Eastern Heretic
Chieftain
- Joined
- Aug 6, 2014
- Messages
- 33
A discussion in another thread got me thinking, what happens to your seeding ship after it unloads the colony pod with your actual colonists, and with the ships of other factions for that matter, assuming the colony pod is not everything what's left of it by the time it reached the Planet's orbit.
For example if we consider the discussion about whether the lifeform-sensor keeps updating the player about the new alien nests, for that to be possible we must assume that the original ship itself is still in orbit in operational condition and keeps feeding us new information. I would say, no spacecraft is that robust (the in-game satellites themselves seem to have a lifetime of 60 turns-years or so), but then again it has already been traveling for 400 hundred years, so why not a couple hundred more? It happened with Mir station, when it's lifetime was extended to twice of what was planned because it's resource allowed for it, and we know everything space-related is built with thrice the necessary robustness. Unless you consider you have to manage the orbital decay somehow and I'm pretty sure all the fuel would be exhausted during the journey.
In any case, I imagine that whatever was left in orbit after planetfall is big enough to cause a catastrophe of at least local proportions if it's left to just fall onto the surface as it pleases, and there's an entire 8 of them. So this poses the problem that it should be disposed of somehow.
While I might be overthinking this in terms of realism (have no idea if anything I wrote above is actually valid), but wouldn't it be cool for this to play out gameplay-wise? For example use the quest mechanic for something like a global quest to stop the remains of the 8 seeding ships from falling onto the planet, kinda like the global fair, global games and ISS from BNW but more engaging than just "invest X amount of production" although that works too I guess. Making all the players suddenly invest their production into something else while they're busy pumping out units to exterminate each other would already be a nice twist. Or maybe even a colony(ship)-drop as the top spy mission for supremacy? (I know they already have something bland sounding already for that role)
Alpha Centauri had some council options related to the starship they arrived on after all, why can't BE have something similar?
For example if we consider the discussion about whether the lifeform-sensor keeps updating the player about the new alien nests, for that to be possible we must assume that the original ship itself is still in orbit in operational condition and keeps feeding us new information. I would say, no spacecraft is that robust (the in-game satellites themselves seem to have a lifetime of 60 turns-years or so), but then again it has already been traveling for 400 hundred years, so why not a couple hundred more? It happened with Mir station, when it's lifetime was extended to twice of what was planned because it's resource allowed for it, and we know everything space-related is built with thrice the necessary robustness. Unless you consider you have to manage the orbital decay somehow and I'm pretty sure all the fuel would be exhausted during the journey.
In any case, I imagine that whatever was left in orbit after planetfall is big enough to cause a catastrophe of at least local proportions if it's left to just fall onto the surface as it pleases, and there's an entire 8 of them. So this poses the problem that it should be disposed of somehow.
While I might be overthinking this in terms of realism (have no idea if anything I wrote above is actually valid), but wouldn't it be cool for this to play out gameplay-wise? For example use the quest mechanic for something like a global quest to stop the remains of the 8 seeding ships from falling onto the planet, kinda like the global fair, global games and ISS from BNW but more engaging than just "invest X amount of production" although that works too I guess. Making all the players suddenly invest their production into something else while they're busy pumping out units to exterminate each other would already be a nice twist. Or maybe even a colony(ship)-drop as the top spy mission for supremacy? (I know they already have something bland sounding already for that role)
Alpha Centauri had some council options related to the starship they arrived on after all, why can't BE have something similar?