An Orbital Playing Field Around the Sun

I've been playing the game for about a week now and it's looking great. Before the new orbital mechanics were added in the latest update, I witnessed my commander flying through the Sun when trying to land on an inner planet. That got me thinking about the Sun.

If these robots have enough intelligence and are a productive as they seem, they would seek out ways to control the Sun, the ultimate weapon of destruction.

It would be some sort of huge "Solar Flare Gun" that could fire huge solar flares at enemy planets.

Perhaps this would not fit into a multiplayer model. Like in Starcraft, units would have to be available for the storyline that wouldn't be included in multiplayer. The scope of a project to control the Sun would be immense (but worth it). This process could be stretched into a campaign of its own.

Picture an AI controlling the inner lava planets and the Sun with the player landing on a moon hidden by a Gas Giant building up an economy to destroy the enemy commander.

The Sun could have a similar orbital playing field to the Gas Giants, with its own special projects and units designed for solar warfare.

Stars are big, but not all stars are equal. Perhaps red giants would be too unstable for a playing field (or even close fly-bys), but smaller yellow/brown stars could work.

This... is a difficult thing to argue. The sun is a gravity well you can't land on, it would definitely technically make sense if it had an orbital shell itself.

I am actually not entirely sure it does or doesn't have one right now, since units must transfer orbit to it in order to transfer orbits somewhere else.

I like this idea and don't see any reason why from a gameplay perspective it shouldn't work. But this just made me wonder, what happens to a water or gas planet that gets moon smashed? does it just pass right through? Having a giant rock displace the landscape isn't as effective a tactic when the landscape is already very easy to displace.

Water planet obviously would cause destruction on everything on the surface (water planets assume to have solid underneath somewhere, physics doesn't allow for a planet entirely of water as gravity inside the planet would pressurize and stuff anyway), and maybe it should have a unique planet smash effect like a giant tidal wave the size of battleships and the units being destroyed without reclaim as it hits them.

Gas giants maybe should either be immune to kews (make them untargetable as well for the sake of not screwing over unknowing players), or make the impact just destroy the units on the orbital layer.

I would like to have tidal waves in PA someday.

Or the gas giant could just rip the moon to shreds due to tidal forces as it approached geo orbit.

Lets face it, trying to send a kew into a gas giant to kill something/one is insane and really should require a suicidal maniac to pull off.

That's like throwing water onto burning oil and fully expecting the water to smother the flames.

Gas giants have a solid core. Except hotter gas giants, where the core has melted and diffused through the planet.

A KEW running into a gas giant would have more or less the same devastating impact that it would have on Earth. I guess best case scenario it heats a localised area resulting in convection currents through the atmosphere

Still, the solid parts are quite a ways down. I want to see what solution they come up with, maybe a giant angry permanant unit eating hurricane!

Ya given. The KEW would not just punch right through though.

That would be fully wicked. Personally I'd like a plasma and thunder storm

Creating an "eye" would be satisfactory.

Anyway, you can't really "land" on the solids in a gas giant. They only even exist as gas, just dense and hopefully cool enough to be solid. Otherwise it would be solid gas. Either way, the gasses even would allow the KEW to have an "impact" as in a collision since the gas still resists force. People described a moon hitting a planet to have a "fluid like" effect even though its a solid, well the gas giant would have the same effect as solid planet, being somewhat fluid but still resistant to force.

A giant eye forming on the planet and destroying the units in the area of it upon impact would be satisfactory. It wouldn't keep on eating units realistically, but it's up in the air.

It would be cool, but not really nessesary since we will have gas giants.

I absolutly love the ideas here about what happens when a gas giant is hit by an asteroid.

The sun's orbital shell already consists of every single planet and body in the solar system. Why would it need another one?

Fighting on a gas giant is going to be very unusual. But consider it this way. Does a gas giant have land? No. Does it have moons? Yes. Therefore, the important part of a GG is having fluid, exciting battles across moons.

You are sort of narrow minded, no offense.

You generate an earth planet. That is around the sun of course. When you give it a small moon, that is around the planet. NOT IN IT'S SHELL, but in orbit close around nonetheless. Theoretically, that moon can have a moon, and planets can orbit planets. Asteroids can orbit almost on the same layer as each other.

The individual planet still has a shell though, where it just begins to leave the atmosphere but before it gets to space. Close-ish to the planet. Orbital units can actually sit here and interact with the planet, any farther and they can't, any closer and they are "flying air units". Gas giants will only have the orbital layer, no land or air or anything. They will have an orbital shell AND moons around them.

Like gas giants, can the sun have a shell at the point "orbital units slingshot around it at", added to the fact they have planets orbiting it like they are moons around a superdense planet with huge gravity?

The game's focus is kind of centered around planets and land war. That's where all the interesting stuff happens. How would fighting over the sun add to to the game's land battles? A resource bonus is nice, but it's not worth building a whole new type of warfare that has nothing to do with the game's core. There's not going to be deep space battles, if that's your intent.

A gas giant comes with a safe assumption that many moons will be in close proximity to an uninhabitable (but potentially resource rich) gravity well. Where are they going to fight? What are they going to fight over? How are they going to do it? Chances are, the focus is going to be on MOONS. As islands. In space. As a battlefield, it makes sense and doesn't stretch the game beyond its core. I mean, just name one gas giant without like a gorillion moons.

Once again, it's not going to be about space fleets duking it out. That's not PA. There's gotta be land battle. The focus has to be about making that land battle as fluid and mobile as possible in a fragmented map domain. Otherwise you're just throwing one aspect of the game away to make a completely different thing. And that's no good. It's not a good idea to be making two completely different games, when it's more important to have one that's solid.

No one in this thread is asking for space battles Bob, even though they are fighting on the sun they are still tied to a celestial body, it just so happens that this object is in the center of the system and glows.
Like you said; the gas giants will have moons and so do other planets, but i believe that we are still able to fight on the giants themselves. How does the addition of the gas giant fights being implemented at all benefit the land battles on its moons? The same way all the other interplanetary fights benefit each other; by being remote resource hubs and places to source reinforcements and supportive functions (when the appropriate transport and weapon features are implemented that is).

Sun fights could just be functionally no different than a gas giant battle on the tactical level, unit vs unit combat level, if Uber/modders want to run with this idea and make it something strategicly worthwhile i can see them going either the angle of:

• only some orbital units can interact with the sun, these must be built elsewhere and then sent over to be used.
• OR: all orbitals can interact with it (not all would be useful, like the current laser platform), but there are some that have unique properties when in that environment.

Depending on what is available and how it is implemented, having control over the sun could be an important strategic benefit to a faction that is fighting elsewhere in the system.

Remember the plan for the Metal Planets is that they have a secondary function as dormant death stars capable of being reactivated and doing God knows what? The sun can be used in a similar manner that differentiates it from a gas giant while still having its primary function be as a supporter of the land battles.:

• Construct a special system-reaching orbital weapon that can only be used when its orbiting a sun
  • Perhaps can be a direct fire laser that requires line of sight, hence can only fire in areas that the sun shines on.
  • "Simba, all that the light touches... is in some deep s**t"
  • Or despite being an orbital device it cannot move, instead releases a huge flaming plasma meteor that is allowed to hit both sides of a planet within a specified cone of fire
• A factory that can produce units really really fast, but at such huge expense that needs to orbit the sun to make it viable to use.
  • The same factory can be kept secret and used over planets as well, but you are going to need a phenomenal economy to keep it running at the same level.
• A change to the orbital fighter (or a feature of a T2 orbital fighter) that allows it to gain a charge while it is on the sun, allowing it to go from the sun to orbit around another planet many times faster than normal (ie Rapid Response), but otherwise behaves as it does now when on the planet and going Planet -> Other planet.
  • This basically makes the sun a great staging area for the otherwise slow S-moving fighters. rewarding good intel gathering by being able to mount rapid reinforcement to an approaching orbital incursion anywhere in the system.

Anyway I like this idea and i hope it gets some fair consideration from the relevant parties.

If gas giants are fought over for their moons, so too can the sun be fought over for the planets. It also begs the mechanic of attacking a unit traveling orbital "en passant" or as they pass around the cosmic body in travel through another.

Woooaaah, getting technical with the chess terms. I'm getting confused about bob's issue here though, Isn't non-solid Gas giant-orbital-only maps already confirmed? So why can't the sun just be a big ol honking one of them? From a "science" stand point the sun could be so supermassive, or so hot that an unit in it's orbit either cannot escape or is burned up. On the gameplay side of things you couldn't load a system of say exclusively rock planets because there would always be at least one mandatory gas sun in the middle of the map. In fact a constantly present sun map would be a pretty big hit against randomized or specialized solar system map sets

Also, I just got to thinking, if the sun has planets, the planets have moons, and the moons stroids, could the stroids have anything around them? To what degree can you nest the planets into larger systems

Perhaps the Star (Or stars? I'd be cool to have binary star systems) could be used as a potential endgame that results in a kind of tie. Maybe this would be better for the Galactic Warfare to add a way to lose a system, but not actually lose any ground. (Not literally of course, destroying the star or whatever would destroy the system (temporarily perhaps, or for that specific war if they plan to have multiple.) I haven't a clue how this would work, or if it is feasible, but it would be neat.

Technically the engine allows for infinite orbits last it was asked. Could have changed. I don't believe it is possible to do it in the currentsystem editor though.

To specify, last we asked does not specify the group I'm in, i refer to the very first live stream which showed off the system editor way before even alpha release.