What do you think about the workings of the current orbital units?

85% of the loud-mouths.

And there is a major selection bias in the poll as it is not a random sample of th population. You can not make any sound conclusion off such a poll, those queried were not randomly selected from the total population of backers.

They instead self selected and the way people behave means that those who dislike something are more likely to be vocal about it. Those who are happy with it won't even bother reading the post for the most part as they're happy with what they're seeing/playing so why should they waste time when they could be playing.

You would need multiple clearly described alternatives with pros & cons listed and the poll to be placed after those and all the comments people had made and finally your'd need to randomly select a few hundred or thousand people to get a meaningful result from a poll.

Please be nice.

But that's the problem with relying on forum polls or data gathering. The forums are primarily useful for getting feedback, collecting thoughts, and getting more verbose feedback on recent changes. Polls are a fun gimmick, but please don't rely on them as anything other than a way to confirm bias. As Aeonsim said, that's mostly what they do. It's hard to write a poll that doesn't pre-bias people one way or another. There's a reason professional pollsters make good money. Though usually they TRY and pre-bias. ;-)

Most of my feedback that hasn't been specific about design goal is: be nice, explain your position, and explain what you're hoping to see. All the anecdotal "but everyone!" doesn't help us have a useful conversation. Being on here and talking does.

I stared a new thread in the main forum to discuss the two approaches.

I was joking, and I did kinda include myself in that joke too!

My personal vision of orbital units is that, in general, they are few, expensive, powerful. They are essentially a tier 3.

I generally think that orbital units can only be seen by ground-based, satellite tracking radar (broadly) and other radar satellite (narrowly - more limited line of sight).

Satellites should be positionable into 2 faux-orbit types:
- low orbit - extremely fast moving, requires plenty of lead / chase time for a targeting solution, targetable by high altitude aircraft
- geo sync - repositionable, painfully slow, easy to hit with a nuke or rail gun, not targetable by high altitude air craft
(no high elliptical)

I basically think of orbital in a few units:
- orbital fab+launcher - as implemented
-- fabricator launcher - to deliver fabricators to other planets and asteroids
(I'd actually like to see fab launchers being kinda cheep to enable an early-game gambit)
-- radar satellite - as implemented
-- rail gun satellites - fab their slugs, hurl them for kinetic-based nuke-effect at ground targets or other radar units (seen either with line of sight or via radar)
-- orbital fabrication station
--- radar satellite (same as above)
--- rail gun satellites (same as above)
--- harvester - as that seems to be the main modus operandi for orbital + gas giant
--- air factory - which presumably would have some high-altitude aircraft capable of targeting and hitting orbital craft

But, you know, the bottom line is if it's fun, then it's fun. That's what I think *might* make a fun engaging experience, but I could just as well be wrong. Who knows.