Dinkledash

Only 101 backers to get to 8K, but still $54K to get to the stretch goal.

IMO there's no reason not to allow massive weapons in orbit, on the planetary surface and as spinal mounts on capital ships. The problem with a big weapon like that is that if you miss, you miss big, it's very slow to aim and very slow to reload/recharge. When it hits, yeah, it's spectacular. It might make sense for use in planetary bombardment, against space stations and against slow capital ships, but such weapons are usually very resource intensive and become sort of a self-licking ice cream cone, as you have to build an entire fleet of escorts in order to protect the Starship Yamato, then you have to build a second wave motion gun to protect the first, and if you ever lost one in battle it would be a massive expense and humiliation, if it breaks down your trillion credit ship is worthless until it gets repaired... so there may be a cool factor to it but if you can get the same job done for less money with less risk with conventional ships and defenses, folks will do that in the long run.

Will TUs consist of the entire hex? I can understand in the countryside having 250 acres as a standard unit of territory, but in cities I would think those could get divided into smaller plots at some point. We'll have about 1000 hexes under the shield, so really the first 1000 people off the ship will have an enormous advantage if the TU is minimum 1k. Imagine owning a square km of downtown Manhattan - you're a multi billionaire. But can you subdivide a hex?

Fair enough

I'm playing Witcher 3 and my toxicity is always in the 70s.

And that gives a real incentive to not die. But do the implants have to be personalized? Can I kill you and grab your implants or do they only work on you and are only valuable as salvage? Could I sell them back to you after resurrection? Lol... that could make from some interesting conversations.

Endgame before the launch of DU 2.0: unstoppable berserkers show up and kick all of our asses, we pile back into the arkship, freeze up and get the hell out of Dodge and fly into a wormhole and an entirely new universe populated with alien races, weather, survival, all the stuff people were looking for that couldn't logically be added mid-game.

Will there be levels then? Will you be able increase attributes through experience? Will you be able to enhance at attribute with an implant or a cybernetic replacement? I mean say you get a cyborg arm that gives you +2 ST and a -1 CH. Problem with attributes like IQ and CH is that even though your character may not be smart or a good leader, the player could be and that's what matters.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with a skill web. I like the idea of a classless character system. I also don't want the skill development to be grinding, though if you shoot down a battleship with your frigate, maybe your character deserves something for that feat, I dunno. I know you shouldn't be able to kill people for XP like in a single player or instanced RPG. Though I think there should be drops and salvage and such. Hmm... nothing to do with skills, but imagine if 4 years into this when there are wars raging all around, a berserker robot fleet shows up at our doorstep and we have to cooperate or face extinction. Someone discovers an artifact and it's actually a signal beacon that wakes up the berserkers... I don't know why that thought occurred to me.

Star Wars is more of an SF fantasy than real science fiction. You can certainly devastate a planet with enough non-fantasy weapons to make it uninhabitable without building an ultimate weapon with the requisite 2m wide exhaust port. Heck, all you really need is a nice big rock and enough time and rocket power to drop it on your target. How could there not be nuclear weapons though? I could see there being a prohibition against using them on planetary surfaces, one which could be broken by a sufficiently evil organization of course. And an organization should be vulnerable to extinction, especially if they put all their eggs in one planetary basket. But if you can make a nuclear reactor you can make a nuclear weapon. Besides if they made a planet wrecker, whats to stop someone from using it on the arkworld? Would the shielded arkship be all that's left along with a 20 km wide hemisphere of mined out soil?

OK so the Market Units and Trade Service Units are predefined elements so the db connections for the economy are inside sealed classes, which is not to say totally unhackable but I'm sure it would be a whopping violation of TOS if someone figured out a way to directly access the trade database.

You want a scripting skill? You want the arkship to give you better default scripts for your gear when you use that skill? Don't forget that the coders are going to be spending time that they could be spending prospecting, mining, raiding etc writing code.

Skills aren't the only thing needed to produce those big badass ships; we'll need tech development and rare resources. And why do people seem to think that spending 10 minutes a day using a skill to get a training bonus is grinding? It would not be required and it just speeds up a process that is happening anyway. Sure, the devs are veteran EVE players. They're going to want to make their game different from EVE, fix the things they didn't like about EVE.

I only did that because you called me son while acting like a brat.

I think that the arkship is going to be the focal point for a massive city due to the impenetrable shields, so while there will no doubt be a mad dash for the rim after FTL is discovered, there will always be a player presence on the arkworld. It's going to be the focal point of banking, commerce and recruiting.

Then you hear the sound of you waking up in a Resurrection Node.

How exactly does one destroy a planet? You could wipe out life on a planet and turn it into ruins with enough nuclear weapons or by dropping rocks on it, but short of hitting it with another planet there's no way to actually obliterate a planet.

How do you think I know your age? I'm not clairvoyant either. I checked your profile. I object to being disrespected and you turn that into me trying to belittle you by referring to your age? That is just so internet. DU is a game where content will be player-driven, EVE is not, and the alpha team is going to have a fair amount to say in the business rule development as DU progresses. We're 2 years out of general release at this point. Nothing is set in stone except for voxel technology and the backstory. There are actually some benighted people who don't like the EVE skill system. If we get to create our own equipment don't we have to be able to create the skills to use that equipment? If people want to have in-game education, to be able to build schools, to have a training skill, that does not make them wrong. Or braindead. So you think that the transfer of the experiences directly to the brain is the same as actually doing something? Fine. I don't like that, but you're not wrong to like that. I'm not suggesting grinding unicorns, I'm suggesting spending 10 minutes a day using a skill in order to increase your learning rate. How does one automatically learn when offline? Are you teleported back to the arkship so you can plug in? What if you're on some far off planet? How do you access the arkship library? I can see how you might learn a skill that's been downloaded to your brain and needs to be processed, but how do you access other skills that you want to learn? Are skills just being broadcasted through the universe? If you have to buy expensive implants, that's fine, but does that have to be the only way to learn a skill? Can't you also learn by doing? Or by being taught? This is a roleplaying game. If you want to minimax every game mechanic, you are free to do so, but the point of any game is to have fun. If you think that achieving maximum exploitation of a game is the way you express your intellect, go for it. If that's how you have fun, good for you. I think that having good relationships with other players, creating a beautiful environment and writing cool code to make SLI products the best on the market is where I'm going to find my fun. So good luck, we'll see how the rules actually get written over the next two years and hopefully be part of the greatest game in history.

They could make it impossible to mine within the confines of a shielded area and make shields spherical.

I'm curious how we can have an interstellar space exploration game with the only form of FTL being stargates unless they're pre-existing gates like in the stargate series. I think in order to allow for exploration, we need to have ships that are capable of FTL on their own. However, the FTL drives are bulky, expensive and prone to breakdown, and they consume a lot of fuel, making stargates a much more cost effective option for freight and passenger traffic and of course sublight warships could be much more heavily armed and armored. I enjoyed Traveller's FTL system. Each jump could travel between 1 and 6 parsecs depending on tech level of the drive and fuel expenditure. 10% of the ship mass would have to be fuel for every parsec jumped, and at lower tech levels the jump drive itself could take up half the ship, so a 100 ton ship with jump capability would have to have a 50 ton drive and 20 tons of fuel for a 1 parsec round trip, leaving only 30 tons for sublight drive and fuel, crew, cargo, sensors, armor and weapons. A sublight ship that relies on stargates would have three times the warfighting, passenger, cargo or drive capacity. Ships can scoop water to filter for deuterium if they have scoops installed, but using unrefined fuel gives you a chance of a mis-jump. Your ship could wind up jumping to the wrong star, or even stranded in interstellar space, leaving you the option of hoping for a rescue or opening the airlock and waking up at a resurrection node. Scout ships are small enough to jump safely with unrefined fuel. In Traveller, a jump took a week, but in DU obviously that won't do. Perhaps it could take 10 minutes, while a stargate transit is instantaneous. A Stargate Constructor ship would be able to go FTL and build a stargate at its destination, but it would't have room for anything else, so it would be big, expensive and vulnerable. I think Stargates would work better if they only connected to a paired gate on the other side. You build the gate in one system, your constructor makes the jump to the destination, you build the gate at the destination, then you jump back to your origin to get more resources for the next gate. That's how you build a chain out. It takes time, it's very expensive, and the size of the gate limits the size of the ships that can make transit. The gate cannot be shut down but it can be shielded or have physical doors added to allow access control. If a gate is destroyed the corresponding gate becomes inactive until a new gate is built with the same quantum signature, so you can't switch gates. Control of the gates is based on defenses on either side so an opposing force would have to take the stargate on one side, then come through one ship at a time, possibly running into a minefield, a focus of many ships' weapons, defensive forts... like the Honor Harrington books. Attacking through a warp point was a very expensive proposition in that series. Before someone tells me that's not how it works, remember that it doesn't work any way at the moment; maybe it doesn't work this way in EVE, but this isn't EVE and we're not locked into anything except the voxel technology and the story at this point. Why did we have to use an ark ship to travel thousands of light years if we have stargate technology? Perhaps that's a tech that's going to have to get discovered for civilization to be able to expand beyond the initial system. We could discover shipboard FTL technology before we get to stargates so we can explore the universe before we set up commercial trade routes. Anyway, that's just my two cents. I think it could make the game progression interesting, giving pirates a way to operate outside of the bounds of registered stargate routes, but making ships that don't use stargates less commercially efficient and combat capable.

One thing all these organizations are going to have to agree on is a method for identifying members of organizations, such as personal or vehicular transponders. We'll also need to create a forum for negotiating multilateral agreements to govern commerce and warfare, and to create a framework for dealing effectively with pirates. Basically, an non-aligned militarized space patrol who will stay out of registered conflicts between organizations and will focus on violent crimes in unclaimed territories and deep space, funded by a fixed percentage of organizational income.

Except those blocks are also destructible. But I wouldn't rely on solar or wind for military installations; I'd want to use underground fusion reactors. They'd produce more watts per unit volume but would be considerably more expensive to build. They'd also require deuterium fuel, which should be fairly common as it is also the basic fuel used for space travel. You'd want to colocate your military bases with your deuterium supply.