One Time Boost to movement

Sorry, but I am having difficulty seeing the "reality" of this.

1) One time use booster rockets used in military operations since WWII have been used only on aircraft, not on naval vessels, and only as an aid in takeoff. To have a booster rocket take a ship across vast distances of space just doesn't feel right to me.

2) Where would this liquid come from? If in orbit, perhaps, but in open space, or even in hyperspace? In planetary orbit, I could see it as collecting fuel from a fuel bunker orbiting the planet, but I don't see how enough matter of any type could be collected when traveling between planets or solar system to make it worth while.

3. According to the story line, use of stargates required more time to get from one point to another than the first hyperdrive invented by terrans took to travel the same distance. (You may have to go to one of the databanks for GC1 or GC2 to find this one). So the warships you are building for your battle really would be slowed down by using stargates.

wow, that feels like a lot of hate

1) S-IVB was used to propel astronauts to the moon and then detached

2) give me a break, it's a joke from spaceballs. But does this make anymore sense than being able to pay a lot of money and instantly getting a ship or I guess you could say that you paid your people to do an all nighter, but it still would not be that fast.  But I agree that you could not pay people to get behind the ship and push.

3) while it may have taken time to place the stargates, my understanding is that the travel between them was instantaneous, so the problem was not that the travel through a stargate was slow, just that you could only travel through the stargates to get anywhere meaningful.  And the GalCiv already has wormholes that do behave this way, you just can't create them yourself

If you were willing to put in the research and construction, you could already do something similar in GC2 with a starbase array. Up to 24 starbases could affect one space, which could then boost the ship's normal speed by 72 points for the turn it starts on the sweet spot. Even more, if you got the Korx module tech, which allowed a 120 point boost from a 24 array. That's enough to launch a ship about a third of the way across an immense map in one turn.

ok, I stand corrected on the stargates.  The wiki says that travel from earth to Arcea "would take over 10 years to get there via the stargate". I did not realize that they were that useless.

that's really cool, I never tried that!

im curious why only 24? if i recall the area of effect was radius 7.5 (the .5 being the square the starbase was on)

meaning if i filled up that entire space with starbases and placed my ship on the centre square 2(pi)r=47.123 starbases

ok so i loaded up a game and started playing with it 4 base max per sector so if i mark my sweet spot as the middle edge of a sector

lets say the middle left edge

4 in the sector

4 in the sector to the left

3 in the sector above

3 in the sector below

2 in the sector above left

2 in the sector below left

thats 18 any more in the sectors above and below i think would be out of range but im not 100% on that

even if im off a bit we might be able to push those 3s to 4s and the 2s-3s but that would still only add to 22

if i use the centre of the sector i can get 20    4*5

not sure how to get 24

There are 15 tiles on a side of a sector and 7 is less than half that. Wouldn't your sweet spot have to be one above or below the middle of an edge if the area of effect was only a diameter of 15 in order to get the affect of more than just the one adjacent sector?

(Note, I tried checking this with the game I am playing but since the map size is immense all I was able to do was to check the influence boundary around one of my Starbases sitting in an isolated spot on the map. Anything more would take several days of play.)

There is a limit of 4 starbases per sector (added in DA I think).

Starbases can affect 8 squares away (rounded up, so if the circle just barely reaches a square it counts as in the ring), and sectors are 15 squares wide. That means bases set in the first four squares in the corner of a sector can affect the squares in the center of the sector next to it, and the first square of the sector just over the border. A crappy text drawing:

x[ooooooooooooooo[x

x[ooooooooooooooo[x

x[xooooooooooooox[x

x[xooooooXoooooox[x

-------------------------

x[xooooooXoooooox[x

x[xooooooooooooox[x

x[ooooooooooooooo[x

x[ooooooooooooooo[x

Small x is a starbase, o is empty space, and large X is the sweet spots, where all 24 bases can reach them. [ and - are sector boundaries.

Ahh I assumed that if the influence covered less then half the square it was just to make it look pretty and didn't count

Alternatively, in GCII you could design a ship in each hull size that consisted of nothing but as many of your best engines as will fit, less any space you require for life support modules, and then 'upgrade' your ships to this design for traveling and 'upgrade' them back to the previous design upon arrival at destination. A small amount of time spent in Battle of the Gods shows that with full miniaturization tech (but no bonuses from random events or structures) and the best hyperwarp drives, Huge hulls can attain speeds of 46 pc/wk, Large and Cargo hulls can attain speeds of 41 pc/wk, Medium hulls can attain speeds of 36 pc/wk, Small hulls can attain 26 pc/wk, and Tiny hulls can attain 21 pc/wk. Why bother with constructing starbases when you can attain this kind of speed anywhere you want by spending only two turns, one to upgrade the base design to the speed design and another to return it to its original state (assuming that you're within your own sphere of influence, anyways - the starbase thing is good at the borders, though)?

I think I kind of like this idea. Space empires had something like this. It was a component called emergency speed I think. If you used it, then your speed would improve for the turn, but the component would be destroyed and have to be repaired.