Zurai posted:

Foxfire_ posted:

Retirements is one of the things C# Aurora changed. Retirement age is now dependent on rank. Basically a junior officer that's been around for a few years is someone who joined up to pay for education, does a tour or two, then quits to go get a civilian job. Upper ranks will be career officers.

Zurai posted:

That is literally genocide though.

Zanzibar Ham posted:

I really don't care if once we're on par with them militarily we start aggressively projecting our influence, but I don't like people using it as an excuse to throw down space-nazi rhetoric.

Also you wanted to conquer them as soon as we ran into them.

Zurai posted:

Shoot, my idea didn't work out. Apparently tractor beams in Aurora force the ship with the beam to be the driver. You can't use tractor beams to latch a rider onto a vessel with engines. I was planning to get the Avalanches to double as FAC carriers by turning the Artemises into immobile pods with tractor beams and enough fuel/MSP/magazine space to accommodate 2000 tons of hangar space. That would have allowed the three Avalanches to carry a full squadron of FACs with them into combat while keeping up with the speed of the rest of the fleet, and as soon as an enemy fleet was close enough to matter they could have jettisoned the pods and been up to full speed with 6 FACs alongside them. Alas, when I tested it out, the combined unit moved at 1 km/s.

I think there's still merit to this idea for the future, and the next time we get a chance to design large capital ships I'm going to propose we slap a tractor on there for exactly this purpose. It lets us turn 500 tons of space (tractor beam) into multiple thousand tons of hangar bay space without having to suffer the combat speed/size penalty associated with having it all onboard. An almost completely future-proof 4500-ton pod can accommodate 2 hangar spaces (2 FACs or 4 full-sized fighters), 2 magazines, 250k liters of fuel, 600 MSP, and 5 layers of armor with 24 months of deployment time (for use as jump point defenses or the like). Stripping the armor down to 1 layer reduces the weight to 3800 tons; reducing the deployment time to 12 moths only saves about 60 tons. The only components on there that would conceivably require updating are the armor and the magazines, and neither would really do anything other than shaving a few tons every generation of tech.

Zurai posted:

That's actually what started the idea in my head, but I don't think missile pods make logical sense in Aurora.

Crazycryodude posted:

Only if you crew the pods with real sailors and not just conscripts....

We can even pretend it's a drone if that's what the newsvids need to hear

Zurai posted:

All of that is technically possible in game. Not exactly the way you describe it, but you can tug shipyards, asteroid miners are a thing, as are recreation and habitation pods.