Giant Stars?

[mlmbd]

Well you can turn an asteroid field into a planet then colonize it, or them!

[geoschmo]

D, A spherewolrd isn't worth all the mucking about? It's the equivalent to eight huge planets, which is more than you will get in any other system without some kind of a mod. Of course you won't be able to have a sphereworld and a bunch of planets.

Actually you can do that by modding a tetonic bomb that can blow up a sphereworld. Then by a series of create star, make spherewolrd, blow up spherewolrd you can create something out of nothing and end up with a spherewolrd and as many planets as you want all clustered in the center sector of the system.

There is also a way to move planets/asteroids, but you have to be using a Version before 1.78. Basically it's exploiting a stellar manip bug that was fixed with that patch.

Geoschmo

[PvK]

If you turn a special system into an empty system by the process described, does the system lose or retain its special abilities?

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by PvK:
If you turn a special system into an empty system by the process described, does the system lose or retain its special abilities?

It loses them. (Hmmm, I think. I didn't actaully double check that.)

[ October 16, 2002, 14:22: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[dogscoff]

D, A spherewolrd isn't worth all the mucking about?

Not in a system like that, no. If I'm gonna build a sphereworld, I'm gonna build it somewhere useful.

Apart from the well-known fact that you only ever build a sphereworld for the hell of it anyway, why would you place it in some dead-end system with no planets? By the time you've got the necessary stellar manipulation for all this arsing around you've probably cut the useless empty system out of your warp-point network anyway.

I think an option to shift asteroids about in some horrendously out-sized ship would be a good idea. The project should be even more of a folly than building SWs / RWs, but do-able.

[Mylon]

Is what I don't understand is if you can build ringworlds/sphereworlds out of nothing, why can't you build planets in the same manner? I understand the game balance aspect, but it does seem a little silly, anyway. Sure, the ringworld/sphereworlds need a star, but that's for energy, not for actual building material. A planet that doesn't have a star would have to produce its own energy, and a huge amount of it, and would have a limited lifespan unless people brought in water for fusion or some such.

Now, is what really bugs me about ringworlds/sphereworlds is they they really should take up more than one square. Like a radius of 2-3 for both. At that point, it might be better to call each sector a "planet", which would alleviate the problem of taking forever to fill a ring/sphereworld. In the ringworld series, the ringworld builders collected all of the mass of the system to built it, so those 5 huge worlds worth of ringworld were at the cost of everything else in the system.

[dogscoff]

Mylon: Agreed, although sometimes I'm prepared to forget about realism for the sake of gameplay.

I guess you could use the Oort cloud or whatever else you call that gigantic shell of asteroids (theoretically) found around every solar system. I mean really, even if you were to take the asteroid belt between Mars & Jupiter you probably have enough matter for a smallish ringworld, but in the game that would get you one planet. A ring of sphereworld would also be thousands or millions of times bigger than it represented in a game as well (in terms of facility, population space) but that's just the way the game is.

SE4's star systems are basically nothing like realty, and you just have to accept it. The planets don't move, they're too close together... you could go on ages picking holes but eventually you just have to accpet that it's an abstraction, nothing more.

[/Ramble]