(04-08-2017, 04:53 PM)JoeStrout Wrote: OK, great stuff!  In no particular order...

• And, I might be wrong, but… is the free design mode gone? I think it was in the demo, where you could design with all tech available? It’d allow one to make a colony one wishes for, as a goal, and then play the career mode with the —found it. Weird to have that as a separate game file, but okay.
• Playing with designs… don’t nuclear and fusion power require cooling? I just made a 1000x1000 cylinder at triton and have 16 GW of power. Comfy 23 degree inside.
• Also, shouldn’t Closed Ecology provide a new building? Since it apparently doesn’t. Or was this meant as one of the automated buildings built by zoning? 
• The Shielded Suit text is incomplete ("Shielding a space colony is one thing" is all that’s there.)
• Gas Gun Launcher… seems really far fetched as an early technology. I’d expect an EM launch tube on the moon far earlier than the equivalent on Earth.
• Statues increase crime rates? Are they, like, Gargoyle Gangsters?
• I think I had a colony with crime rates soaring adjacent to a police station. Yeah, here, at Phoenix Lane, there’s a police station not far. Two water treatment plants would fit between the houses and the station.
• Trees and paths can be placed everywhere, even in/through buildings. Is the reverse also true? Would a zone building be built in a forest, so to speak?
• A stack of toruses has the same windowed lighting conditions despite the torus mirrors being in each other’s way. Unless it’s assumed the primary mirror reflecting light down the axis is curved in such a way to facilitate lighting all toruses? Doubtful, considering the number of toruses that can be stacked this way (I checked with a dozen, the furthest had 100% lighting)
  

• In Manage, provide an overview of a colony. Selecting (but not loading) a file allows one to see that colony’s statistic tab. Ideally, also the position (i.e. orbit).
• Specialised Colonies, which is probable a whole barrel of suggestions, since it’d require specialised modules and the colony part would be living and recreational. To provide an example: 
  • Base for construction and maintenance of beamed solar power satellites (i.e. the other end of the rectenna). Requires NEA Retrieval (resources) and Space Solar Power. 
  • Spaceship Drydock, requires NEA Retrieval, Ion Drive / Nuclear Rocketry, Magnetic Shield / Shielded Suit
    
• Have more interaction between your (and others’) colonies. For instance, you can build a Rectenna for power, but having a station that builds and maintains SSP lowers power cost (since it’s an in-house power provider). (I’ve never built a rectenna, I assume power beaming is reflected in higher maintenance cost or something.) Another flavour would be Squawker texts mentioning people moving from a previous colony to a new one, or vice versa
• More data on what a building does, in gaming terms. Do I need a government building? I don’t know. Maybe it lowers maintenance or crime rate, not a clue. When would I need a dehumidifier? *shrugs* This’d fit in the hover text before building them.
• Sending a police cruiser to a high crime area lowers crime rate for a set amount of time, after which it increases again. Maybe the same for fire fighters (IRL translates to being taught best practice, fire code checks, and evacuation exercises)
  

(04-12-2017, 11:54 AM)JoeStrout Wrote: Yes, fission and fusion generate a lot of heat.  If your colony was comfy anyway, then you're lucky, it must have plenty of passive cooling (perhaps due to that crazy skinny-but-wide torus design you showed in the other thread ).

On the Gas Gun Launcher: at a space conference last fall, I spent lunch with a guy who thinks he could build one today if he can get the funding.  This was a real physicist, not some guy off the street, and he made a pretty good case.

Yes, there is (alas) no collision checking among trees, paths, and buildings.  This is often quite convenient: you can plant trees right next to buildings, paths that go right up to the door, etc.  But it also means you can do silly things, like run paths right through buildings etc.

And you're right, we're not actually ray-tracing the light paths, though we do try to make sure each module has a view of a mirror pointed the right way.  I'll see if we can make that more robust, as you've clearly found an exploit!

• Heat: 
  • Well, it’s strange. The temperature range for the described Neptune colony goes from -100° to 1200° C (min power vs max power draw). Funny thing is, once I had enough power to raise the temperature to the prescribed 23°C, adding more power did nothing. No increase in colony temperature. Only the max temperature (as given by the help window) increased. Thing is, so far I’ve always had a decent surplus of power available (enough to heat a colony to 100°C, give or take), but is there actually a reason to? I don’t know. For hypothetical industrial colonies there’d be additional need, for melting and welding and such, sure, but that’s not in the scope of the current game version.
  • My point is, the colony should require radiators when using fusion/fission, since a notable fraction of the generated power is inevitably lost as heat. So far I’ve never been in a position to actually need any radiators. So something’s off here.
    
• Gas Gun Launcher: I never doubted its technological feasibility, but as an economic technology? That’s where I need some serious convincing. It’d be, without a doubt, in the three digit billion range with current tech. Doable, but boy is it expensive.
• Does the autonomous building creation employ collision check? I think so (I’ve never seen buildings being built in a copse. I think.).
• What about buildings being built in water? Because that’s a thing, especially since I usually build roads along the shore of the lakes. Incidentally, bridges? Those’d be nice.
• I don’t think you’d need to accurately ray-trace, since the basic premise of mirrors already assumes an alignment of the colony rotational axis being perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic (parallel to solar system’s north-south). ‘Just’ check superposability with anything between primary mirror and habitat mirror. (I’m not a programmer, and still I know that ‘just do x’ is more often than not incredibly complicated)
• Incidentally, is the ratio of area of habitat mirror by surface area of habitat taken into account to calculate the lighting percentage? I noted you can’t get higher than 100% lighting, which is fine for now. I assume 100% lighting equals equatorial lighting conditions on Earth? Anyway my point is, by adjusting the distance of the habitat mirror from the axis (mirror radius), one can alter the amount of light reflected into the torus. Smaller radius = less light. At cislunar space this slightly lower (mirror radius < habitat radius → mirror area < habitat surface) ratio translates well to Earth ecologies, but farther out the actual amount of light available by mirrors would be less than stellar. Deeper in system on the other hand you’d like to avoid too much light, so less mirrors would be presumably good. Though less reflective mirror’s would work just as well to avoid force-tanning the inhabitants.
• Unrelated, but are orbit-related wear and tear included in the colony’s maintenance costs? LEO and HEO would have lots of space debris, HEO and out have higher rate of radiation damage (noteworthy for solar panels and rectenna and other sensible equipment), Jupiter has stupid large radiation damage, Saturn has rings (and debris), and so forth.
  

• Space Debris Removal: New Component
  Early space exploration littered LEO and HEO with debris, from small screws to giant rocket boosters. By using laser we can change the orbits of this dangerous littering to our colony and let it burn up in the atmosphere.Decreases Maintenance cost for LEO and HEO colonies at expense of notable power requirements.
  

(04-12-2017, 02:49 PM)Permeable Ceiling Wrote: Thing is, so far I’ve always had a decent surplus of power available (enough to heat a colony to 100°C, give or take), but is there actually a reason to?

Quote:My point is, the colony should require radiators when using fusion/fission, since a notable fraction of the generated power is inevitably lost as heat. So far I’ve never been in a position to actually need any radiators. So something’s off here.

Quote:Does the autonomous building creation employ collision check? I think so (I’ve never seen buildings being built in a copse. I think.).

Quote:What about buildings being built in water? Because that’s a thing, especially since I usually build roads along the shore of the lakes.

Quote:Incidentally, is the ratio of area of habitat mirror by surface area of habitat taken into account to calculate the lighting percentage?

Quote:Unrelated, but are orbit-related wear and tear included in the colony’s maintenance costs? LEO and HEO would have lots of space debris, HEO and out have higher rate of radiation damage (noteworthy for solar panels and rectenna and other sensible equipment), Jupiter has stupid large radiation damage, Saturn has rings (and debris), and so forth.