Oh well. Inspired by Josh's latest progress report, I finally felt inspired to finish my epic poem "The Song of Captain Hardenberg" (written in trochaic tetrameter and just a bit above 150 pages in length)...
In the docks of Freeport Seven
In the System of Arcturus
Stood the starship of Hardenberg
Haughty freebooter Hardenberg
High above it rose the Starbase
Rose its shining solar panels
Rose the turrets for defending
Bright below it was the planet
Was the luminous red planet
Was the world they call Arcturus
[...]*
*= Rest assured that I'm merely pulling your leg here. I'm neither that creative nor cruel.
...so, now that I've got your attention, let me get to my actual point:
Chances are that sooner or later, the player will want a place to call home, aka a station in which to fix his ships, stash his surplus stuff and maybe also manufacture an item or fifty. So, there has to be a way of construction new stations - first of all, to replace destroyed ones, and second, to allow the player to build a home for him- or herself.
Now, building ships is easy - feed the mats and the blueprint into a fabber of appropriate size, fit the modules and guns you want, and fly off. With a station, however, there's the problems of a) getting a large enough fabber and b) getting the resulting station to wherever it's supposed to go.
I couldn't find anything regarding the procedure via the search function (mostly due to the fact that it's not possible to search for "station", and that I had to rely on Google's domain search instead), so I'll post this here and ask for suggestions.
Secondary, as the owner of a station, you will probably also want to prevent the stuff from Stanza 36 from happening...
From the Flagship of Prince Valen
From the "Empress of Arcturus"
Launched a pair of proton missiles
Launched the dreaded station busters
Bringing fiery devastation
Bringing doom to Freeport Seven
Preoccupied where the gunners
Busy shooting at some fighters
When the proton bombs impacted
Tearing Freeport's hull asunder*
* = [...or am I?]
...which means, all things considered, that you'll probably want shields sensors and guns on the stations, just in case, making them in effect driveless spaceships.
One idea, inspired by Space Rangers, would be that stations in fact DO have engines, but are glacially slow - this would however allow them to be moved from the place of manufacture to wherever they're supposed to go on their own power (and wouldn't it be fun to fit the station with a jumpdrive, just for shit and giggles?).
Another one would be a pre-packaged station kit a'la X, which would allow a large freighter to place the station somewhere else, or as a variation, a self-contained asteroid converter torpedo that gets launched at a suitable rock and will then convert it into real estate.
A third option would be a construction ship (or rather, several) which construct the object of desire in situ, though the logistics here could easily become rather iffy.
Of course, there's solution number 4 as well: Blatantly teleporting the station into place (marked by a beacon) after shelling out the required cash and resources at the nearest planet, but that seems...cheap. But at least it would work.
Any ideas or suggestions, anyone?
Post
Sun Nov 03, 2013 8:57 am
#1
Space Stations - Building, Care and Nurturing
Hardenberg was my name
And Terra was my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination
And Terra was my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination