Also worth noting is that most of the early tests were carried out in the Atlantic instead of the Pacific, and radar can be surprisingly vulnerable to atmospheric conditions messing with propagation.

A year or so ago, the internet was aflutter about reports that the Navy had set up a program for reporting UFOs, or at least encounters with unidentified aircraft. Why exactly they did this was not and is not clear, with some taking it as semi-official confirmation of the existence of either UFOs or some sort of highly-classified aircraft with performance vastly greater than anything the public knows about.

Nimitz and cruiser Princeton, major participants in the "Tic Tac" incident

I want to focus on this article from The War Zone's Tyler Rogoway. Let me start by saying that Tyler Rogoway is one of the better defense journalists on the internet. He's knowledgeable, writes well, and frequently manages to produce some insight that's worth reading. But in this case, I think that leads him to the wrong conclusion. Read more...

Said Achmiz is looking into the Captcha bug, but I figured out a way around the problem. Commenting is working normally for people with an account, so I've set up a commenting-only account. It's named Commenter and the password is commenter. If you want to log in and comment, do so. I can't promise this will stay active forever, but it should let you avoid filling out the captchas.