Teleporting air and naval?

X'D x'D x'D

simple yet filled with soooo much obviouuus

And how would you get a fabricator onto the water planet to build the other side of the teleporter? You can't land a bot/tank fabber in water, orbital transports can't carry air/ship fabbers (AFAIK), and landing your commander into the water is most likely suicide.

Don't lie. Naval units could walk over land, be carried by a transport, or launched through a cannon. There is no reason they require a teleport.

Arbitrary restrictions?

you mean couldn't?

well I don't see why not, first off the walking boat was a phenomenal unit in Supcom,
second transporting boats to the battlefield sounds pretty baddass to me (though the other way around too)
lastly boats launched through a cannon, may seem a little over the top, but in PA language "over the top" is a compliment, why not a boat-launching cannon?! sounds awesome to me!

The teleporter could need two gates (entrance+exit) linked toghether, that way we need to control and defend a beachhead into enemy territory for keeping the unit flow.

Or a one way teleporter like the one that sent commanders on SC/FA, but with some restriction, like mass/energy.
Each "unit mass point" raising the energy requirement exponentially, it becomes nearly impossible to sent too much units at the same time, and the heavier units (=deadlier) costs much more to teleport than the light ones.

Air units should weight way less, but the teleporter could also take into account the raw number of units into calculation of the energy cost to avoid sending a million plane at once, each extra plane making the energy cost jumping to a higher step, and each step being far more expensive.

There could be some spawning side effect of the teleportation process (small damage to unit, weakness or complete deactivation at arrival and need for a small time to become functional again, like some EMP damage), and off course a cooldown to avoid sending a lot of small groups to cut the costs. (Or at least making this tactic less effective for an instant massive teleport rush)

There could be some counter to teleporters, like the gravity generator on Homeworld that prevent hyperspace operations near it; such protection preventing teleporting an army into a protected base.

What about teleporting nukes? The teleporter could act as an "instant nuke" avoiding the missile travel time and being fast enough to pass through any antimissile device.

There could be some orbital laser missile defense covering a wider range and being way faster and much more able to take down multiple missiles at once, but perhaps still uneffective if the nuke is teleported right into a structure.

About that, why not teleporting a rain of raw materials to cast a little projectile rain somewhere, or even directly into enemy units to destroy them from the inside?

There's a reason that 1-way teleporters are in a completely different class from the 2-way network. Being able to easily dump any arbitrary matter anywhere you want requires throwing away everything you know about warfare and completely reimagining the game.

Even in Total Annihilation, teleportation warfare required rewriting all the rules for war. In fact, it is the very reason that a Commander exists in the first place! Traveling through the galactic gate was so difficult and resource consuming that any war package had to be self sustaining, self replicating, and the absolute best of technology.

so why can't air go through portals peeps?
the opinion on this seems like it isn't one sided. Or am I mistaken?

I think it is good, that we cant teleport air or naval. This is a good restriction to how powerful a teleporter already is (not really expensive, instant teleport/no travel time, no micro after linking).
It is a "good deal" gameplaywise!

ok... how do we justify land being the one that was picked ?

I think evetually air willbe programmed into being able to be teleported into through. Its just a tougher hurdle then land units since all the units dont fit into the building. I think the hornet is a little bit wider then the gate circle.

On a second note, would it be better to have a separate teleporter for all three ground forces? Naval teleport/air teleport/land port?

Is sending 100 bombers through at a time really a problem if you have flak turrets?

Instead of teleporting air, I'd rather have an orbital fighter-bomber that can drop out of orbit and operate in atmosphere. And I'd love to see an orbital naval factory that drops ships into the water below it.

If you can't send through air, there would need to be some t2 flak tank/bot to support initial troops or risk being so far behind in the air game that just building air on a new planet may suffice as defence.

Or give us a sweet *** mothership which transports air units a la Independence Day.

That or have effective static AA, and send engineers through the portals.

I agree we desperately need ways to get sea and air units into our invasions, but I would rather see new options for each rather than expanding the teleporter to cover everything.

For air units we could use an orbital carrier that descends into the atmosphere to launch it's fighters.

For naval we could have a "Beach Head Fortress", a heavily armored (and maybe armed) factory that is dropped from space into the ocean. It unpacks and begins building ships in the combat zone.

orbital carrier sounds cool, but I agree def need a way to move air and sea around esp. for water and all air planets

What's wrong with dropping boats directly into the ocean? It's a much softer landing than striking raw soil.

In the movie Pacific Rim they swing a ship around like a club, but in reality a ships hull strength is directed at keeping water pressure out, not rigidity. Attempting to lift a ship from the fore and aft is kind of like trying to lift a sheet cake off it't tray without supporting the middle. Dropping it to the ocean surface would go over as well as dropping a cake on the floor.

Partly because of the size and how ships are built and how you need exponentially stronger building materials to support it's own weight at that scale. Battleships and carriers use unreal amounts of steal in their construction and are reinforced internally on a scale that can hardly be found anywhere else in the modern world, but at that scale steel moves like putty. Not only are the materials soft at that scale, the ship has to lighter than it's own weight in water. You can try to make it tougher, but you'd have to increase the displacement, which means more hollow. It's a vicious cycle.

In real life ships may free fall briefly when they come off of dry dock and hit the water, but the timing is crucial. The whole ship has to move as one and if it hit *** first the whole thing could split in half before the nose hits the water.

Also, there is the issue of mass. Ships are really frick'n heavy. They're so heavy that it doesn't make much sense to lift that much mass into orbit. You'd be better off building ships in orbit and lowering them down the surface gently.

In theory you could make a special (enormous) aestreus that cradles the ship evenly along its hull and lifts it slowly into orbit and lowers it down as gently again, but we already have an aestreus, a unit cannon, and a teleporter. Lets imagine a new and exciting way to invade with naval units that hasn't been used yet.

In reality, a ship floats because humans don't breathe water. In nature, surface-ship type animals don't exist because they're so blatantly retarded that they all went extinct. Everything goes above or below the water line, and only dares to meet in the middle.

Boats can be as large or as small as anyone damn well pleases. The only important attribute is density, which means developing robo-anorexia because NO base metal in existence is lighter than 1.004grams/ml (actually there's 3, none of which are worth building any level of armor). Once again, boats float because the HUMAN AIR that comprises most of their capacity is lighter than water.

Why do I keep emphasizing humans? Because there are no humans in this war! Everything is fought by machine. You do not need 90% hollow ships to support life that will never be on your ships!

A robot that is literally packed full of weapons, armor and engines is never going to float without using exotic lightweight materials.