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Total Members Voted: 21

[10ebbor10]

I have many-many ideas for modules, but I'd rather wait until we have the technology

The question is which approach is better - totally module based ships, or motherboard like ( basic hull + expansion sockets like the proposed destroyer)

Well, Totally module based ships have a greater customizability, but the The motherboard ships are stronger. ( The connection between the modules will always pose a weak point. I'd go for Motherboard ones, with reactor/crew in the motherboard, and then adding weapons.)

Also since it seems we're researching fusion again, this are ways a fusion plant can explode

Spoiler: Fusion plant explosion (click to show/hide)

-Coolant explosion. (For some reason the most commonly used coolant is quite volatile)
-Magnets(The magnetic fields to keep the fusion reaction going are quite strong. If the structure isn't strong enough, the reactor will tear itself apart)
-Other

[Ukrainian Ranger]

I think we don't need  huge ships ATM, at least military ones, so I propose this to be last shipyard expansion for a while.  (But smaller backup shipyard may be very  useful, especially well defended one)

When we'll have hundreds of fighters dozens of corvettes, dozen frigates and several destroyers we may start thinking about capital ships, now it will only unbalance the fleet

And big civilian ships can be easily built using module system, they don't need high durability, and they are abstracted enough to not micromanage their design

[Immortal]

- Construct a space tether on aqaurius, it can be anchored to a large floating hydroponic farm. Problem is, you need to anchor it to the ground though, of which there is no on Aquiruis. Also the frequent heavy weather will damage it, resulting to a giant chain crashing into the ground, so no.

Do you know much about mega-structure engineering?
One of the current leading theories on where to place a space tether on earth to allow easy evasion with space debris is to attach a tether to a large ship in the ocean.

In context of the game, we can easy build a floating city, shield it from storms and attach the space tether safely. The space tether, if anything would go flying off into space rather then into the ground..

Begin its construction, and for the record, they are constructed from space to surface. That means we don't need the floating city constructed to do this, it will come second when we can send materials down to the surface easily for construction.

[10ebbor10]

- Construct a space tether on aqaurius, it can be anchored to a large floating hydroponic farm. Problem is, you need to anchor it to the ground though, of which there is no on Aquiruis. Also the frequent heavy weather will damage it, resulting to a giant chain crashing into the ground, so no.

Do you know much about mega-structure engineering?
One of the current leading theories on where to place a space tether on earth to allow easy evasion with space debris is to attach a tether to a large ship in the ocean.

In context of the game, we can easy build a floating city, shield it from storms and attach the space tether safely. The space tether, if anything would go flying off into space rather then into the ground..

Begin its construction, and for the record, they are constructed from space to surface. That means we don't need the floating city constructed to do this, it will come second when we can send materials down to the surface easily for construction.

Problem is that your space tether is connected between a sattelite(counterweigth station ) and a ground station. In order to keep the line stable qnd save you need to secure those at both ends, meaning that when you move the ship, you need to move the counterweigth station too(Moving spacestations around is not cheap). Of course you can try to stabilize the tether in some other way(Magnets interacting with the magnetic field), and there's a small margin, but move it to much and you break the cable/ pull the station out of orbit.

As for the space tether falling, It really depends on where it snaps, still I doubt that the upper piece would have escape velocity in order to fully escape the planet(And thus fall back in pieces over the next few months).

[Immortal]

- Construct a space tether on aqaurius, it can be anchored to a large floating hydroponic farm. Problem is, you need to anchor it to the ground though, of which there is no on Aquiruis. Also the frequent heavy weather will damage it, resulting to a giant chain crashing into the ground, so no.

Do you know much about mega-structure engineering?
One of the current leading theories on where to place a space tether on earth to allow easy evasion with space debris is to attach a tether to a large ship in the ocean.

In context of the game, we can easy build a floating city, shield it from storms and attach the space tether safely. The space tether, if anything would go flying off into space rather then into the ground..

Begin its construction, and for the record, they are constructed from space to surface. That means we don't need the floating city constructed to do this, it will come second when we can send materials down to the surface easily for construction.

Problem is that your space tether is connected between a sattelite(counterweigth station ) and a ground station. In order to keep the line stable qnd save you need to secure those at both ends, meaning that when you move the ship, you need to move the counterweigth station too(Moving spacestations around is not cheap). Of course you can try to stabilize the tether in some other way(Magnets interacting with the magnetic field), and there's a small margin, but move it to much and you break the cable/ pull the station out of orbit.

As for the space tether falling, It really depends on where it snaps, still I doubt that the upper piece would have escape velocity in order to fully escape the planet(And thus fall back in pieces over the next few months).

You are missing the physics of a space tether..
It needs a weight in only one end as an anchor. The mass of the tether itself acts as the anchor. The energy expended putting mass into space without this faaar outweighs the energy of moving the tether around during construction. Considering we are capable of building this thing, I think we have engineers or subroutines capable of calculating the margins very closesly so large uses of fuel will be unnecessary.

The tether wont snap under its own weight, not to mention we can infuse it with self-repairing nanofibers, we can even build it with a large safety factor if you are so worried. As for it breaking during operation, it would snap at the base.. Which would result in the centripetal forces throwing it into space.

Either way we could even use the tether as a centripetal water pump on the surface to fuel a mutitude of project from space base fusion reactors, to the hydoponics farm, or to create more oxygen for space based human settlements.

[10ebbor10]

Then again, you  want to have a ground station to keep the space elevator stable and keep it from swinging or moving around. Also, while space elevators are more cost effective then then conventional launches, moving one around after constructuion finishes is a hell of a job. Inertia poses quite a problem there.

Tethers won't snap at the base, It will snap near the middle, probably where the centrifugal force equals the gravititional force. That part has to carry the weight of the cable below it and prevent the cable above it from flying away. Carbon nanofibers will help, but it will snap if caught in an extreme storm.

Fusion barely uses water (You come a long way with even a little deuterium), Hydroponic farms are quite water efficient( Though they do need water and nutrients equal to the food you get out) and lifesupport is often very efficient (Nearing 100% since we have nanotech)

Still if you want it you can build it. I would put it at low priotity though.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

I'd rather not screw with Aqurius, few colonies are fine, some watertaking, too, but epic constructions is bad for our long term goal - intelligent avian allies and trade partners. We have 4 other planets to exploit for resources and industrial base

[Xvareon]

Well since we're going the route of epic scale farms and food production we could probably use a way to store all that for a long, long time.  I'm no expert on refrigeration techniques and other methods of food preservation, but I do know that ensuring a safe & steady supply of food for a growing populace is imperative.  It wouldn't do to starve because some tragedy befell our farms or food production, so having security against such a disaster will be good.  Vacuum-sealed underground food bunkers FTW?

[Unholy_Pariah]

i vote we build the floating city on Aquarius, install some shields and PD lasers, name it Atlantis and start designing an FTL drive for it.

then fly it around the system for no apparent reason.

[Mr. Palau]

Well since we're going the route of epic scale farms and food production we could probably use a way to store all that for a long, long time.  I'm no expert on refrigeration techniques and other methods of food preservation, but I do know that ensuring a safe & steady supply of food for a growing populace is imperative.  It wouldn't do to starve because some tragedy befell our farms or food production, so having security against such a disaster will be good.  Vacuum-sealed underground food bunkers FTW?

If you wanted to store it for a long time, the bunkers are kind of excessive. To ensure the long term safety of the food you could just place it in a vaccum sealed container and then bombard the container with X-rays, killing all of the life inside while not making the food readio active. Then you could just put that container in temperture controled warehouse.

Also seperating the food into individually vaccum sealed containers would be better than haing an entire vaccum sealed bunker, because if the seal on the bunker breaks than all the food could be contaminated. Whereas not all the seals would break on all of the containers at the same time so even if one did it would onlly contaminate that food and then you could just eat the contaminated food and reseal the conainer with new clean ood inside.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

i vote we build the floating city on Aquarius, install some shields and PD lasers, name it Atlantis and start designing an FTL drive for it.

then fly it around the system for no apparent reason.

But before we must create insect-human hybrid and advanced replicators

[Unholy_Pariah]

then fight them?

[Maldevious]

So I need to have a talk with my players. Hopefully you can help me figure out what to do.

I'm finding the game getting a bit too in depth for me. With everything going on in this system, it's become a chore rather than a joy to write the updates. I find myself simply going through the list of suggestions, rolling, and then writing a rather lousy sentence or two about what I rolled. When I roll a 1, something explodes. When I roll a 6, something goes a bit extra well. It's... not sustainable from my perspective.

I started to notice it in the last two updates, which I thought were particularly uninspired. When I was writing them, they were something I had to get done before sleeping rather than something I was attacking with gusto. If you go back and take a look at them, I think you'll see what I mean.

In effect, while the game has produced some awesome stuff, it's gotten a bit too broad in scope. Mavens are cool. Space navies are cool. Moonies are cool. Avians are cool. Those crazy defensive spiked robots on Gaia are very cool. But they have taken center stage when perhaps they were best left on the wings. I know that the majority of that is my fault as GM, but we cannot always predict how these things will play out in advance.

Here is what I'm thinking, and I'll see what you all think of my... thoughts. I'd like to increase the speed of the game. One turn will be years. Not sure how many yet. Maybe five. Maybe a decade. I want to see this colony grow, not a few hundred people at a time, but eventually generations could come and go. I'd like to pare down some of the details. Keep them in for flavor, but maybe not have so much focus on them. Probably pick one colony to focus on, probably on Aries, since that is where it all started.

Needless to say, I think that this is my post for tonight. Sorry for those of you that were looking forward to what I was going to put up this evening. I started to write it and got a bit bummed out by the lack of narrative. It was... not a story anymore, but a uninspiring mashup of what was suggested and the whims of a d6.

Sorry for the long-winded rant. I'd love to hear what you have to say about all of this. Thanks again for 90+ pages of posts. Let me know what you think.

[Zecro_The_Scourge]

I agree with the years idea, however I think it should deaccelerate a bit between turns if something major happens so we have a choice on things and then resume the time skip and such.

[Xvareon]

I understand completely, though a year in a game is a unit of time best left to large empires with hundreds of things going on at once.  We're still quite small, and a lot does get done in two months, but if you like we can shake things up a little.  I was thinking more along the lines of four months or so, it still allows us to cut through years nicely and deal with any issues that arise promptly.  You don't want to go too fast because then stuff will shoot right by you so fast you won't have any idea what the flip is going on.  If we were sending ships on FTL travel to distant star systems, then yeah, that would take several years, but we're still in a local system and a lot of things are happening within each year.

I also understand what you mean about having all these different things to deal with in the game; the Avians, the Mavens, the giant spiked robots on Gaia, the Moonies, etc.  Best advice I can offer you is that since we can only concentrate on a few of these areas at any given time, make something happen from the others that we can either ignore to perfect our work in our current area, risking catastrophe-level repercussions on the other end, or turn around and apply a patch to the emerging problem, running a risk of what we were doing before going horribly wrong and causing an even worse problem -- die rolls are perfect for this.

Really the best way to deal with multiple situations is force us to choose between what we want most.  It's only natural to want everything to go perfectly, but in reality, it rarely works that way.  It also provides a good basis for replayability and creating new situations to deal with in the future.  I recommend using polls as an option for deciding on what major path to pursue.