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
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.