Facilities

[Andrés]

Transporters are useless against shields, and maybe even useless against EMC.
Boarding parties would still be needed, and spent in the boarding operation. The only difference wold be that instead of being at point blank the boarding ship can be a few sectors away.
Transporter bombs wouldn't be different than a direct fire weapon there's no need for that. Other uses such as food replicators may already be being in use without our knowledege.

I'd also like to have boarding shuttles combined with starwars ion cannons, if not your shuttles would be killed by pdc before getting close


And about component and facility pictures. You seem to suggest that we should make pictures first and then let modders choose and add the ones they need.

That will not work. I don't want to make a pic no one will ever use, or if some picture looks really good, force modders to use it.

The point is that everything starts with modders requesting the pictures they need.
I'm not sure if a small Version of the picture is needed, since small Versions of all default pics are just re-sizes of the big ones.

I also suggested that some modders may need help editing those bitmaps that contain all minis.

[Suicide Junkie]

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Transporters are useless against shields, and maybe even useless against EMC.

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If you're referring to trek style transporters. Definitely ECM is effective. Even certain common ores can prevent transporters from operating, and you don't have to be buried under it either.

I think the main problem with the transporter is that even if you can't materialize anything at your destination, you've still got one hell of a "High Energy Discharge" Weapon. Remember that E=MC^2, and you've moved six people worth of mass (in the form of energy!) in under six seconds from one point to another.

E = MC^2
= 500KG x (300,000,000 M/S )^2
= 4.5*10^19 J
= 11,000 Megatons TNT

So, 500KG -> 11,000 Megatons of TNT, all dumped into a small room over a five second period...
Who wants to purchase a shuttlecraft capable of cracking a planet?

[Taqwus]

I always wondered why the Trek shows didn't make heavy use of the obvious powers of the transporter as shown (e.g. if an enemy vessel's shields have been downed, you could beam a bomb *inside* the enemy ship, say, into their warp core... likewise, the pattern storage system would also seem to encompass cloning. An army of Data clones, perhaps?).

Much more powerful than the rest of SE4 tech, with the possible exception of warp point manipulation, unless we presume that for dramatic purposes all the races in the SE4 galaxy are too inane to take advantage of them.

Speaking of facilities, it occurred to me that perhaps radioactives production should be negatively correlated with climate / colony survivability. Unless we're positing radiation-immune races, or some "clean" method of living on, say, a 180%-rad planet. It'd might be rather difficult to implement reasonably without a whole Stars!-like system of environmental preferences, 'tho.

And for some REALLY rambling ideas, perhaps more efficient construction yards (e.g. reduce actual building cost -- say, takes computers and space yards... and maybe resource manipulation?) would be nifty. Right now, all we can do is influence the production side of things; we can't ever lower actual resource costs.

[geoschmo]

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Originally posted by Taqwus:
And for some REALLY rambling ideas, perhaps more efficient construction yards (e.g. reduce actual building cost -- say, takes computers and space yards... and maybe resource manipulation?) would be nifty. Right now, all we can do is influence the production side of things; we can't ever lower actual resource costs.

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True from the facility side we can't affect the production cost. That would be a nice ability.

You can do this in a roundabout way from the component side by extending the tech tree and adding higher level components that are cheaper, but have the same abilites. Already done in the stock game with engines. No reason other than extra complexity the same thing couldne't be done with other components.

Geoschmo

[Mark Walton]

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Originally posted by geoschmo:

You can do this in a roundabout way from the component side by extending the tech tree and adding higher level components that are cheaper, but have the same abilites. Already done in the stock game with engines. No reason other than extra complexity the same thing couldne't be done with other components.

Geoschmo

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This is one reason why I put on my wishlist, a tech requirement for "CompEnhancements".
Imagine being able to create an "Construction Efficiency" tech which allows a compenhancement entry giving a % reduction in costs (amng all the other possible benefits such a system could bring)

[Andrés]

About creating new pictures for components and facilities used in mods.
I didn't see modders as interested as I expected.
If some modders such as s_j, the starter of this thread, would post a list of pictures required by their mods I'd like to help with a some pictures. And I'm sure other artists would do the same until all custom components and facilities in his mod have good custom pics.

There are some comments about a new mod with some interesting variations of standard techs instead of new tech trees.
There's potential to make a great mod here. And the idea of spicing it with more variation in graphics is good.
Again when someone starts actually working on this mod he can request artists the pics he needs.

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Speaking of facilities, it occurred to me that perhaps radioactives production should be negatively correlated with climate / colony survivability. Unless we're positing radiation-immune races, or some "clean" method of living on, say, a 180%-rad planet. It'd might be rather difficult to implement reasonably without a whole Stars!-like system of environmental preferences, 'tho.

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There're planet conditions in se 4. Even if they only affect reproduction and ground combat (never verified that one).
It shouldn't be too difficult to make high rad value planets have poor conditions.

Trek transporters are scientifically impossible. So what? I already knew that. They are sill cool. FTL travel and shields are also impossible. Are you going to say that all standard technologies in se iv are scientifically realistic??
Some theories about transporters suggest that they don't transform energy into matter, but do some limited manipulation of matter at a molecular level. (you cannot replicate latinum, and even some complex organic proteins are difficult to replicate, however they can be easily transported...)
Who cares? Their main use, if they are ever included in se iv should be as its name indicates TRANSPORT.

[capnq]

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Unless we're positing radiation-immune races

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I'm reminded of a short story I read a long time ago (long enough to not recall the title or author) in an SF mag, which involved a radiation-dependant race that would die in an environment without enough background radiation.