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Post by dragonkid11 on Nov 14, 2016 12:20:57 GMT
How much maintenance does a space warship need anyway?
It's probably cheaper to just set space robot warship in than training people for the job when there's most likely a lack of candidates.
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Post by tessfield on Nov 14, 2016 19:37:19 GMT
I wonder why there aren't any escape pod type mechanics in the game.
Why don't we take prisoners? Think about it, every crewman in a spaceship is trained on several fields. They're now very far away from home. They could've died, but they escaped before their ship was destroyed. They are now POW, and can be put to work on the field they trained for. Or even have them change sides?
One thing the game doesn't take much into account is how expensive would be to get people into warships. You need well trained individuals who are willing to risk all these things we've mentioned.
I can easily picture all the major powers agreeing to a never destroy an escape pod and capture all prisoners rule, if only to encourage the few individuals who can take care of a ship to actually participate in battle.
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Post by subunit on Nov 14, 2016 20:03:09 GMT
I wonder why there aren't any escape pod type mechanics in the game. Why don't we take prisoners? Think about it, every crewman in a spaceship is trained on several fields. They're now very far away from home. They could've died, but they escaped before their ship was destroyed. They are now POW, and can be put to work on the field they trained for. Or even have them change sides? One thing the game doesn't take much into account is how expensive would be to get people into warships. You need well trained individuals who are willing to risk all these things we've mentioned. I can easily picture all the major powers agreeing to a never destroy an escape pod and capture all prisoners rule, if only to encourage the few individuals who can take care of a ship to actually participate in battle. Boarding is at least implicitly represented a couple of times in the campaign, so it definitely happens. My guess is that the overall number of actual crewmembers on fighting vessels for the various factions numbers in the low thousands, so I think you're right that the personnel themselves are quite valuable. I would really like an explicit boarding representation- this could be a couple of little EVA men models that move from a Marine Pod on the boarder's ship to the armor of the ship being boarded, then traverse around the surface of the armor until they find apertures and start moving along the inside of the outer armor till they get to the crew pod, where they stack up and board, and some roll is made for the actual boarding action. This would give low- (no?)-power slugthrowers a much more valuable combat role (sure you've knocked out my main power... but can your marines get across in the face of my machinegun nests??). If we wanted to get really crazy, permit inside-armor weapons, like arming crew pods with firing port weapons... then the marines would really have a rough time of it, and you might have to get them to follow the interior components for cover rather than skating around on the exterior armor.
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Post by jonen on Nov 14, 2016 22:06:00 GMT
I wonder why there aren't any escape pod type mechanics in the game. C/f Atomic rockets. Short version: The safest place to be in case of emergency is right there in your crew module inside what's left of your armor. If necessary dump your reactor and persist on emergency power. Main Belt Extraction? But unless you can guarantee a strategic benefit, the cost benefit of trying to take prisoners probably fall due to the logistics of it. It's also expensive to get someone out of a warship if they don't want to go. --- You know, a customs/patrol mission where you have a set number of transports you need to rendezvous zero/zero (zero distance, zero relative velocity) with inside individual time limits (each transport has it's own scheduled windows for arrival and departure) and send over BVSS teams could be interesting. More Search and Rescue (rendezvous with a ship transmitting emergency and send over a rescue/salvage party. Troop deployment to a larger station or smaller asteroid transit, rendezvous/enter orbit and deploy troops).
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Post by wafflestoo on Nov 14, 2016 22:24:19 GMT
If you want to mount SAR/C on hostile personnel post-battle you radio them and tell everyone who doesn't want to be a frozen space raisin in 3-months (+ 3-months depending on the condition of their craft) to suit-up and abandon ship. Pick them up one-at-a-time, cuff'em, intern'em, move on to the next. If nobody takes you up on your offer you fly away waving, "buh-bye".
Obviously, any SAR is going to be costly in propellant so you're going to go chasing after your guys first and the other guy's guys second (if ever).
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Post by tessfield on Nov 14, 2016 23:26:02 GMT
C/f Atomic rockets. Short version: The safest place to be in case of emergency is right there in your crew module inside what's left of your armor. If necessary dump your reactor and persist on emergency power. Good point... It depends on how much radiation that is, though. It's "safe" enough that you can make a pass next to the enemies's without dying... I think. I mean, let's assume realistic radiaton levels here, not the crazy ones we actually use that would probably melt everyone inside a crew capsule not in your own ship. A solid rocket fuel powered escape pod would push you away from the ship, so you'd experience high radiation, but only temporarily. Radiation can be lethal, it doesn't have to be. I'm not picturing forced extraction, just a matter of asking the people in escape pods if they want to be taken in as prisoners or just let them float away and die. The game does mention a fairly heavy propaganda machine, but soldiers are way easier to come by if they don't have to be suicidal to enlist. An agreement to take prisoners on BOTH sides would make soldiers easier to come by, and cheaper. Also, there's plenty of labor that can be gotten out of prisoners. Specially those with the skills required. Medics are supposed to heal anyone too, right? There are plenty of factors that could contribute to more "friendly" warfare, the only question is how much of a factor they are in this environment. On the other hand, human life seems to be very useless to our faction given they're happy to nuke the heck out of everything, so maybe everything I'm saying is rather pointless
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Post by dpidz0r on Nov 15, 2016 0:01:13 GMT
On the other hand, human life seems to be very useless to our faction given they're happy to nuke the heck out of everything, so maybe everything I'm saying is rather pointless Yeah. And tbh I think you'd almost want crews that understood they were expendable and were willing to expend themselves. A lot of the encounters in this game tend to be a lose-lose scenario, it's just that the mission ends before the aftermath has a chance to kick in. e.g. yeah my railguns maybe sawed the enemy silo ship into 6 different pieces and we "won" with no immediate casualties, but the 120 nukes that detonated 1km away while chasing my flares probably means that in another 5 years my crew is all going to die of cancer. That sort of situation could also turn really nasty really fast. e.g. I lost the fight due to my ship having the engines and radiators nuked off of it and I know I'm going to die from acute radiation poisoning in a few days, so why not cut up all the structural bits of my ship just right and scuttle it in such a way as to make the debris a massive navigational hazard for the gravity well we were fighting over? And for good measure we could make sure all as much radioactive crap as possible falls on top of the inhabited areas of the planet. It's not like my side is going to take it back any time soon with transit times measured in years, and if we're lucky the reinforcements will arrive to take it back about the time the enemy has finished cleaning up the mess we left for them. Though having typed all of that, I guess you'd need a crew that's willing enough to sacrifice themselves but not so crazy that they'd commit some final act of spite that would push the enemy over the edge and turn the war into mutually assured destruction. I'm not sure where you'd find people like that. Maybe a dystopian future full of brainwashing and propaganda?
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Post by jonen on Nov 15, 2016 0:07:30 GMT
Like in submarine warfare, at least part of the issue is how do you accomodate survivors?
Most of the stock designs, and most of your own designs as well, will only have the bare minimum accommodations to squeeze in the crew. Let alone boarding crews or security personnel to keep prisoners under watch. To say nothing of prisoners (which, if worse comes to worse, can be kept in spacesuits tethered to the outside of the crew module.
Presumably there are tenders and support ships available not far away that you can offload them to, but in that case it's easier (and safer) to leave the enemy stewing in their hulls until a recovery can be organized.
And for radiation safety - you're not just looking at the reactor as a hazard. Cosmic rays aside, the biggest reactor in the system is the sun, and CME will fry you just as surely. So staying in the ship with actual armor, and radiation shielding, and hoping for the best, is safer than gambling on getting as far away as possible with what little supplies and stores you can grab on the way.
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Post by dragonkid11 on Nov 15, 2016 0:19:00 GMT
Honestly, every single fight in the game kinda showed that warship crews are suicidal as all hell.
Even the Neptune Methane miner depot in that difficult as hell mission was readied to face their death when your ship eventually catch up on them.
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Post by wafflestoo on Nov 15, 2016 0:35:37 GMT
Honestly, every single fight in the game kinda showed that warship crews are suicidal as all hell. Even the Neptune Methane miner depot in that difficult as hell mission was readied to face their death when your ship eventually catch up on them. I think it's more a matter of they didn't have much else they could've done... Makes me wonder what kind of society would be able to generate masters-degree-level educated people with near fanatical zealotry levels of nationalism to them in the quantities needed to prosecute a war on the scale shown?
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Post by tessfield on Nov 15, 2016 0:54:13 GMT
<snip> Makes me wonder what kind of society would be able to generate masters-degree-level educated people with near fanatical zealotry levels of nationalism to them in the quantities needed to prosecute a war on the scale shown? THIS. All the this. My argument comes down to, if crew is well educated masters-degree-and-such, it makes less sense they'd be fanatical zealots. Where do you get these people from? How do you create these people? Doesn't their education include history and such? Actually, the game actually makes it clear everybody knows it's war and we're doing whatever we can and we're desperate, so I guess that answers that: desperation. Kinda sad. On the other hand, we meet a lot of bloodthirsty people, or those who are trying to make a difference, so it rather looks like a combination of desperation and sadism?
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Post by Durandal on Nov 15, 2016 1:15:25 GMT
<snip> Makes me wonder what kind of society would be able to generate masters-degree-level educated people with near fanatical zealotry levels of nationalism to them in the quantities needed to prosecute a war on the scale shown? THIS. All the this. My argument comes down to, if crew is well educated masters-degree-and-such, it makes less sense they'd be fanatical zealots. Where do you get these people from? How do you create these people? Doesn't their education include history and such? Actually, the game actually makes it clear everybody knows it's war and we're doing whatever we can and we're desperate, so I guess that answers that: desperation. Kinda sad. On the other hand, we meet a lot of bloodthirsty people, or those who are trying to make a difference, so it rather looks like a combination of desperation and sadism? After all the crap that happened to Earth in the game's backstory I really don't think it's that much of a stretch. Look at what happened after the massive loss of life in WWI. That on a *planetary* scale? Sheesh.
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Post by dragonkid11 on Nov 15, 2016 1:18:43 GMT
It really makes you wonder if the game was secretly a stealth sequence to Mobile Suit Gundam.
We NEVER really know what happened before Universal Century.
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Post by bdcarrillo on Nov 15, 2016 1:27:57 GMT
I like how we're negotiating and assuming the space geneva convention.
Currently we see board and seize or total annihilation. I don't think we've explored capitulation or surrender.
Surely a crew facing immnent destruction would signal that they yield, in a space-chivalrous manner. Or perhaps they'd take the more devious scorched space dogma... Who knows?
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Post by jonen on Nov 15, 2016 1:34:19 GMT
Survival in space demands pragmatism. Not chivalry.
Pragmatism means if it's not practical to take prisoners, you do not. It means that the enemy will know that they are unlikely to be taken prisoner.
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