Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - FS2 Required => Inferno => Topic started by: Snail on August 24, 2010, 02:05:02 am
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Wait, all of those are domes? :wtf:
I'm sorry but I'm calling bull****. You can't encase an entire ****ing planet in giant domes. :doubt:
Then again, this being Inferno/Mobimod, plausibility or even believability was never very high on the agenda.
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Wait, all of those are domes? :wtf:
I'm sorry but I'm calling bull****. You can't encase an entire ****ing planet in giant domes. :doubt:
Well, technically there's a term for that kind of thing. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere)
But yeah, I have to second that. The part of my brain that does engineering just screams against it. :nervous:
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Don't forget paraterraforming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraterraforming#Paraterraforming). You guys are forgetting that the EA has superb industrial capacities, and managed to build an enormous fleet plus the Icanus. In terms of construction, they're more akin to the Shivans than any Terran or Vasudan faction. How is that suprising? :p
Then again, this being Inferno/Mobimod, plausibility or even believability was never very high on the agenda.
Enough with this kind of comments because a) this is not a "Mobimod" of any sort and b) what the pic shows is a pure application of the EA's capacities to terraforming, which IMHO is quite plausible considering their technology. As I said, nothing to be surprised of. While you're free to criticize constructively these additions (explanations on why they're plausible will come later on, so I perfectly understand the current skepticism) I'm kind of sick of this "Mobimod" thingie someone recently came up with. Just letting you know.
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Alright I guess the Mobimod comment was slightly out of line. Sorry.
On a more 'constructive' note, I'm just going to say that there's a massive leap between making a large fleet of ships and the Icanus and completely encasing an entire planet in atmosphere-retaining domes. It's just not plausible in any way and seriously cheapens the entire universe and background of Inferno.
I hope you at least think about this, because really the only reason I'm saying this is because I care - I care about Inferno and I just don't want to see something so ridiculous spoil the ethos and lore of a possibly very rich and interesting universe.
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The thickness of the domes hasn't been mentioned, so I fail to understand why the thing looks unbelievable. Also unmentioned is the time required to build all domes. Furthermore, Luna isn't a planet, it's a satellite, and that's the reason why conventional terraforming was impossible in the first place. Worldhousing something of the same size as Earth... that would be kind of difficult to understand, but Luna?
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Not to mention that this dome idea is a severely bad idea on an astral body that acts as a meteoroid catcher for another one (like the moon does for Earth). Not to mention that the moon has other severe problems, such as an incredible amount of background radiation courtesy of the sun. Then there's the issue that the moon doesn't have the natural ressources to make an operation like this profitable, especially if you've already terraformed Mars.
But again, this comes down to narrative preferences. One adage of SF is that if you keep the bat**** insane stuff to a minimum, the audience will be more able to accept the bits of really crazy technology you're introducing.
In this case, you're basically positing that this Earth Alliance or whatever it's called is, for all intents and purposes, a post-scarcity society similar in capabilities to Iain Bank's Culture. The question then becomes how anything could be a threat to them.
The thickness of the domes hasn't been mentioned, so I fail to understand why the thing looks unbelievable. Also unmentioned is the time required to build all domes. Furthermore, Luna isn't a planet, it's a satellite, and that's the reason why conventional terraforming was impossible in the first place. Worldhousing something of the same size as Earth... that would be kind of difficult to understand, but Luna?
Why terraform Luna at all? That's the question we're asking.
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You're posting apparent conclusions to a debate about the presumed effectiveness of the materials the domes are made of, except this debate hasn't even started. If by domes you mean conventional domes, then terraforming of the Moon should have started before the 2100s. Due to many difficulties, many of which are mentioned in your post, it was impossible to do anything on the Moon other than building some installations and cities.
As I stated a while ago, when I posted pics of an EA group near a terraformed Luna, something in the 2350s ensured suprising technological development. I can tell you that new technologies made certain things possible, but unfortunately I can't give out the details. Discussions on such technologies date back to April 2008 (I've just checked the private boards) and they required a lot of time.
Why terraform Luna? Perhaps to move citizens and increase the number of military surface installations? Population in Sol entered a period of sharp increase in the 2350s, and further colonization of Luna by Earthers and Martians alike is to boost the alliance between the colonies which just came out from a bloody war (you don't need INFASA to understand this, it can be easily deduced in the old INFA).
I see I should provide more plot-related info to prevent such comments, but the general trend in eyecandy threads is to post pics and only a handful of info. This may (and probably will) change if community members press the unplausibility alarm button.
I acknowledge it's my fault: I should definitely provide more explanations when posting pics of this kind.
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Housing something the size of Luna is still an extremely difficult operation to accomplish. It's 1/4 the size of Earth. That is a big number; do you honestly believe we could construct a covering over 1/4th of the planet? Just bringing in enough materials for such a project would noticeably alter tides on Earth.
And we actually see Luna in the FS1 end cutscene, looking pristine and quite familar, so you have a canonical constraint on how long you can take on this.
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As I said, everything will be explained.
Canonical constraint on what? I wanted Luna to be terraformed at the time of FS1, but then remembered how it looked like in Endgame. At that point, I realized it'd be better to terraform it in the 2350s for reasons I mentioned above.
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It's pure fantasy, but whatever, I'm rolling with it. I try to think of whatever Inferno has mutated into as being kind of like Wings of Dawn.
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Wait, all of those are domes? :wtf:
I'm sorry but I'm calling bull****. You can't encase an entire ****ing planet in giant domes. :doubt:
Well, technically there's a term for that kind of thing. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere)
But yeah, I have to second that. The part of my brain that does engineering just screams against it. :nervous:
Hasn't it been theorized that it would take several planets (meaning sextillions of tons) worth of materials to build one?
Not to mention that this dome idea is a severely bad idea on an astral body that acts as a meteoroid catcher for another one (like the moon does for Earth). Not to mention that the moon has other severe problems, such as an incredible amount of background radiation courtesy of the sun. Then there's the issue that the moon doesn't have the natural ressources to make an operation like this profitable, especially if you've already terraformed Mars.
Exactly. Mars and to a lesser extent Venus are much better candidates for terraforming.
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Exactly. Mars and to a lesser extent Venus are much better candidates for terraforming.
Yeah, I think that Venus is theoreticaly possible to terraform within present day, real life technology (albeit extremely slow and too expensive):
- Venus gravity is near perfect
- Venus rotation speed can be increased (might be much easier/faster with FS tech).
- Venus atmosphere can be thinered and altered (easy stuff with FS tech).
- Venus higher solar energy input (due to the smaller distance to Sun) can be deflected (or bettter deflected by harvesting) using the large number of space solar panels & deflectors, placed between Sun and Venus (should be really easy with FS tech - if you can build 20 cubic km instalation, then you can build a very thing but thosand cubic km large "solar deflector/collector" - not to mention it would be econnomically worth if you could store that energy for further use).
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Exactly. Mars and to a lesser extent Venus are much better candidates for terraforming.
Yeah, I think that Venus is theoreticaly possible to terraform within present day, real life technology (albeit extremely slow and too expensive):
- Venus gravity is near perfect
- Venus rotation speed can be increased (might be much easier/faster with FS tech).
- Venus atmosphere can be thinered and altered (easy stuff with FS tech).
- Venus higher solar energy input (due to the smaller distance to Sun) can be deflected (or bettter deflected by harvesting) using the large number of space solar panels & deflectors, placed between Sun and Venus (should be really easy with FS tech - if you can build 20 cubic km instalation, then you can build a very thing but thosand cubic km large "solar deflector/collector" - not to mention it would be econnomically worth if you could store that energy for further use).
Wrong, very, very wrong. Venus' atmosphere is far too toxic for terraforming to ever be possible.
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Exactly. Mars and to a lesser extent Venus are much better candidates for terraforming.
Yeah, I think that Venus is theoreticaly possible to terraform within present day, real life technology (albeit extremely slow and too expensive):
- Venus gravity is near perfect
- Venus rotation speed can be increased (might be much easier/faster with FS tech).
- Venus atmosphere can be thinered and altered (easy stuff with FS tech).
- Venus higher solar energy input (due to the smaller distance to Sun) can be deflected (or bettter deflected by harvesting) using the large number of space solar panels & deflectors, placed between Sun and Venus (should be really easy with FS tech - if you can build 20 cubic km instalation, then you can build a very thing but thosand cubic km large "solar deflector/collector" - not to mention it would be econnomically worth if you could store that energy for further use).
Wrong, very, very wrong. Venus' atmosphere is far too toxic for terraforming to ever be possible.
Yeah, and freespace is far too realistic to ever allow Venus or Luna to be terraformed. How can anyone even consider that.
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You are not getting the point. There's a fine line in SF, where being very realistic in some areas allows you to be very unrealistic in others. Also, think a moment about what the technological capability to terraform Mars, Luna AND build a supermassive fleet on top of it means. Question is, how can an economic entity capable of all that be threatened by anything?
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Shivans.
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They have a super massive fleet but are supposed to live entirely in space - so they have no need for terraforming :drevil:
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That wasn't the question.
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Shivans.
Well that's the thing. The Shivans are supposed to be unknowable; a semi-mystical species that has resources and influence that can only be speculated at. They introduce a slightly mythological angle to the FreeSpace saga. What this is on the other hand, is a very human faction that in around 15 years (!!), has gone from being a space faring society to possessing practically godlike power. It just doesn't make any sense.
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It does make sense when you know why and how it happened. I have to correct misinformation in your last post: 1) nobody here has stated at 15 years after the Great War Luna will look that way; it's a slow process, hence the reason why I said that it started in the 2350s. In the 2380s, it may be still in process. 2) there's no such thing has the "human faction" you mentioned. Factions changed over the time due to alliances, wars, and discoveries, so you can't act pretty much as if the GTA as you know it will suddenly become capable of terraforming Luna and building enormous fleets.
jr2 got it right: Shivans. Technology of the EA is more akin to Shivan technology (that's why any conventional assumption on economical efforts is not precise) for reasons that will be explained. It is convenient, and even a lot, but the EA will pay the price of such technology since the first encounters with the Shivans in INF SCP. I can't tell you more about the matter, however.
Oh, because someone has mentioned Venus, I'd like to say that it won't be terraformed at the time of INFASA. While terraforming is cool and necessary to explain the EA boost, it's not going to be overused.
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Shivans.
The Sathanas fleet as a productive and engineering achievement is utterly insignificant in comparison to this. Any society capable of terraforming Luna by this method could bury the Sathanas fleet under wave after wave of millions of automated flying beam cannons. The premise prohibits the story.
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Yeah, my big problem with the Luna domes is that any society that can do this can eat the Shivans, GTVA, and anything else in FreeSpace alive.
They're technically feasible, maybe even in the very limited timescale possible, assuming you have von Neumanns doing the work. But they imply a level of technological development that's way past anything else in FS.
Each of those domes is bigger than a Sathanas by far.
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I actually have heard some theoretical potential for Venus climatological manipulation. It would involve creating a genetically engineered bacteria which would chemically alter the atmosphere to be less inhospitable, so further terraforming could be attempted.
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Wrong, very, very wrong. Venus' atmosphere is far too toxic for terraforming to ever be possible.
Those toxins can be easilly removed by mechanical, chemical, or biological mean. I bet that even present day technology make a removal possible, albeit not at planetary scale.
My point is that Venus is far better (both in living condition and economical means) place to terraform than Luna, plus it exclude the need of those rudiculous "bigger than Juggernaut" domes.
IMO the resonable order of Terranforming should be Mars -> Venus -> Luna.
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Do the research.
Venusian surface pressure is 93 bar on average. Venusian surface temperatures, on average, are 460 °C (860 °F for our metrically challenged friends). Atmospheric density on ground level is 65% of water, for crying out loud.
You simply cannot manipulate an atmosphere on that scale, not with the knowledge and expertise we have right now. Not to mention that permanent settlements under those conditions are beyond our capabilities at the moment.
Establish a permanent, self-sufficient settlement in the Gobi desert. Establish a permanent, self-sufficient settlement in Death Valley. Establish a permanent, self-sufficient settlement on the ocean floor. Then you can start talking about terraforming, or extraterran colonies.
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For today's technology... yes, but the know-how exists... its really just a question of scale and time... and of course getting there. The high temperatures are partially due to a runaway greenhouse effect. The temperature staying up keeps it too hot for water to form, so its all in the atmosphere, where it contributes to the high atmospheric pressure. If you could find a way to disrupt this balance, you could conceivably return Venus' atmosphere to something that would permit terraforming. You'd probably need to introduce something high in the atmosphere that would serve to deflect a portion of the incoming sunlight, similar to how particulates in the upper atmosphere after some volcanic eruptions can contribute to lower global temperatures. It would be a long process, for sure. If one wanted a fully terraformed Venus in time for Inferno, you'd probably have to start now.
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There's a lot of "if" in there. I say again, first prove to me that you can establish permanent self-sufficient colonies in the Gobi, Death Valley and the ocean floor. Then we can come back and talk about terraforming a place as hostile as Mars, or Venus, some more.
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About the Shivans' Sathanas / Luna dome tech comparison... apparently some people have forgotten what Sathanii do... they cause a star to go supernova! :eek: Think about that for a minute.
Now go back, you're still not thinking about it.
Now picture this: a civilization that can terraform Luna with glass domes, would still be vulnerable to a Lucifer-class Shivan vessel, if the subspace weakness was not discovered yet.
Now stop and think:
The Hindenburgh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_129_Hindenburg) was as large as the Titanic (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Infographic_Hindenburg.jpg). Roughly.
Now: Try this argument.
A society that can build this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:F-16C_Fighting_Falcon.JPEG
(http://i34.tinypic.com/2rpxlia.jpg)
would be utterly insignificant compared to a society that could build this:
http://www.airships.net/wp-content/uploads/hindenburg-747-profile-550x193.jpg
(http://i37.tinypic.com/b8qz9f.jpg)
(http://i35.tinypic.com/1fis6u.jpg)
(Size comparison of Hindenburgh to Boeing 707... or 747, depending on whether the website is to be believed, or the filename. It looks like a 747. Then 747 compared with F-16)
... OR NOT
One is a weapons system.
One is a transport.
Now, the technology that enables you to encase Luna may in fact eventually give you the ability to threaten the Shivans.
I, for one, am betting the Shivans know that.
I would say Luna will be back to its former condition (albeit with a lot of burning plastic on the surface) pretty soon.
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I'd say you are the one not thinking about this.
The problem, in a nutshell, is that encasing Luna, even partially, requires a massive amount of production and logistics capability. Building a supermassive fleet on top of that requires even more of that. Now, what if said production capability was turned towards building shoals of Mjolnir-equivalents? What good does it do the Shivans if they can blow up a system's sun, if said system is protected by the defenses an infrastructure like that can build and support?
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I'm betting that the encasing equipment isn't as hard to manufacture as you think, due to several technological breakthroughs. That's the only way I can make sense of it. Something like how plastic was revolutionary... except in this case, maybe a sort of Saran-Wrap crossed with Kevlar crossed with it being able to be grown by bacteria out of household components. And some sort of revolution on air processing technology... maybe some genetic engineering with bacteria to do that, too.
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Well it just suggests that Inferno has changed a lot.
It used to be that the Icanis was a big technological accomplishment that had taken massive amounts of resources to get working just because of its size.
Now it turns out they can mass produce domes far more massive than the Icanis using von Neumanns which suggests they can just sodomize everybody else. You can argue that the Icaunis is somehow more complex but the fact is that with this tech they could just as easily have thousands of destroyers. But for some reason they don't.
So whatever, I'm rolling with it. Its Ace Combat/Wings of Dawn/animetech and I'm fine with it, even if it's a big break from FreeSpace's insistence on internally consistent tech levels.
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I'm betting that the encasing equipment isn't as hard to manufacture as you think, due to several technological breakthroughs.
Why are these great advancements in materials science not applicable to the design of spacecraft then? I mean, we've already talked about how the moon is a meteor trap so this stuff has to be strong enough to make good structural and armor material.
That also ignores the other half of our objections, which is the sheer scale of it all. The raw amount of material needed for this project would compromise anywhere from a generous 1% to a conservative 10% of the mass of the Moon. If you bring it in from outside you're going to alter orbits and tides and that's enough hauling capacity that you could simply throw all the freighters at the Sathanas fleet and win. If you produced all the raw materials on the moon then you have the refinieries and mines sitting around to churn out raw materials for an Icanus every five days.
The mod of SadisticSid and Woomeister no longer exists. This new mod is many things, but it is in no way heir to the name of Inferno.
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Yeah, I mean I've got no problem with technological advances, but if this was done with von Neumanns then holy ****, the setting has changed, and if it wasn't well...
Let's do the math.
The moon's equator in the screenshot is banded by about 50 of the hexagonal domes. Since only half the equator is visible, we'll assume it takes 100 domes to completely belt the moon's equator.
The moon has a circumference of 10,921 km. Each dome is therefore 109.21 km across. This gives each hexagonal dome an approximate radius of 54.6 kilometers, and an internal area of 7,745 square kilometers.
Treating each dome (for ease of calculation) as a hemisphere, each dome has a surface area of 18,731 square kilometers. Assuming a thickness of ten centimeters and a flat Lunar surface (har har), each dome's actual material has a volume of 1.873 cubic kilometers. (These are arbitrary numbers, but quite optimistic, I think. In reality each dome is probably squashed rather than hemispherical, but I think it's a fair tradeoff for the thin domes, use of diamond and concessions to terrain regularity.
Assuming the domes are made of industrial diamond, they have a density of 3.52 grams per cubic centimeter.
Each dome contains 1.9 x 10 ^ 15 cubic centimeters, which at a density of 3.52 grams per cubic centimeter comes out to
a total mass PER DOME of 6 690 000 000 metric tons! (Unless I screwed up.)
By comparison, if we treat the mighty Colossus as a cylinder of of steel six kilometers long and one high, it has a volume of 4.7 cubic kilometers, with a mass of 36 895 000 000 metric tons. So the Colossus would mass about the same as six domes, assuming it were a solid block of steel (which has twice the density of diamond)...
...but assuming that the domes take up the entire Lunar surface with perfect efficiency, you need 4897 domes to cover the entire planet...
...and the total mass of all those domes is equal to about 888 Colossi.
Now you might be tempted to say that each dome is nowhere near as complex as the Colossus, which is why the Colossus took 20 years to build, but remember that each dome also contains all the necessary terraforming and general life support equipment, PLUS they have to be self-repairing to deal with constant impacts because the Moon is a huge target and has no atmosphere.
So the EA could probably do it, if they had von Neumanns (the total mass of the domes, while formidable, could easily be obtained just by disassembling Ceres), but the question then becomes why they struggled to build the Icanis. If you can build self-supporting domes of this size in a gravity well, you should be able to build a heck of a lot of destroyers or beam weapon platforms...and for that matter you could wall off the node with a massive shell of tremendous thickness (!).
Not to mention that if you can build an autonomous Neumann to assemble these domes you can build autonomous Neumanns that can build and then fly a combat fighter...meaning the EA should be defended by millions, maybe billions of drone weapons constructed by gray gooing the less valuable bits of the Solar System.
Also the whole blimp/F16 metaphor is faulty as heck. This is more like 'a society that can build F-16s versus a society that can build shells of F-16s by the trillions...and could clearly therefore build full F-16s by the billions'.
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The mod of SadisticSid and Woomeister no longer exists. This new mod is many things, but it is in no way heir to the name of Inferno.
Erm this is still woo's mod said so himself, in another thread, he just stays behind the scenes. As for the doming the moon, i'll go along with it, it is sci-fi. I can understand terraforming mars, because it already has an atmos and there on about terraforming it even in todays age. The moon, i suppose its possible since they say they found water on it. Just hard to imagine it covered in domes but its still a cool sci-fi idea.
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Just hard to imagine it covered in domes but its still a cool sci-fi idea.
No. It's a cool fiction idea, but there is very little science behind it. As Battuta, NGTM1-R and I have pointed out, if you follow the science behind it, it leads to conclusions that are simply not fitting into the established scales of the FreeSpace universe.
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Just hard to imagine it covered in domes but its still a cool sci-fi idea.
No. It's a cool fiction idea, but there is very little science behind it. As Battuta, NGTM1-R and I have pointed out, if you follow the science behind it, it leads to conclusions that are simply not fitting into the established scales of the FreeSpace universe.
Given that the Moon will never be self-sustaining without the domes, the other big question is why you'd bother. Mars can (sort of) hold an atmosphere, but with the Moon you're basically building a giant space station around a huge meteorite attractor.
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Erm this is still woo's mod said so himself, in another thread, he just stays behind the scenes.
Yeah, at this point that's not actually believeable anymore since it has absolutely nothing comparable to R1 or even INFA. The Inferno that we all knew and liked is dead as hell.
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Well I do think we could see a lot of cool stuff come out of Mobius' work. But it is pretty much Mobius' show at this point.
From what I know the team was much larger until a couple years ago. At that point Woomeister had mostly withdrawn to deal with real life and Mobius started taking control of the creative direction. I gather the rest of the team disagreed strongly with this, and there was an attempt to course correct back towards the original Inferno. Woomeister objected, and most of the team quit or became inactive, leaving Mobius to pretty much run the show as Woomeister has been too busy with RL stuff for a few years now.
Whether or not you think this is a good thing is up to you. Like I said, I'm excited to see some of Mobius' ideas, but I also miss Inferno, a campaign I was very excited for. So I'm ambivalent.
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Battuta, was it necessary to reiterate that once more? We know about your view on the subject, we've debated about it earlier. No need to post it again.
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Well...
If we were trying to find a more reasonable means of explaining the domes, perhaps we might fall back a little on FS's handwavium, as well as general handwavium that in abstract may make sense...
Perhaps there is no dome material, but rather there exists only a support truss which might be some form of field housing/projection mechanism... or something like that.
By ionizing the upper atmosphere and providing a corrosponding magnetic array of sorts, the moon might thus hold onto its atmosphere well enough to avoid using physical ceramic plates which might provide another advantage - ease of access to space from the Lunar surface below. Assumably you could also build a built-in communications array/power grid into the structure as well...
However, like any massive construction, the maintainance would still be substantial, but at least in this instance, it wouldn't be like tending to an actual sheet of... something.
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Of course, that would then only bring up the issue of the power grid that energizes that entire structure.
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Yeah, you could build your own swarm of uber-Lucifers at that rate.
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Bathe the node in a single perpetual beam that will fry anything.
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The Shivans might have over eighty paraterraformed moons... or a shielded one! :shaking:
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The Shivans might have over eighty paraterraformed moons... or a shielded one! :shaking:
Which move around and blow up planets.
Wait what?
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Why we don't stick with a lot of domed lunar cities? I mean a small 20-40 km domes that wouldn't be visible from space (exept the night city lights).
Such thing would be easier to build, maintain and protect (you can just put a few "anti-meteor" defence systems around the city).
Moreoever if you can create and maintain a 1 g gravity in 20km large ship, then you can add 2/3 g (to Luna's 0.3 g) to 20km large city (or at least it's buildings).
The whole concept of planetary size domes is just rudiculous and lead nowhere but flame war, someone even said that it's not Inferno anymore - such discredit is stupid, I mean discredit whole mod because ONE background image ?! WFT someone overreacting :).
I still think that terraforming Venus instead of Luna would be better, but if it needs to be Luna, then small domes should do the work.
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The whole concept of planetary size domes is just rudiculous and lead nowhere but flame war, someone even said that it's not Inferno anymore - such discredit is stupid, I mean discredit whole mod because ONE background image ?! WFT someone overreacting :).
You obviously missed quite a lot of stuff. Huge changes have been made to Inferno lately. For better or for worse (hopefully for the better).
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The funny part is that these aren't even bitmaps.
The Luna and Mars pics I posted a few days ago are meant for storytelling purposes. Mars as we see it in that pic dates back to the 2200, pretty much one century after terraforming got started (and if you think that one century isn't enough to bring Mars to that level, do some research). The Luna pic has a more uncertain dating because there hasn't been a detailled planning on that subject (things will change, however). That pic may show Luna anytime between the 2370s and 2390s.
Anyway, a very detailled explanation is on its way. I'm asking starwolf1991 to do some polishing to make it more readable and I'm also adding the necessary quotes from a couple of canon table entries and cutscenes to underline references to canon.
You will realize how plausible "the new Inferno" is. Just wait 1-2 days and let starwolf do his job. I will start a separate thread for that because I want as many people as possible to read the explanation and realize that the new Inferno continuity is strongly based on a) canon, b) the old continuity and c) Science. There's been a lot of work in the planning phase to make everything as much as believable as possible: as I said, we're not doing things for the sake of coolness. There's quite some reasoning behind them.
I'd say to wait before posting any more comments. Wait until you see the upcoming thread. Thanks.
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Right. Looking forward to the exposition. :yes:
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I was against the Luna domes, but the explenation in the other topic seems somehow resonable (more or less). Anyway looking forward to INF:SA :)
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The Shivans might have over eighty paraterraformed moons... or a shielded one! :shaking:
Which move around and blow up planets.
Wait what?
[SW4]That's no moon...[/SW4] :nervous:
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I have a question. ... Which is easier?
A) covering a moon in domes with support for artificial atmosphere etc.
B) creating a weapons platform the size of a small moon capable of destroying planets
Now, according to popular reasoning: The Imperials pwn Shivans. Therefore, the Rebels pwn all.
The end. :P
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A is many billion times easier to do than B for many reasons (materials, maintenance, ease of repairs, etc.etc.).
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A is many billion times easier to do than B for many reasons (materials, maintenance, ease of repairs, etc.etc.).
Not actually sure about that. Each dome is an incredibly complex piece of machinery - one we don't have working in the modern day - and if you could build such a dome you could mate two of them in orbit and put some weapons on it and have a battle station the size of a small moon (moons do get pretty small, and those domes are huge.)
So I think B is actually a few orders of magnitude easier than A.
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Materials. Different materials, different complexity, possible use of advanced bionengineering to let NatureTM build the domes, electronics, etc.etc. At least in INF, A is far easier to achieve than B. But still, the previous discussion showed that we don't have the same concept of "dome" and "Nanotech" in our mind. You think domes are masterpieces of incredible complexity, I think they're not because that would make worldhousing the Moon unplausible (so, if worldhousing of that magnitude is possible, it has to be done with cheap materials). You think Nanotech can do X and makes Y possible, but I think it can only do Z. In poor words, it's almost as if we speak two different languages.
My sincere invitation is stop discussing Luna's domes in Inferno until a proper description is published. Discussions on Nanotech are still welcome, anyway. I've quite a few ideas about it, solving all the (apparent, mind) inconsistencies, but I currently have to work on something else. This thread is about terraforming in general, so if you guys have something to say about it just say it.
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Sure, sounds good.