Fleet Operations for Beginners

At the heart of Aurora is a naval simulation that isn't too different from modern seafaring vessels and their operations. Ships are organized in fleets, task forces and task groups. They need fuel, spare parts and ammunition. They need maintenance and repairs. The crews need a lot of training before they can be expected to perform well in a battle. And they need up-to-date information about the enemy. All that is simulated in the game

In Port

 * Ship Maintenance
 * Ship Repair

Support Vessels
If you equipped every ship with enough fuel tanks to travel halfway through the galaxy, you'd have no more room for weapons. Dito for missile reloads and spare parts (maintenance supplies). So you build specialized vessels to transport these and assign them to a task force as per your needs.

All special orders related to them are only available if you designate ship classes as tanker, supply ship or collier in the ship design window. Unlike other design parameters, you can change the designation of ship classes already in service.

You can also build maintenance ships which contain Maintenance Modules instead of performing standard maintenance at a base.

Naval Organization
You can organize your Task Groups into Task Forces. A quarter of the leader boni of the Task Force commander apply to all ships in the TF, as long as he's in the same system.

See Naval Organization.

Formations
Formations allow you to split a Task Group into several parts which travel together, but keep a predetermined distance from the main group.

Fleet Training
Each crew has a Crew Grade that affects hit chances, chances of malfunctions, speed of repairs etc. In addition, each Task Group can be set to Task Force Training, which raises their TF Training Rating. The latter affects the speed with which orders are carried out in battle. Both are increased by the ships' or Task Force commander's Crew Training skill.

See Fleet Training.