If you can play as an alien environment race, and you choose something like Sulfur, then any world with water ice on it means you have to heat it up to a certain point (likely significantly raising the CC) to turn it to gas then remove it. You would then remove the aetesium then add whatever else you need in order to terraform it.
Previously only gases had negative impact and these were easy to deal with. Now we have a solid gas that causes a problem but no way to remove it other than through something inefficient.
So the request might be to enable terraformed to remove (but not add, except through water vapor) frozen water somehow. Ice mining, if you will. (Cue the Ice Pirates movie)
Being able to mine frozen ice sounds like a great idea. Perhaps also the ability to transport frozen ice to other plants would be reasonable but that could add balance concerns but definitely interesting play options. Do I transport ice to a planet to help cool it and add water or do I use traditional terraforming methods?
My opinion is, terraforming would greatly benefit in both interesting choices and flavour with addition of solid materials and energy delivery. I see two relatively simple mechanics possible:
Materials
Add a task for Terraforming facility to collect frozen volatile from the list available. When this task is active, the packet appears in the list for mass drivers to throw. The mass driver capacity can be set about an order of magnitude higher comparing to TNM packages without inconsistency, because in the case of frozen volatiles we don’t care if some percent of packages would miss the body and be lost, so the drivers would work in higher rate of throws. When arriving at a target mass driver, the frozen volatile appears in the terraforming tasks list to be blown out on the surface.
Energy
Add a shipboard component “Mirror panel”, which enables the class ability “Solar mirror”. For the class ability, add a task “Focus mirror onto body …” (list of the system bodies). Redirected solar energy depends on the solar luminosity, star - mirror distance and the number of mirror panels. Add a tech line that determines the max radiant flux (i.e. the minimal orbital distance from the specific star) the mirrors can redirect without melting down.
To double the flux for, say, Oberon, we need an equivalent of about 1500km mirror. AFAIU, the solar flux increase slows down at the 1 Solar radius orbital distance, so let’s put the mirror at 1/10th of the Mercury perihelion - it’s about 150 times radial ratio to Uranus orbit, so we need just 10km diameter mirror. There are some big Solar plants with this squares, actually. I’d say it needs weeks to deploy it with TN shuttles in orbit, yet it isn’t something really huge when you have at least 100`000-tons of cargo ships loading up every day in droves.
The mirror could also be a solar panel, generating ‘energy’ as a mineral, requiring a cargo ship to transport it to terraformers, as opposed to mirrors.
The problem is finding a generally known, non-dangerous greenhouse and anti-greenhouses gases.
There is sulphur hexafluoride for greenhouse, but that isn’t really known. Anti-greenhouse is even worse.
Besides, the game simulates drawing gases in from an alternative dimension to completely terraform planets in a few years or decades. The gas names are not the primary realism issue
They would have the same problem as I originally envisioned for the mirrors. I really like the idea of massive mirrors close to a star beaming energy into a planetary atmosphere.
They would need nav-packs to not become solar sails.
As in putting the array at 0.5 AU to provide a 2% increase of solar flux to Mars would require 80,000 km2 of 100% reflective at 100% on target time to achieve. Station keeping would require 60GW of continuous electric power for ion drives, which of course will require fuel, with our most efficient engine, that’s about 2 million tonnes xenon annually. (Current production is at best 200 tonnes)
Putting at Mercury orbit would be 50,000 km2 with same limits. Putting inside Mercury orbit for extended amount of time would require material science we do not currently possess.
Yeah, more complex terraforming is on my list of pipe dream wishes too! The solar mirror idea is good, it’s a staple of sci-fi in various forms. Using mass drivers to move frozen stuff from where there is excess to where it is needed is another classic.
Presumably one might put the main collecting mirrors in a Lagrange of an inner planet and then smaller reflecting/focusing mirrors might move using a negligible amount of fuel to direct light/energy to the target body. Plus if fuel was a concern I might make something that was already solar array solar powered.
I would rather have slightly unrealistic space mirrors and water/oxygen mass driver bombs than completely unrealistic alternative dimension gases that work like magical non-dangerous greenhouse and anti-greenhouse source.
Basically it doesn’t have to be a real world simulation. Terraforming could just be more complex than pumping one of two possible gasses to change temperature.
Why does it need to be “more complex”? I wouldn’t want to see terraforming becomes a significant time and micromanagement sink that detracts from flying my spaceships around and having them shoot things (or load/unload things, for the pacifists).
Is adding giant mirrors really adding more complexity to terraforming? Boiled down, it sounds like “build this thing and put it here, maybe jiggle it around a bit” which is … what terraforming stations already are, mechanically.
I for one think current terraforming works fairly well. With the possible exception of water management. But still think space mirrors could be interesting.
One way they could be different is that terraformers add atmosphere to a planet and then terraformers get to move on. But if a planet is being heated by solar mirrors than aside from the impact of melting frozen gases/liquids the impact of the radiation might need to continue or the planet could return to its uninhabitable state, so some mirrors could need to support the planet permanently. This could add an interesting security and resource concern. It also could make it more clear that neither terraforming stations or mirrors would always be best. Although depending on the exact balance sometimes a hybrid approach could also be helpful.
The base temperature in Aurora (before accounting for atmosphere, albedo, etc.) is based on a combination of distance and stellar luminosity.
Mirrors would effectively increase the luminosity of the star for the purposes of calculating temperature on the target planet. It wouldn’t increase radiation in game terms any more than moving the planet closer to the sun.
The differences for mirrors vs terraformers would be:
It allows a temperature above or below the limits of terraforming
It needs to be a permanent presence, rather than terraform and move on.
I haven’t run the math yet, as in the past I hadn’t considered having the mirror close to the star rather than in orbit of the planet.
