BTW, when you have a ship that is 95% fuel by mass, especially fuel less dense than the structure and operational systems, you're not really leaving a whole lot of volume for that structure and those systems.
For the Corvette that I talked about in the OP, I have it as approximately a cylinder 400 meters long and 80 meters across, or a volume of about 2.01M cubic meters. Assuming the propellant and/or reaction mass are as dense as the other materials, if you take 95% of that, it's about 1.91M cubic meters. Removing that volume equally around the cylinder above leaves you with a skin of the ship that is 0.92 meters thick. (Basic steel has a density of 7.84 g/mL, while solid propellants are between 1.5 and 1.85 g/mL and something like liquid oxygen is 1.141 g/mL - liquid hydrogen is 0.071 g/mL, lol.) If you're really smart, you could have liquid water (basically 1.0 g/mL) or something similarly dense, inert, and plentiful (in an unrefined state that a warship can reach without landing) as your reaction mass, surrounding any fuel, but then you've really cut into the average thickness of your warship's skin where all of the structure and systems are supposed to be.
No.
Way.
In.
Hell.
Is that a warship to then compare to your Strike Craft.
The only aspect of "realism" about Stellaris that I covered in the OP was the rule that a smaller ship does less damage (and can only take less damage) than a bigger ship, with that difference being more than proportional, and if a Strike Craft (which would actually fit inside Hangars) sticks to that rate of damage drop-off, it would do and take considerably less damage than was being shown in the vanilla rules. You posited that the massive difference in fuel and/or reaction mass would make the difference in damage, when 1) your theoretical "95% fuel" basis-warship would never exist, and more importantly 2) nothing in Stellaris suggests that even starting empires' warships make any kind of concessions in that direction. I have granted that there would be some space savings by removing some systems unneeded in a shorter-endurance patrol craft, but I don't see it being near enough to make up the difference to even half of an L-slot X-Ray Laser's output, never mind all the way to vanilla SC output.
I'll take your calculations as correct and use them. So the summary would appear to be the opposite of what you concluded:
"when you have a ship that is 95% fuel by mass, especially fuel less dense than the structure and operational systems, you're not really leaving a whole lot of volume for that structure and those systems."
But even with 95% mass as fuel you have a lot of mass left over for structure and systems, more than you need.
Using 95% of the volume for fuel, the proposed size of corvette could
only have 920mm thick armour (that's a lot of armour, the guinnessworldrecords for the thickest armour on a ship is 1,070mm though I'm honestly surprised that number is so low)
If only 90% of the volume for fuel the same size of corvette could have 1,840mm thick armour... roughly. It would be twice the weight of armour, though the change in diameter would depend on the densities of reaction mass vs armour, which could actually go either way.
After a point you'd have far more armour than you would possibly need and can start using that saving for additional weapons. But how thick does armour need to be? What's it like in reality, not just hypothetically?
The article presents the characteristics of 1.3964 steel and the results of firing a 7.62 mm projectile with a steel core. A simplified Johnson–Cook material model for steel and projectile was used. Then, a FEM (finite element method) simulation ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
The thickness of the hulls of warships depends on their combat purpose. In extreme cases, it can be from 3 mm for mine warfare ships to even 650 mm on the 1941 battleship “Yamato” [1]. Nowadays, armored units are no longer used, which, along with the development of the quality of the produced steel and changes in the concept of war at sea (reduction of the use of artillery projectiles), has changed the thickness of the ships’ hulls. To reduce the ship’s magnetic field, glass-polyester laminates were also used. These materials, in most cases, have almost no bullet resistance.
...
Due to the change in the concept of war at sea, the plating of both ships and warships has decreased and ranges from 2 to 20 mm in most cases.
So the basic corvette, using your numbers, would have 50% more armour than the 1941 battleship Yamato and almost world-record levels of armour... at least 300x the armour of mine warfare ships today (and other ships that use very lightweight and non-conducting materials, with the general trend being to have thinner and thinner hulls). With armour not designed to stop ballistic weaponry like in Stellaris but instead to help evade detection (boosting evasion by reducing enemy tracking).
In general I'm not quite sure what you're trying to argue. It seems self-evident from your own calculations that even small reductions in fuel carried (by not needing FTL drives) could free up a huge mass for the payload of the ship. And that even spending 95% of the mass on fuel and you can still have a lot of mass for armour or weapons. Save some fuel and you can have far more armour than current warships, or indeed almost any warship ever built (though not every warship ever designed, the planned Project Habakkuk was a carrier design with 12,000mm thick armour, intending to be torpedo-proof with pykrete armour it is probably a much cooler example... but that was just a reinforced iceberg with refrigeration problems).
Whatever the scale of savings, non-FTL equipped strike-craft could use the mass saved to mount more weapons than a comparable ship that needs an FTL drive. Just like how Platforms and Starbases have far more hull and armour than other FTL-capable ships. They don't need to move so save on reaction mass and FTL drives. They use the saving for better defences than a mobile vessel can mount... but suffer from having no evasion and no disengagement chance sadly... and from the fact that the big fun platforms were patched out of the game just when Ion cannons were added in paid DLC... that still irks me.
So, it doesn't have to be as extreme as 95% reaction mass used for fuel. And more efficient propulsion system would indeed use far less fuel. One currently very efficient but sadly very slow propulsion technique is ion propulsion. It uses half the reaction mass, but is currently much slower.
Also as an aside here, you say water is inert, or rather you say you'd want something as similarly dense and inert as water... but water isn't inert. It's the opposite, water really likes to react with metals and almost everything else. But water would be useful for other reasons like being used as radiation shielding and even armour (see Pykrete). Water is vital for all life primarily because it is so reactive. But ships using efficient ion drives do use noble gasses, inert meaning that they don't form chemical bonds easily. Forming bonds would be a problem if the reaction mass exits the ship with residual charge, sticks to metal and starts to corrode the ship or other ships nearby. Though inert gasses aren't that common or cheap, a bit expensive on earth at least (something like £2460/kg for xenon).
On Ion Propulsion:
The "Deep Space 1" spacecraft had only 113kg of xenon as reaction mass, with a dry weight of 373kg for 23% of the total mass as fuel/reaction mass. At the time it was a breakthrough and used half the mass of comparable technologies.
But that's a one-way trip only needing 23% total mass as reaction mass.
If you want to stop add another 113kg xenon to decelerate.
If you want to accelerate back home add another 113kg xenon.
Stop when you reach home? another 113kg xenon.
But now the starting ship mass is 93% higher so the first stage will need 93% more fuel to reach the same speeds.
The second stage needs 70% more fuel and so on
The last step is unchanged.
The first 113kg used is now 218kg... but that adds 105kg to the total weight so you need to add a little more fuel to each stage and so on.
The feedback loop continues until you end up with a seemingly ridiculous % of the ship being reaction mass for simple journeys (like more than 90% of total mass as fuel/reaction mass).
I know it's not obvious, but the reaction mass needed for spaceflight is often huge. The distances are really huge. Even using extremely efficient methods of propulsion it takes a lot of mass to accelerate and decelerate even just a few times. Not to mention flying for years in enemy space moving from planet to planet, although you could imagine the ship could pick up mass at each stop on the way to use, so you only need enough reaction mass for a couple of fights before stopping at some asteroids for fuel... but that means big ships also need mining and refinery equipment to save some weight on fuel.
I want SC to be successful as a weapon system, but I don't see enough reasons just at the weapon output level to justify the vanilla numbers. I think there are other ways to get the two numbers closer to each other, but I think the bigger issue is actually direct-fire weapons being far too accurate at similar ranges to what SC are stuck operating at. To put it another way, if SC were capable of less than 14.09 DPD (as a wing) but at 10x the effective range of direct-fire L- and X-slot weapons (WWII carrier attack planes had ranges dozens that of even battleship main guns), would you sign up for that? That's the kind of realism I'm looking for.
I'm confused as to what you want here. I'm trying to give you reasons to justify the damage output but I don't think you like that. It sounds like you just want to nerf Strike craft damage down by at least 50% while increasing range (a bit harsh to cut DPS that much but not ridiculous if the aim is for total damage during the entire battle to be the same, but it would be pointless to make those changes if there's no intent to change the total damage... so I assume a big nerf is the intended outcome).
You want them to have longer than Long range. Strike craft already outrange L-slot weapons - the carrier computer can cause a +100% Engagement range, the carrier staying at 150 range that, in theory at least (when it works) should keep them out of Long range weapons (80) for some time, even with the +20% bonus range from the computer system. I wouldn't oppose increasing the engagement range to cover the entire gravity well, but if you wanted to reach 10x the range you'd need to shrink L range down or expand the size of systems as they currently aren't nearly large enough for that to work. Though current ship speeds make any changes here fairly inconsequential. As an aside it would be nice to have some visual indicators of distance because it's not obvious how large systems even are... and yes you'd probably need to slightly reduce DPS if strike craft were in battle for weeks before getting into Long range.
I'm also confused as to what you want with regards to accuracy and DPS. The 14.09 DPS mentioned confused me, because it seemed oddly specific (2 decimal places, but no matching results on the wiki), dividing by 3 that's 4.69 DPS which is equal to a small X-Ray laser. So you want a H slot max damage to equal 3 small X-ray lasers in damage? I don't think that would work as a change in isolation. The section needs to compare with the other L-slot weapons it could equip for balance, and those do far more damage than that (42.41 DPS for Neutron Launchers, not accounting for the bonus damage to hull).
You say other weapons are too accurate at similar (Short? or Long?) ranges that strike craft operate at. But Strike craft already have 100% accuracy and up to 100% tracking (at range 10) vs a mere 75% accuracy and 50% tracking for S-Gauss weapons at range 50. And L-slot weapons already have 0% tracking, although a negative tracking value that boosted enemy evasion wouldn't be a terrible idea I suppose. In general it looks like Strike craft already work exactly as you suggest they should. At least in small systems when the engagement range already covers most of the system. As increasing the range isn't going to matter that much it sounds like you want Strike craft damage nerfed significantly. That's easy to understand as a balance suggestion. Strike craft may have been overbuffed in previous patches but the damage stats are arbitrary and set for gameplay balance concerns and those numbers are not connected to realism. I don't think the argument from a realism standpoint works, nor does the game need to focus on realism to work. I would rather have have a fun game than one that tries too hard to be realistic (and I don't think you are actual using reality as a guide).
Anyway... I do enjoy thinking about these things. And I have enjoyed your prompts... Though I suspect you will continue to hit the respectfully disagree button no matter what I, or anyone else has to say.
I certainly don't think Stellaris combat, or Strike craft balance is perfect, I have issues with combat in general, a lot of issues actually. But I'm not expecting things to improve dramatically or for the changes to be quick. There's just so much that will need adjusting in a combat overhaul. And I don't have that much hope it'll go smoothly as previous changes have removed features and often made situations worse in my opinion.
My top issues with H-Slot balance:
First, that problem that Carriers combat behaviour is bugged and they try to get into knife-fighting range to fire their S and PD weapons (which aren't really needed and just waste space). But that type of bug has been mentioned by the devs so I hope it'll be fixed... and I hope the fix doesn't introduce any new issues, like carriers trying to kite enemies (good for realism) only to end-up stuck in combat as they quickly flee from each other into deep space rather than standing and fighting.
Second is an old design change, in prior versions there were two sublight speeds, an out-of-combat speed and a second much lower combat speed. The two stats were merged, this resulted in ships moving far too fast into combat and all the consequences of range were reduced. This small change upset me, purely for the loss of visuals, it made once pretty battles into frantic and ugly ball of death (to me at least vs early versions of Stellaris). Also sublight speeds were increased dramatically after the FTL changes to compensate for requiring ships to move to the hyperlane to charge FTL drives... this made it all even worse. I hope the devs revisit this, especially now we have hyper-relays, gateways and jump-drives, perhaps we don't need such high late-game in-combat sublight speeds. But any change will need to accompany a rework of all weapons to avoid making Long-range, alpha-strike weapons like Neutron Launchers even stronger.
Third, the massive issue of Neutron Launchers. They are a bit ridiculous now. But they weren't always so comically stupid. These weapons made sense originally when energy torpedoes (and disrupters) were anti-shield weapons. Then Neutron Launchers were the high-damage, alpha-strike, anti-shield weapon for energy builds that would be followed by shorter-ranged lasers and plasma to cut through the now-unshielded enemy. But changes have made them beyond strange. They have a longer range (130) than the anti-shield energy weapons (50, 120) and most of the anti-shield kinetic weapons (30, 100, 120). They also have more DPS and a massive bonus to Hull when the only weakness being poor shield damage when added terrain like pulsars completely remove shields making Neutron launchers even stronger. So... they need work to make sense and more work to be balanced.
Fourth would be number tweaks. H-slots were perhaps overbuffed to compete with Neutron Launchers and to compensate for all the myriad of bugs they have had in previous versions that made them completely useless. Things like strike-craft flying off randomly, not engaging properly or interacting strangely with missiles and PD, or not benefiting from repeatable techs, when only the first ship out of entire squads would gain a benefit. So once strike-craft are deemed to be in a relatively bug-free state I'd gradually adjust their DPS and make sure all weapon types have balanced damage outputs while making sure all ships and weapons have a role to play.
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