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Posted by: TallTroll
« on: June 01, 2014, 09:50:29 PM »

Seems like sun-mining would make a possible end-game source of resources, allowing you to afford some of the monster ships you can now design and build with end-tech,and provide more of an incentive in the early / mid game to take and hold territory. Even a system with no other bodies could one day be sun-mined, so it has inherent material value.

It might be wise to limit quantities and accessibilty though. Stars are vastly larger than any planet we could exploit, so we'd literally only be able to scratch the surface. Maybe not even the surface, maybe you'd "mine" the corona. Make it a supertech after Sorium mining perhaps, with a few levels for mining rate, like other extraction techs. Since you could tweak the costs and mining rates to suit, you could predetermine the expected breakeven date for the mining modules, based on an average star, and you can fiddle the distribution so "average" can fall where you like, and you could rig the numbers for mining modules to require lots of wealth / crew to limit their deployment too, if you like.

I don't think you need to worry about changing the behaviour of stars within the timescale of Aurora though. Even Pop 0 stars have a life of 10 mil years or so, and it's unlikely they would be worth mining anyway. Extracting millions of tons of anything is inconsequential to a star; consider, our own quite weedy star loses around a billion tons kilograms of mass per second in ordinary solar wind emissions. Any player mining, at any conceivable rate with any conceivable tech just won't even show up.

<edit> I was 3 orders of magnitude out. Still doesn't matter </edit>
Posted by: xeryon
« on: May 29, 2014, 06:48:39 AM »

At least part of the code for solar intensity increase and decrease already exists.  It is a start up option you can toggle on and off when you create a new game.  I know this affects your starting colony but I haven't checked to see if has an effect on all the other uncolonized system bodies at the same time.
Posted by: Rich.h
« on: May 29, 2014, 03:34:12 AM »

While mining stars is cool I think if you could then alter the output of a star by mining you would introduce a minefield of complexity. By altering the output of a star you would also effect the colony rating of all planetary bodies in orbit of that star. Hell you could feasibly turn Earth into an icy Hoth planet this way. This would then mean you have to alter all your terraforming states.

It's a great idea for uber tech and such but my mind boggles at the amount of extra coding stuff that would be needed to implement such an idea fully. When the game in it's current state struggles to handle load that well I'm not sure such a thing would be of any great benefit for the extra slowdown.
Posted by: xeryon
« on: May 28, 2014, 09:06:04 AM »

Quote from: xeryon on May 21, 2014, 02:36:39 PM
An interesting by-product of mineral extraction of a star might be increase or decrease in solar energy output.  Extract too many of the minerals and you might alter the environment of the entire system.

From post #17 I get to lay claim to the altering solar output by excessive mining idea.   ;)

As previously discussed there are many stars that have mass and surface temperatures that would require nothing more than a modified asteroid miner to pull this off.  Main sequence stars could be argued that even in the TN age the technology isn't capable of it but with brown dwarfs why not?

I also propose the feasibility of this from a temperature standpoint via the already existing lack of penalty for close star approaches.  I can navigate directly to a star and orbit it, presumably at 0km?, without a problem.  I realize that the current mechanics exist because of a desire to not make things too complicated in stellar navigation (and programming too) so TN technology is used to explain away the complications to make it so that close star approaches are possible.

Other aspects of the game would be far more complicated to implement or correct.  I presume modifying stars to be mine-able and adding an expensive to research and build solar miner would be a relatively quick task.
Posted by: boggo2300
« on: May 25, 2014, 05:58:13 PM »

Quote from: Panopticon on May 23, 2014, 07:38:16 PM
Oh please, like any of us here can say we haven't bombarded a planet from orbit with nuclear weapons.

I can!!

I quite often rock a planet, but that's rarely deliberate :P

but I've never nuked one!

Matt
Posted by: Haji
« on: May 25, 2014, 01:28:45 PM »

Rather than mining stars, I'd prefer to see solar power satellites, a spaceship module that would generate wealth (basically the space station/ship equivalent of financial centers).
Posted by: Panopticon
« on: May 25, 2014, 01:27:02 PM »

I think with TN elements, we have the tendency to think of them like we would a different type of metal ore, and that they act like regular elements. But they don't have to, what if TN elements are always in the form of free floating atoms? Or partly in another dimension? Or even some form of energy state that we "mine" by gathering it in large canisters that we then scatter around the hallways of our ships to be shot and exploded, taking out a group of enemies with one shot?

I mean, they make all this fantastic stuff possible, I don't see why it is such a stretch that they be fantastic themselves.
Posted by: rcj33
« on: May 25, 2014, 12:40:04 PM »

Neutron stars do contain large quantities of iron (and superfluid neutronium) but it's practically impossible to get at those resources due to their high gravity and escape velocity.  It's possible in Aurora, of course, but I bet Steve wouldn't allow it.
Posted by: Erik L
« on: May 23, 2014, 09:29:18 PM »

Quote from: Panopticon on May 23, 2014, 07:38:16 PM
Oh please, like any of us here can say we haven't bombarded a planet from orbit with nuclear weapons.
We're supposed to wait til we hit orbit?
Posted by: Starmantle
« on: May 23, 2014, 08:05:02 PM »

Quote from: Panopticon on May 23, 2014, 07:38:16 PM
Oh please, like any of us here can say we haven't bombarded a planet from orbit with nuclear weapons.

Great sentence.
Posted by: Panopticon
« on: May 23, 2014, 07:38:16 PM »

Oh please, like any of us here can say we haven't bombarded a planet from orbit with nuclear weapons.
Posted by: Erik L
« on: May 23, 2014, 06:53:10 PM »

Quote from: swarm_sadist on May 23, 2014, 05:50:02 PM

You're a very dark person, you know that?
So says the sadist... ;)
Posted by: swarm_sadist
« on: May 23, 2014, 05:50:02 PM »

Quote from: Lamandier on May 22, 2014, 08:49:44 PM
I won't complain if the feature is added(and I actually kind of think it wouldn't be a terrible idea for a spoiler to be able to do it), but I would be disappointed if it came at the expense of, say, improvements to the crew/commanders system, to use an example from another thread.
Agreed. It's a small thing that probably wouldn't affect the gameplay much, it just adds a little flavour. I definitely would not want it interfering with any updates.

Quote from: Panopticon on May 23, 2014, 02:55:04 PM
It'd be a fun way to deal with an opponent that you don't want to invade, mine their sun till it goes dark or whatever and let them freeze to death instead.
You're a very dark person, you know that?
Posted by: Panopticon
« on: May 23, 2014, 02:55:04 PM »

It'd be a fun way to deal with an opponent that you don't want to invade, mine their sun till it goes dark or whatever and let them freeze to death instead.
Posted by: Lamandier
« on: May 23, 2014, 02:03:21 PM »

Quote from: Erik Luken on May 23, 2014, 06:58:15 AM
Don't forget the biggest reason a suggestion gets into the game is that Steve thinks it would enhance his gameplay :)

Good point. Can't fault him for that, lol.

If it does ever make it into the game, I do agree that there should be consequences for over-mining. And/or possibly that it should be limited to the spoilers.