"Junk" Ships?

[Magus666]

So it seems that Andromeda turns are being massively delayed by huge battles of thousands of "junk ships".  What exactly qualifies as a junk ship? Sure, those "screen ships" that are nothing but a lump of armor with some engines -  that's junk. They serve no real purpose, and stylisticly they really ARE "junk". Frankly, though,  I've never been a fan of the mechanic that bigger is always better. I LIKE having fleets that are composed of a few enormous capital ships, supercarriers and mega battleships, with a bunch of smaller cruisers, destroyers, etc. It may not be the most efficient model, but it FEELS more realistic (at least if you are using the modern naval model for comparison). So what is the dividing line between "junk" and small support ships? If it's got weapons and bridge strength, is it still junk? What size and what percentage of its mass? 

(BTW, not my fleets!! I haven't had any major encounters in well over a year!!)

[Hobo]

anything under 100,000 tons and also that includes explorer ships, old tanker, old cargo ships, colonial ships in my mine is junk ships. If you played it long enough your war ships should be 1 billion ton by now

[Magus666]

Well if you're throwing explorers, old tankers, cargo and colonial ships and the like into battles just to clutter up the field, that's certainly junk, yes. Billion ton capital ships for sure, but again, I do like to have a mix of smaller support ships, cruisers and destroyers (by task, not by given name in game). Generally, even those ships need to be 1M+ tons to carry enough armor, shields, firepower, etc to make them worthwhile, so I could see ships under 100k tons being classified as junk. 

 

[Hobo]

It would be nice if Pete would come on and give us a update .You know how some people are they never clean there ships up from the start of the empire to now so you have lots of very old ships just sitting around or move them to a battle area to loss them for you don't have to waste the orders on doing it . And yes one of my empire does have some very old ships in it but I'm swapping them out for new ones

[RTGPete]

Stayed up all night last night and through today; in the home stretch at this point.  Will take a few hours to create the data files and pdf's, emailing setup etc

[Hobo]

Pete Thanks for the update

[hobknob]

In my battles, years ago by now, I had 100's and 1000's of BDN's in the 10-20M ton range and I recall them being called Junk screens as they were screening my big ships that were 20B - 40B tons each.  Total fleet strength was 700B plus.  

Even old useless ships are useful for spotting somebody so there is zero reason to gather them up and destroy them in Andromeda.  So, you should help your neighbors remove these old ships by running around with your fleets on Zulu so they will be engaged and destroyed. 

[Sakarissa]

Well, I was responsible for 2 large battles this past Andro turn. Close to 40,000 ships were destroyed. I'm guessing that Pete was quite happy about that....