Planetary rotation and Solar Power

I saw a reddit whereby it was mentioned Wind Generators were going to be included, with fluctuating output dependent on wind speed.

However in TA the main source of income when you first join a game were Solar Collectors, because for the most part they provided a reliable source of income, were quite robust compared to wind, and if threatened, could fold up the collector array for extra protection.

If this game is truly on a solar system scale, then perhaps planetary rotation could be added which would make gameplay more dynamic, because as you would expect there would be day-night cycles, so if solar collectors are in, then only the ones on one side of the planet would have functioning ones until sundown, whilst on the other side they are offline, until sunrise. It would certainly make early games more interesting, with either one side focusing on wind for the first few minutes, or forfeiting a few minutes just to find a better spot to migrate to or even building one or two solar on the other side of the planet relatvely undefended so that you have a continuous stream of solar no matter were you are.

Alternative would be to make solar collectors orbitng in space.

+1 for this, a good simulation would open up so much emergent gameplay. Like orbital bombardment to blot out the sun with dust and cut their power :twisted: Solar could be more efficient than other power sources to make up for this vulnerability.

One could expect high winds in the twilight hours of the rotation, due to warming and cooling over large areas. There's a small nicety in this is that it is predictable behaviour - nobody wants to be completely screwed over by a failed gamble on wind.

Day and night cycles do depend on siderial rotation periods. Mercury and Venus periods, for example last 58 and 243 Earth days respectively.

Mercury does have a very good solar irradiance, from 4.59 and 10.61 times the solar constant. On the other hand Venus is a volcanic hell planet with a extremely dense atmosphere and runaway greenhouse effect, even with 25% of sunlight power of Mercury, barely any of reaches the surface.

Plus, we aren't even touching on binary or n-body star systems.

So, it would probably be a good idea to block, or disincentive players from building solar generators in places they won't get any benefit of it. Fusion plants would be a most cost effective choice in outer ring astral bodies.

I would imagine its another feature of the Procedual Planet Creator, whereby you could add a rotation cycle to the list of planetary attributes

Interesting ideas. I'll try some of this stuff but if it anything doesn't work for fun gameplay then it's out

Woohoo! Looking forward

Weather/climate/planetary rotation/distance from the sun etc... could all be interesting factors to how bases develop and power is generated

If it doesn't make it in, will you be making an equally cheap source of income, similar to the Tech1 Reactors in SupCom?

Solar collectors will have to be in in some form to provide low-tier energy, whether the solar radiation is modeled as a single planet-specific value, or something more complex. While there's no reason the rate couldn't be dropped dramatically in response to an asteroid impact, by the time this is a real threat you're probably going to have higher-tier sources of energy that might not be dependent on solar radiation.

Just had a second idea:

What about planetary rotation affecting orbital and moon-based weapons, as well as interplanetary ones?

I mean, sure, there can be weapons that are guided or pre-calculated to arrive at a certain point, but what about direct-hit weapons? Maybe you can't bombard an enemy base for a few minutes... an hour... or even more hours... because it's on the other side of the planet? Or maybe because your own planetary rotation is out of sync with the other?

I'm still a bit confused about how the planets are going to behave in this game.

In the pc gamer interview Jon said the planets wouldn't be actual planets but flat maps that would be wrapped up to look like a planets. At first I read that as: "there will basically be flat maps circling around a sun which we will simply give a planet shaped graphic when you zoom out."

Later I realized that this couldn't be the case because throwing an asteroid at a flat rotating map wouldn't give an accurate simulation of the actual impact point. This would rule out the possibility that day and night is goin to play a role too

Could you please clarify this to me because this could really be a game breaker for me...

From the Player's point of view the Maps will seem spherical, from the engine's point of view they are not truly spherical, but still represent a sphere.

Basically don't worry about it.

Mike