Useful Starbases! ? Modders, please respond.

Barnacle Bill · #25 January 15th, 2001, 02:33 AM

If you assume that there is nanotech & robotic industry everywhere, then planets & population are completely irrelevant. All that matters under that paradigm are resources. You would not bother with colonization. You'd just park shiploads of nanobots in asteroid belts and they would crank out - more nanobots. Weapons would just be - more nanobots which would "eat" enemy hardware and make more of themselves out of it. It wouldn't look much like SE4, which is more "space opera". I prefer a SF paradigm in which we just see incremental improvements vs how things are done today (which is pretty much what "space opera" means - modern day or historical naval paradigms translated into space, with tech that is better but similar in principle to that which goes with the historical paradigm). So, I "reality check" things against my real-life experience (retired USNR CPO, 8 years active duty in submarines, on the commissioning crew for one new boat so I know a lot about shipyards).

Aside from the above, a practical reason that I don't like space yards in ships is that it reduces the value of real estate. The industrial base that realy counts is your space yards. If you can't move them, or at least not quickly (assuming my proposal for remote assembly of bases were in effect), then you have to defend the place they are. Otherwise, you just move them at first indication an enemy has seen the system they are in. In fact, to increase the importance of real estate & population I think it might be a good idea to give a production bonus to space yard bases based on the population of the planet they orbit (have to think that through more, though).

As to building ring & sphere worlds, if you could remote assemble a base as I have proposed, you could still build them pretty much as today. That not being in place, in my own data set when I killed space yard components in ships, I also reduced the size of all the ring & sphere world associated components so they will fit in a base ship.