Repulsion's Copious Pile of Questions

[HaliRyan]

Didn't do anything to lock it due to the backlog of commercial ships that I needed to build. Hell, the design is still unlocked well over a decade after the first civilian vessel was launched.

Crazy.

[Thiosk]

i can confirm that civvies will buy unlocked designs.

[Repulsion (OP)]

Q20: I'm not sure if I understand colonies.   I know to become a 'colony' you just have to drop some stuff off, but I don't understand how to actually make it habitable, how people get there, what I actually need to drop there, and so on.

[Atlantia]

Oh, I can answer that!

For a planet to be habitable, it has to be terrestrial and within the gravitational and temperature limits of the race. Let's use Mars as an example.

In order to colonise Mars, you'll need to put Infrastructure on it, because that makes possible habitation. The more infrastructure, the more population can be supported. The amount of population supported for each amount of infrastructure is modified by the colony costs, which takes into account the temperature and gas composition of the planet. Naturally, you can bring Installations and other products of industry over to the planet with cargo ships. The tutorial recommends a cargo ship with a cargo hold of 5 so it can carry over whole installations like automines.

People get there with colony ships. You can find a starting design in one of the tutorials. You just have to order it to pick up colonists on Earth, and drop them off on Mars.

Strictly speaking, infrastructure is the only thing you need. However, you'll find that having terraforming installations or at least ships with the terraforming module are necessary to bring the colony cost down so that the population of the colony can be increased.

[Ashery]

Q20: The key component to checking to see if a body is habitable is to check the F9 menu (Or F2 if you already have a colony created) and check the colony cost. If it's listed as N/A, you will not be able to colonize the surface of the planet as the gravity is outside your racial tolerance.

If there's a number listed, you'll be able to unload infrastructure onto the surface and start shipping colonists (Once you drop the first batch, the colony will become flagged for civilian lines to ship infrastructure/colonists). The amount of infrastructure required for the colonists depends on the colony cost.

Some more bits re:colony cost: In the F9 menu you will notice various colors on planets/moons. Dark blue indicates ideal (0 cost) where no infrastructure is required, light blue indicates roughly <3, red indicates roughly <6, and purple indicates that the planet cannot be fully terraformed to your racial ideal. Purple is fairly typical for planets/moons with a low base temperature due to how the greenhouse effect works (It's a multiplier for the base temperature). Note that for a similar reason, it's often fairly easy to terraform a hot, atmosphereless planet.

Note that the higher the colony cost, the greater the percentage of the population that will be forced into jobs in the "Agriculture/Environment" sector. That is to say, don't expect to have a robust industrial sector on planets with high colony costs (Iirc, the percentage that goes into the A/E sector is equal to [(colony cost) x (5%)] + 5%).

Terraforming is relatively straight forward: Either ship land based terraformers that require 250k employees and are 4x the size of mines/factories or design a ship with terraforming modules that simply needs to be parked in orbit of the planet you wish to terraform. Once done, just go into the "Environment/GMC" tab in the F2 menu, select the gas you want to add/remove, and input the max/min amount of said gas.

[Repulsion (OP)]

Thanks guys.

So, er, what gases SHOULD you terraform with if you are just a normal human?

[Atlantia]

Having little experience with terraforming, I'm hardly qualified, but I aim to get to an atmosphere with a similar composition to that of Earth. Mostly nitrogen, some oxygen. Carbon Dioxide is a good greenhouse gas, so it's probably OK to leave a substantial concentration of it in an atmosphere when you need to warm a planet.

[HaliRyan]

When you look at the System View window (the one that shows a list of all bodies in a selected system) it will tell you if there are any poisonous gasses in the atmosphere of a planet/moon/rock/whatever. You need to remove those gasses, and then add greenhouse or anti-greenhouse gas to bring the body to a livable temperature for your species, then add enough oxygen to make the atmosphere breathable. You also need to keep in mind minimum and maximum atmospheric pressure your species can withstand, although this will only come up in the more extreme cases.

[Din182]

Aim for having just enough oxygen on most worlds, like maybe .02 atm more than needed so that they can't be hostile terraformed easily, and use safe greenhouse/anti-greenhouse gas for temperature. If you want to role-play, go as close to earths atmosphere as possible.

[Ashery]

Depends on the temperature.

You've got five or so categories to work with (and one example): Inert gases (nitrogen), greenhouse gases (safe greenhouse), anti-greenhouse gases (safe anti-greenhouse), poisonous gases (methane), and the gas your race breathes (oxygen).

Poisonous gases give a flat colony cost should any be present in the atmosphere.

For the default human race, you will need between 0.1 and 0.3 atm of oxygen as well as having under 30% of the total atm consisting of oxygen.

Inert gases are pretty much just that, their only contribution being a small increase in the greenhouse factor.

For the anti/greenhouse gases, they each contribute +/- 1 to the "Greenhouse Pressure" value in the following equation for the greenhouse factor (This is also displayed in the F2 menu under environment): 1 + (Atmospheric Pressure /10) + Greenhouse Pressure   (Maximum = 3.0)

Couple example situations:

A planet with 25atm of GG: 1 + 25/10 + 25 = 28.5, which is over the maximum value of 3.0, so the effective value is just that, 3.0. Note, however, that it'll be a pain in the ass to terraform as you'll need to remove over 22atm worth of GG before the temperature starts dropping.

A planet with 0.2atm oxygen, 1.8atm nitrogen, and 1atm AGG: 1 + 3/10 + (-1) = 0.3. Note that, with the way the modified temperature is calculated, this planet will likely experience substantially more cooling than a planet that you were trying to warm up with a similar amount of GG.

The order in which you add/remove gases will depend heavily on the particular setup of your planet.

[ZimRathbone]

There is also a limit of 30% O₂ - more than this and the atmophere becomex toxic  (in theory this would be true of some of the other gases eg CO₂ but only O₂ is actually implemented in the game)

argh - ninja'd

[sloanjh]

2. I'm not sure what the difference between a move to option and a picket is besides that fact that it turn your ship speed down to 1km/s

That's the difference.  If you want to picket a jump point you generally want to move to a waypoint near it and turn your engines down so you don't have a blazing thermal signature.  The picket order lets you give an order to do so.

John

[Repulsion (OP)]

Q21: So, I've started moving people to Mars. Right now there are 0.13 million people on Mars, and I've been getting "Unrest is increasing on Mars due to overcrowding..." I'm wondering, what does this affect, and how does it affect it?

Q22: I'm experiencing some shortages of minerals, with Earth and Mars. I've been trying to get a mass driver up on Mars, but it will take a bit. Do you guys know of any efficient way to get a colony up, or to transport minerals? I've been thinking of designing a mining ship, and then pairing it with a freighter that drags around a mass driver. The plan is, the mining ship mines, the freighter unloads the mass driver, then the mining ship unloads the minerals onto the planet, to get launched by the mass driver out to another planet. Would this work?

[HaliRyan]

Q21: So, I've started moving people to Mars. Right now there are 0.13 million people on Mars, and I've been getting "Unrest is increasing on Mars due to overcrowding..." I'm wondering, what does this affect, and how does it affect it?

Q22: I'm experiencing some shortages of minerals, with Earth and Mars. I've been trying to get a mass driver up on Mars, but it will take a bit. Do you guys know of any efficient way to get a colony up, or to transport minerals? I've been thinking of designing a mining ship, and then pairing it with a freighter that drags around a mass driver. The plan is, the mining ship mines, the freighter unloads the mass driver, then the mining ship unloads the minerals onto the planet, to get launched by the mass driver out to another planet. Would this work?

21 - Any planet which isn't ideally habitable (0 colony cost) requires infrastructure to keep the population alive. If you exceed the limits of that infrastructure, you'll get overcrowding messages and the colony unrest will start to climb. This affects a few different things, like the efficiency of buildings on the planet, and the growth rate (it will be negative, the more overcrowded the place is, the more people will die annually).

22a - There's no real trick to getting a colony up as far as I've been able to find. Just load infrastructure or terraform it, then ship people/installations there. To transport the minerals I typically put mass drivers on each mining colony in a system and have them fire to a central location, with a freighter set to do the hauling from the central system depot to Sol and Earth. Remember to set the orders on a hauling ship to cycle (including a refuel order) so it can make round trips forever. If you want to keep some of the minerals at the world doing the mining or the 'depot' world, you can set a minimum threshold by clicking on the appropriate line in the mining/maintenance tab of the pop/production window.

22b - Yes, that would work. I've never actually used them myself, but my understanding is that asteroid mining ships will automatically mine from any asteroid they're in orbit of as long as you have a colony on it, and they leave the minerals on that asteroid. The main issue will be finding an asteroid with a worthwhile amount of the mineral(s) you need.

[sloanjh]

The plan is, the mining ship mines, the freighter unloads the mass driver, then the mining ship unloads the minerals onto the planet, to get launched by the mass driver out to another planet. Would this work?

Or you could just load the minerals on the ship and haul them wherever you want them

I think you'll find that, for useful quantities of minerals, the time it takes to mine out an asteroid will be MUCH longer than the transit times of freighters and other ships.

John