Defense base refuses to fire on the enemy

Did you put any suply pods on board as thats the usial reason for this

you normally don't need supply pods on a ship because the ship's engines provide supplies if your weapons need them. of course, using your guns eats into your ship's range that way.

try using some math to figure out the right combination of supply/ordnance. if your weapon uses 4 supply and 2 ordnance, chances are you'll need twice as many supply as ordnance to make it come out even on a station.

That is unless your playing as an organic race.... Check the requirements of the weapons you put on our ships. Each race is different so supply and ordanence is very important.

The supplies used by each component (eg weapons) is in components.txt.

It would be a nice feature if the design module would warn you if no neccessary supply or ordnance components are in the design.

I know how to do that for components:
add an AI Tag 01 in the abilitys section, it puts a description on a component:
something similar might be able to be done for shipsizes.

that would be useful, along with the necessary minimum quantities just like it does for crew and life support, but I guess we can do without it...

Always run your designs through your combat simulator...
I fixed a supply issue that way too. My phased polaron beams used a lot more supply than ordinance.. Now duration of the supplies are optimized.

~Myrath

aha!!! now this explains why my ships won't fire at enemies. and i DO mean won't fire. the DUs do sometimes.

but wouldn't it have been easier just to give us a warning about such things? this just seems very lazy on the devs' part. a small popup saying 'need more supplies, etc' would make a MP game a lot easier cos my mates have to wait ages whie we each try this out? just doesn't make sense... kinda like the devs did it to say "we're gonna make this game as hard as possible for you to get into" when most of us just want a micro mngmnt game cos we like to micro manage BUT not faff around 'testing' our ship designs to see if they work. the micro element is enough to be getting on with without all this bs.
altho i like the idea of the combat sim, forcing us to use to prove our designs work is..well.. it's downright annoying, isn't it? i hope this game doens't have any more of these 'surprises'.
bit naff , innit?

It just takes a bit of training on the user-end In the end you'll find a good balance.
Although a flag that says 'this design used both supplies and ordinance' would be useful.

~Myrath