Back in VB6 days of yore, removing the last MD on Earth meant that all mineral packets in transit cause orbital bombardment damage depending on their size. This was of course a nasty surprise for new players and I recall many suggestions that wanted this mechanic removed.
Currently, in C# 2.7.1 version, if you remove the last MD on Earth while mineral packets are in transit, nothing happens. The game does not stop you from doing so but neither are there any repercussions - the MD destination is automatically reset for all mining colonies in Sol that used to send to Earth and not only are the packets in transit harmless, they get added to Earth’s stockpile as if they were received normally.
This, IMHO, means that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. I propose that any fleet trying to load the final MD on a colony that has incoming mineral packets in transit, causes an interrupt and a warning message: “Cargo Fleet has cancelled Task: Load Facility: Mass Driver as there are incoming mineral packets.” This way, players know that the last MD should not be removed. Then, if they use SM to remove that MD or ground combat or orbital bombardment destroys it, the incoming mineral packets do still arrive and cause orbital bombardment of their own.
This, at least in my mind, would be the golden middle road - it would preserve the inherent risk in slinging thousands of tons of minerals across interplanetary distances while preventing new players from obliterating their home world accidentally.
No sane engineer would aim a mass driver on a colony directly. It’s obvious that mass drivers throw packets at a nearby point in space, where the targtet’s orbital receiver would catch them. No receiver - packets fly through.
It does not matter where the packet is aimed. Orbital mechanics ensure that unless it has sufficient velocity to maintain a stable orbit, it will eventually hit the planet. TN-magic ensures that stations and ships remain in planetary orbit instead of plummeting to their fiery deaths. Actually, we don’t have any orbits at all, fleets are just at the centre of the dot that is the planetary body.
However, as I stated, the packets ARE caught by the colony even without a MD. So yeah, the packets are aimed at the colony and they arrive safely whether there is MD present or not.
Nope, orbital mechanics doesn’t ensure that at all. As I’ve said, without a deceleration with a receiver the packet would fall on a planet only in case of insanity of the planners. Aim at a nearby point in space instead of a planet body - and all the packets would fly by. Hyperbolic trajectory.
We are getting sidetracked here but you do realize that a packet that needs to be retrieved, cannot be sent on such a trajectory and such velocity that the gravity of the receiving body would not affect it? The MD is not a ship flying thousands of kilometers away to catch a mineral packet. The packets are sent directly to the target planet and the receiving MD catches them before they can re-enact the dinosaur extinction. IRL this is of course impossible which is why nobody is even proposing anything like it for Earth use - bombarding Mars, Venus or Mercury are an entirely different thing since there inos human population to worry. Maybe I am misunderstand something here?
Regardless, your point is entirely moot because as it is, and as I have written twice already, currently Aurora treats the packets as if they were sent directly at the planet hosting the receiving colony.
I’m not a physicist or engineer so won’t comment on the realism or otherwise. I’d like to instead take the game design perspective.
What’s the advantage of a mass driver causing harm? I would argue, like many of the excellent design choices, it’s a covert tutorial.
For example, I see the resistance mechanic as an excellent armed forces tutorial. No matter how peacefully I’m playing, I have to grapple with army building. The game says “if you can’t make a troop and land it on your rebellious colony, I won’t let you progress further”
I think dangerous mass drivers serve the same purpose - teaching me how to use orders to always leave one behind.
Tankers taught me order delays, protection demands taught me how to use box launchers etc.
I can absolutely believe it isn’t correct from a physics standpoint, any more than rebellion is totally absent below x pop and rampant above it, but I think it was useful for me and would like it to return
Gravity affects everything. That’s why it’s hyperbolic trajectory, not a stright line.
What is MD is up to a player. It isn’t a ship not a purely orbital construction (like shipyards), yet it definitely needs orbital effectors to catch anything inbound, because catching mineral packets after their entry in atmosphere is a bit useless - you’d have a meteor explosion regardless of the packet’s ballistics.
And nothing in Aurora currently tells packets are aimed at the body directly. They are aimed to be caught by the colonie’s mass driver receivers.
There are games that need not any kind of realism - like chess, for example, that lost it’s realistic part hundreds of years before and currently it’s just a fixed set of rules.
Aurora is definitely not this kind of game. It’s distinctive feature is very realistic (for a computer game) map - it’s not an abstracted board, it’s space map with nearly real orbits. It tells a player on wich nuclear technologies an engine is based, it tells the culture-defined names of officers, and the officers have their age and health and personal traits.
So, Aurora isn’t a schematic game, it’s a story-telling game with as much realistic rules as it’s creator think he could make without breaking some other essential features.
Therefore, when something in Aurora is unrealistic - it doesn’t mean it has to be specifically unrealistic. It just means it’s hard for Steve to make it more realistic.
Making something in Aurora less realistic then it already is means lowering the story-telling part for… and then you need an explanation, what is the purpose of making Aurora less Aurora-like?
Here you are explaning that Aurora would better teach a player to play Aurora in this way. Well… I think learning to play Aurora is not a purpose of playing Aurora for most players. Learning anything is fun, yet not a final purpose.
I’d agree that losing packets if you have no MD at the receiving end is logical and if currently it doesn’t happen then it would be better to get this fixed, because consistency is good for a story.
Easily killing your capital by slipping such a tiny part of the planning is not the kind of story I’d like to build by playing.
I think if I’m understanding you right, what you’re saying is that Aurora has two dual aims as a game - realism and storytelling, and that mass driver catastrophes mess with both of those.
To look at another part of the game (pop growth), somehow couples who aren’t having children on earth move to the moon and start breeding like crazy.
10% compounding pop growth means that 1/5 women are successfully delivering live births each year. This means that the newborn baby girl born last year has a 20% chance of becoming pregnant.
OR
Women in the fertile age range (18-50 with some TNE) are having increasingly large numbers of children year on year. If we assume that 30% of the population is below 18, and nobody is too old to have children, you end up with something approaching 1/3 - 1/2 of women pregnant at any one time.
If we are conservative and say you spend one year pregnant and get 2 off from 18-50, that’s just over 10 children per family! On average And then those children go on to do the same.
Now both of these realities are quite alarming and unrealistic. Steve could easily “fix” it by lowering max growth from 10% to 3%. But there’s a good gameplay reason for this un-realiry which I think trumps the horrifying storytelling vision it implies.
I think there’s a good gameplay reason for mass driver casualties (diligence), it also acted as a good lesson in that reason.
I would argue that if we bring back fatalities AND allow you to target enemy inhabited colonies, that makes the gameplay stronger for the downside of requiring more diligence and attention.
Realism and storytelling aren’t different aims. Realism (perceived one for a median player at least) is a quality to be a good storytelling game, which Aurora is.
I do think (wrote about it on the old forum) that Aurora pop growth mechanics is weird, yet Steve thinks it’s ok because it generally corresponds with humankind history (which is pre-industrial in it’s low population density part, that’s why it has indeed so high birth rates; Aurora populations are industrial-era ones, so I think these mostly-preindustrial stats are irrelevant, while industrial civilization definitely needs industrial means of building pop, or else it’s dying out like we are currently).
On the other hand, the most popular setting here is WH40K, which is a totalitarian distopia, in which women treated like birth cattle is a bit of consistency, while tracking every civilian citizen’s age is a bit too much for a game, so for this setting Aurora pop mechanics is nearly ok.
Thanks for that background and detail - uncivilised space empires do exist! I think my sci fi reading was too civilised.
I think we’re straying into ‘taste’ or ‘tolerance of suspension of disbelief’ rather than realism. I am worried about the genetic wasteland my " *Habsburg Moon", but I get that you and many others aren’t. Probably comes down to the fact that I barely understood physics at school and went for biology.
On the other hand, I can totally believe an administrator is stupid enough to remove the “catcher” of the incoming projectile to try and meet some bureaucratic target, kiling millions. Again, probably down to the fact that I’ve worked with and for those administrators!
So perhaps we can sideline the realism part? I think with this topic it is quite personal.
Instead, I guess, my question is “is the game better if mass driver projectiles kill?” I think the answer is yes, as it could create interesting tactical situations and create consequences for poor discipline. E.g. I mine on a distant comet, put a reserve of minerals on it and try to time the mass driver to hit a populated colony at exactly the moment I sabotage their mass driver / take advantage of the fact they didn’t build one.
BUT it was removed for a reason, and I don’t know that reason so may be missing a key part of the puzzle.
The thing with realism part (or suspension of disbelief part, which is just a differnt wording of the same thing) is exactly about how to make the game better.
Yes, different players perceive different parts of the game as “better”. Yet, often they perceive something for a short time and then got cought in an absolutely predictable trap just because they didn’t thought out for something while pursuing some short-range aim. I’m trying to generalize such cases as tendencies and warn about it instead of just writing about my own desires.
And I has more then enough exp of working with and for bureaucracy to understand the difference between low-risk-high-danger cases and nearly-inevitable-catastrophe cases. The latter is extremely rare event, bureaucrats aren’t idiots.
Either don’t let me load the last md off a colony with inbound packets, or give me a warning (somehow?) when I do so, or…maybe put a number next to the md count that tells me how many incoming packets there are.
I really don’t want the game to punish players for things like this.
Maybe just annoy them instead?
Suggestion: If you have packets en route to a colony without a mass driver, you get an event log message about it every con cycle.
And maybe some percentage of the minerals disappear upon arrival. But not the whole packet.
Jokes aside, I do kind of wish that since we don’t have any big kinetic consequences regarding mass drivers anymore that we just did away with the mineral packets and just increased the stockpile at the destination based on the actual mass driver throughput.
Yes there is the issue of lead time which would potentially be lost, but you can have it just be a timer once the destination is set where the minerals only start coming in once the timer runs through.
Just seems like a lot of extra work to have these mineral packets flying around in the background.
This is why forums are so good - I would never have thought this was an option.
IMO either they should be simulated, dangerous, versatile tools like everything else, firing mass at whoever we want or they are the equivalent of what you’ve described, zipping minerals from a to b so we have a solution with minimum ram footprint.
I don’t think they’re even upgradable, right, like I think almost every other component?