Planetary rings - another suggestion
 

Here is another suggetstion for future Versions of SE: Planetary rings. (ie like Saturn's rings.)

They'd be exactly like asteroid fields but would be in orbit around planets. You could remote mine them or use stellar manip to turn them into moons.

With the map editor and text files this is probably more or less moddable now, but it would be nice if the game recoginised them as planetary rings, and maybe changed the images as well as rings are created / destroyd.

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"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"I think so Brain but, if you replace the P with an O, my name would be Oinky, wouldn't it?"

Re: Planetary rings - another suggestion
 

somewhere i heard that if you condensed saturns rings, it would fill a suitcase. or maybe that was haley's commet's tail. in any event, i dont think you are getting a heck of alot of resources out of a planets rings, but someone with a cool nasa link could probably prove me wrong.

what would also be cool, is if planetary rings were a kind of stellar construction. you could use them as extra space, or as huge defensive weapon platforms. of course, i still am in favor of being able to construct hive facilities on planets that increase available space at a massive resource cost. not sure what reminded me of that, but its a good idea, says me.

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"...the green, sticky spawn of the stars"
(with apologies to H.P.L.)

Re: Planetary rings - another suggestion
 

I also had a hard-code idea about planetary space (your "hive" comment reminded me.)

First up, the "minimum population to operate facility" would have to be implemented. I blieve this was put into the game in the early stages and then disabled before release.

Second, remove the "domed" and "non-domed" status for planets. Each planet would have a maximum population for native breathers. If the population doesn't breathe the atmosphere, you have to...

Number three, build a new "Dome" facility. Each dome allows a certain amount of the population (say, 20million or so) to be non-breathers. You could even have different tech levels of domes, allowing higher populations.

Think about it:

Under the current system, a huge methane world with 200 million methane breathers has 25 facility slots. Add 1 million hydrogen breathers, however, and suddenly you only have 5 facility slots. This is crazy. Under the new system, the same world with the same mixture of population would have 24 facility slots (one slot being taken up by the dome for the hydrogen breathers.)
If you wanted a lot more hydrogen breathers on there, you'd need to build more domes -you'd have to balance your population requirements against your facility requirements.

Building a dome would not increase the maximum population of the planet (although a facility to do that would be cool). It would just allow a certain amount of the population to be non-breathers.

Of course, it means you could have 4 free facility slots on a tiny world even if you can't breathe the atmosphere there, but if the minimum population per facility was balanced right, those extra facilities would be useless without more domes=-)

It would make population handling far more realistic, flexible, interesting and challenging.


Another bonus: Domed facilities would become more realistically vulnerable to attack (ie one (un)lucky shot could destroy a dome facility and kill millions.)



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"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"I think so Brain but, if you replace the P with an O, my name would be Oinky, wouldn't it?"

Re: Planetary rings - another suggestion
 

There's a small problem with the dome facility idea: you have to colonize the planet before you can build any facilities. If you have to have a dome if you can't breathe the atmosphere, you'll need to capture another race before you can colonize any atmoshere you can't breathe.

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Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Re: Planetary rings - another suggestion
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Puke:
somewhere i heard that if you condensed saturns rings, it would fill a suitcase. or maybe that was haley's commet's tail. in any event, i dont think you are getting a heck of alot of resources out of a planets rings, but someone with a cool nasa link could probably prove me wrong.

what would also be cool, is if planetary rings were a kind of stellar construction. you could use them as extra space, or as huge defensive weapon platforms. of course, i still am in favor of being able to construct hive facilities on planets that increase available space at a massive resource cost. not sure what reminded me of that, but its a good idea, says me.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Yes, you are talking about something I suggested months ago. You build an "orbital elevator" facility to connect it to the ground and then add an artificial ring around your planet. This should add extra facility spaces and maybe population capacity. A graphic of a ring-shaped space station should be made to appear around the planet when you get it built. Having the ring appear in the combat map might be harder but worthwhile. This would be much easier than a ringworld or a sphereworld. It could be down at level 4 or 5 of Stellar Manipulations or maybe a special field could be made for "Megascale Engineering" with three different things to construct. Increasing population capacity of a planet should be really easy compared to these other projects. He just needs to add the ability for a facility to increase population capacity and maybe a new facility picture. Instant "Arcology"! http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif Maybe that could be the very first project in the Megascale Engineering field.

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 08 August 2001).]

Re: Planetary rings - another suggestion
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by capnq:
There's a small problem with the dome facility idea: you have to colonize the planet before you can build any facilities. If you have to have a dome if you can't breathe the atmosphere, you'll need to capture another race before you can colonize any atmoshere you can't breathe.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

The easiest solution for this would be to allow colony ships to plant a single dome. If this seems too generous, make additional colony components which are more expensive (and if you really want to annoy, larger) but have this capability.

Re: Planetary rings - another suggestion
 

What about making additional tech levels for the colonization components. Remember SE3 and the incremental colony types - I think they were 1M, 10M, and 100M IIRC. Maybe you could do something like that - Rock I only allows your atmosphere type, Rock II gives 1 dome, Rock III gives 2 domes, etc. I don't do a whole lot of modding so I don't know if this is even possible - probably has to have some hard coding somewhere - maybe an idea for SE5??

ANyways, I like the idea - more variety is good as long as it doesn't sacrifice gameplay...

Re: Planetary rings - another suggestion
 

I like the idea of the orbital rings
although i think it will onlt increase pop storage and not really facilities.

hard to build a mineral miner on an orbital platform, but all other facilities are goable.