Creation of New Species though Genetic Modification

[UnLimiTeD]

You could crash some asteroids into it.
And if Jump Engines are able to bend space around a ship to the point of being able to jump on La Grange points, it should be possible to make a planet look heavier than it is.
Low Gravity is also in no way lethal, you could circumvent arising problems with 'weight suits' or similar.
In the end, I just think too LOW gravity should drastically contribute to colony cost, but it shouldn't make a planet entirely uninhabitable.
On the other side, just like terraforming, stripmining a planet could gradually reduce it's weight.
If ships can travel at lightspeed while still communicating and staying combat capable, realistically someone should have found a way to do it....

[Father Tim]

Low Gravity is also in no way lethal, you could circumvent arising problems with 'weight suits' or similar.
In the end, I just think too LOW gravity should drastically contribute to colony cost, but it shouldn't make a planet entirely uninhabitable.

The problem is a sufficiently low grav tolerance - one that makes every little rock and asteroid habitable, even at ridiculously high colony costs - WILL KILL THE PROGRAM.  When you start filling asteroid belts with anything other than ColCost = N/A Aurora dies, taking minutes to run even the simplest 5-second update.

So no matter how much you want it, or how logical it may be, it's not going to happen.

[UnLimiTeD]

Yeah, right, and it's totally impossible to set a lower limit to .1 or exclude everything that isn't a moon or a Planet.
Or, I don't know, exclude all Asteroids?
Example: The moon.
Could be a nice place to set up a colony, why ever one would do that.
It's gravity is roughly one sixth that of earth, I think thats pretty habitable. Below a certain point, which to my knowledge no or at best a few asteroids in the solar system reach, you could pretty much jump into space with a car or the like, which would certainly lead to the loss of quite some people.
And something actually needs a sufficient size for a population, which on asteroids is not a given.
There can always be a limit.

Aside, adding an option to terraform gravity would still work, if you want to inhabit that specific body, and be it an asteroid, you have to make it that way first. Limits the amount of habitable asteroids to the number your able to grow to reasonable size within one game, which will probably be no more than 2.
In my current game, I set gravity tolerance to 85% at a .9 base, and it still works. Also comes way closer to real human tolerances.
Though, well, I agree I sort of remove the problem by that
I just would want to have extra cost on small moons. But this is not the topic.

This is the place to celebrate Steves newest invention.

[sloanjh]

Yeah, right, and it's totally impossible to set a lower limit to .1 or exclude everything that isn't a moon or a Planet.
Or, I don't know, exclude all Asteroids?
Example: The moon.

Just to be clear, populated colonies on the Moon are possible now - I've got one in my current game (the Moon had good minerals).  Steve expressly lowered the minimum limit (to 0.1, I think) when I asked for it for exactly that reason.  Any lower, though, and as Father Tim says it will break the program.

John

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

But you can't change the gravity, why ever that is.

Two reasons

1) Realism: Adding or removing atmosphere is a lot easier than changing the size of a planet or altering its mass. Earth has undergone some huge atmospheric changes in its history. it hasn't changed its gravity. While having gravity in a ship through some type of artificial gravity would be reasonable, you can't cover a planet in gravity plating.

2) Gameplay: Having every asteroid as a potential habitable planet would absolutely kill performance in many areas of the program due to the large number of checks that are made each turn in relation to colony cost. Gravity is a very simple way of excluding 99% of system bodies from those checks.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

You could crash some asteroids into it.
And if Jump Engines are able to bend space around a ship to the point of being able to jump on La Grange points, it should be possible to make a planet look heavier than it is.

Low Gravity is also in no way lethal, you could circumvent arising problems with 'weight suits' or similar.
In the end, I just think too LOW gravity should drastically contribute to colony cost, but it shouldn't make a planet entirely uninhabitable.
On the other side, just like terraforming, stripmining a planet could gradually reduce it's weight.

Just to check, you do know the solid crust is only 30 miles thick and the other 8000 miles of diameter is the stuff that comes out of volcanoes? The temperature in the mantle (below 30 miles) varies from 500 to 900 °C. Also, where would you put the material you stripmined? The mass of the Earth is 6,580,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons so it may take a while with mass drivers.

If ships can travel at lightspeed while still communicating and staying combat capable, realistically someone should have found a way to do it....[/i]

Believe me, getting a ship to travel at 5,000 km/s per second will be child's play compared to changing the gravity of the Earth. We could already do the former with current technology - it would just take a lot of money and a lot of acceleration time. We can also manufacture gases using 19th century chemistry. As far as I know, there are no current studies with regard to changing Earth's gravity.

Steve

[UnLimiTeD]

*smirks*    Yep, thats basically it, everything is just an extension of current technology, and then bumped up to ridiculous heights.
We have no way currently, or probably the next few thousand years, to mave mass at light speed, without time freeze and using more energy than a star could provide.
Ultimately, if this is possible, I think it's not too far off to change a planets gravity, or, say, create a Dyson's Sphere, after all. (not a shell)
(It would make for awesome stories in campaigns, atleast that much I'm sure of^^)

Though this is not really a matter of my personal concern, so let's just leave it be.
One can always make stuff up with SM functions after all.
(Is it actually possible to alter a Planets gravity with SM functions? Never tried...)

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

*smirks*  . There are no physicists talking about changing the gravity of planets. Besides, as I mentioned earlier, with current tech and lots of money/fuel/acceleration we could build a near-light speed spacecraft right now. The fundamental physical laws that Aurora breaks with TN Physics are not speed-related but momentum-related.

I think we had better agree to differ

Steve

[Andrew]

*smirks*    Yep, thats basically it, everything is just an extension of current technology, and then bumped up to ridiculous heights.
We have no way currently, or probably the next few thousand years, to mave mass at light speed, without time freeze and using more energy than a star could provide.
Ultimately, if this is possible, I think it's not too far off to change a planets gravity, or, say, create a Dyson's Sphere, after all. (not a shell)
(It would make for awesome stories in campaigns, atleast that much I'm sure of^^)

Though this is not really a matter of my personal concern, so let's just leave it be.
One can always make stuff up with SM functions after all.
(Is it actually possible to alter a Planets gravity with SM functions? Never tried...)

I have to say that changing a planets gravity is almost inconsievable. Ignoring that is is much more unlikely than the rest of the tech in this game have you considered the secondary effects?
Planets are the shape and size they are due to the interaction between their materials and their gravity , you would cause the liquid elements of the planet to shrink, and heat the core this would cause massive tectonic effects wrecking the planet.
Next the planets gravity would now pull more strongly on all the celestial bodies in the system, although probably not relevant in the time span of the game this would result in things like the moon(s) hitting the planet, increased asteroid impacts and if you changed the gravity of a big ehought body such as Jupiter pulling other planets out of their orbits (Jovian or larger planets may under a higher gravity initiate fusion and turn into short lived stars)
Decreasing the gravity would cause the planet to lose atmosphere and again cause changes to the inertior of the planet , massive tectonic activity  and result in things like the moons heading off on their own.
I presume that some degree of gravity manipulation technology is available allowing local manipulation of gravity which explains how crews can be confortable on ships and allows for the small outposts you can build on hostile gravity planets .

On the moving things at Light speed , there is at least 2 good theoretical methods of moving objects at apparent speeds comparable to that of the speed of light (of course like all theoretical FTL Schemes they are probably wrong). With current teachnology 8-12% of C is practical with Orion Drives

[UnLimiTeD]

Let's just agree to differ here It's an unimportant side discussion, and keeps the important people from doing the important stuff^^.
Gravity after all would be a late techline anyways, and that means people will hardly get there.

SM functions can probably simulate a good part of it anyways.
Btw, if you start about secondary effects of gravity, without the moon, an earthday would be around 5 hours, it's also slowly escaping right now and will probably leave us in a billion years or two, resulting in shorter days (The biological clock of humans is genetically set to 25 hours for most individuals, and a few billion years back, the moon was so close that the tides raised the LAND by several meters), and Mars lost all of it's atmosphere because of the solar wind, and probably would again without constant terraforming, even venus is streaming atmosphere constantly, earth is an exception because it has a magnetic field.

Btw. I've already thought about the possibility of turning a Jovian into a Star, that would be awesome for a Campaign. Is that possible with SM functions?^^

[Andrew]

SM functions can probably simulate a good part of it anyways.
Btw, if you start about secondary effects of gravity, without the moon, an earthday would be around 5 hours, it's also slowly escaping right now and will probably leave us in a billion years or two, resulting in shorter days (The biological clock of humans is genetically set to 25 hours for most individuals, and a few billion years back, the moon was so close that the tides raised the LAND by several meters), and Mars lost all of it's atmosphere because of the solar wind, and probably would again without constant terraforming, even venus is streaming atmosphere constantly, earth is an exception because it has a magnetic field.

quote]
I know.

[praguepride]

Would it be possible to increase the speed of rotation to alter gravity?

And wouldn't atmospheric pressure simulate gravity? If you've got 10 atm's pressing down on you, you're not going to jump like michael jackson any time soon (if you don't get crushed outright...)


What I think base gravity should do is alter how many gasses stay in the atmopshere. So low gravity worlds leech out atmosphere, eventually reducing atmosphere pressure and thus lowering gravity again...

/shrug. just a though...

[Shadow]

As far as I know, atmospheric pressure affects the 'thickness' of the air.

With 10 atm, I think breathing would be a problem, but you could probably fly/glide unassisted.

[The Shadow]

Studies have been done on this subject.  Steve is approximately right;  above 4 atm or so, breathing gets too difficult to take over the long haul.

And no, a thick atmosphere is not a way to simulate a change in gravity.  A light body like an asteroid can't hold onto an atmosphere anyway.

Spinning up a heavy planet would indeed make you feel lighter at the equator (no change at the poles)... but there would be a lot of problems, to say the least.

[praguepride]

Could you just say "asteroids are uninhabitable (for whatever reason, lack of surface area/dangerous terrain) and then removing all the other "cannot colonize" situations.

Another alternative would be to set up orbital colonies, but space stations would probably be a whole new suggestion (that has already been suggested before)