Quote from: SevenOfCarina on August 22, 2018, 04:01:25 PM

Also, Aurora doesn't allow you to remove the last mass driver on a colony when mineral packets are inbound to avoid accidentally wrecking your own populations.

That was because too many of us bombarded our home planets to dust.

I will deny being in any way responsible for this until my dying day!

(the trick now is to begin the bombardment before constructing a catcher mass driver)

Quote from: Rich.h on August 22, 2018, 05:20:21 PM

For the current tech level I can prefab a 100 armour PDC for 9k DUR and 3k NEU, not too bad mineral costs really. All I need do then is ship it to locations get them bolted together and transfered over to the other colony population. Pretty sure doing things this way I could even pull down the temperature on venus to levels that can be managed until the atmosphere becomes reasonable.

Beam weapons are ineffective when targeting worlds with over 101.325 kPa of atmosphere, so this technique would be useless on Venus. Orbital Habitats would probably be more efficient in any circumstance.

True beam weapons are pointless, but a ship design that is full of size 1 launchers allows for this to work on bodies with an atmosphere of 1.0 or greater. A couple of 100 armour PDC's can take a fair amount of damage before giving it up, and at 5 second launch intervals you could feasibly drop a body surface temperature by 50 desgrees or more in the space of a couple of minutes tops. Granted it will take years for all that dust and radiation to clear, during which time the population would have to be on a short cycle time, heading back to a colony with high tech midical facilities to prevent them dying off from radiation poisoning and such. But during this time the colony cost would have dropped to allow you a greater population for terraforming per infrastructure than before. Assuming of course you get below the magic colony cost 20.

Hot worlds with little atmosphere though can be dropped tremendously fast with a few beam weapons, and no need to waste missiles.

I do agree completely that this is far from an efficient method of doing things, for me the entire concept just added more RP flavour than the magic terraformer vaccums that fix everything. Also this is a case of doing something simply because it "can" be done.

For the current tech level I can prefab a 100 armour PDC for 9k DUR and 3k NEU, not too bad mineral costs really. All I need do then is ship it to locations get them bolted together and transfered over to the other colony population. Pretty sure doing things this way I could even pull down the temperature on venus to levels that can be managed until the atmosphere becomes reasonable.

Beam weapons are ineffective when targeting worlds with over 101.325 kPa of atmosphere, so this technique would be useless on Venus. Orbital Habitats would probably be more efficient in any circumstance.

It works to an extent with some fudging, first up I can't find out how you were able to use a laser to target one of your own colonies? I can't even see my own colonies in the combat screen. As such I had to do a quick test with a work around.

1. Design a new race with identical properties to your main race (thus costin zero RP).
2. Using the new race in the F9 screen add a colony to your chosen body that for example already has a colony of your main race.
3. An unfortunate step but easily handwaved with some RP (radioactive waste etc), you need to have some form of installations or such on this new colony as it needs to have a thermal or EM signature for detection.
4. Give this new colony Independence so they effectively become a player controlled new empire
5. Have a TG detect this "new" race then target the colony on the combat screen (ensuring "show hostile only" is unchecked).
6. FIRE!

Doing the above causes an orbital bombardment as per normal, in my test run i used a heavy cruiser with a vollet of laser fire to inflict 208 points of damage to the colony. I had only SM'd in a single factory to test as a thermal signature so obviously this was totally destroyed. This also resulted in a dust/radiation level of 208 being produced and a temperature change of -2 degrees, the dust/radiation effect was felt across the entire planet. So when I switch back to my main empire I find my main race colony on this planet now are suffering from a dust/radiation level of 208 and a temperature change of -2 degrees also.

The same could be achieved easier with mass drivers I would think as you could skip the first four steps. Just setup a colony as per steps 1 & 2 but ensure a freighter is present to unload/load a single mass driver to the colony and allow you to throw spare minerals at it.

If you were able to target one of your own colonies with a beam weapon as per your OP then this entire process becomes simplified, and I would definitely like to know how you did that as it could be used for short term aid with terraforming and as a good RP tool.

You're correct - Aurora doesn't allow you to target your own colonies. I used a workaround that was similar to what you've done, though what I did was to use SM mode to create an extra player-controlled Empire on Earth. I SM'ed in a massively armoured PDC on Mercury that I named 'Planetary Crust', transferred the PDC over to the NPR, and then deleted the NPR's Earth colony. It's not exactly without its headaches.

Also, Aurora doesn't allow you to remove the last mass driver on a colony when mineral packets are inbound to avoid accidentally wrecking your own populations.

While not a good long term solution, they could perhaps be used for short term gains. Bombard a body to kick up dust and drop the temperature, this then you should be able to get a higher population count per infrastructure. This gives you time before the dust settles to get going with the terraforming to bring things inline on a permenant basis.

For most cases I can't see this being a viable solution with low cost bodies. But for your venusian world types this may be of some use.

Actually, it's a fairly viable long-term solution. Dust only settles at the rate of 250 per year, so that's at least ten years before the temperature gets high enough to become uncomfortable. Even the most basic Ion-era warship can easily sustain this. It's ideal for airless worlds like Mercury, since beam weapons rapidly lose effectiveness in atmosphere.

Can you target waypoints at a system body for orbital bombardment?

For missiles, sure.  For beam weapons. . . I don't think so.

Quote from: Rich.h on August 22, 2018, 05:34:22 AM

Obviously when doing this, you set up two colonies on a body. One being the actual colony to be used and another is simply a "target" site somewhere on the other side of the body to let the dust drift across and thus not blasting the population out of existence.

Does this actually work? Can you bombard one colony on a planet while leaving the other untouched?

If so, do dust and radiation carry over?

How about mass drivers?

It works to an extent with some fudging, first up I can't find out how you were able to use a laser to target one of your own colonies? I can't even see my own colonies in the combat screen. As such I had to do a quick test with a work around.

1. Design a new race with identical properties to your main race (thus costin zero RP).
2. Using the new race in the F9 screen add a colony to your chosen body that for example already has a colony of your main race.
3. An unfortunate step but easily handwaved with some RP (radioactive waste etc), you need to have some form of installations or such on this new colony as it needs to have a thermal or EM signature for detection.
4. Give this new colony independance so they effectivley become a player controlled new empire
5. Have a TG detect this "new" race then target the colony on the combat screen (ensuring "show hostile only" is unchecked).
6. FIRE!

Doing the above causes an orbital bombardment as per normal, in my test run i used a heavy cruiser with a vollet of laser fire to inflict 208 points of damage to the colony. I had only SM'd in a single factory to test as a thermal signature so obviously this was totally destroyed. This also resulted in a dust/radiation level of 208 being produced and a temperature change of -2 degrees, the dust/radiation effect was felt across the entire planet. So when I switch back to my main empire I find my main race colony on this planet now are suffering from a dust/radiation level of 208 and a temperature change of -2 degrees also.

The same could be achieved easier with mass drivers I would think as you could skip the first four steps. Just setup a colony as per steps 1 & 2 but ensure a frieghter is present to unload/load a single mass driver to the colony and allow you to throw spare minerals at it.

If you were able to target one of your own colonies with a beam weapon as per your OP then this entire process becomes simplified, and I would definitley like to know how you did that as it could be used for short term aid with terraforming and as a good RP tool.

While not a good long term solution, they could perhaps be used for short term gains. Bombard a body to kick up dust and drop the temperature, this then you should be able to get a higher population count per infrastructure. This gives you time before the dust settles to get going with the terraforming to bring things inline on a permenant basis.

Obviously when doing this, you set up two colonies on a body. One being the actual colony to be used and another is simply a "target" site somewhere on the other side of the body to let the dust drift accross and thus not blasting the population out of existence.

For most cases I can't see this being a viable solution with low cost bodies. But for your venusian world types this may be of some use.

Quote from: CatastrophicReEntry on August 21, 2018, 12:54:47 PM

Point taken. But there's no reason why a populated world can't be bombarded every now and then.

I guess we know what kind of civilization you're playing.

Similar to the Elon Musk approach to terraforming