for development cost is quite low.Whenever a rocket is launched it can be fed with orbital roboport instead of satellite. When such rocket is launched, 50 orbital bots are deployed above planet's atmosphere which can build anywhere on the map via ghosts and blueprints. Every such rocket adds another 50 orbital bots. Such rocket cost should be enormous, probably cost of current rocket or at least half of it.
Along with orbital roboports a building is researched called "Command Center" with open roof, lotsa CRT monitors, keyboard, satellite dishes, and it costs a lot. Whenever player approaches that building and hits Enter, he sits in there surrounded with keyboards and monitors, and game switches to sort of sandbox mode - i.e. you may quickly scroll across entire map and do things remotely through ghosting, i.e. every left-click is placing a ghost and every right click is marking with deconstruction planner.
While flying you may do following things:
- Place ghosts and blueprints
- Use deconstruction planner
- Set up recipies, filters, etc... for any entity on the map including ghosts and regular entities. including shift-right-click, shift-left-click
- It should be possible to place modules by ghosting, so orbital bot can drop a module into a building. I guess that comes with 0.13 for regular construction bots as well
- Rotate any entity, no matter if it is ghost or not
- Toggle power switches (comes with 0.13)
Unlike sandbox mode, you cannot:
- Discover new chunks of map by flying over them. What's dark remains dark. But you may deploy radar arrays on the edge to discover map ahead. It may also be a use for launching a rocket with satellite - all discovered map edges are extended as if a radar was put in every edge tile and worked for long time.
- Place items directly from your inventory or dismantle them, only ghosting.
- Use grenades/capsules, the player still stits in Command Center.
Every regular ground roboport gets a checkbox (default off) saying if it's linked to orbital roboport. This means that orbital construction bots are allowed to pick items from this roboport's logistic network to perform remote building and may drop items to this network storage chests for remote deconstruction. This checkbox is actually property of logistic network, not roboport. When two logistic networks merge, checkbox is set if it was set in any of them.
Orbital roboports are not accessible or seen anywhere, they just exist, but it would be good to see number of them so you know how many orbital bots you have and how many of them are busy.
Orbital bots do not perform jobs in yellow/green area of ground roboports and in vicinity of player carrying personal roboport, except for case when logistic network contains no construction bots at all (so you don't block your remote building capability by deploying remote ground roboport before the station is finished).
Orbital bots are allowed to harvest ore from non-empty crates and belts during deconstruction. They are also allowed to harvest trees by using deconstruction planner. Since orbital bots are a very costy resource, you wouldn't want to farm that way, it's just to clear things out and fix building mistakes when ore has already started flowing on placed belts. Another option - belt/crate contents (and trees) are simply destroyed instead of bringing them to crate of some orbital-connected logistic network.
Orbital bots cannot carry items except for deconstruction (they act as construction bots), so you will have to set up a train and railroad quickly (again, via orbital bots) to send first set of repair packs and regular construction bots once ground roboport is deployed at remote outpost.
Orbital bots are light fragile constructs with like 1 hp, so they are killed by biters instantly, and biters always make them priority targets. You wouldn't want to perform turret creep using orbital bots. It may be an option to forbid harvesting alien artifacts with orbital bots, but I think it's not important given you can't normally fight with them.
Unlike regular construction bots, orbital bots cannot use repair packs. Also, there should be some property on a ghost if it is result of destruction or was placed by player (shift-click/blueprint); orbital bots will not touch ghosts that are result of destruction. Such ghosts may have reddish color instead of purplish they currently have; would be useful in current game as well.
This proposal resolves two problems:
- Use of rockets now has game value
- It's now easy to quickly setup many outposts to support megabase, though clearing enemy bases may become a new bottleneck
Anyway, you won't have to run back and forward to your base for resupply.(not to discuss here) This proposal also prepares ground for my vision of next past-end-game proposal - setting planes to travel to different islands discovered by satellites. Planes will have small capacity, so you will be encouraged to build a whole new factory on other islands to send planes full of red circuits instead of just ore (resource packing). Having multiple factories accessible only via planes network won't be manageable without orbital construction and command center, but any fighting still has to be performed on foot, so you will want command center on every island. Personal command center connector is probably an option too, so you can manage your bases while out in the wild fighting biters.
