the edit button next to the reply button which is next to the quote button which is in the top right corner of every reply. You can only edit until someone posts after you though.

Ah that would explain why I couldn't see the edit button someone had already posted after me.
Thanks

"The anti-aircraft fire of New Jersey and the other screening ships proved virtually impenetrable."

Ya, sucks that . . there airforce had no armor or self-sealing tanks.
And I said "where on there way out" where was no switch thrown . . but the biggest threat to any ship where aircraft and they proved the demise of many BB's . . the threat of aircraft forced many ships to upgrade there antiair . .

The Battle of Leyte Gulf was the only real action the Yamoto had (except the suicide mission), the BB Musashi a sister ship was sunk . . Yamoto ran . . from mainly the US destroyer Heermann and it's torpedoes! (no BB’s on the US side)

Remember this argument started with this statement “If people want large battleships with massive guns slugging it out they are thinking WWI/WWII (even though in WWII this did not happen)” which was a bit of a over statement but not that far off . .

Out of all of the ships you listed none where BB’s and only one was even in a fleet that had a BB in it when it sunk (USS Monssen) . . AND that was rather irregular fight . .the two fleets almost ran into each other in the middle of the night. (but this one qualifies as a slug fest!)

Now what you did not list was Battle of Surigao Strait (which was again rather unconventional, not a slug fest and was one sided because it was a ambush and the US had better tech that kept it as a standoff fight)
“USS California and USS Tennessee opened fire. Radar fire control allowed these American battleships to hit targets from a distance at which the Japanese could not reply because of their inferior fire control systems. (Night fighting) Yamashiro and Mogami were crippled by a combination of 14-inch (356mm) and 16-inch (406 mm) armor-piercing shells. Shigure turned and fled but lost steering and stopped dead. Yamashiro sank at 04:19, with Nishimura on board. His surviving ships retreated west.”

So again Where are the BB vs BB stand up fights? We have BBs sunk by Aircraft and “running” from destroyers, we have a rather accidental slug out in the middle of the night (luck and vision had a massive role here). . and we have an ambush that was entirely one sided. . . no massive like of BB’s lining up and “slugging it out” . .

Now, I could be convinced otherwise if shown otherwise . . really . . I just need evidence to the contrary and I have yet to see anything to. What I see is some not exactly valid examples. This is not saying that BB’s where useless then (by no means). . but there effectiveness was always trumped by airpower (even as “fledgling” as it was) in WWII This effectively stopped any real “epic” BB battles from happening . . It is still the realm of WWI and old sail . . not WWII and not modern day.

lol, reminds me of Warship Gunner 2 (yes, i know the game is rather unrealistic, but it works for making a point)

You only had one ship against fleets of aircraft, destroyers, battleships, and subs. To effectively kill everything, you had to pull away sections of their fighting force and take them out bit by bit. Even the superweapons, which were REALLY strong, couldnt really run into the middle of a bunch of ships and hope to survive for long.

The problem with doing this in space is that you cant really separate the pockets since the bigger you are, the more inertia, which makes it easier for smaller ships to catch up and attack from behind.

If you make a ship that can kill anything, it has to be HUGE, with that mass comes inertia, which means slow turning speeds and accel/deccel, this allows smaller ships to come in from behind and take it out. The solution to that would be, of course, to make guns all over the ship, increasing its size even further. Now then, are all these weapons each going to be the same power as a regular cap ship's? If so, it would have to be HUGE.

My point becomes, anything that big is an easy target. All you have to do is make a REALLY big bomb and chuck it at the thing. The same thing happened to battleships, Aircraft were able to dispose of them without being hit. Big, slow, target vs small, fast, target.

OK Ta_erog the Hood was a battlecruiser so I didn't realized that you only wanted BB sunk by BB. sorry. you maybe right. but, what does this have to do with weather Cap ships should be researched or not?

I don't have oodles of time to research every aspect of every ship ever made. I lived the navy life, I was on the USS Fox from Nov89 til Apr94. I'm proud of my first hand knowledge of her. I Know I'd like Cap ships to be in the research tree. Although having it as a selectable pre-game condition might please both sides.

Thanks

If you're being anal about designations, those battleships aren't battleships anyway. Battleships were coined for the old ironclad ships that replaced the line battle ships. The dreadnaught classification coined in 1905 would be more appropriate for a ship three or four times the length of an ironclad. Really it's just a general classification that changes depending on who's doing the naming, and could loosely be applied to all modern naval warships, not one of our modern frigates are less than a match in firepower or durability to a WW1 battleship, let alone something from the 1800's.

Obsolesence in space. Conventional space travel is practically speaking, impossible. Unless of course you've created some form of inertial dampening. Going from thousands of miles per second, a rough estimation of the unit speeds, to a full stop in a second? Everyone on the ship just turned into a very thin film on the walls, assuming the ship itself didn't just experience its own implosion triggered nuclear blast. In such a universe where reality is either compensated for or ignored in such a manner, inertia is a relativistic problem that can basically be ignored. For balance reasons it's a neccessity that the biggest badass be the slowest badass, but it's not a physical requirement as it would be today if we decided to start an interstellar war with little green men and spent the next million years traveling to the nearest star. Of course, we could also be cute and say it's really taking several days to cross that gravity well and the game just advances at a rapid pace for convenience. In which case we're not really using anything resembling realism at all and all of the previous and following is pointless.

Another problem is the idea of a really big bomb. They didn't actually use really big bombs to kill really big ships. It was often a fairly small hole by comparison, something you'd also sink a significantly smaller ship with. You perhaps needed to poke a few more holes due to segmented hulls, not a real big deal. These futuristic spaceships aren't floating in water slightly below the density required to sink. A hole leaking atmosphere from a portion of the ship is a hole. They also have shields. Shields aren't an arbitrary concept, they are something that feeds off power. Your method of power generation is almost surely going to be limited by size in some fashion, so the size of the ship can scale directly with it's shielding. The armor, although less so, is also comparatively uninhibited. You needn't worry about problems like sinking, so mass is irrelevant. If you have a ship with 20 inches of armor and a ship with 200 inches of armor, the only difference is how big of an engine you need to push it, arguable considering the definite existence of inertial dampening. Weighing more doesn't pose any other problems.

Battleships have been antiquated by physical limitations of something that floats in water, and the technological limitations in defensive weaponry. We can kill them much easier than we can protect them. Shielding doesn't likely hold to that architecture though, it's an equalizing force that changes a battleship from a big, exceedingly slow target, to something that can have a hell of a lot more shielding and take one hell of a beating before even suffering damage. Being in space with inertial dampening, it's not neccessarily slow either.

For research... This damned leveling system really screws up the idea of sticking abilities in later research and just having them be big guns. What would they level before they obtained that research? Do you stick them at level 1 and keep them there till abilities are researched? It's a rather contrived setup to start with, and probably not improved by such a change. Many of the abilities aren't things that look like more advanced technology anyways, the range enhancements are akin to having radar. The Dunov and Akkan I would say have advanced, tech requiring abilities, but not the other three. Making them research requiring capital ships would make perfect sense. It only seems wierd having such early access to the other three because it takes equal effort to gain access to siege frigates, missile frigates and more for carriers, the smaller equivilencies. With armistice, I'd say the Akkan is worth at least eight or nine, without still five or six, and the Dunov with that shield restore(that's worthless on anything but a capital ship by the way,how about changing it to be an area effect on the surrounding ships if significantly less impressive magnitude?) is an impressive lifespan increase on your capital ships if not drained of antimatter continuously, probably worth more than the Akkan. Against this poor ai, four of those by themselves is the game twice over. Regardless, it's going to seem odd that the command cruiser is so high up the tech tree.

You need to define "conventional" here, because I do not think you're using it the way I -- or most others -- would. Because conventional space travel does happen, right now. Both orbital and interplanetary (remember the mars probes?)

Yes, and how long do they take to accelerate? It's possible for a person to leave the solar system, or fly into a sun. Space travel isn't possible though. We can shoot someone off on a rocket in a straight line, with a sustained acceleration and get them going quite fast. Being a ballistic missile for space travel is possible, but it's not practical. The moon landing took four days. That's comparable to a constructor leaving the planet to build a crystal or metal mine on the orbiting rocks. They could have done it faster, a lot faster, but you're still looking at hours of acceleration to reach a meaningful speed without killing your passengers, even with the gravity well system limiting your needed flight durations. The near instantaneous acceleration of the ships in game amounts to my above statements on thin films and implosion.

Let's get back to capital ships and whether or not they should be researched.

Having access to cutting edge capital ships with awesome abilities prior to cruisers (or more advanced frigates) just seems so wrong. I still would like to see capital ships being the next step in the tech tree AFTER their similar concept cruisers. So, for example, to be able to research the Sova Carrier, you would have to research the Light Carrier Cruiser first.

Your missing my point! You need to define your "conventional" because what you say is not what most people would mean by it (assuming most people can apply "conventional" to "space travel" anyway!). Its unclear and confusing.



We've also got the technology to build a nuclear engine capable of producing 1mm/s^2 acceleration effectively indefinitely, along with other technologies that (as long as they last) would allow astronauts to survive in space indefinitely (urine -> water conversion, and some hydroponics to grow food). Assuming they last long enough, that right there is enough for interstellar travel! Admittedly, it need refining to be useful, but thats still a huge leap.

Apollo and the shuttle gets/got their water from fuel cells. and the more energy they used the more water they got. Apollo they got up to 2.2 lbs a day or something like that.

I agree. That's (and from the background story of Sins) why all sizes should be available from the start. Because I don't think the Vasari could ever be galactic locust with corvettes (or whatever) only. I've written about this already.

IMO the sizes should not be the limitation. And I agree with you that capital ships shouldn't be cutting edge godly-powers ships from the start. They should become so through research. Research should also lead to better frigates, cruisers...

Ron, that is conventional space travel, as opposed to unconventional, folding space or whatnot. It's possible, but not practical. Yes, we can go places, no, we can't do combat maneuvers with that nuclear engine. Even 10g's over an extended period of time will kill you. With a liquid breathing apparatus and a gel encasing, maybe we could get some very high numbers. Accellerating to hundreds or thousands of miles per second at a survivable pace will still take a very long time, reversing direction would be an obscenity. Thus inertial dampening must exist for the game to be so, or realism is irrelevant and concerns about size needn't be adhered to anyways. I'm saying that size is not a problem, mass is not a problem. It's a problem inside an atmosphere with current technology, not for a space faring race that can perform combat maneuvers at hundreds of miles per second. Going splat is the true limitation to space travel.

None of this has any bearing on Sins of a Solar Empire, unless we're going to remake the whole game into a WWII historical simulator, where the aircraft utterly pwn all ships by dive bombing and torpedo runs.


Fighters are not standoff weapons in space games in general, and in Sins in particular. Unless seeing giant fleets of Sova and maybe a few of the one that restores shields is your cuppa.

R
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You disagree? The speed of light is 983,571,056 feet per second, At an acceleration rate equal to our own gravity(something we'd know is safe for extended durations) it would take just under a year to get going that fast, never mind the possibility of obtaining that speed. Accelerating to a useful speed at a safe rate will take days.

your assuming no gravity from the ship. ships as big as these caps would have some gravity which would reduce the g's pulled.

wasnt disagreeing, just found it incredibly funny <3

and capships probably wouldnt have that big of an effect since you are inside them

Yes, the people at the front end would have the opposite effect from those at the rear of the ship, they'd go splat just that much faster.

Thank goodness for the simple fiction of artificial gravity and inertial compensators, so we can soundly not give a gorram about that and get back to what's important - watching big ships beat the snot out of one another.

The problem here is that people are mixing reality and different sci-fi's freely and making assumptions on that. .

First some comments . .
IF you remove inertia you are removing what mass is, inertia could be seen as a side effect of mass. to accelerate/decelerate something with mass you must expend energy [full stop]

Inertia also <> gravity

Artificial gravity if it had anything to do with "real" gravity would have some strange consequences. . Gravity has no range limit (only the inverse square law limits it’s strength)
See the problem? Make 1g of gravity on your ship and your ship would have the attractive power of earth . . but not the mass to back it up . . also the people near the generator and farther down the ship would have to deal with the gravitational gradient. Fun fun . .

Shields . . Still entirely fiction . .. . there are 100’s of sci-fi books that have shields work in entirely different ways. . . pick one ore make a new one up . . .

Reality - Humans are frail, High acceleration changes kill. . and there is NOTHING we can do about it short of reconstructing our body’s . . and even then we may only be able to dou Even 10g's over an extended period of time will kill you. “With a liquid breathing apparatus and a gel encasing, maybe we could get some very high numbers.” The air voids in our body are only a small worry compared to internal organs that are built and secured for that much pressure. It is the difference of mass of these structures that will rip them apart and the destruction of our “internal plumbing”

Anyway going at speed (not 1c but a more reasonable .5c) is just impractical (not impossible) to our sci-fi ideals but possible in reality.

My point being IF you start adding sci-fi tech (which are frankly impossible or so far out there that it is good enough to say so) then all real physics goes also . .
If you add a “inertial compensator” what heck that is really other then a plot device a writer made so to further his sci-fi story (like most sci-fi tech, Heisenberg compensator? Come on! Just a black box saying suspend disbelief so we can get on with our cool sci-fi story and impossible tech.). What most writer do is tailor there sci-fi tech to fit there story . . . or if writing for someone else’s story they have a “bible” to work from.

If we are to have sci-fi (which I love) you have to Define your new and TOATALY fictitious universe.
That means if you have an “inertial compensator” then you have redefined Physics in your universe. But with that change allot of other things change also. And change another thing and more change. Reality gets thrown out the window . . But beware you need to be aware of strange side effects (a ship with a inertial compensator that is hit with a projectile might react strangely, as in if you have no or little inertia anything that hits the ship will make it rebound like a ball. A small real mass at speed hits your ship that has generated small fake mass etc, rail-guns could fire at .9999 lightspeed with little needed power, etc)

Now with that the author NEEDS to define what is changed and not and how that affects the story. Internal consistency is important. Without this framework NO discussion could be made about anything IN the story.

In effect that makes most of the above posts . . . .not really worth much since people are bringing there own fictitious sci-fi universe in to the discussion and they are incompatible (exposal when you add pseudo-reality into the mix)
We should stick to the SIN’s universe and tech, and if we do not have enough information we need to ask the developers/writers if said item/tech fits in to the SIN’s universe and storyline.

SO if SIN's has artificial gravity, inertial compensators, and shields . . that we need to know what "flavor" the writers have put in . .THEN we can have a real discussion of what the game should be like.

jc1ward -
I do not mean to be argumentative, but I do not have the fascination that allot of people have with BB’s as most people do. I have always been more interested in History, Naval battles as a whole, the roles of tech, tactics, personal, environment, and numbers had to play in the battles. . . .
Unfortunately there is allot of misinformation, entirely wrong idea’s how things work, nationalistic bride and bias, propaganda, nostalgia, off popular views, and biased personal views . . to wade through . .
The fact is that BB’s in WWII did not play the role entirely in the manor at which they where designed is highlighted by the lack (read diminished number of expected) of massed BB duels or line battles (in which they where designed for), shift of priorities on construction, and subsequent found limitations and vulnerabilities. What we have left is allot of nostalgia over the older ages of combat.
Now tech has changed again . . Naval warfare will never be the same and will change again. Concepts, designs and tactics MUST change also . . Some old concepts, designs and tactics must be retired. . bigger guns no longer = better offence, more armored no longer means better defended, etc . . the new way is finding and killing from a stand off position FIRST. Not getting hit is the new defense (this includes active defenses) because the new weapons are terribly powerful . . . . With this new way of thinking comes medium ships that have multiple roles and capabilities. They employ stealth, massive sensors, Extreme range weapons and countermeasures. And this will change again . . .

“USS Fox from Nov89 til Apr94. I'm proud of my first hand knowledge of her. “
That is great . . and something to be quite proud of. Though I am a bit confused since I would expect a missile frigate man, (even a older class one) would see the growing power of smaller ships once the “size of the Gun’ Era has passed.

“I Know I'd like Cap ships to be in the research tree. Although having it as a selectable pre-game condition might please both sides.”
This is quite acceptable . . If it fits with the storyline and game play SIN’s is working on.

ok before we start this fight we need to make sure everyone has been stuffed with their packing peanuts.       

Yup, just make sure they are of the same density of the surrounding tissue
But how to get them in the head . . . .sticking them up your nose and ears is just so undignified . .   

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that is why we installed the hing.