So I was playing a rather long game where I was sending a Moon to planet smash this ice planet that was rather far away. Just for kicks I built an orbital launcher and launched some landers into orbit... as I was building and rockets were getting dumped back onto the moon they were blowing up engineers that were on the ground... I did it a couple times and it actually killed a good size of engineers. Has anyone else experienced this? In short. Orbital launcher that is on moon that is being propelled to an Ice planet has rocket boosters falling on Fabbers and killing the Fabbers.
ive seen some thing to note here, if you give the orbital fac a move order... rallypoint-ish ... the rocket will probably land there ... after it delivered its freight to orbit. otherwise the rocket just spins into orbit and falls straight back down. as far as i observed.
This seems like a very strange mechanic. Whoever designed these boosters (in the game lore) is an idiot.
Real life rockets don't drop onto populated areas, don't they drop over the ocean and are planned to do so? Edit: a quick read over https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Solid_Rocket_Booster mentions that they parachute into the ocean and are refurbished and reused many times over. In the event the boosters become out of control they can be remotely exploded to prevent damage to objects on the ground.
Remotely exploded. They should program that into the boosters ingame. They explode half way back down. I never noticed rockets did damage on return. I thought i saw them land exactly on top my unit too.
Not quite correct. real life rocket launchers aren't built in populated areas because the associated decibel levels are dangerous to organic hearing and excessively annoying. but of course, neither of the above is an issue for robots .
I guess I wouldn't have to much of a problem with this if I knew that these boosters can be used as weapons upon ground impact... might as well set the rally point of these booster rockets to be over an enemy base to bombard them with spent booster rocket shells haha.
That doesn't excuse PA's rocket-boosters-from-the-future lacking the 2 other safety features: Parachutes and remote detonation. Despite this pointless debate over realism that I let myself get dragged into, what's the purpose of this rather odd mechanic that causes damage to your own base for getting into space? I really can't see the motivation behind it.
First time this happened to me I was playing around and had like 20 orbital launchers. I spent forever trying to use them as defensive turrets.