Suggestion: More realistic nukes.

As of now the nuke mushroom animation ends in like 1/3 of way to the orbital layer. Clearly there is not enough physical force to destroy the orbital units. Therefore they shouldn't explode up there. It would be much more interesting if the orbital units would fall down to the surface due to the lack of proper control. Since every nuke emits an EMP.

EDIT: Or just make the orbital layer target-able? ( it would require increased area of effect range since the orbital layer is always bigger, also would be nice if there was an option to get orbital anti nukes)

I like the EMP idea. Would be cool if it also EMP'd buildings near it.

Stuff in space does not fall down, no matter if controlled or not. You can stay months in a low orbit until the tiny amount of air resistance lowers the orbit far enough to give reasons to worry about.

One does not simply fall down from orbital space.

Sure you do, if your orbital velocity isn't fast enough, gravity decides you shouldn't be so high up there anymore. Unless orbital units in PA are supposed to be all in geosync orbits, they would indeed drop out of the sky without power. They're definitely not moving faster than escape velocity at all times

Though I'd also like to point out, the mushroom cloud isn't whats doing the damage either. In real life and PA both, by the time the mushroom cloud shows up, the party is already over. The pressure/light/heat/radiation wave is what does the damage, the cloud is pretty much irrelevant. Mostly because we don't need fallout calculations

Isn't orbit just falling, in style?

Its basically moving so fast that you just happen to miss the ground when you're falling. Changing altitude becomes about altering speed, not thrusting up or down. Changing latitude is an even more costly operation, since you're fighting the forward momentum you have from achieving orbit, as well as gravity.

source: Kerbal Space Program and the book Anathem.

I see what you did there. But still that seems to be more problematic than just drop down. Sill we can assume that the orbital layer is far below the geostationary orbit (somebody calc. that :] i am too lazy) and the objects there are suspended by some sort of anti-gravity or propellant engines. Thus lack of that would make them fall down.

What I said above seems to be true since according to Wikipedia page about Geostationary orbit. (There is a picture of the orbit heights)

The geostat. orbit of earth is like much further away than the orbital layer in PA. Which implies the need of constant vertical acceleration if u want to achieve stable placement aligned to surface of planet.

(Also geostat. orbit only works according to objects over the equator. If u do not want to put any force into use.)

And one more thing how do u see orbiting ( if you can even call this an orbit )on the north/south pole of planet in PA?

Hope that explains things.


tl;dr: In short the objects on orbital layer are still in strong gravity field.

EDIT: Now I just noticed that implies that even anchors and orbital factory need a drive of some sort.

Geosync orbits distance would be relative to the size and mass of the planet. And rotation speed of the planet, which makes geosync very difficult (impossible in some cases) around tidally locked planets by realistic means.

Either way, I think the very small area over the nuke that hits orbital covers the EMP effect, even if the animation is a simple destruction. Though seeing a little electrical fizzle and glow as they fall to the ground would be funny.

Exactly my point it's too dull now.

I think that in order to balance nukes better, units and buildings in the immediate area of the blast and around it should slowly take damage, and the damage delivered over time decreases. The ground should have a blue-green "glow" effect, to show the radiation. Units closer to the epicenter will take more damage over time than units near the edge of the fallout. These effects should happen when a commander explodes as well.

Machines don't much care about fallout. Much less machines 100 thousand years in the future. The initial blast wave is the only damage that would effect them. Radiation doesn't do a whole lot to machines, aside from making them dangerous for gooey things like us to be around.

Radiation fries circuits and corrupts memory.

They can be hardened against such things now, I feel pretty certain the armies in PA have the technology to deal with it.

I also jsut thought it is the EMP that kills them.
And the explosion is just that much simpler then a Empire at War style death Animation for space ships.

They can also build T2 units. But if it is worth the resource investment is a totally different question.

Being able to do something is one thing. Doing it on a large scale another. EMP shielded variants of the units and buildigns would be a whole lot mor expensive.

A) Being in a geosynchronous orbit has nothing to do with whether something falls out of orbit. Bodies in orbit have one of two fates, assuming they never interact with anything else such as other orbiting bodies or nearby massive bodies, and those are: losing enough velocity because of atmospheric, tidal, or electromagnetic interactions to fall in, or gaining enough velocity, usually through tidal interactions, to escape the gravity well. A body in a stable orbit around an object, can stay there for pretty much the age of the universe and have barely changed orbit. Also, escape velocity is defined as the magnitude of velocity a object needs at a particular point in space relative to a massive body to escape gravitational attraction without further propulsion. You do not need to achieve escape velocity to attain or maintain orbit. In fact, if a satellite were to achieve escape velocity and did nothing further, it would fly away in an open orbit.

B) What you mentioned about the shock wave causing most of the damage is the tricky thing about video games and space combat. Because shock waves only occur when there is sufficiently dense gas to be compressed, nuclear weapons are kind of underwhelming useless in space. Which partially leads to....

C) If you really want anything in this game to be realistic you're gonna either have to trash the game, or pick and choose what parts you want to be "realistic," so maybe stop wanting things to be realistic because you can't actually make an exciting space combat game and have it be realistic?

First off, I'm not the one who proposed the idea for more realism in nukes, I don't see much point in changing their effect as it is now. Beyond that you misunderstood what my point about geosynch orbits were. Orbital units, if they truly worked as orbital units would, would pretty quickly stop being orbital units if they lost power. They're small enough any number of outside effects can disturb their orbit (if they had one, which they don't currently). I brought up geosynch to give an example of how orbital units would be far/high enough away to ignore nukes, as per the OPs post, which I also misunderstood. Yes, I misused escape velocity, my point was primarily that orbital units aren't constantly moving (or have to be anyway). Yes, I'm aware nukes without an atmosphere are very limited in their capability, though I think the gamma burst would probably do some damage.

Again, I was providing some half assed explanations and theory crafting.

Pretty sure he was talking about radioactive fallout frying circuitry, not the EMP itself. Which means I stand by the statement that if modern day electronics can be hardened to resist the relatively weak radiation from fallout, I'm pretty certain anything built in the PA world can.

The radiation from fallout isn't weak. PA's nukes are bound to be plenty of times stronger than ours anyway.

For nukes it is all about doing more bang with less fissible material. You need a minimum of about 15 KG Fissible material just to get a proper chain reaction. With less you only get a dirty dud with not enough force to kill a flyswarm. Nukes are the most powerfull weapons we have. They are also the easiest to missfire.

The one things fusion weapons (real ones, not the fake ones we made so far) would have would be that you need less material for the same bang. The minimum material requirements are significantly lower (in the gramms rather then kilogramms).