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[EuchreJack]

The return of the {!!-<<+Iron Dwarven Spaceship+>>-!!}

There's quite a few hurdles to overcome.  For one, the problem with tracking inside and outside tiles, and the temperatures there in.

You also can't really control what your dwarves wear beyond telling soldiers to equip armor, and they can do jobs for you, as one would expect people in spacesuits to do.

I love the idea of the other races being replaced by nations.  "The Liaison from New Beijing has arrived."

"We've struck a peculiar chamber..."
"Horror!  Martians from the caves!"

As far as armor, you can trick your surface workers into wearing leather armor if you give them the hunting task.  Since the surface of Mars in generally uninhabitted, this shouldn't prevent them from working on the surface.  Just remember to give all your starting colonists the "hunter" job.  Plus, if leather armor is the space suits, you can make metal armor into armored space suits!

I'm curious what will replace the elves...

[Calvin]

I'm curious what will replace the elves...

PETA

[Im_Sparks]

Exposure
The exposure time should be afew minutes, long enough to get started on a fort and for immigrants to get inside. Justify this with the fact they are all wearing emergany oxygen tanks or something.
The only people that can be outside for long periods of time are people that can equip armour, such as military and hunters. It's kind of conveniant due to lack of trees. Cave adaption isn't really a problem if your colonists are inside all of the time anyway. It will be funny to see them take trade items up to the depot and then puke everywhere though. 

There should still be war, from other pissed off factions.
Weapons
Hammers = Wrenches
Swords = Plasma cutters
Axes = Drills
Crossbows = Guns
Shields = Large Riot Shields
Bucklers = Small Riot Shields
Ballistas = Siege lasers (produced with cut gems)
Catapults = Artillery Cannons

Obviously a space suit that has been shot up isn't much good, so make them different sizes. Or use different plugs or something to avoid the player massing loads of sets of space suits.

Crops
Space Helmets = Plump helmets
Hogtail = Pig tail
Spaceweed = Cave wheat
Spacepods = Sweetpods
Redweed = Dimple cup (but red dye)
Martian Fungi (Processed into wood, for charcoal and building)

Add advanced and high yeild crops, Algae that grows in 1/7 water.
Yellow Algae = Rocket Fuel (Booze)
Red Algae = Algae wafers (After being dried(milled) and cooked)
Green Algae = High Strength Cloth (silk) Not high yeild, but an interesting method of obtaining silk.

Trade
2 types of trade.
Rovers. Like a normal trade depot for trading with colonies around the place.
Spaceships. Come enter from the edge of the map several z levels up and come down. The spaceships need atleast 3 z levels above them and 3 wide. Haulers shouldn't die, since they have these "emergancy oxygen tanks". Used for trading items back to Earth. One one of these should come a year, or even less, and it should be an event. Crafts sell for lots of money, and other things exotic to earth. They sell stuff like seeds and animals more often. If the trade depot is inaccessable they will pass you by, so you need to put some effort into digging a hanger. In order to make spaceships require just a little development, only allow trade depots to be placed underground.

Food, alchohol, wood, metals, gems, cloth, clothes, dye, armour, weapons are all trade commodities. Pretty much the same except for the fact bone crafts are a little rarer, unless you decided to bring breeding animals along.

Creatures
Earth livestock, cats, dogs
Martian cave creatures
Monster cave and surface creatures

Holy hell I love the idea of make a 10x10 crop of spaceweed and having all the space dwarves trip out. As said on the lovable show, trailer park boys: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5410360369098561423

[woose1]

XI

[Granite26]

There's no need to preserve elf-like traits at all.  If you beef up the difficulty of surviving enough (take out most of the plants, etc), you could remove the need for raiders of all sorts....

[Calvin]

Replace trees with junk?

[Im_Sparks]

Replace trees with junk?

Dude. Spacetrees. Awesome. That, or biodomes

[mainiac]

A martian colony has little economic incentive to it.  A lunar colony on the other hand is a potentially profitable enterprise since lunar materials could be used to make satellites for earth.  The surface of the moon is covered in Oxygen (useful for filling habitats), Iron (useful for building habitats and good for export) and silicon (useful for export, aka solar panels for powering satellites or even for sending power back to earth via microwave transmission).  And the atmosphere on mars is hardly an asset as it is far thinner then earths and will cause erosion, unlike lunar vacuum.  The only reason to send a mission to mars is to investigate the geology, while a mission to the moon could be a permanent settlement with a strong economy.  And that's not even getting into the benefits of a six round trip over a three year round trip or the fact that getting anything back from mars would be nigh on impossible.

Therefore I recommend building your fortress on the moon not mars.

Also, plastic would be difficult to produce on either the moon or on mars as neither planet has the petrochemicals we make plastics from.  Maybe plastics could be an import good?

[Orange Drink]

A martian colony has little economic incentive to it.  A lunar colony on the other hand is a potentially profitable enterprise since lunar materials could be used to make satellites for earth.  The surface of the moon is covered in Oxygen (useful for filling habitats), Iron (useful for building habitats and good for export) and silicon (useful for export, aka solar panels for powering satellites or even for sending power back to earth via microwave transmission).  And the atmosphere on mars is hardly an asset as it is far thinner then earths and will cause erosion, unlike lunar vacuum.  The only reason to send a mission to mars is to investigate the geology, while a mission to the moon could be a permanent settlement with a strong economy.  And that's not even getting into the benefits of a six round trip over a three year round trip or the fact that getting anything back from mars would be nigh on impossible.

Therefore I recommend building your fortress on the moon not mars.

Also, plastic would be difficult to produce on either the moon or on mars as neither planet has the petrochemicals we make plastics from.  Maybe plastics could be an import good?

what if the moon is already populated with moon elves?

[Calvin]

And actually, Mars HAS a atmosphere that's much related to Earth.

But its too thin. If we release enough greenhouse gases on Mars, it could be almost exactly like Earth, thus meaning a secondary planet for Humans.


Plus, the surface contains iron oxide, which explain why it's red. (Although anything breathing the air of Mars would die of lung cancer) and Mars has more oxygen than the Moon.

[Aqizzar]

And actually, Mars HAS a atmosphere that's much related to Earth.

But its too thin. If we release enough greenhouse gases on Mars, it could be almost exactly like Earth, thus meaning a secondary planet for Humans.

This is pretty wrong.  Mars has an atmosphere, but it's almost exclusively carbon dioxide, and has less than 1% the pressure of Earth's air.  And there's two major hurdles to changing that.  One, the lower gravity would have a harder time holding onto more air.  Two and more importantly, with no magnetic field, part of why the atmosphere is so thin is solar wind constantly stripping off the top layers, and more air would have the same problem.

It would take a lot more than smoke to make Mars breathable.  A pie-in-the-sky plan floated around is clobbering Mars with ice-asteroids from the edge of the solar system, over and over for a couple centuries, to build up a lot of moisture.

[mainiac]

I have no notion as to how the martian atmosphere can be considered like the earth atmosphere.

Also both mars and the moon have plenty of oxygen.  The limiting element in both instances would be hydrogen which is hard to get on both planets.  The big advantage mars has in terms of element abundance is carbon, specifically the useful CO2.  Lunar silicon is a much bigger advantage though, as that can be used as the basis of an export industry, which is what makes a colony a worthwhile endeavor.

[EuchreJack]

Anyone read the Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury?  Those Martians are a lot like Elves.  It is theoretically possible that a species more advanced by ours could be living on Mars.  Honestly, a species a bit less advanced than ours could be hiding from us on Mars.  It would be hard to replicate the tree diplomacy of the Elves though.

[woose1]

Anyone read the Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury?  Those Martians are a lot like Elves.  It is theoretically possible that a species more advanced by ours could be living on Mars.  Honestly, a species a bit less advanced than ours could be hiding from us on Mars.  It would be hard to replicate the tree diplomacy of the Elves though.

Like it has been written:
Dood. spacetrees, awsome.

[tigrex]

You could avoid specifying which planet you're colonising by deploying the random name generator.  Then, given the nature of the result, we could look at screenshots and argue whether its the moon, Mars, or Venus.