For Backers Only: Metal Planet Iteration

Fire a bunch of antimatter into it? Reduces the mass off the star, while dumping a load of extra heat into it.

Increase thermal pressure, and decrease the gravity holding it all in. Sounds like a recipe for something bad to happen.

Well the matter and anti-matter would annihilate each other, but unless you have an anti-matter star as well......well you should just fire the anti-matter at all of the planets and then use the spare for like a BBQ or something.

Increasing the pressure could be bad, but deceasing the gravity would just cause like a really big solar flare right? Sure you would screw up the planets but at that point your gravity gun would be just as effective on the planets no?


My point is anything that works great on a star would be much more efficient when used on anything but the star.

I still want the Metal world to simply rapid fire nukes, get some real glass growing down there.

The reason you'd nuke a star out is mainly because it would cost a lot more to make a planetless star than a supernova

I certainly don't know the physics of it, but that's roughly the assumption I was working with. I don't even know if lowering the mass of the star would actually make it go supernova or not. Ask an astrophysicist. I'm just here to blow things up.

Blapping planets instead of stars is entirely reasonable too.

Lowering a the mass of a star certainly won't make it blow up, but it probably won't stay together, and if you do it quick enough it should still have a little fusion in it to bugger up whatever it drifts into (As it turns back into a nebulae), that and without the mass the planets would all fling off into space.

But now you got me thinking of fighting over rogue planets!

Mann that would be awesome!

If the laser could penetrator the hydrogen on the outer regions of the stars, and get to the heavier metals in the core, then in theory the laser could cause the heavier elements to fuse. If this sustained for long enough, it could speed up the death of the star, and either cause a black hole or super nova. Depending on the conditions

You don't get past iron in the main part of a stars life, but once you do they go all red giant and start fusing helium.

I am uncertain on the conditions required for a supernova explosion or for a blackhole to form and eat the star from the inside out.


But if you start blowing up stars, then by the time the game takes place how much galaxy is actually worth or able to be fought over?

You don't get past Iron and get a net energy release.

It's certainly possible to fuse Iron and heavier - it'll just take more energy to do than you get out. It's fission in reverse. Kinda'.

I think the point of that laser is to artificially push the star into fusion cycles that it wouldn't normally be capable of. The question is; do that laser supply all the power to fuse, or does the process scavenge energy from the star? I think it has to be the latter for it to work.

And at what point do you not think that this is somehow easier them simply firing it at a planet but on a lower setting?

Truth be told; I actually think shooting planets is more plausible (mind you, it's still a stretch of the imagination already).

But at the moment I'm just considering if we were to blow up the sun(ocean!), how would it actually take place?

Depends on your flavour of blow up or implode.

I like the idea of a sort of slowed-down supernova. Like, it just gains gravity and mass at a rate slow enough to not be instant but still to cause massive destruction. Let's say "lightyears" is just a figure of speech here, for unknown distance, because I won't bother to get it right.

Here's our solar structure-
DA SUN- 0 LY
DER METEL PLENET- 1 LY, shooting distance
Lava/mercury planets- 2 LY,
Hot/desert/useless as crap planets- 3 LY
Regular-ish, forested, and generally habitable planets- 4 LY
Cold- 5 LY
Really cold- 6LY
Pluto- 7 LY


DA SUN---
In 1 Light-Year (LY) distance is the Giant goddamn metal planet.
GDMP fires death ray at the sun, melting the crust and causing fusion.
Sun goes supernova, outpacing the GDMP and causing rapid expansion for the next 1.6 LY.
The sun expands slowly, at a rate of .1-.8 LY per ingame 30 mins/hour/10 mins/5 mins/ 2 seconds.
Any planet that gets within 1 LY or so is melted and you ain't commanding any army on that rock, yo.
As this happens, planetary orbit is severely changed. LY 2 is pretty much doomed, any wars going on there will end pretty much instantly. These planets typically aren't capable of getting any more volatile, and will pretty much just melt even further.
In the beginning, 3 and 4 LY are going to be thrown out of the normal orbital path, to the extent of being thrown closer to the sun.
3 would pretty much just melt, and the armies on the planet would go with it. 4 would be where crap hits the fan. The planets would begin burning up as orbit became steadily more unstable, destroying various things. The oceans would also evaporate, stranding and eventually destroying all forms of navy. The earth/rocks would melt and make the planet slowly a lava planet.
5 would become an ocean planet, Then a really small rock ball, then a giant lava ball. Not much to it. This would probably be around the point of expansion nearing 3 LY or so.
6 Would become a mountain planet, then a lava sphere.
Pretty much ditto 7.

After all the planets are consumed, the supernova is basically just going to continue expanding till it hits about LY 8/9 then it will implode. And then there will never be another word spoken, other than the grats' of aftergame, and the occasional meteor strike going missing.

The reason a star becomes a red giant is because as the star gets older, it's rate of fusion goes up. 2 billion years ago our sun was MUCH less luminous and thus "colder" than it is now.

Generally, there are two forces in the sun: Lightpressure and Gravity. Gravity wants to collapse the star. Lightpressure is generated by fusion, and wants to blow the star apart.

When a star reaches the end of it's life, it goes to a helium cycle in stead of the normal hydrogen cycle. This vastly increases the lightpressure and the star expands.

When the star has actually reached it's end, the lightpressure has a massive drop in strength and the star collapses. All this matter rushing in on one point causes pressures and temperatures far beyond normal star "operation" and starts a super-fast fusion chain reaction. So much energy is released that the star explodes in a nova/supernova/hypernova.

Now, and here is the crucial point to whitedwarf/blackhole:

when matter gets compressed, Quantum Physics has one ace up it's sleeve: the uncertainty principle. This can be phrased several ways, but i'll phrase it like this: The more you know about the position of an atom, the less you know about the momentum. Throwing a ton of matter into a really small space counts as "knowing a lot about the position". The atoms speed up and gravity is counteracted by this principle. First, electrons counteract gravity, and if gravity is strong enough, it'll contract further and neutrons will counteract gravity.

If a star has the right amount of mass (above 4 solar masses) gravity overcomes the uncertainty principle and no counteracting forces exist: it just keeps collapsing into an infinitesimally small point of space-time.

If you had a bunch of metal planets, and all fired a super-powerful gamma ray laser at a precisely determined point at the core of the star, it could compress the star's core enough to make a couple of million ton black hole (It's event horizon big enough to scoop up atoms and stuff). It would probably require some more firing to grow the black hole.

Estimated time of death: could be as long as a couple million years.


Alternative: misfire the beams and disturb the nuclear fusion, causing a small nova.

Alternative: fire the laser at an object 1/100.000th it's size and obliterate it.

Thank you devak, you did my work for me. I can't really say making a metal planet able to destroy the star is a particularly desirable mechanic. Yeah it would look cool but all you're doing is forcing a draw.

Am i the only one who thinks that the current metal point feature looks out of place on the metal planet. If the plan is to not have metal be anywhere, would having a second "plug" version be possible?

A plug version...

You sir, are a genius.

Indeed, "plugs" or fuel line caps would indeed serve best on a metal planet. (That is, if you don't play with the "the planet is made from metal" rule...)

Now whats missing? I would say the engines and the control buildings you need for the "king of the hill" type of minigame you have to play to get full weapon / steering control of the planets main weapon / drive. Like "Control at least 4 of 8 control centers while your enemy controls none.". Destroying the other 4 is a legit way of preventing enemy interceptions, and so is bringing down the number of control centers to less than 4 in order to disable the planet for good.

All the talk aout exploding suns ect, i mean its a ressource war why would you destroy a sun? The more i think about i could see that metalplanet being kind of a "Starforge" harvesting the power of the sun and turn it into matter for production usage.

If you know Kotor then you know exactly what i mean

Steve wants to do different metal spots for different environments, so yes.

Sweet!