Moons of Moons?

Moonception.

If someone is bored enough, please, try it out here:

http://phet.colorado.edu/sims/my-solar- ... em_en.html

I really, really want to see if it's physically possible. For the lols, but really.

Why realism matters:
One of the important parts of why science fiction is so interesting is, that it stays close to our scientific reality in order to make us believe, that the scenario it creates could one day be our world.

To achieve this it is necessary, that the non-artificial parts of the scenario behave the same as they do for us because nature staying the same allows people to relate to the scenario. It is an entry point for understanding how the scenario works because we are already familiar with it.

Deviating too far from how things in nature behave today makes the scenario feel like some sort of a parallel universe and not the same universe we live in.

In short: Going totally nuts with the artificial sciency stuff is perfectly fine, but doing so with things which are supposed to be natural is bad in almost all cases.

(Also your mother is so fat, she needs a flux capacitator to counteract the extreme time dilation her mass causes.)

suspension of disbelief...

for an audience to suspend their disbelief you can't ask them to excuse more than one fiction

nobody is going to be suspending their disbelief for PA, the same way nobody did for SupCom after they realized in the future you use 1940s technology combined with energy shields.

That makes perfect sense.............if I slept through the classes that covered over planets and the giant 100M tall Spiderbots.......

There is more so Suspension of Disbelief than being realistic.

Mike

i should clarify that in supcom the disbelief you're supposed to suspend is the discovery of quantum gate technology. not that society has devolved into 1984 on steroids or that radar is still the primary means of intelligence gathering when today satellites can zoom in on my house.

the latter certainly don't reinforce the former though.

suspension of disbelief is about accepting one impossibility so that you can accept a series of implausibilities.

I can suspend my disbelief long enough for tidal forces to not apply, especially after taking a look at the kick starter video again-- that moon is orbiting wildly close to that planet. Thus, to me, nesting is just fine. (It also seems like implementing the tidal forces that would make nesting impossible would be a waste of resources.)

They shouldn't go out of their way to implement nesting, of course, but it would be a cool little wrinkle if it occasionally popped up in their normal solar system generating system. I'd be excited if it happened on a low incidence even if it meant absolutely nothing strategically.

On the more fanciful end, it would be nice if the world editing tools would extend to solar system editing tools, and limiting those tools against nesting would be no fun at all.

Also, Yo dawg, I heard you like moons, so I gave your moon a moon so you can crash a moon into your moon.

and it seems to fit into the PA style to have binary moons and asteroids trapped behind it and such. :lol:
and to how it help gameplay: it adds diversity and strategic goals. "get the moon asteroid so we can be the first to have an interplanetary gun platorm done".
the main difference is accessability and diversity.

i would also like to introduce the perfect moonlet: the orb. it has an extreme metal density and can provide a tangible benefit to the economy of a player, it is also very dense and when the resources are dug up you can use it as a great orbital weapon.

What's the difference between that and an Asteroid you get from the belt other than potential "timing", which we're still completely ignorant about since Uber has not revealed anything on how interplanetary transport works yet.

What tangible gameplay difference is there other than "timing"?

If it takes you 10 minutes to reliably get to T2 asteroid colonisation, and between 10-30 seconds to get to a nearby or far away asteroid, then the difference between landing on a suitable asteroid in orbit around a moon (where it should not logically be) and one in the asteroid belt is a mere 20 seconds at most.

There is no gameplay advantage to nested orbits around moons during system generation (I must stress that point).

No one here has proposed any plausible reason that they increase tactical depth at all. You're just taking Science out-back and rogering it for no appreciable gain.

Maybe I misread something, but I'm curious as too how this is actually impossible according to science?

My logic:
The sub-moon needs to both be close to the moon, and the moon also needs to not be tidally locked (not all of Jupiter's moons are tidally locked).

Will as time goes to really big numbers things tidally lock and sub moons destabilize? Yes, but a transient (over huge scales), unlikely scenario is not the same as impossible.

I may have missed something...

no it's not impossible and i'm sure there's a couple small sub satellite asteroids in the jovian system

as far as the argument that it would add nothing to gameplay, well by that logic neither would moons. What does a moon add that a small planet orbiting the same star or a Lagrangian object can't?

Show me a single real-world example of us finding a sub-satellite that is not in a transient and unstable orbit, and I'll change my views.

Until such a time the Science that relates to sub-satellite orbits, is that they fail...
They may work... if everything were perfect... they might work. But we have yet to find an example.

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And still, no one has a legitimate gameplay related reason for sub-satellite orbits' inclusion.
I assert that this is because there are none.

again; throw a theoretical gameplay enhancing scenario at me that begs closer inspection and I'll agree that it should be tested. I am scientific in my methods. Prove that there's legitimately something to gain by disregarding scientific evidence that will enhance gameplay and I'll accept it.

Until then I see no reason for nested sub-satellite orbits to be present within the random planetary generation system.

Hand editing, fine.
But not within the randomly generated systems.

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veta, Did you not see the Pre-Vis? There was a reason for that moon. You are making leaps of logic that have already proven to be false. Try not to do that, it doesn't help your argument, nor does it undermine my own.

Also, Moons are a perfectly "normal" part of planetary systems as far as we can tell, using our limited information presented by our own solar system.

Consider that there is not one, not two, but twenty eight moons in our solar system. There are only eight planets, (and many, many TNOs or trans-Neptunian Orbits, of which, out of the eight largest, five have 'moons'... multiple moons... plural) so I'm pretty sure than Moons are just as common an object to expect within a Planetary System as Planets themselves. Out of those twenty eight moons, none have detectable sub-satellites.

If there were no Moons in the Random System Generation sequence I would be equally if not more outraged.

:geek:

28 moons sounds like a pretty bad sample size, what sort of moon population do u think there is in the galaxy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_sa ... satellites
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... rings.html

there's some evidence, the Mullard Space Science Laboratory has calculated Rhea to have a stable sub-satellite orbit albeit no ring system has been observed.

as long as a celestial body isn't tidally locked it can have a non-transient satellite and the only question we're dealing with is scale. if your issue is with disproportionate scale then say so.

To be honest, if you're expecting super accurate scale it's likely you're going to be disappointed.

For the sake of devil's advocate, what possible unique scenarios could moonlets create?

Well an asteroid orbiting a moon orbiting a planetary 1v1 could make for some interesting moon play. Presuming whoever commands the moon will have an easier time capturing and commanding that asteroid, early moon control would allow for an early asteroid attack on your opponent. This would differ from a planetary system with a moon and an asteroid in that control of the moon would not affect control of the asteroid.

Then again maybe we shouldn't talk about the hypothetical impact (or lack thereof) on gameplay because we don't yet fully understand the mechanics.

I do agree with the others that said this should be a rare occurrence and I too would like Uber to adhere to scale the best they can.

Hey, Moons with rings sounds cool!...
But the article claims there "may" be rings around Rhea, not that there definitely is.

I'll put his in the "needs further investigation" pile. I'm going to keep a watch on any further information regarding Rhea in the future... fascinating...

Rings I'm going to assume however, if they make it in the game at all, since there is no evidence for it yet (though I'll put pressure on Uber to do so). Planetary Rings are cool and could maybe a harvestable resource...

Rings are not the same as moons however. Pretty sure you can't land an army on Saturn's rings, nor Rhea's... if she turns out to have any.

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What's much more interesting is Iapetus... I wonder how long it may have held a moon for... or if it didn't, what may have caused that equatorial ridge...

I kinda agree that you have to be talking a ridiculous scale to see something that wouldn't be called an asteroid even possible in a sub orbit. I didn't mean to undermine your point here I just think it's an interesting topic.

Space is fun! :geek:

I can't argue with Twenty Eight being a bad sample size though... But it's all we've got

Here's another Example:
[1v1] Gas Giant --> Planet/(Moon) --> Moon

Players can start on the Planet/(Moon) and expand to the Gas Giant for its advantages as well as orbital gameplay and/or the Moon for its Unit Cannon advantages and Lunar gameplay. If one player gets control over the Moon, the other player will not be at a total disadvantage if they get control over the Gas Giant. Maybe Gas Giants can also ship units down to its Planet/(Moon).

I don't know all the mechanics behind a Gas Giant but it maybe useful when playing a 1v1 on its Planet/(Moon).

Does that not take away one of the unique aspects of playing on several Moons around a Gas Giant?

Why play around a centralised Gas-Giant if the gameplay is exactly the same as playing on Planets around a centralised Star? Other than the scale... at which point how the hell are you building a Unit Cannon on a sub-satellite?

I hope you don't mind but I cleaned up your termanology. A moon is not a planet.

Obviously he is talking about a planet sized moon nanolathe. After going through the comments on this thread it seems you are in the minority when it comes to what people want in the game and your arguments are no better (maybe worse) for keeping this type of thing out of the game than the people saying they want it (weather or not you think your opinion is superior). I hate to break it to you but we are on the internet. Just because you say your reasons are "scientific" doesn't make you any more of an astrophysicist than the rest of us. You a depending on the fact that we haven't seen this yet, even though we have barely explored our own solar system. That reeks of desperate cop-out to me. Are you going to start denying Dark Matter too? Will we need to include God in your map editor because we can't prove he doesn't exist?

Space is big and unexplored on levels none of us can comprehend. Some of us have bigger imaginations than others. This game is a sifi game, and for many the bigger the imagination and the scale the more fun they will have. The game devs themselves made this game so the scale of their imaginations could be explored. A common theme in it's design is that there is no such thing as "too big". If people want to make maps so big the moons have moons this is their game! If you want a smaller scale RTS, may I suggest starcraft?

I don’t know everything about the game mechanics... with that said: I’m under the assumption that there is some way to transport units from a Gas Giant to its Moon. I’m also under the assumption that the Unit cannon can only fire units from a Moon down to the planet it is orbiting. That it cannot fire units anywhere it likes.

If this is the case, if the Gas Giant has two moons you will not be able to fire them from one moon to the other since 1 of the moons is not nested with the other. In the example I gave you, you would be able to transfer units all over but I suppose that an Earth-like planet with 2 moons (1 Gas Giant & 1 Traditional Moon) would also work in a similar fashion. It would be weird to see the Gas Giant orbit the smaller planet but w/e…unless a planet’s moon cannot be bigger than itself :?: Like, I said before I don’t know everything about the game mechanics... but the idea sounds fun. Something I would play around with when creating maps/games with me and my friends.

I was using the Planet/(Moon) to suggest that the Moon was more like a planet than a Moon in the sense that it was an Earth-like celestial object. It had water, trees, w/e.... whereas the Sub-Satellite was more like the traditional concept of a Moon, like Earth’s Moon.

If I'm assuming/questioning something that you have the answer to, let me know.

Thanks

:roll:

Ok iron420, you've successfully come up with one of the most obvious Strawman arguments I've seen so far in my entire time actively foruming. Perhaps I should congratulate you on that...

Then again, perhaps not.

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The definition of a planet is that of an object that (primarily) orbits around a star and is massive enough to be more or less spherical.
Whatever orbits a planet, is called a moon or satellite, hence sub-satellite for those theoretical objects that would orbit a moon. Whether something is called a Moon or a 'Double Body' (as you might be able to make a case for Pluto and Charon) lies on where the barycentre for the rotation occurs. If it is below the surface of the main body, it would be considered a Moon around a Planet... if not, it's a 'Double Body' (or 'Binary' in the case of Stars)

It's interesting to note that the size of a planet/moon theoretically doesn't matter; rather it is the overall mass and density of an astral body that would determine which one is orbiting the other. Theoretically you could have a planet be MUCH smaller than an orbiting satellite... if the planet were extraordinarily 'heavy' and the satellite very very 'light'. However that is again, theoretical. I'm unaware of any real-world scenarios.

And yes cptusmc, you're making a lot of assumptions that we can't necessarily take as truth yet.

I must (seemingly) continue to reiterate;

• If you want to MAKE Planetary Systems that have nested sub-satellite orbits then I have no quarrel with you. I don't HAVE to download your maps, so I am not forced to endure this scientifically unlikely event
• If you want them to RANDOMLY show up REGULARLY within the Random Planetary System Generation Process then I have do have a quarrel.

Can you all PLEASE stop insinuating that I don't want it to be part of the game AT ALL because the words you are trying to place in my mouth are untrue