Okay, obviously, when Heavy Weapons Platforms (HWP) are introduced, they will not be able to fly using the typical battery and engine configurations of todays light fighter/bombers.

Ultra-Heavy Powerplant
Power: 7000
Recharge: 100/second

The UHP is the basic battery for the capital-class vessels to come. The battery isn't heavy enough to power the engines and weapons systems of a cruiser for very long. Standard on all cruisers.

Nuclear Powerplant
Power: 14000
Recharge: 175/second

the Nuclear Plant is the middle battery for cruisers. Capable of powering a cruiser for a fairly good amount of time, it is the obvious choice for many cruiser captains that dont invision long drawn out fleet engagements.

Microwave/Fission Plant
Power: 24000
Recharge: 225/second

The MFP combined plant generates enough power for a long drawn out engagement. It can maintain a cruiser at both Maximum Burn and weapons fire for some time. The highest civilian version.


Military T2042 Cruiser Powerplant
Power: 50000
Recharge: 2500/second

The military's finest and only battery. Supplies power to the Cruiser-class vessels. The military authorizes the use of this battery only when the captain has earned their trust for the Heavy Cruiser.



Civilian Frigate Engine
Speed: 70
Turbo Speed: 85
Battery Consumption: 0/225 a second at burn

The CFE is designed to provide thrust to the lighter capital craft. When attached to an agile craft, it can easily overtake small fighter craft using civilian systems. Using full turbo it can give chase breifly to craft with upgraded civilian or military configurations

Patrol Engine
Speed: 65
Turbo Speed: 100
Batt. Consuption: 0/300 per second

The Patrol Engine is the primary factory-extra engine of cruiser fleets. It is capable of propelling the cruiser to a relatively high speed for short amounts of time to chase down hostile targets.

Military T609 Phalanx Engine:
Speed: 75
Turbo Speed: 110
Batt. Consumption: 0/325 a second

The MTPE is the military's engine for cruisers. Awarded at the same time as access to the Military Powerplant and Heavy Cruiser

For the longest time I've been an advocate of multi-powerplant/engine systems, in which you add engines and batteries much like we'd now add weapons. Ships would get existantiated then with a 'virtual powerplant' that was a product of the sum of the installed components - e.i. the total thrust of the engines and the total turbo consumption is added and the max speed (etc.) is averaged to obtain the number used in calculations by the client/server.

That way we can have bigger and bigger classes of ships (well up to some limit) without having to invent a whole new set of engine and battery objects (remember I talked about having 130 different fighter engines alone) for each class.

For balance reasons, you should always have as many engines as powerplants (otherwise its too easy to generate infinite turbo power).

For capital ships, I divided them into four classes single (frigates), double (destroyers), triple (cruisers), and quadruple (battleships) engined ships. Then I had light/medium/heavy/efficient/etc. powerplants that more or less were like the fighter ones but only several times larger. The resulting range of power supplies more or less mimiced what you have here (7000-40000 power, and 210-1200 recharge). Of course, those numbers would need to be tweaked.

yes, my numbers I just pulled out of thin air as I went and only used them to show proportions such as 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x power and the same for recharge.

And I like the idea of different sub-assemblies of engines/batteries to create several types. However, I think the virtual powerplant should be able to be augmented by a powerplant.

I also like the idea that there is one powerplant per engine maximum, you could do this by creating an "Engine" tab and equipping a powerplant to an engine similar to weapons and engines to a ship.

*bump*bump*bump*

only 110m/s?

these are still rough numbers since I dont know how exactly Capital-class Armed Spacecraft should fare in speed compared to our fighters. I think though that a capital would be slower but unfortunately, as is, the way the new System - System jump gates are laid out, having only a 110 is going to cause it to take quite some time to cross the system to make it's jump, so I'm not entirely sure...

If you have an opinion we'd like to hear it

I expect us all thinking about Star Wars & Co when thinking about capital ships, don't we?

Now those are slow, I'd even say they are slooooooooooow.

Maybe around 5 m/s in this game.

You say 'Oooh, but I don't want to spent 20 minutes flying through a sector!'
I say 'If you don't want to carry some hundred (thousand) tons of freight in one run and be prone to pirate ambushes while crawling through a sector then don't use them.'

look, the more hp a ship has, the faster it can go without geting rip't apart by g force. so it can go faster, but turns slower.

Aah, but the more mass a ship has, the slower it accelerates. The way I see this, it means that a capship might have a max speed of, say, 100ms impulse (non-boost), but might take 30km to get up to that speed. Since they don't need to -go- 30km, they'll never be going very fast. And they should have no boost.

Why do you think "The more HP a ship has, the less it gets ripped apart by g force."?

See:
You need more force to accelerate a heavier ship with the same acceleration than a small one. If you scale everything along with the mass (thickness of steel plates) it's probably the same. But if you take 5mm steel for your 5t fighter and 20mm steel for your 50t cruiser. Hmmm, you'd probably need extra structures to fortify the hull.
All in all I'm not sure how stability of something of a spaceship scales with its size, but I would doubt that you can accelerate a larger ship faster.

Imagine the Titanic accelerating like a speed boat. It would burst into pieces.

<Imagine the Titanic accelerating like a speed boat. It would burst into pieces.>

In a speed-boat the engines are at the back and the boat is rather small. Since the boat is small, the large force applied by the speed-boat engine doesn't put a great deal of tortional strain on the hull. Putting an identical setup on an enormous ship like the Titanic would put an enormous amount of strain on the hull towards the front and do damage.

However, if you split up the engine load along the entire length of the ship, (spaced about a speedboat's length apart) you wouldn't put any extra stress on the hull while getting a lot more accelleration (assuming you had a proportionally stronger set of engines.)

But then again, as things get longer they tend to get fatter as well. So suddenly you have strain being put along those parts of it that are far away from the source of the force. So you'd need to have uniformly spaced engines all over a large craft.

/me goes and asks the devs to import Battlestar Galatica (the old TV show models) in as captials...


The problem is this. While large craft are structurally more stable, they are much larger requiring huge engines that just continue to add weight overall.

The trick is to find equilibrim between the engines and the hull since you dont want to lose anything more than you have to.

If all else fails, we could (relating to the Star Wars post) make craft of varying classifications, such as Light Freighter (Falcon), Medium Transport (Med. transport), and Heavy Freighter (something like a frigate) then have Light Cruiser (a craft about 3 times the size of the Prom, with weapons and hull to match), Medium Warship (long, and spiked with guns), then Heavy Battlecruiser (this thing could be like the current Frigate and bristle with F-AGTs)

Personally, I like the way Homeworld (particularly 2) implimented cap ships. But that's just me.