Suggestions Thread for v2.4.0

[db48x]

I'll take a page from quantum mechanics and only generate the ones the player actually looks at.

In fact, if you subscribe to the 'the universe is a simulation' theory, that is probably how quantum mechanics was designed, to cut down on file size

Just an aside, but that’s a common misunderstanding of quantum mechanics. No quantum interaction needs a person around to observe it before it happens. Quantum experiments often talk about what is “observable”, or even mention “observers” and “observations”, but they don’t mean a human is watching things. All they mean is that the interaction has a measurable effect, and that measurement involves _any_ interaction between particles. That interaction could just as easily be with a stray radio wave passing through your experiment, or a cosmic ray, or a random particle from the environment, etc, etc. Quantum experiments are usually very noisy. They are repeated many times per second, and the results that don’t match the expected values are discarded or counted separately. This is why the apparatus is often so complicated; putting the experiment in a vacuum, chilling it to extreme temperatures, trapping individual atoms in beams of light, all of that is designed to decrease the noise and increase the number of successes that you get.

But no one will mind if the game doesn’t bother to calculate things before they are really needed.

[paolot]

Could we have more stealth classes?

[MarineAres]

Could we have more stealth classes?

If you're talking about class types like 'Stealth Fighter', 'Stealth Scout' etc. You can add more yourself by clicking the 'New Hull' button in the class design screen. This doesn't persist over database updates i.e. major patches, but can be done just as easily the second time.

[paolot]

Thank you, MarineAres.
I would like a "more permanent" option anyway.
Now, there is only a Stealth Scout class type. Having also a Stealth Craft type would be enough, for me.
I'm trying to design an ambush ship: I feel a bit reductive calling it a scout (by the way, there is no "Ambush something" class type  ).

[Andrew]

Really just add your own names , it takes a lot less time than posting something to this forum.

[DNAturation]

I'm trying to design an ambush ship: I feel a bit reductive calling it a scout (by the way, there is no "Ambush something" class type  ).

Would be fun to have some space submarine equivalent. Substellar? Subcosmic? Subcelestial?

[paolot]

I'm trying to design an ambush ship: I feel a bit reductive calling it a scout (by the way, there is no "Ambush something" class type  ).

Would be fun to have some space submarine equivalent. Substellar? Subcosmic? Subcelestial?

I am designing that ship with high level cloaking: it shall appear as 7% of the ship mass (and I'm studying 5%).
I think of it as a submarine-like vessel.   

[Eretzu]

I was wondering would it make sense/be interesting if you could transport water for terraforming purposes?

[GrandNord]

Would it be possible to keep the "Unassigned weapons" list closed when an action is performed with the fire controls? I am currently in a fight and I have ships with around a hundred box launchers and the unassigned weapons list opens and shoots me to the bottom of the page whenever I so much as assign a target to a fire control.

If the list didn't open automatically that would reduce the tedium of ship combat with bigger ships.

[paolot]

I was wondering would it make sense/be interesting if you could transport water for terraforming purposes?

Considering how many times you would need to do and repeat this, I think it would soon become tedious.

[Laurence]

I was wondering would it make sense/be interesting if you could transport water for terraforming purposes?

Considering how many times you would need to do and repeat this, I think it would soon become tedious.

And eat a lot of fuel stocks.

[nuclearslurpee]

I was wondering would it make sense/be interesting if you could transport water for terraforming purposes?

Considering how many times you would need to do and repeat this, I think it would soon become tedious.

And eat a lot of fuel stocks.

This is a severe understatement.

We can make a back-of-the-envelope calculation to see how impractical this would be:

Let us assume that volumetric compression can be neglected as a transportation option. Let us also assume that we wish to cover 20% of the surface area of a terraformable body with liquid water to a depth of 10 m---this is a gross underestimate, but by being so it should more than cancel out the previous assumption to yield a conservative estimate.

Consider a Mars-like world, which has a mean radius of about 3,400 km (3.4e6 m), yielding a surface area of 1.45e14 m^2. To accomplish our stated goal will require (1.45e14 * 0.20 * 10) = 2.9e14 m^3 of water. Now consider a standard 25,000-ton cargo hold: if we neglect compression of the water and use the Walmsley ton (1 t = 14 m^3), we can transport 350,000 m^3 of liquid water per standard cargo hold per round trip. The number of (round trips * standard holds) required to complete this terraforming goal is therefore (2.9e14 / 3.5e5) = 830 million.

In fact, even if we assume a ridiculous Trans-Newtonian compression factor of 100x, we're still looking at over 8 million standard cargo holds worth of water to transport. Now, I've been known on occasion to give a freighter flotilla cycled orders with dozens of cycles and let them run around unsupervised for a few years, but this is well beyond that and probably well beyond the realm of feasibility. And of course, this is ignoring the fact that for a real, sustainable planetary water cycle, bodies much deeper than 10 m are certainly required, increasing the transport throughput required by potentially multiple orders of magnitude still.

A similar analysis could be done for terraforming gases, where the much higher compression achievable with gases is offset by the fact that an atmosphere must be many dozens of kilometers deep rather than 10 meters. This is why in Aurora, our terraformers magically scientifically produce gases out of nothing through Trans-Newtonian handwaving. 

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

A similar analysis could be done for terraforming gases, where the much higher compression achievable with gases is offset by the fact that an atmosphere must be many dozens of kilometers deep rather than 10 meters. This is why in Aurora, our terraformers magically scientifically produce gases out of nothing through Trans-Newtonian handwaving. 

They take the gases from the Aether
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=10239.0

[Collin Thomas]

Hey, longtime player, MASSIVE fan, please be patient as I am incredibly new to forums and their etiquette.

One thing I think the game needs is a clear breakdown of how my minerals are being spent. I can read things like how much ships cost and through experience know the resources needed for fuel and maintenance supplies, but when I see my stockpile change info in Empire Mining, it's not clear what's being spent on what. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the stockpile change chart isn't recorded per month or per year, but rather how much was changed in the stockpile since my last time increment (however long that was).

Thanks for making this awesome game!

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Hey, longtime player, MASSIVE fan, please be patient as I am incredibly new to forums and their etiquette.

One thing I think the game needs is a clear breakdown of how my minerals are being spent. I can read things like how much ships cost and through experience know the resources needed for fuel and maintenance supplies, but when I see my stockpile change info in Empire Mining, it's not clear what's being spent on what. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the stockpile change chart isn't recorded per month or per year, but rather how much was changed in the stockpile since my last time increment (however long that was).

Thanks for making this awesome game!

You mean like this?

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13463.msg173710#msg173710