Advanced Warship Tutorial

This article contains information relevant to both the C# and VB6 versions of Aurora. Where differences exist, they are noted in the appropriate sections.

Designing an effective warship in Aurora is a tricky thing. There are many different components and weapons that can be combined to build anything from fast, nimble scout fighters to ponderous, near-invincible battleships. However the large number of effective designs is dwarfed by the enormous number of possible creations that are an ineffective waste of resources. The game itself does only the most rudimentary sanity checking, so it is up to you to make a sensible design.

This article aims at helping to design any kind of warship, it is however by no means the only way.

Mission Profile

No ship can be good at everything, thus you first have to decide what kind of missions your ship should handle. Is it designed as escort, as scout, as main combatant, carrier, or for light rear area protection? Does it operate close to its home base, or is it designed to project power? Does the ship operate alone, or in a task force, and if yes, with what other ships?

Once you know what you want, look at any existing designs you might have, and check if any of them can already fulfill that mission, and if yes, if it is significantly outdated. Retooling and Component Research is not free, so you might be better with building additional ships of older designs.

Concept

Once you know the mission, you need to fix the tonnage of the ship. Fighters have built-in tonnage limits of 500 tons, and gunboats/fast attack craft are limited to 1000 tons. 5-10kt are usual sizes for escorts or smaller ships. You can pick any size you like and have the yards and maintenance facilities for, but it is important that you set one. You can always make a ship larger, but this easily leads to a size creep as you cram in more and more. When you have your size fixed, decide on what type of weapons and sensors you want to mount to fulfill the intended mission. Keep the number of different systems low, each weapon has different strengths, if you select too many, you end up being mediocre everywhere.

Armor

Add a the armor thickness you want from the start. This is easy to forget, and it is annoying to have to redesign your already balanced ship because it still has paper thin armor. This is also the time to set the deployment time. A fighter only needs some days, a system defense craft some months, while a ship designed for missions in other systems should have a decent time it can stay on station. If your ship should incorporate shields, add them as well.

Engines

Knowing how heavy your ship will be, you can now decide on how fast your ship should get. If your ship will be operating alone or only with sister ships of the same class, you just need to balance the size of the engines with fuel consumption and the resulting speed, however a ship operating in a fleet is restricted to the slowest vessel. To not waste fuel and space, it is advisable to standardize your fleet to the same speed. This can be done by committing a certain percentage to engines with given power multiplier, for example 20% with 1.2 engine power, resulting in one 8HS engine per 2000t of ship size.

If your ship should be jump capable, add the jump drive.

Sensors / Fire Controls

Add now the sensors and fire controls you want on your design. Larger ships will need some redundancy in fire control. To fire on a target, an active sensor contact is needed, it does not need to be on the same ship but, it is still a good idea to include some active capability on larger ships as backup. The active sensor you employ should have more range than your fire controls. Missile Fire Controls should match the range of your missiles, else you either waste fuel or HS for your FCs. Excess MFC range can be useful if you expect enemy ECM and/or improved, longer ranged missiles. Beam Fire Controls are more flexible in range, and lasers often cannot be matched by the range of the Beam Fire Control. However excess range means increased damage over the effective range. Beam Fire Control however should match the tracking speed of the weapon. The minimum of weapon tracking speed, and the rating of the Beam Fire Control is used, so they should be matched for optimal performance.

Engineering & Fuel

Add some more engineering spaces and fuel until the range and maintenance lifetime are higher than what you want in the end. They don't need to be balanced yet, this is simply to hold space free for them.

Weapons

Now it is time to add weapons. Fill your ship up with weapons and appropriate power plants (for beam weapons) or magazines (for missile weapons) until you hit your set tonnage. Weapons are the fanciest and most exciting part, but there is a thing as 'too many guns'. Armor, Engineering Spaces, Engines and Fuel are dull, but as important for an effective fighting unit. Hangars can also be added here, they are the 'weapon' of a carrier.

VB6 only: If you use hangars, you need to check the 'Keep excess Q' flag, and add additional spare berths for the crew of your parasites. Without this, the ship suffers from overcrowding, and life support will eventually fail, killing your crew.

C# only: Remember that beam weapons in C# can consume MSP when they're fired. Make sure you have enough MSP to fire your weapons for as long as you'll need them. This should be in addition to the MSP you need for getting to and from the fight, and for damage control during the fight. For space combat this isn't necessarily a huge requirement, but for planetary bombardment it can be quite significant.

Command Facilities (C# only)

In addition to the basic Bridge required on ships of 1000+ tons, C# adds several additional command facilities, to allow multiple leaders to boost a single ship in various ways. Generally, these will be wastes of space on smaller ships, but on larger vessels, the weight penalty for installing them matters less, and the benefits they offer matter more.

Fine Tuning

Now it is time to balance your design. Your Maintenance lifetime should be larger than your deployment time, which should be larger than your days on max power. There is a value 'Max Repair Cost', which is the amount of MSP needed to fix the single most expensive component, your ship should be able to store more MSP than this value, if you want your ship to be able to repair itself.

Also check you have enough power, and look if you are satisfied by the number of missiles you can load. In the ordnance tab (next one to design) you can add a default load out of missiles. Divide the number of missiles by the number of launchers to get the number of salvoes you can fire. Weight the number of Fire Controls against the number of weapon mounts. It is a good idea to check the percentage of space different components take up, to see if your ship is balanced. You can always tweak the size a bit if you need to, but make sure that the ship still does what you need it to do.

Finishing Touches

Last you can decide on the minimum rank required to command your ship (VB6 only), and set a list of ship names from which your ships will be named. The latter is a matter of convenience, you can also manually name all your ships. Officer rank is important especially in the beginning where you might not have enough senior officers to command your constructions, so you may want to lower the rank requirement.

Different Class Notes: While it sounds very cool to have Destroyers, Light and Heavy Cruisers, Frigates, Battleships, Battlecruisers, Carriers with Bombers and Fighters all together, their functionality will overlap in practice. A few classes are probably enough.

Fighter Notes: Fighter design is a bit special, as you only have 10 HS to work with (and you might want to use even less), while a single 10cm beam weapon already takes up 3 HS. Together with the weight of the single layer of armor it can be very difficult to design an effective fighter early in the game. Box launchers for missiles are a popular way to give fighters a useful punch, because of their small size.

Research Notes: By the time the lead ship of the class leaves the yard, you probably will have researched some base tech that would allow some slightly improved version of some component. This is inevitable,. Don't try to include that, your ship is still okay without it. Wait until the improvements accumulate, and then make a new design, or refit.