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Re: S46's mega suggestion thread (will edit whenever something new pops up from out of my brain)

#31
CSE wrote: [Stuff about different factions per megastation]
That is the first actual difference to normal stations outlined here.
Which would be interesting but probably a gigantic pita to handle.

The multiple population groups i'd expect in a normal station as well, though.
Ages ago josh talked about some 1000x length difference between the smallest and largest ship classes. That yields some 20odd km long supercapitals.
I'd expect stations to reach at least similar sizes.
which gives us some 8000 cubic kilometers of living space. Or 1000cubic meters of living space per person if we assume a population of 8billion.

Those things can house civilisations.
Hundreds of millions of people at least.
That stretches the credibility for social one-biome-constructs a bit :V

CSE wrote:
Mon Nov 20, 2017 7:36 am
Then, my friend, I am sorry for you. This means your experience will be so much more limited, if concentrating exclusively on mechanism and utility and not on label and poesy.
you are putting words in my mouth that werent there before :P

Why cant a scaled up normal station without implementation changes do that as well?
Why cant a normal station have nice graphics?
(Why would the visuals be different for a megastation over a normal station?)
Why cant a station provide an "impression of a rich universe"?
Why do they need to be different?

Labeling and poesy are completely different from how the stuff works and can be tacked on later.
Aka are pretty much meaningless before we have actual functionality going :P
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Re: S46's mega suggestion thread (will edit whenever something new pops up from out of my brain)

#32
Cornflakes_91 wrote:Those things can house civilisations.
Hundreds of millions of people at least.
Yeah, well, I thought about this. In theory, you are right - realistically, most world would have a wide variety of climatic zones and lanscapes, most stations are big enough for a whole variety of society and specialised services.
But there is a reason why "typical" science-fiction with fast interstellar travels use "specific" worlds (desert planet, ice planet, jungle planet, metropolis planet...) and by extension, specialised stations (most standard services but one or two speciality). The reason is the motivation for traveling. If you have almost the full variety in one place, why should you remember specific locations? What would be special? why travel if every service is available everywhere?
If everywhere is the same (very diverse) than there is no diversity.

I think for this reason that it makes sense to have "simplified" ecosystem or speciality in locations. This allow for a coherent description/imaging and give specific reason to travel there (I want the best ship, so I go to the shipyard station; the market on Glyyb trade everything; want to buy illegal weapons - Kupler Station is the location to visit) .

And then, to increase diversity, suddenly you have local diversity as a suprise. A "homeworld" planet like earth, craddle of a civilization and with incredible ecodiversity and climatic regions; megastations with a collection of specific colours and tastes.

And note: "a gigantic pita to handle": much, much less than almost all other features here. In code, this is an array of stations at a single location. It is like we have several cities on a planet. When landing, you can select the region on a pull down menu, or you graphically can point to different entrypoint icons while flying.
you are putting words in my mouth that werent there before :P
I am indeed :twisted: .
The answer to all your "why" is: they can.

The label mega-station, by making us dream, made us think of new possibilities and even of a new feature. And will give this feature a memorable effect in-game with a catchy name that take the particular location outside the norm.

By extension, and even without attached new features, just giving a nice name is like giving a nice background to a system (the famous nebulae of Josh), it makes something nicer and memorable.
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Re: S46's mega suggestion thread (will edit whenever something new pops up from out of my brain)

#34
S46 wrote:
Tue Nov 21, 2017 9:59 pm
Just thought of a colonization ship and put that on the suggestion list.

Assuming there will be uninhabited planets in LT, these ships could be specially designed to hold a number of colonists through deep space journeys to seek out habitable yet uncolonized planets...
Did you search though the dev logs? I'm near 100% certain that this is assumed to be in the game. It's part of the universe generation. It should be assumed that a lone explorer can't start up a major colony in any real given time.

Please use the search feature. Ctrl+F with my dev log PDFs or the forum's search feature. Or Google!

For instance This thread is relevant as is this one about how long it should take, Hyperion made a nice post which touches on the subject, and there are probably others which can be found in the results.
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Re: S46's mega suggestion thread (will edit whenever something new pops up from out of my brain)

#35
CSE wrote:
Tue Nov 21, 2017 3:16 am
And note: "a gigantic pita to handle": much, much less than almost all other features here. In code, this is an array of stations at a single location. It is like we have several cities on a planet. When landing, you can select the region on a pull down menu, or you graphically can point to different entrypoint icons while flying.
the difference here in my mind is that cities usually arent directly connected.
but a megastation is just one gigantic blob of infrastructure, so who controls what parts of it?
logically there'd be a gigantic lot of politics who controls which generator and where its power is flowing and the ownership of the devices wanting to use that power changing...

a gigantic furball of politics and logistics.

and if theres no interaction between the segments its probably a lot of effort to implement something that provides 0 differences in kind seems like wasted effort.


also, when it just acts like a cluster of stations, why should i or the AI build one?
why would i build a gigantic blob of station instead of putting the components in individual places where they'd be more useful?

CSE wrote:
Tue Nov 21, 2017 3:16 am
eah, well, I thought about this. In theory, you are right - realistically, most world would have a wide variety of climatic zones and lanscapes, most stations are big enough for a whole variety of society and specialised services.
But there is a reason why "typical" science-fiction with fast interstellar travels use "specific" worlds (desert planet, ice planet, jungle planet, metropolis planet...) and by extension, specialised stations (most standard services but one or two speciality). The reason is the motivation for traveling. If you have almost the full variety in one place, why should you remember specific locations? What would be special? why travel if every service is available everywhere?
If everywhere is the same (very diverse) than there is no diversity.

I think for this reason that it makes sense to have "simplified" ecosystem or speciality in locations. This allow for a coherent description/imaging and give specific reason to travel there (I want the best ship, so I go to the shipyard station; the market on Glyyb trade everything; want to buy illegal weapons - Kupler Station is the location to visit) .
just because it can in theory house civilisations of population doesnt mean that it does support the whole bandwith of industries.
me stuffing a lot of people into it doesnt make the station good at doing everything industrially.

refineries, factories, farms, shipyards take gigantic volumes. a lot more than the required workers need to live in.
while such large stations will probably have a bit of everything just to support their population, they wont be the best at everything or have identical market situations or have access to the same technologies or the same population distributions.
a station built to support the mining industry in an asteroid field wont have the same population distribution than a station built as a transfer station over a densely populated planet or as a shipyard.
all three will have some ship production facilities, but the shipyard will outclass the other two at least in the ship size classes it can produce.

i still want to visit all thee of them for different reasons.

similar for what people and cultures exist on stations. you wont find a lot of betazoids on a klingon shipyard because their basic cultural values clash a lot and if they have the choice between trying to carve out an enclave on the klingon station they'll probably stay on stations where they dont have to do that
that is also amplified with the ease people are able to travel to a different "civilisation", so they'll differentiate quite strongly between stations on their own
which also changes what other services are available and what kind of environment the habitat sections have
the faction to which the station belongs will also change what kind of tech you'll get there. no klingon ships in a betazoid shipyard

theres a lot of cities on earth that already provide more than enough space to diversify into a ultradiversified micro representation of earth, they still dont become generic :P


TL;DR: just because it can support a civilisation in population doesnt mean that it will support a civilisation worth of diversity in equal measures.
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Re: S46's mega suggestion thread (will edit whenever something new pops up from out of my brain)

#39
Cornflakes_91 wrote:
Wed Nov 22, 2017 6:06 am
the difference here in my mind is that cities usually arent directly connected.
but a megastation is just one gigantic blob of infrastructure, so who controls what parts of it?
logically there'd be a gigantic lot of politics who controls which generator and where its power is flowing and the ownership of the devices wanting to use that power changing...
a gigantic furball of politics and logistics.
The cities are connected in the sense (at least logically) that transport on the planet will always be MUCH cheaper than transport via orbit on a spaceship. So they are connected in the sense that you should not be able to make huge profit by transporting "normal" goods from a city to another in your ship. But still at different locations and with somewhat different characteristics, so you can find different "specialties" in individual cities, thus making them not interchangeable.
This is the same in mega stations. Due to the connection, you probably can send material much cheaper per lift/automated shuttle transport than by transporting from the seller, loading your ship, taking off, going to another entry of the same station, landing, unloading and transporting to the receiver.

It does not need to simulate a political life more than several cities on a planet. If the cities can, than just reuse the code for mega-stations.
Cornflakes_91 wrote:
Wed Nov 22, 2017 6:06 am
and if theres no interaction between the segments its probably a lot of effort to implement something that provides 0 differences in kind seems like wasted effort.
also, when it just acts like a cluster of stations, why should i or the AI build one?
why would i build a gigantic blob of station instead of putting the components in individual places where they'd be more useful?
We have seen, there is interaction for the movement of goods, and the movement of the player.
The AI - a single AI - should probably not build one. But two AIs cooperating to share some ressources can decide to build a station with two parts. Then a third joins. This can be several individual stations (sharing for example a defence fleet) but can grow to a mega station if enough AIs join. Then they share more, e.g. energy cores, space (i.e. inhabitant have more options for their free shifts), whatever, but do not fusion as one single big station but keep their individuality/differences.
Cornflakes_91 wrote:
Wed Nov 22, 2017 6:06 am
TL;DR: just because it can support a civilisation in population doesnt mean that it will support a civilisation worth of diversity in equal measures.
OK, so we are good and your previous comment :
Cornflakes_91 wrote: Those things can house civilisations.
Hundreds of millions of people at least.
That stretches the credibility for social one-biome-constructs a bit :V
was probably misinterpreted.

I stand for the "one location - one biome" in the broadest sense (in descriptions, but also in specialisations, and therefore that mega station, by violating this concept, increase diversity while making an interesting addition.

And it should look amazing - never forget this :-P!
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Re: S46's mega suggestion thread (will edit whenever something new pops up from out of my brain)

#40
CSE wrote:
Thu Nov 30, 2017 2:26 pm
Cornflakes_91 wrote: Those things can house civilisations.
Hundreds of millions of people at least.
That stretches the credibility for social one-biome-constructs a bit :V
was probably misinterpreted.

I stand for the "one location - one biome" in the broadest sense (in descriptions, but also in specialisations, and therefore that mega station, by violating this concept, increase diversity while making an interesting addition.
not misinterpreted but probably... harder than intended.
they wont contain "ALL the diversity", but also not "no diversity"

to build upon my earlier examples:
there wouldnt just be one shade of miner on a mining station
theres the corporate drone miners, the individualist miners, the 5 different shades of support ecosystem subcultures, freighter pilots and so on
all of them at different levels of wealth and different species (within their individual compability ranges)

TL;DR it would (in my mind) be that theres one main culture on a station with a couple of subcultures derived from / around it.

CSE wrote:
Thu Nov 30, 2017 2:26 pm
The cities are connected in the sense (at least logically) that transport on the planet will always be MUCH cheaper than transport via orbit on a spaceship. So they are connected in the sense that you should not be able to make huge profit by transporting "normal" goods from a city to another in your ship. But still at different locations and with somewhat different characteristics, so you can find different "specialties" in individual cities, thus making them not interchangeable.
This is the same in mega stations. Due to the connection, you probably can send material much cheaper per lift/automated shuttle transport than by transporting from the seller, loading your ship, taking off, going to another entry of the same station, landing, unloading and transporting to the receiver.

It does not need to simulate a political life more than several cities on a planet. If the cities can, than just reuse the code for mega-stations.
that is not what im getting at.
disparate cities usually dont have shared infrastructure

say the 5-faction megastation runs off one big main reactor, who controls how much of it output goes where?

who determines what additions are made to the station?
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Re: S46's mega suggestion thread (will edit whenever something new pops up from out of my brain)

#41
Cornflakes_91 wrote:
Thu Nov 30, 2017 6:02 pm
TL;DR it would (in my mind) be that theres one main culture on a station with a couple of subcultures derived from / around it.
Yeah, but basically, when you land in one station, you get one image and one description. They can be complex, explain that the society is diverse, but there is only one.
A planet has several cities, so each has one description; but as they are in the same planet, they probably will share a common species and civilisation, but could have local differences (more a farmer's region with food, more a mountain region with mines and ski resorts, more a shady spaceport with local organised crime) - what you could call derived cultures.
Such would also be the case in a mega-station, but with an even relaxer homogeneity; for example a larger mix of species, and not only "derived" cultures.
Yes, I know a planet could also have heterogeneous colonies, but this shouldn't be the rule.
Cornflakes_91 wrote:
Thu Nov 30, 2017 6:02 pm
disparate cities usually dont have shared infrastructure
say the 5-faction megastation runs off one big main reactor, who controls how much of it output goes where?
who determines what additions are made to the station?
First, I do not think we really need to simulate at this level of detail. Secondly, if we do have this level of details, than free market does it - a sub-station is more effective to generate energy, so does and sell it to the neighbours.
There is no central authority (as a difference to a station) but a cohabitation - this is the whole difference with just a large station. Probably it means that very aggressive culture will usually not be represented on such structures.

So after the refinements of our discussion, the differences/characteristics:

Code: Select all

			 entry_points   cultures    local transport   shared ressources   massive local economy
Station                       1            1             n.a.               n.a.                     no
Collection of stations      each 1       multi.          no      exception (e.g. protection force)   no
Megastation                multi.        multi.          yes             frequent                    no
Planet                     multi.        derived         yes     exception (e.g. protection force)   yes
Local transport allows to move and exchange goods between entry points/locations without limitation of ship cargo hold and without going to space.
Massive local economy is the fact that the planet, with massive population, ressources and so on, and because of the gravity hole, has a closed economy much bigger than the space-exchange one.
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Re: S46's mega suggestion thread (will edit whenever something new pops up from out of my brain)

#42
quote=CSE post_id=157572 time=1512165485 user_id=648]
First, I do not think we really need to simulate at this level of detail.
[/quote]

well, power distribution mechanics have been in the game since the very beginning, so im pretty sure that they'll be in at the end.
i also highly doubt that stations will work fundamentally different from ships.
and when we weld stations together it very definitely makes sense for them to have to share infrastructure, because why else weld together in the first place?
why would they build a big communal station if not for efficiency?

you also didnt answer how additional construction would be handled.
how does one get to attach another substation to the hub?
how do the inhabitants agree on who can add another segment?
what happens if two subcomponents declare war on each other?

and if there is no such interactions and it just acts like a bunch of stations near each other with infinte ware transport speed between them...
whats the worth?
things look cool the first time, and then get boring if they behave like any other thing.
why spend effort on implementing that instead of improving something else with more actual interest?

https://youtu.be/TlBR1z-ue-I
CSE wrote:
Fri Dec 01, 2017 3:58 pm
Secondly, if we do have this level of details, than free market does it - a sub-station is more effective to generate energy, so does and sell it to the neighbours.
and we have a big blob of mechanics and interface to trade object "internal" resources for a niche application inside a niche application... which is crappy as well.



and i still dont see why we'd need a special structure to enable multicultural communities...
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Re: S46's mega suggestion thread (will edit whenever something new pops up from out of my brain)

#43
I maintain that similarly to the fact that we will not simulate the complete economy and politics of a planet, ergo don't need to simulate it in a station or a mega-structure. Still they can and will share ressources, as agents (NPC or Player) will "transport without ships" services and product (incl energy, water, ...) within the station.
You don't agree.

I maintain that a mega-station has different gameplay elements than a cluster of station.
You say it's not worth it, that's your opinion.

I maintain that having mega structure is interesting, awe inspiring, so bring further richness to the experience.
You think it is boring after two visits (so will be planets, stations, asteroids, ships... so probably you won't play long).

I maintain that it can be a logical emergent system under an appropriate economical model (cost of transportation, economy of scale), if the inhabitants are of the kind that want to cooperate and not fight.
You think it needs a central decision for expansion and don't see any option to implement it without complexity that will be at the cost of other features.

So we obviously don't share the same opinion, but you don't give any new argument that negate mine, we just weight things differently... and thus probably should agree to disagree.
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Re: S46's mega suggestion thread (will edit whenever something new pops up from out of my brain)

#44
CSE wrote:
Wed Dec 06, 2017 3:18 pm
I maintain that similarly to the fact that we will not simulate the complete economy and politics of a planet, ergo don't need to simulate it in a station or a mega-structure.
a station exists in the same gameplay space as ships do
so they'll likely have a lot of shared components (sensors, turrets, etc)
so they need at least equivalent internal structure as ships do (with power distribution and allocation)
how to handle all that?

planets dont have that overlap - they have mostly independent mechanics and can break with the mechanics stations and ships are using.

and im talking purely about how to handle the mechanics that megastations share with normal stations but lead to different interactions because of the composite structure of megastations.
CSE wrote:
Wed Dec 06, 2017 3:18 pm
Still they can and will share ressources, as agents (NPC or Player) will "transport without ships" services and product (incl energy, water, ...) within the station.
transporting discrete goods you can transport with ships as well arent the problem
its abstract, non-discrete services that are the problem.
how do you manage the distribution/allocation of power (which isnt a discrete container good) between sections?
what do you do when the power needs of the station change rapidly (eg when an attack rolls in and you need power on the shields) ?
how do you handle sensors being on one segment and weapons being on another (which doesnt have sensors)?

how do you handle the one section being in control of shields and generators putting up the shields and preventing external trading to dock?
because the faction in control gets some advantage by cutting out the station's economy from the external one for a while ("they'll sure pay more for their necessary supplies if they get nice and low in their stockpiles!")

CSE wrote:
Wed Dec 06, 2017 3:18 pm
You think it needs a central decision for expansion
it needs any mechanism to decide how and where to expand.
and one where every participating faction has a voice else the whole thing is going to shoot on itself before long.

say a federation-ferengi common station.
the cardassians want to join there because they want to trade with the ferengi as well.
what to do? fed and cardassian relations never are that good.
can the feds disagree? do they have to simply accept that theres a cardassian component on "their" station now?
what if the feds and cardassians go to war? will the two components simply open fire on each other or is there some way to handle that they are sitting on the same power supply under the same shields?

what if someone else decides to weld their component on in such a way that completely blocks my hangar access to the station? do i have to simply accept that? in a structure thats supposedly built on cooperation?


none of that is internal politics of the station. all of that directly changes how the thing interacts with the outside world, thus there has to be some way to handle that
else its simply dysfunctional when people have to shoot on the station to get the shields down to dock with their own segment again...
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Re: S46's mega suggestion thread (will edit whenever something new pops up from out of my brain)

#45
Cornflakes_91 wrote:
Wed Dec 06, 2017 4:24 pm

what if the feds and cardassians go to war? will the two components simply open fire on each other or is there some way to handle that they are sitting on the same power supply under the same shields?

Well then it turns into a scene of Autobots VS Decepticons on cybertron... ...An internal war that could lead to the collapse and abandoning of the Megastation.


And this is a procedural game, so there will be infinitely varied shapes, sizes and forms of megastations anyway.
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