Do Planets need Cargo facilities?

[Suicide Junkie]

Recall that these fighters can fly to the sun, or to the edge of the solar system in one turn (depending on actual design). If they can do that, I sure that taking off from a planetary surface is no problem.

If a fighter can get to orbit by itself, you can launch as many as you want at the same time, from anywhere on the surface.

The cargo space is just to store the fighters so they don't rust in the rain .

[rdouglass]

Please don't take this the wrong way, but I don't know of many SciFi lines that have characters launching mines or sats from thier "backyard catapults". They always have some kind of infrastructure support to accomplish this. They sometimes launch fighters but usually from some kind of airstrip or something. I'm not looking to reproduce reality, just enhance the gameplay. Right now it's too easy to defend planets with mines and sats. IMO they need to have an infrastructure in place to support them (mines and sats). Also IMO cargo facilities just don't have the infrastructure. I mean, you can't launch 'em (sats, mines, and fighters) from a cargo ship without the proper components. Why would a planet be any different other than for ease of programming?

It may also make it more important to leave a fleet or two to protect the home systems behind enemy lines.

[Suicide Junkie]

Maybe, you should have to have a spaceport, shipyard, or 'enhanced' cargo facility, in order to put mines and stuff in orbit.

OTOH,
I imagine it would be fairly easy to have fighters with VTOL, but runways are really cheap too. You could use civilian airports, roads or highways as runways for fighters, and not have to worry.

If its got its own engines, it seems reasonable to assume it can take off on its own.

The problem is when the item you're launching dosen't have its own engines. If you launch something from the surface without engines, there are few options.
- Goes up & comes down. Crunch. No good.
- Fling it hard enough that it doesn't come back down. The sat goes off into space, and dosen't stay in the area long. no good
- use a moon to slingshot the object into orbit. Most planets don't have moons in SE. There would also be a good chance of the moon later flinging the object in or out.

[Spyder]

Don't forget Asimov's 'Tethered' space station....a Space Station that is tied to the earth and a massive elevator moves between the two...you could do a lot from there....

[jimbob55]

An alternative to all this realism stuff is to assume that the launch facilities are abstracted into your civilian infrastructure.

The sharing of resources between planets is carried out by a civilian merchant navy that you don't see. The storage of your basic resources is carried out by civilian infrastructure as well. It is only when you want a large surplus storage capability that you have to build storage facilites. There may be hundreds of small shipyards churning out merchant freighters, but they aren't capable of building military ships.

You are in charge of the top level of government which means you play with the millitary and planetary production. Lots of little organisations have to exist to support that infrastructure but they are abstracted into population and happiness.

It may be that making cargo storage a requirement to launch fighters, mines + sats into orbit would help game balance. That's fine with me.

[rdouglass]

I could live with the Cargo Fac a requirement to launch fighters / sats / mines. Right now the way it stands, I don't care much for it - too easy to launch 100 sats and mines per planet (with the current bug IIRC) and defend the planet that way. Build, launch, build, launch, rinse and repeat... Of course, if the AI used 'stuff' the way humans do, we would be on equal ground.

I guess if the bug for max units in space is fixed, that would control it a lot...

[Sinapus]

That also might help explain the millions of people pulled off a planet per turn.

Hm... you know, that complaint about the transport minister sending a transport to a planet, waiting, loading population the next turn, waiting then going on to the nearest planet with <500 million people might just be realistic. It might very well take .3 years to get all those people loaded up onto a ship before you send it off.

I use the transport minister since it seems to be pretty good at spotting planets w/high population and low population. I just manually load/unload the ships usually and check it to keep it from depleting a small world w/1200M people. It's actually a bit faster than manually doing everything since I don't have to search around for a high population world.


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"What do -you- want?" "I'd like to live -just- long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I would look up into your lifeless eyes and wave like this..." *waggle* "...can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?"