Solar flare idea

Suggestion:

Solar flares is too often event on world of planets to skip it. Its rather global than single event.

There are few ideas:

1. How about inducing solar flares by sending few (30? [ number of nukes causes different size of solar flares]) Bombarding sun with nukes make a solar flare that disable unit for a time or burn one side of planet. Of course one side of sun send flare
Strong flare can blow atmoshpere from planet... and...

1a. Solar activity, different types of suns. Solar cycles. Double suns.

2a. Building shield or shelter that protects from it or cover only few units deep underground eg. commander. That one unit can reset units to make them active faster after disabling.
2b. commander is EMP resistant and can reset units. Engineer can do it too but they are vurnelable on EMP (but reset faster).

3. Overheating of weapons, cold planets make guns shooting a bit faster (cold guns is not melting )

3a. If units are closer to ice caps, they would be disabled longer because of impacting solar flare EMP.

3b. Water can cool unit guns too.

4. Random solar flares and warning of equal time to impact will make game more exciting.

4a. Planets closer to the sun are warmer, metal rich and more vulnerable for the EMP. EMP can take even whole planet.

5. Unit that eat a lot of energy are disabling by EMP longer.

*cross out if something is too complex. Simpler games are even better than too complex ones. But this is PLANETARY ANNIHILATION.

I like the idea of heat effecting weapons.

If you have thirty nukes and have not yet won the game, you're doing something very wrong.

How do you know? Maybe that was the case in TA/Supcom but the scale of this game is obviously way bigger. It's pretty weird to make such a statement before work on the game has even started. Because I imagine 30 nukes being less powerful than one KEW....

1. Solar flare is rather bigger than few nukes and can take few planets.
2. There arent effective defense agains it.
3. Nukes can be shoted down. In both way but process started on sun cannot be stopped
and ussually disable one side of planet with exception of N and S poles where always.
4. Defense on polar poles can be broke by flare so is rather uselles. But not impossible. Only advantage here is cold air where guns shoot faster.
This is like weak spots of planets.

THAT GIVES LOTS OF TACTICS! use your imagination

a. Planets closer to sun have more metal but are more vulnerable. Planets defensive CAN shot nukes that fly toward the sun.
b. Planets which are in outer rim are coldest (units shoots faster there), and emp blast is small even dont reach. But resources are harder to extract. (?bulding nukes takes a long time?)

That can naturaly divide planets by two sides. Yin Yang
ice cold vs volcano hot

And once again and more important:
Number of nukes changes size of solar flare,
and different size do: EMP, burn, blowing whole atmosphere making planet barren without amtopshpere (fligt units can't fly) and planet(s!) into volcano. Where battle will be more intesive because of avaliability of resources.

Better?

You know how often solar flares occur in our solar system? Several per day during active periods. We can defend against them but choose not to because they amount to an inconvenience at most. Why are these armies of nuclear death robots more vulnerable to solar flares than modern unarmed unarmoured observation satellites? Next you'll be suggesting having the units rust in the rain (because it'll be TACTICAL, you'll have to build umbrellas for your units, but they'll give away their positions, and if they open them inside they'll become unlucky).

500 units per player was mentioned as being a typical 'large' game. The scale will not be significantly larger than large games of SC or TA, at least for the immediate future.

And the scale of the game is irrelevant since it doesn't matter what the relative scale is, if thirty nukes is enough to induce a solar flare, far fewer than 30 nukes is enough to blow up the entire planet your target commander is standing on. If even an astronomical unit's worth of falloff isn't enough to drop the nuke's damage below "kill everything", firing the same nuke at a planet should really kill everything, the planet included. It's like trying to kill someone on the Moon by nuking the Earth and hoping the fireball reaches them. I don't understand why bad SF writers have this obsession with trying to blow up the Sun. Is it because after Star Wars did it, blowing up planets somehow became routine?

This is an interesting idea.. The solar flare needs to hit the correct surface to be effective and there is also a chance to miss the enemy surface and do harm to your own units. It also can be used to shootdown the engines of an incoming asteroid (pretty hard to hit I think, but still possible)
I just don't like the idea of using a large amount of nukes.. Maybe there could be an specific nuke that trigger this?

Solar flares do not harm our planet because of our natural magnectic field and some planets might don't have one as good as ours or don't have one at all, also if the solar flare is powerful enough, it will cause some problems to our communication systems.

I'd be cool with the idea of a SF being a natural element that a player could somehow manipulate to his/her advantage with enough effort. I'd be totally against it if it was just some random event pain in the *** that damaged us indiscriminately.

:lol:

Srsly tho, anyone ever play MW2, and notice how a nuke detonated in the upper stratosphere causes a more powerful emp?

That would be more realistic, useful, and cost-effective. If you have a nuke, just use the one single nuke detonated really high above the planet to emp whatever is below.

And for those of you who don't like natural event pains in the arse who hurts a randomly chosen team... You have just described a bouncer, yet they put them into SMNC. Those have single handedly made me lose the game, by grappling me twice on anni so I can't use it while ignoring the enemy so they get it instead and we get nuked. That game every mofo bouncer went after only me for some damn reason.

Hardening against EMP is relatively trivial when your basic troops are throwing antimatter warheads around like they're buckshot. Any stunning weapon will probably have to be magitech or some anti-nanotech information warfare device.

Because we've never had probes operating for years closer to the Sun than us and beyond the protection of our magnetic field before. Never. And by 'never', I mean 'at least four times'.

Classic. :lol:

And I know, I am just saying, why waste 30 when you can get'r'dun with 1?

If solar flares worked that way, you could instead use 1 nuke to create a if-anything-better emp, and 29 to bombard the enemy while their defences are down.

Depends from star size, type and age. You can't expect much from half dead brown dwarf, but white giant can annihilate smaller planets in closer vicinity and burn all other planets in star system.

Shields. Different Ones. Positron. Neutron. Graviton. Cover some area. Cover entire planet.

Process on sun can't be stopped? My friend, you missing some knowledge in physics. We need special catalyst, that disrupts any chain reactions. IRL it's impossible, because we don't know what parameters this catalyst must have to cause break down of chain reactions. In Planetary Annihilation it will be possible.

I post this summary for reference in the discussion only:

Solar flares are very intense things, and there are a huge range of scales. On rare occasion they head the direction of Earth. Their imapact is mitigated by the "strong" magnetic field of earth (gas giants appear to have them, but they do not appear common on terrestrial planets). The field is distorted by the flares, really strong ones will push the safe bubble inside of geostationary orbit (faster spinning planets with these fields would not have this problem as geo is closer to the surface) causing satellite failures. Ground effects are seen due to induced currents, I believe (I am less familiar on this part), which are a bigger issue in longer cables, such as our power grids on Earth (not a PA problem), any long cable is a giant antenna for this type of stuff.

On planets with little magnetic fields or units in transit in deep space, IF they get hit (these are highly directional events in the solar system) you are going to get a huge blast of particle radiation, which would toast any current tech I think... but I have little knowledge of how the probes we currently have (4ish) survive or dodge the flares (2 at L1 which is really close to earth .01 AU)

The actual cause of the flares is *thought* to be the magnetic field of the sun getting so twisted that it basically snaps in some manner into a less stressful shape, which throws a large amount of particles out into space (btw particles are protons, and maybe electrons, I think...). Nukes, well I have no idea, how they would impact the magnetic field of the Sun... go ask a physicist and once they stop staring you may even get an answer!

You don't mean a catalyst. Catalysts facilitate reactions, not inhibit them. Also stopping the reactions in a star doesn't cause solar flares, it cases a supernova.

Trying to induce a reaction in the sun would be like trying to put out a forest fire with a squirt gun. Maybe if you had a few trillion tons of heavy metals, you could induce a spot on the sun to belch, but it would be easier to use all those heavy metals as a massive slug to ram into your enemies base.

But lets suppose you could induce a reaction in the sun to oppose the enemy. "Oh no, in 8-15 minutes the payload will arrive at the sun! Which means in 8-15 minutes later, we will experience a minor electromagnetic burst!" Kinda anti-climatic.

Yeah, pretty much that.

We could handwave something if the gameplay ask for it, though. Some magitech warhead or orbital device (which would be very specialized and not a nuke, or it would be like messing with a firestorm with a match) that can cause some massive flare - nothing like the naturally-produced ones, which wouldn't even harm, say, today's tanks. It would be a little bit like turning the star into a flamethrower.
In fact, it probably shouldn't be called a flare then...

The next step, then, would be to turn the star into a runaway expanding gas giant or even a supernova if it was in pre-nova state.
But we're talking about things an order of magnitude beyond planetary thrusters, both in terms of what would really be needed and in what it would do gameplay-wise.

And here I thought this post was gonna go the way of letting solar collectors perhaps gain a small energy boost for a short duration. It doesn't make exact sense due to how 1: solar panels work and 2: what solar flares are... All this talk of disabling my planet makes me feel a little less awesome.


Meh its anti-matter futuristic robots I'm sure they can use the charged particles of a solar flare to produce power in some fashion. It would kinda give that wind turbine effect to solar panels a little more they still be the best early solid power source but they could fluctuate.

here's to discussions :lol:

So when do we get a poll on these cosmic radiation umbrellas I've been hearing so much about!?

got to look out for those long leads.

Generaly I just wanted start discussion about solar flare in the game.
I'm not going to be smartass like others want
and pointlees is write a startegy game like PA and put into advance solar simulator with all features.
I'm wrote IDEA OF RULES that can appear in game to make game more interesting.
btw which game have solar flare or even using CME like weapon?

thetrophysystem wrote that one special nuke can initiate solar flare process and I think it's better than using lots of them.

What help to develop that idea?
What do you think is good or bad and why?


btw everybody can critic new ideas, write better than mine. Jealous people... ugh! Even worst, guys behave like girls. xD