Right. Here's the system screen, which will be staring quite a lot.
The top-most row has buttons for the important screens, all of which can be accessed through short-cuts. F3 opens this system map and F2 opens colony summary - these are the two most often used ones.
Scroll and zoom are self-evident. Time increment means how far will the game "jump" - the really short commands are mostly useful during combat. Sub-pulse length allows us to determine how often the game calculates movement - best to leave it on automatic.
The large window on the left holds all the information and tools for manipulating the map. We're going to make few changes:
On the display screen (which shows in the above screenshot), I selected "Show order time and duration" which will allow us to see on a glance how long it'll take for each Task Group to finish its current task. I also selected "Show events" so I don't need to check the game log all the time as events will be displayed on the bottom of the map window. On "Display 2", I selected all of the combat options. We don't need to touch the rest of them - though "All bodies" is a good way to see quickly what sort of shit a solar system has and enables you to zoom from one celestial object to another.
Okay, the big blog in the middle is the solar system. Let's zoom in:
Now we can see the Kuiper Belt, which is the outer asteroid field, surrounding the actual solar system. Read more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt Note that the game still considers Pluto to be a planet
You can also just make out Pluto and Neptune and Uranus and Saturn. The inner solar system is a mess, so let's zoom more in.
Right. The large green circle on the outside, next to the mouse cursor, is the orbital path of Jupiter. Going towards the star, there's next the Asteroid Belt - read more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt The asteroids are randomly generated, though. Would be really fucking cool if the game pulled them off the Minor Planet Centre database but oh well.
Now we can see Mars and Earth and Venus and Mercury but it's still a bit of a mess, so let's go deeper! In fact, let's zoom in on Earth and see what's that blue stuff above it is.
A-HA! There's Luna and Earth - the cradle of civilization in all of its manboon glory! More importantly, we have 600 Missile Bases on Earth and because I earlier turned on the various combat displays, we can see that the missiles (Conventional ICBM (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile)) have a range of 100,000 km (light blue) but that's not much of use to us as the fire control system currently in use (dark blue) only has range of 50,000 km. Oh and from now on, to avoid the thousand-zero-syndrome, I'll use kkm (thousand km), mkm (million km) and bkm (billion km) when talking about distances. Anyway, that's the only defence that Earth currently has. But what are those missile bases? Let's take a look.
Pressing F6 gets us to the "Individual Unit/Ship"-screen. Let's go through each of these panels.
TOP PART
-Ship commander would tell us the name and skills/rating of the commander. They can have a multitude of skills - most important being initiative and crew training.
-Basic information tells us the class, this is flavour purely for the player; Fleet and Task Force tells us the organization and hierarchy this unit belongs to - the game stupidly uses Fleet and Task Group interchangeably sometimes, when in reality Fleets are combinations of several Task Forces which are made up of several Task Groups. Moving on, we got Species, Construction Date and Transponder none of which are important at the moment.
-Power systems tells us nothing, as missile bases are PDC (planetary defence centre), they don't have much power for anything, especially these primitive ones. We'll take a closer look at them when we have ships.
-Maintenance is zero for PDC and the Mothership/Parasite-tools are useless as we don't have fighters or fast-attack craft
BOTTOM PART
-Now this is the meat part. I'll quote each window to explain it in detail
Missile Complex class ICBM Launch Base 13900 tons 212 Crew 366.4 BP TCS 278 TH 0 EM 0
Armour 1-51 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control 1 PPV 240
Annual Failure Rate: 0% IFR: 0% Maintenance Capacity 0 MSP
Magazine 240
ICBM Silo (10) Missile Size 24 Rate of Fire 43200
ICBM Launch Control (1) Range 50k km Resolution 50
Conventional ICBM (10) Speed: 10 km/s End: 16.7m Range: 0.1m km WH: 6 Size: 24 TH: 0 / 0 / 0
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This ship is classed as a Planetary Defence Centre
First line:Name and Class first, then size in tons. This is important to note whether it can be loaded into bigger ships and serviced by maintenance stations and jump gates and so on. Also, it affects speed and to-hit%. Number of crew and number of build points required to make one. TCS is target cross-section, which is only used for sensor purposes - basically it tells us how large the ship looks to sensors. Then come THERMAL and ELECTRO-MAGNETIC emissions of the ship, these are the two main passive sensors in-game.
Second line: Speed would be here but since this is an immobile missile silo, there's nothing. Instead the first thing is Armour. 1-51 means that we have a single layer of armour that is 51 "blocks" wide - which means that there are 51 different "blocks" for hostile weapons to hit but they only need to pierce one before getting to the soft insides. Then we have shields which are, unsurprisingly at zero as we don't have any. Sensors reads as 1/1/0/0 which means we have sensitivity 1 sensors for both TH and EM emissions - basically Mk1 eyeball combined with 20th century radar. Damage control is also just 1, meaning the Missile Base can repair a single point of internal damage - armour cannot be repaired outside of maintenance facilities. PPV is planetary protection value, meaning that civilians are feeling safe and secure for this amount per missile base.
Third line:Annual failure rate and IFR% are both related to military-grade vessels and their maintenance or lack of it - the first one shows the yearly average for something breaking down and IFR is the actual percentage that the game checks during every 5-day "turn". Naturally we would love to keep them both as near zero as possible. Finally maintenance capability tells us if this ship can maintain itself and others - looks like it doesn't. Magazine tells us how many missiles this PDC has - 240 may sound like a lot but we have 10 silos, meaning that we can only launch 24 salvoes before running empty and 240 missiles isn't anything to brag about when facing proper defences.
Fifth line: Shows us the name of the weapon: ICBM Silo, and their number (10), then comes the maximum size of ammunition it can use - in this case size 24 missiles (pretty fucking huge) and rate of fire which is abysmal as 43,200 seconds means 720 minutes between salvoes - that's 12 fucking hours. Obviously, if we need to defend Earth with these missile silos, better hope that the first salvo (10x600=6,000 missiles) will do the job.
Sixth line: Shows us the fire control for the above weapon: ICBM Launch control, and their number (1), which means that all ten missiles are slaved to the same fire control which can only target a single unit. It has a range of 50kkm with a resolution of 50 - which means that it can see&target any ship that is at least 2,500 tons (size 50) from half-a-million-kliks. If the target ship is smaller, we won't spot it until it gets closer. If it's larger, we can see it farther away. A 10,000 ton alien ship (size 200) would be "visible" to the fire control from a whopping 8,000,000 or 8bkm away! This relates to both active and passive sensors in everything they do or take part in so it's a important thing to remember.
Seventh line: Shows us additional, related information. In the case of missile weapons, this line shows the actual missile that is launched from the launcher and controlled by the fire control shown above - first is name "Conventional ICBM" and number of units in the weapon (10), then is speed which is paltry 10km/s. Endurance is 16.7 minutes so the missile has an effective range of 0.1bkm. WH is warhead - size 6 is quite respectable. Size is already explained and TH in this context is To-Hit and the numbers are explained below - as the poor ICBM is so fucking slow, it'll never catch a real target
that is trying to evade it but should help us shoot down assault craft and such. Or maybe not. In any case, they will keep the population happy but should be upgraded ASAP!
Next up is Class Design Display which is almost identical:
Missile Complex class ICBM Launch Base 13900 tons 212 Crew 366.4 BP TCS 278 TH 0 EM 0
Armour 1-51 Sensors 1/0 Damage Control Rating 0 PPV 240
Magazine 240
ICBM Silo (10) Missile Size 24 Rate of Fire 43200
ICBM Launch Control (1) Range 50k km Resolution 50
Conventional ICBM (10) Speed: 10 km/s End: 16.7 minutes Range: 0.1m km Warhead: 6 MR: 10 Size: 24
This design is classed as a Planetary Defence Centre
Yeah. Moving on. Next is Combat Settings and here I have to use a screenshot:
Okay, by now you should have an hard-on already. Here we can go through each FC that the ship/base has, assign them a target, assign suitable weapons and PRESS THE RED BUTTON - plus point defence and ECCM options. Shields and active sensors are automatically off because keeping them on is like advertising your existence to all passive EM-sensors. Imagine two guys sneaking in a dark forest with flashlights - they need to get pretty close to each other, unless the one is stupid enough to turn on his torch, immediately illuminating himself as a target.
The rest of the screens aren't really important.
In the next update, we'll take a look at the industry and mining situation of Earth, plus research.