Dinkledash
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Posts posted by Dinkledash
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A space elevator would be worth it if the fuel needed to lift cargo from the ground to orbit cost more than running the elevator. It would also be worth it if operating smaller, atmosphere-capable ships was more expensive because atmospheric control surface requirements result in small cargo spaces. Maybe even the best cargo shuttle can only carry 1 ton of cargo for every 6 tons of ship. It comes down to game physics and economics.
But it'd be a thing of beauty.
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I'm new and my understanding of the existing system is limited to watching the videos, so maybe I need to do some more reading around the forums, articles and such. But if there is more to a mark 3 engine than researching the mark 3 engine and collecting the raw materials, that would be great. But say you wanted to make engines; one player could specialize in injectors, another in combustion chambers, a third in vectored nozzles, and perhaps you buy the other subcomponents on the market because you aren't big enough to have a full-scale R&D department. And maybe nobody is willing to sell their best blueprints. I wouldn't. Heck it could be a crime to sell a blueprint to a competing state or corporation. Industrial espionage, bribery, skullduggery... selling parts that have scripts hidden in them that allow them to be disabled, or even explode if a receiver built into it receives a code word.
Yeah I'm pretty jazzed about this game.
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So The color of the laser could effect the way it works in certain mediums. For example, a red laser has less powerful photons, but there are more of them per watt of power. It may be easier to stop these with a sandcaster, for example, while blue lasers may not work well in atmosphere. A green laser may split the difference. Specific coatings would work better against different color lasers: blue photons would be reflected more efficiently by blue paint, so matching your lasers to your paint jobs would reduce damage by friendly fire. Mirror surfaces would work well against all colors, but maintenance would be a pain, it would be expensive, and would be quickly degraded in battle due to carbon scoring, or if hit by a missile or projectile.
Deflector shields would be electromagnetic fields that repel projectiles and missiles. Armor would be heavy plating that could absorb all kinds of damage.
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This plus several discrete sizes of elements would be great, IMO. It would impose some limitations instead of making a one-size-fits-all element that will give you exactly what you need for minimal tradeoffs. For example, if you had a medium sized engine that had the best parts to produce the most force, the only way to get more force would be to move from medium engine to large. The consequence of that would be a significant increase in mass. Or you could add more engines. Having truly scalable elements is a little bit too easy, I think.
Sorry, I get confused what quote button to hit.
OK, imagine that the basic engine is 2 tons and has a 3-1 thrust ratio, producing 6 tons of thrust. That's enough to push a 6 ton ship at 1G or a 3 ton ship at 2G. You can combine three of them on a 9 ton ship producing 18 tons of thrust for 2G performance.
You have a research track into aerospace design that lets you build a single 6 ton engine with a 10% bonus thrust, giving you 3 x 6.6 = 19.8 tons of thrust. This is due to higher efficiency by eliminating redundant subcomponents, Your ship now has 2.2G performance.
You have a research track into metallurgy that lets you build your engine with a lower-weight, higher heat-resistant alloy, giving you a 10% bonus. You also have a research track into fuel science that lets you burn fuel more efficiently for another 10% bonus. Put all three advances together, you can build a 6 ton engine with 24.17 tons of thrust, which would power your 9 ton ship at 2.7G. You'd need to build the engine in a bigger facility to be able to make a 6 ton engine, using rarer alloys and more highly refined fuel, so you'd be dependent on a supply of the right kind of ores being refined using a level 2 technology to build the engine, and the fuel being refined by a level 2 technology in order to fuel that engine.
And of course I'd like to combine that with the subcomponent idea, so on the metallurgy track a fuel injector made with Duralumin might be able to survive more battle damage and be lighter than one made of stainless steel, while one made of titanium would be very durable and resistant to higher temperatures but would be much more expensive to manufacture. In aerospace design, your injectors could be made to be designed to require less frequent maintenance, and you'd need advanced injectors to be able to handle higher temperature burns from advanced fuels (or suffer higher rates of failure.)
I mean, if it isn't complex enough, it'll be boring and if it's too complex it'll be tedious, I suppose. But now that I think about it, this actually is rocket science.
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how I delete a post? I wound up replying to myself.
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We should have to capture, breed and domesticate wild animals we find on the various worlds, then we can export them to other planets. Perhaps we should start with the basic domesticated animals which can be purchased at the arkship, generated from DNA stored in the ship, but to make the universe alien, there should be exotic beasts. I know there are going to be pets, so there is an animal template of some sort. Perhaps we can develop biotech that will allow us to create customized lifeforms. I'd be very interested in this myself. Not that I want to bioengineer my little ponies or anything.
<.<
>.>
Yeah, OK, I want to bioengineer my little ponies. And mount lasers on the unicorn's foreheads because I can.
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In my opinion, there shouldn't be any game-mechanic penalties for murder, however there should be a chance of losing skills when dying so RNs aren't used as teleporters and folks don't Leroy Jenkins all the time. Crime and punishment are typically handled by governments. The issue is different than real life as people come back and can sometimes identify their killer; however there should be a game mechanic that allows the killer to be identified through analysis of the crime scene. Perhaps the RN stores a video of the moments before someone is killed, but there's a chance that the image gets corrupted that increases the further the distance between the death and the RN. There could also be black market tech that increases the odds that the image will be scrambled.
Of course if the person who gets killed got a look at the killer before the resurrect, then they can report them to the cops or put out a bounty on their own, but if we're responsible for building the civilization, it's basically the wild west until we get players who are willing to be the government and law enforcement. Government and law is what make civilization possible... say you kill someone in the Lunar Republic and you hop over the border to the Solar Empire. Is there an extradition treaty? Will Lunar authorities raid across the border to grab the criminal? Will they hire a bounty hunter? Will the victim hire a bounty hunter, or perhaps register a grievance and seek to settle the score personally (and legally according to the law of the Lunar Republic?)
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That would be very cool, and would really help make R&D be an actual thing. Probably quite complicated to implement, though.
Assuming that this is object oriented design, the implementation wouldn't be that difficult, as a spaceship is already made of components. This would just make those components made of subcomponents; it's just adding another layer of inheritance. The hard work would be the art and the component management interface.
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Yeah, this is the major problem with it. Something like this, while amazing, would have to be in the game from launch to work well, and it simply isn't going to be. Which is a shame, because it would massively increase the value of R&D, which seems like a really good thing.
Thanks for the support. I agree that it would have to be something that's in the initial release, but maybe not in alpha. If we said that R&D was boring because it was too simplified, we could get them to allocate resources to designing a deeper R&D (and component interaction) system. Imagine if your post on the starship is in engineering and you have to monitor the power plant. It sounds extremely tedious, doesn't it? Basically you're waiting around until there's some combat damage to the component and then you hit the repair button.
If instead you had a station that displayed all the subcomponents of a major system and there was actual stuff to do that could impact the power output, like changing the fuel mix, tweaking the pressure in the #2 fuel valve, examining the fuel tank for leaks from micrometeor impacts, then that becomes an actual job. When the engine takes a hit and one of the fuel injectors goes off line, you have to check to see if the injector has taken direct damage or if it's a problem with the electronics, and hope you brought spares. Or have time to fabricate a replacement. It wouldn't just be an improvement in R&D, it would make running a starship much more fun.
For small ships, it may make sense to use unitary components simply because you only have one set of eyes. Perhaps it could be added later by leaving the unitary components in place and making the complex component systems more efficient and powerful, and allowing skills to be transferred to the complex component system. That way people who don't want to have a screen full of nerd knobs at their station won't have to deal with it and their investment won't be wasted, but there will be an incentive to upgrade.
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In order to make the game more interesting, I think that major components should consist of subcomponents. For example, one of the basic components now would be a power component. Presumably at higher tech and fabrication skill levels, a power component would produce higher output, be smaller and more durable than older designs. I think it would be more fun if a powerplant consisted of subcomponents which could be researched and designed independently and could be assembled into a resellable product.
Say you want to make fusion plants. A fusion plant would have a combustion chamber, a magnetic containment bottle, a laser array, a fuel injector and depending on whether it is meant to produce electricity or be used to power a fusion rocket, it would have a dynamo or a thruster. Each of these components could have its own independent properties, methods, interfaces and tech/skill tree, which could make the job building, maintaining and repairing damage to fusion plants an interesting and challenging role for a player to specialize in.
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In order to make the game more interesting, I think that major components should consist of subcomponents. For example, one of the basic components now would be a power component. Presumably at higher tech and fabrication skill levels, a power component would produce higher output, be smaller and more durable than older designs. I think it would be more fun if a powerplant consisted of subcomponents which could be researched and designed independently and could be assembled into a resellable product.
Say you want to make fusion plants. A fusion plant would have a combustion chamber, a magnetic containment bottle, a laser array, a fuel injector and depending on whether it is meant to produce electricity or be used to power a fusion rocket, it would have a dynamo or a thruster. Each of these components could have its own independent properties, methods, interfaces and tech/skill tree, which could make the job building, maintaining and repairing damage to fusion plants an interesting and challenging role for a player to specialize in.
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It would be best if we were able to engineer components out of subcomponents each of which have particular properties, methods and interfaces. For example, a rocket engine could consist of a fuel tank, fuel pumps, high pressure piping, fuel injectors, a combustion chamber, an afterburner assembly, a nozzle and control actuators. Without each of these sub components, you can't build an engine. But if you developed a superior fuel injector, you'd have a superior rocket engine, perhaps one which is more fuel efficient, while a superior nozzle could improve manuverability, a superior combustion chamber could improve acceleration, superior tanks and pumps could increase the pressure at which you store fuel and that increases range, and superior piping could reduce weight. That way you'd have more than the Mark 1, Mark 2 and Mark 3 engines. You could have a company that makes rocket engines that are lightweight and high maneuverability for combat craft while another company makes engines that are fuel efficient and reliable for long haul cargo ships. The new Zykos-V fighter is equipped with a Motokrafwerks F-300 rocket motor with the highest vector-thrust capability of any commercially available engine! Subcomponents for major components could greatly enhance the individuality of the designs produced by players. It wouldn't be the coolest looking starship is the best, it would be deeper than that.
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Since each functional element is a component, there should probably be a relationship between components and elements on the monitors that will display the properties of the individual components. Say your starship has 12 power components, you'd want to be able to display maximum output, current output, damage, efficiency and fuel consumption as gauges on a dashboard. The engineer would have to have a way of reacting to these gauges, for example tuning the fuel injectors for better efficiency at different speeds, making repairs, transferring fuel between tanks, etc. We have to consider what the appropriate properties and methods are for each type of component as it gets defined in the game. Higher tech levels, skills and the use of rare elements and materials would allow for components that have superior efficiency, are lighter, smaller, and more durable. I think much of the work in Alpha will focus on components, their properties, methods and interfaces.
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I didn't see any brony clans and I can't believe with 6000 backers we don't have several hundred weirdos who are into watching a cartoon for little girls and fanboying about it. "But this isn't a fantasy game!" OK so the goal of the Lunar Republic will be to create a recreational planet called Equestria where tech-saturated galactic citizens can go to unwind, chillax and advencation with miniature, pastel colored pony constructs. Or possibly biologicals if the universe will let us. All tech will be hidden underground and above will be a replica of a hugely popular 21st century media franchise. Administrative and defense installations will be established on the Equestrian moon and if it becomes necessary for us to use this as a base for galactic conquest in the name of justice and liberty, so be it! Praise Luna!
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How about something like this: in order to ressurect with your skills and inventory, you must be quantumly entangled with the RN by having your body and gear scanned into the unit. Basically, you create a save point and a respawn location. You are simultaneously in both places. It isn't perfect. 90% of the time you will respawn with all your skills and each piece of gear has a 90% of ressurecting with you. You have a 9% of losing a recently learned skill and each piece of gear has a 9% of not being in the ressurection template. Anything that doesn't ressurect gets dropped where you died. And you have a 1% of learning a new skill at random and a 1% of getting new or upgraded gear in each gear slot. Sort of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applied to quantum ressurection. That way people won't use RNs as galactic teleporters unless they're willing to take a risk. If the RN you are entangled with gets destroyed or captured and re-keyed to another player, your quantum signature is forwarded to the Ark ship RN complex.
Weapon types
in Builder Forum
Posted
The Starship Yamato's Wave Motion Gun.