Due to the costs of launching things to the moon from earth, I don't think that food imports would be feasable on any sort of long term. I think that the colonists would make it a first priority to generate their own food. So short term in fact that they should be food independant by the end of the first turn (year).
We should severly restric food imports from earth. (perhaps a single early national wonder would allow it?)
He3 should generate Money.
We could replace the food imports from earth mechanic with an imigration mechanic.
Something like this:
No improved tiles (or very few, just food resources have 3 food) produce more than two food during the time before isolation, but exactly two food is easy to achieve. This is so your citys don't grow much, but new population will be usefull and not starve.
Write a python script that generates imigrants to your citys (new population) based on the amount of He3 you control. People want to imigrate to rich colonys, right? Only add free population intermitantly, and only as long as happiness and health allow.
After Isolation there would be improved terrain improvements that allow more food to be generated, so specialists and field workiers generating no food will be feasable.
Also think about how few people are on the ISS to feed, and how much easyer it is to get to low earth orbit than to the moon.Think of how long the ISS is orbiting Earth already and still there's no hydroponics bay in it.
Also, every city has a 2 food output on its own tile. I think of that as the city's own and primary cultivation. Anything that would come in from Earth (and they have to send cargo ships anyway for getting He³ and presumely other ores) would be types of food the colony was not yet able to cultivate.
Fear of failure is no reason to not try. We may not have any experts, but some here are proficient enough to give it a shot.I agree mostly, and this is the point (migration events) where the mod was when it became buggy and later on abandonned by the coders.
The problem is we don't have expert coders atm (afaik) working on the mod.
Another problem is that we're (At least I am) guilty of is mixing the future versions of this mod and this one.
How much depth do we want to go into with the vanilla version? I agree that this all needs to be changed for the BtS version so do we tinker here or leave it as is and address it later?
Also think about how few people are on the ISS to feed, and how much easyer it is to get to low earth orbit than to the moon.
He3 would be so valuable because it is so small. Just a few ships a year would be needed to transport the entire production of it back to earth.
I don't think that any common ores(iron, aluminum, copper) would be sent back home, just used on the moon to replace imported materials. Uranium and Plutonium might be valuable enough in weapons to validate the expence.
Fear of failure is no reason to not try. We may not have any experts, but some here are proficient enough to give it a shot.
Do we want such code? I can attempt to write it.
It may only take 10% of the fuel, but how much more fuel had to be used on liftoff to get that extra 10% into orbit with the craft? How much bigger was the Saturn 5 (apollo) rocket than the space shuttle?I knew you would bring this up, and infact you're dead wrong here.
Lifting cargo in Earth orbit makes up almost (about 90% I reckon) all the fuel of an Earth-moon-Earth trip. So the extra expense to boost a ship towards the moon is negligable compared to just lift it in low orbit.
here we have the advantage of the writer; we don't know how it will work, so we can pick how we want it to work for the game to play well.True that, it only depends on how accurate current predictions are of the amount of He³ needed to fuel fusion reactors. My last check on this issue learned me there's quite a difference of opinion there.
Not to Earth itself, no. But Earth orbit would be a greedy market of any metals brought in from the moon. It would still be way cheaper then lifting those same metals from the gravity pit that Earth is.
If you feel up to it, I'm all for trying.
But please let us first determine more exactly how/what we want with migration and supplies from Earth.
It may only take 10% of the fuel, but how much more fuel had to be used on liftoff to get that extra 10% into orbit with the craft? How much bigger was the Saturn 5 (apollo) rocket than the space shuttle?
You seems to forget the Space Elevator !