Idea for the goal in the late game - supply ships on orbit

[Dakkanor]

true, i just want a longer range rocket so that i don't have to keep on trying to squish rocket turrets.
some form of manual artillery could be fun. or a rocket mounted onto a car...

there could also be a mechanic to recieve return shipments like a landing pad with a beacon locator, and a small chance that the return shipment gets lost in transit, where it crashes a random distance away and if you wanted it you would have to get it before any creepers tear it to pieces. god i could plan out a small game JUST on this idea.

[ssilk]

I think an artillery turret would cool. Needs special ammo. Loading, aimin and firing takes 30 secs. Targets every building within a radar range and within -hm - 50-100 tiles. In the beginning it has a very bad aiming (20% hits) and it can be researched up to 80%; as the range.
The creepers try to destroy it of course - perhaps, if a house is hit by artillery it spawns many creepers with the "destroyer" as target.

[zer0t3ch]

I think an artillery turret would cool. Needs special ammo. Loading, aimin and firing takes 30 secs. Targets every building within a radar range and within -hm - 50-100 tiles. In the beginning it has a very bad aiming (20% hits) and it can be researched up to 80%; as the range.
The creepers try to destroy it of course - perhaps, if a house is hit by artillery it spawns many creepers with the "destroyer" as target.

That sounds like an awesome idea!

[Balinor]

I think an artillery turret would cool. Needs special ammo. Loading, aimin and firing takes 30 secs. Targets every building within a radar range and within -hm - 50-100 tiles. In the beginning it has a very bad aiming (20% hits) and it can be researched up to 80%; as the range.
The creepers try to destroy it of course - perhaps, if a house is hit by artillery it spawns many creepers with the "destroyer" as target.

That sounds like an awesome idea!

Yeah best idea so far. I love artillery in games.

[ssilk]

Well, I want to underline they "spawn when hit". The reason is, I tend to use artillery only, when the game allows me to. But I don't want that in factorio.
You will gave of course the "good idea" to place e.g. 10 artillery at one place (to spare some defense) and they manage to hit all something within short time, then so many creepers are spawned, that they will overrun the defense per sure.

So it should be much more sure, to to place the artillery not at one place, which means more costs/time to built the defense for the artillery.

[andzoak]

Scenario:
Player is member of scout team. They arrived first to examine planet and possible landing places. Next to them was travelled colony ship. After scout ship has been bring down, colony ship used remains of fuell to stop on the orbit of another - unhabitable planet in that solar system.

So player has two tasks:
- to supply fuell needed to leave orbit of second planet and land on players planet
- ensure the safety of landing

Middleterm goals:
- reach space
- build ship to transport fuel to colony ship
- ensure safety of all ships and rockets (some of cargo rockets could be bring down, cargo ship too)
- colonists could use delivered supplies to make advanced factory on the orbit (or moon) - they have needed workforce to keep it working (some things need expirienced engineers and can't be done only by automats)

[ssilk]

The only thing I don't understand is why the colony ship is at another planet.
Another reason to bring something into space is the loss of gravity - you can for example smelt completely different alloys.
The rest makes much sense. +1

[andzoak]

If scout ship could be bring down from orbit of creeper planet then other ship can be bring down too.

Colony ship has enough time to estimate that orbit of other planet is safer. Ship has fuel only to travel in orbit of planet in that solar system. When ship was starting then nobody knows that on the creepers planet is hostile species. Tere was no reason to give them more fuel because space travels are very expensive. Another reason is that the more fuell they transport the more fuell they need to accelerate/decelerate ship so costs growing exponentially.

Scout ship was small unit separated during interstellar travel and it's objective has been to find suitable landing place before colony ship will start maneuvering. Colony ship has no fuell to change orbit so it should be done at first time.

[n9103]

I avoided picking at the idea the first time I read it, but since someone else started the flow, I'll go and point out a big flaw as well.

If they made the trip to another star system, I can't believe that they wouldn't have the fuel to change orbit from the first to the 2nd planet.
If they didn't have the fuel to change orbit, they never had the fuel to land safely.
Compared to the interstellar trip, the change of orbits is less than a drop in the bucket. Hell, even landing and launching from the surface, (while a few magnitudes greater than changing orbits,) is pretty close to incomparable to the fuel for interstellar travel.

[andzoak]

If You want to add a drop of fuel to colony ship then you need a bucket of fuel to transport it. So mass of the ship was minimized and it has only fuell to fulfill a mission. Earth is overpopulated - there is no resources to make any colony ship able to travel beetwen planets of other solar systems.

[n9103]

If You want to add a drop of fuel to colony ship then you need a bucket of fuel to transport it. So mass of the ship was minimized and it has only fuell to fulfill a mission. Earth is overpopulated - there is no resources to make any colony ship able to travel beetwen planets of other solar systems.

I took a lake of fuel to get it to the system in the first place. No one's going to draw a line at an extra bucket.

[ssilk]

Hum. Think for example to the voyager probes. They travel currently with about 12 km/s through the space. Everyone can imagine the afford of power which was needed to bring them to the point, where they are now.
Now imagine this: Even with factor 100.000 more speed (=quadratic power: you need 100000 * 100000, thats a 1 with ten 0's more energy!) the probes would need about 10-12 years to the next system (alpha centauri) and experts mean, that humans would not be able to live there. So we need to go more distant.
And now take into account, there are relatively sure planets out there, where humans can live, but they must be really far away, 100 or 1000 light years perhaps.
So - if it would be possible to have that much power in chemical reactions (which has not even a hair of chance) - the power, which is needed to drive from one planet to another in the same system is really nothing compared to that.

A more or less realistic scenario, why a colony ship would stop at a planet is described in "the songs of distant earth" by Arthur c. Clarke, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songs_of_Distant_Earth ).
I use that story to create an own:
A colony ship must stop half the way to its real destination, because it needs to refill its frozen-water-shields, because even a very small meteor shower at half speed of light has the energy to destroy a whole ship. The scout (us) lands on the planet and the drive of his rockets "wakes" the creepers and they fire rockets at us and the colony ship.

The colony ship has no other defense as its shields and must flee. When fleeing, the remaining scout ships was used to defend the colony ship. They fleed at the Lagrange point L1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point) because they want to to be as near to the surviving scout as possible and they don't have any scout ship left, so their only hope is the survivor.

The job of the scout is now to bring many million tons of frozen water into space. Because all ships where destroyed he will need also rockets and rocket fuel. After that first phase we build a space elevator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator). This needs immense electrical power and works a bit like trains.

Many more stuff is thinkable here.

[n9103]

Good Book, Great Author.
As for propulsion, our only viable techniques for interstellar travel that has any urgency (meaning solar sail/ion drives aren't suitable, as they are incredibly slow to accelerate) will be nuclear powered.
Whether it will be a Conventional or a Fusion-based approach is left to time to tell.

[kovarex]

This is nice idea, I will read the book.

[andzoak]

If You want to add a drop of fuel to colony ship then you need a bucket of fuel to transport it. So mass of the ship was minimized and it has only fuell to fulfill a mission. Earth is overpopulated - there is no resources to make any colony ship able to travel beetwen planets of other solar systems.

I took a lake of fuel to get it to the system in the first place. No one's going to draw a line at an extra bucket.

Fuell tanks, thermonuclear reactor, engine (or whatever) was lost due to creeper attack ;p

A more or less realistic scenario, why a colony ship would stop at a planet is described in "the songs of distant earth" by Arthur c. Clarke, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songs_of_Distant_Earth ).I use that story to create an own:A colony ship must stop half the way to its real destination, because it needs to refill its frozen-water-shields, because even a very small meteor shower at half speed of light has the energy to destroy a whole ship. The scout (us) lands on the planet and the drive of his rockets "wakes" the creepers and they fire rockets at us and the colony ship.The colony ship has no other defense as its shields and must flee. When fleeing, the remaining scout ships was used to defend the colony ship. They fleed at the Lagrange point L1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point) because they want to to be as near to the surviving scout as possible and they don't have any scout ship left, so their only hope is the survivor.

I like that idea.

I don't understand how does frozen-water-shields works. Is it some like ablative plates on space shuttles?

[n9103]

Fuell tanks, thermonuclear reactor, engine (or whatever) was lost due to creeper attack ;p

Don't quit your day job.

I like that idea.
I don't understand how does frozen-water-shields works. Is it some like ablative plates on space shuttles?

Something like, but not really.

The point of the ice is that it gets hit by the various interstellar debris instead of the ship itself.
The ship is surrounded by ice, effectively turning the whole thing into something more like a comet than a ship.
This is one of the alternatives to electrostatic/magnetic fields that deflect the debris in the path of travel.
But instead of relying on electronics and power generation, it simply provides a large amount of impact resistant material to simply absorb the impacts.
The problem is, it relies on getting vast amounts of water into space.
Basically, it's more reliable and failproof, but takes vastly more energy to establish.

Considering you're sticking to a problem of not even being able to change interplanetary orbits, you shouldn't even consider this approach as viable and not creating planet-sized plot holes.

[ssilk]

I don't understand how does frozen-water-shields works. Is it some like ablative plates on space shuttles?

About, but much bigger. They are hexagonal plates of destillated, frozen water, about 20 meters in radius and 2 m in thickness.
In space, the plates is mounted to the other plates, think steel cables are a molten into it and the whole plate is smelted together with the rest of the shield. In the end i mean the shield had a radius of about 500 meter and 10-20 meter thickness. The shield is mounted at the front of the ship, so that the ship is in the "lee" of the shield.
The whole stuff is very heavy, more heavy than the spaceship, and its only possible to bring that to half speed of light, if you have a nearly endless source of energy.

Nuclear powered is the minimum. See this http://xkcd.com/1162/ !
In the book the author describes "vacuum energy" as this endless source of energy. Today there are other more or less serious theoretical physics, which say, that such a source might exist. In the book, the spaceship doesn't even need fuel-tanks, because the ship just produces light, enormous amounts of light, to accelerate. This drive is the ultimate weapon, and it would be easy to grill the whole planet with it.
Why didn't they do it?
The colonists in our factorio-story are in a conflict: they need the water to make sure, that they can travel secure to their target, but they don't want to create a genocide! And the hero is on the planet,,,

And he is fighting for survive on the planet. His endless energy-source was destroyed and he has to begin from scratch.

[ssilk]

This is nice idea, I will read the book.

I recommend also to hear the same named album from Mike Oldfield while reading. It's based on the book.

Not that I think the music would fit into factorio; the game has a completely different atmosphere!

[andzoak]

Considering you're sticking to a problem of not even being able to change interplanetary orbits, you shouldn't even consider this approach as viable and not creating planet-sized plot holes.

Practically that problem isn't necessary. They can travell accross whole solar system but there is only one habitable planet. They travelled many years to colonize that planet and hadn't resourcess to leave solar system. Colony ship was designed to only one interstellar travel by whole planet Earth. So they can colonize the creeper planet like America or slowly die due to run out of their remaining resources.

Colony sheep try to resolve problem in it's own way looking for resources at other celestial bodies of that solar system. But that is not effective. All will change when player build communication center and he establish link with ship. People from colony ship began to understand that is real chance to colonize the planet.

[RawCode]

Earth 2140 feature supply to orbit as main goal of the game with ultimate goal to leave planet, it nice game to view how it was implemented.

but...

it will be much more fun to launch supply in form of rockets (sometimes with nuclear payload) to creepers and other types of enemy units.

also something like playermade ion cannon sattelite will be full of win.

current grinding system does not motivate, it FORCE player to do something in order to survive endless creeper waves.