I’m starting to get the feeling that not many players responding to my suggestion actually bothered to read my topic in full.
Rather than orbital bombardment due to poor decisions made with SM enabled, it would also be inconvenient for a player to have all those incoming minerals become part of the un-mined minerals on the receiving system body, but with 0.1 accessibility. A warning would be nice before the last MD is removed from any MD target body.
Maybe a bit of maths can help.
Let me use the Meteor Crater, in Arizona, as a reference: its diameter is about 1.3 km, it was generated by an asteroid of dimensions of 30-50 metres, and mass around 300,000 tons.
One Aurora mass driver can throw 5,000 tons per year, i.e. 5,000/365 = 13.69863 tons per day.
So, we need 300,000/13.69863 = 21,900 (21 thousand and 900) mass drivers to launch 300,000 tons in one day, to generate another Meteor Crater… if they hit the body surface exactly at the same point at the same instant… not very likely.
Which is the largest number of launching MDs that are you using in one of your systems in your current match? Maybe I have ten or so.
May I suggest to simply make the packets disappear, if there isn’t a receiving mass driver?
I agree about some warnings about removing the last MD from a body, while packets are arriving; or a warning that no MD is eventually present on the receiving body.
But if the player ignores these messages, he just looses the minerals.
About the MDs in orbit, you should think of a position for them that is fixed respect both the launching and the receiving MDs, which continue to move with the bodies they are at along their orbits… not very realistic, IMO.
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Impact energy depends on the velocity more then on the mass (E=mv2), so it’s actually pretty plausible to achieve exterminatus effect with a packet slipping at the planet surface or just atmosphere - packets have much higher entry velocities comparing to asteroids.
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