Anti-Greenhouse gas

[xeryon]

I like complicated but it still needs to fall inside the boundaries of entertaining.  If not particularly realistic it would be interesting to have the various terraformable elements have a greater effect then pressure +/- and temp +/-.  Various elements could effect industry, mining, population growth, orbital bombardment and so on.  If missiles are unusable in nebulae whats to say that a planetary atmosphere mimicking the make up of said nebulae would render the body impervious to ordinance?

[wedgebert]

I think one thing that would help with any complexity would be a terraforming queue and the ability to both save preset atmospheric conditions and maybe even some simple automation like "raise (or lower) temperature to racial tolerances" or "make atmosphere breathable". These options would queue up the necessary commands to satisfy the goal which would then be in your terraforming queue to tweak if so desired.

[Haji (OP)]

Or we could rebalance the current mechanics a bit and call it a day.  Just add a lower limit of about 0. 3 to the Greenhouse factor.

I generally agree, althought the 0. 3 is a little too low in my opinion, as this means that planets up to 1000K of base temperature could be terraformed, and I don't think I have seen planets with that high temperature in the game.  0. 5 or 0. 6 would be more balanced I believe.  0. 5 would mean only planets with base temperature of 600K or so could be terraformed, which excludes Mercury.  On the other hand I think (I don't remember now exact numbers and I'm too lazy to look up) that Mercury could be colonised with combination of terraforming and +50C genetic modification reaserch wich would make it similar to Titan (terraforming and -50C modification reaserch), which is partially the point (in the gameplay terms at least).  To lower effect of anti-greenhouse gases enough to make genetic modifications for higher temperatures useful again.

One point of note:  the dark side of Mercury can get down to -180° Celsius.    So, saying that Mercury is going to be difficult to cool because it is so close to the sun sorta gets refuted by that fact.    I am not saying that its proximity has NO bearing, I'm just saying that if there were a way to block the sunlight, the planet would actually cool down because it has almost no atmosphere to retain the heating from the sun. 

I don't think it works that way, not once there is atmosphere.  Take Earth for example.  If Aurora is to be believed our base temperature is -4C.  The rest is result the atmosphere.  Or think of the Moon.  It's more or less the same distance and, true, it can get -160C on the "dark side" while the temperature on the "sun side" is well over +150C (I'm pretty sure I'm off with numbers, but not much), while Earth with atmosphere have (usually) temperature of +10C or more.  So, once you get atmosphere to the planet, assuming it is not tidally locked to a star, it will generally have the medium temperature (medium of the dark and light side) and then some over it's entire surface.  Ergo, it doesn't really matter how cold can it get on Mercury, in the end, the temperature would be well over 300C over the entire planet, maybe come more. 

Of course, Mercury orbits very slowly around the Sun.  It's not as bad as with tidally locked planets, but close, so certain areas may stay cold for long time.  But, sooner or later, unless you tidally lock the planet, those areas will enter sunny side and they'll have to whitstand 400C of solar output.

[Marthnn]

K.I.S.S? In Aurora? Might as well ask Toady to stop calculating the damage done to dwarven toenails.

The difference is, you don't have to track down every dwarf with a damaged toenail and tell him to go fix it (or not) at what passes for a hospital. The game does it for you, and you have access to the info in the obscure event that you want to know. If you complexify terraforming in Aurora, you need to reduce the micromanagement to simple decisions like "terraform this planet to X racial middle tolerences", and then have the option of looking at gases, pressures, temperatures.

[xeryon]

Rather than making it more complex it would be nice if the options we do have were more dynamic.  Like putting 3ATM worth of Argon into Mercury.  If the action has no relevance then the only point it has is to laugh about when someone posts on the forums that they accidentally did it.  It is just window dressing.  Argon, for example, is a wonderfully popular industrial gas.  Bodies with plentiful Argon in the atmosphere could receive a construction factory bonus dependent on the volume of the gas present on the body.  Likewise, each of the various gases already present in Aurora could be given a produce bonus and minus value.  There might be a way to really justify orbital habitat usage in here by making certain atmospheric combinations super productive but the combination is lethal to habitation.

[TallTroll]

Disclaimer : I'm not intending to get into politics here

The problem with trying to make terraforming more realistic, is that we fundamentally don't understand how planetary climate systems really work. A great deal of current climate change science is bad science. Since the technical definition of an ice age is that ice exists in quantity on the Earths surface, we're in an ice age right now. It should therefore not be surprising that some bits of ice are receding, and others increasing, and pretending that we a) really understand why, and b) can change what is happening significantly is anthropocentric arrogance of the highest order

Functionally, I agree with much of what the green lobby says : whilst I don't believe we really have the power to radically alter the whole planets climate, we can certainly pollute the hell out of it, and if the planet is warming naturally anyway, we can push it along a bit faster, or help slow it down once we actually know how. The forces at work are several orders of magnitude greater than anything we have control over though, although clearly that will change, and probably sooner than we think

[xeryon]

Disclaimer : I'm not intending to get into politics here

Which is exactly what you did.  Realism does not have to equal actual.  It is scientifically proven that certain gases behave in certain ways.  When generically applied to an atmosphere a generic result happens.  If I take real Earth and add 1ATM of Carbon Dioxide all hell wold break loose in reality.  Pressure goes way up and CO2 in that quantity absolutely would raise temperatures.  But in a general realism sense you can do that within Aurora and still have the planet be habitable as long as O2 concentrations were sufficient.  Aurora as it is doesn't deal in climates, just atmospheric numbers.  Earth in that atmospheric arrangement is technically habitable.  You can still deal in realistic configurations without bringing in real life climate science.

[Haji (OP)]

The problem with trying to make terraforming more realistic, is that we fundamentally don't understand how planetary climate systems really work.
(. . . )
Functionally, I agree with much of what the green lobby says : whilst I don't believe we really have the power to radically alter the whole planets climate,

Doesn't matter.  First, because right now we can only adjust gas levels in minuite ways, while in Aurora we can add whole atmoshperes, which is several orders of magnitude bigger task.  Second, becouse it's set several decades or centuries (depending on your play) into the future with FTL technology.  I believe we can safely assume humans would know more about climate by than.  Third, becouse Aurora does not deal with fine-tuning climate.  It doesn't really matter whether you have nice shiny days, or rainy ones.  Aurora only checks whether the atmosphere created is breathable (with very broad definition of breathable) and whether or not the temperature is survivable.  However, I'd like to point out, that the temperature is median.  Earth have, supposedly, temperature of 22C in Aurora, but in reality it ranges anywhere from -80 on poles to +40 on hot summer days.  I guess it's similar with other bodies.  Even if temperature is supposedly 2C or 44C you have huge variances there.

Fine tuning climate is irrelevant in Aurora terms.  And like the previous poster noted, we know how gasses affect atmosphere more or less and that's good enough.  If you add too much carbon dioxide you have Venus.  Of course the question is how much is too much seeing how Mars have bigger partial pressure of it than Earth but is nonetheless colder (of course it doesn't have thick atmosphere, but that's another issue).

All in all the only thing I would add to terraforming (aside from the AGHG limit of course) is some kind of minor penalty (similar to the political one for example) for planet being habitable, but far from ideal.  As it is, once you reach bare minimum you have "ideal habitable world" even if it have temperature of 2C and pressure of 0. 3 atm, which is climate similar to this in very high mountains.  Where you don't see much of civilization I might add.  Such a penalty would affect productivity but would otherwise not limit population. 

[ussugu]

I think one thing that would help with any complexity would be a terraforming queue and the ability to both save preset atmospheric conditions and maybe even some simple automation like "raise (or lower) temperature to racial tolerances" or "make atmosphere breathable".  These options would queue up the necessary commands to satisfy the goal which would then be in your terraforming queue to tweak if so desired.

Love this idea! Would definitely cutdown on the micro-managing of terraforming. . .  although, I really enjoy terraforming and tweaking the atmospheric numbers.

[TallTroll]

>> Which is exactly what you did

Seriously, I'm really not trying to get into the politics of it, just the science, and the science is very unclear, partly because of political interference which makes it extremely hard to disentangle the two.

>> It is scientifically proven that certain gases behave in certain ways

This is true, but understanding the components does not equal understanding the system. There are huge gaps in our understanding of how anything to do with planetary conditions work, because the oceans are increasingly looking like being the primary drivers of pretty much everything, which is a shame, as we have no idea how they work at all.

>> Pressure goes way up and CO2 in that quantity absolutely would raise temperatures

It's less clear than that. CO2 is also known as "plant food". Most of the plant matter on Earth is actually marine algae, which we understand poorly. It's possible that increasing CO2 levels will encourage algae growth. How would that affect global temperatures? We dunno

Auroras terraforming system is much better than most similar games, and it's still fairly abstract, and it might be better to leave it that way. Any attempt to make it more complex / realistic immediately starts running up against the boundaries of our knowledge.

The current system says here are some numbers for how hospitable the body is, here are some things you can build to change them, you take some stuff out, you put other stuff in. Awesome. It's complex enough to need thinking about and some management, without descending into micromanagement hell, for no return

[ussugu]

Well, my only reason for even thinking of broaching M. I. S. C.  (Make it super complicated) is that terraforming planets is almost a game within a game and is one of my favorite things to do.   With Steve making a large amount of changes in 5. 7, I was merely adding to the wish list

[xeryon]

It's possible that increasing CO2 levels will encourage algae growth.

On a completely off-topic note: if only the public knew.  As it is due to a combination of effects we are having algae blooms of massive densities here the last two years.  Public and Private sector researchers have pinned it to considerably higher then normal temperatures, higher CO2 levels and the presence of excessive nutrient rich (i.e. fecal waste and fertilizer) farm water run off have now made most of our states water bodies toxic to touch, let alone swim or drink.

Climate science is actually very well understood.  What isn't understood is how quickly our actions are affecting it: which we are finding out more and more every day how much they really are.

The bottom line is that climates and atmospheres are extremely delicate and to me it would be a very nice touch to delve into some of the greater complexities of the existing terraforming systems so that the atmospheres are more then just numbers that equal .1 O2, 22C and less then 30% O2

[Marthnn]

Science deals with complex problems by simplifying them.

Earth is huge, has oceans and landmasses and mountains, its atmosphere is not the same everywhere, water evaporates and condenses into rain or snow all the time, winds and water currents influence temperature distribution, and the most important : et cetera. Complex as hell (or more so).

I say Earth is a perfect sphere of a given radius and mass, with an homogenous layer of static gases around it. NOW I can determine the theoretical greenhouse factor. No climate, no vegetation favorised by CO2, no oceans and landmasses. I barely acknowledge the planetary albedo, which encompasses snow, ice, water, land and cloud coverage. For me, this is what Aurora Terraforming is about.

You want to complexify it? Add a tiny bit to the simple model : tectonic activity indicates nuclear reactions in the planet's core, heating it enough to keep it liquid, and so increasing slightly surface temperature. Another tiny bit : by using reflectors, we can reduce or increase exposure to solar radiation, thus in a way modify planetary albedo.

This is lightyears from climate and vegetation, there's not even geography involved!

[Haji (OP)]

You forgot to add planetary rotation to the mix.  Living on Mercury where day is longer than year, would be much more. . .  interesting then living on Earth.  Then there are tidally locked planets.  Then there are moons of Gas Giants within habitable zones, which can have orbits of 2 mln kilometres, ie, within a several weeks they move 4 mln kilometres closer to the star, than back, not including ecliptical orbit of the giant itself.  And that reminds me of plantes with high eccentricity, but those are not included in Aurora, so that is no problem.

[ussugu]

I just cracked myself up thinking about this thread.

Not belittling it AT ALL. . .  just the discussion is about planetary atmospheres and how to make the game more realistic or should an atmosphere have to be maintained or if other things should affect the given balances of gases and habitability.

All this, and I don't know if I have ever seen a discussion about the Jump Gates.   I mean, we go build them and forget about them.   No upkeep required, no breakdowns, no "Ooops!! Our fleet just went 'POP!'".   Seems Jump Gates would be a pretty tricky bit of engineering and we just take it at face value for game simplification.   Maybe terraforming should be taken in the same light.

I am, however, enjoying the different turns this thread has taken.   Learning more here than on Wikipedia.