A New Planet-Smash Effect

oh my GOD!!!

the music doesn't work against it either.

f**k that would be amazing!

Moon hits earth planet Earth planet turns in Lava planet

That would be so damn awesome.
Pieces flying off to hit the other site also would make the asteroid hit _really_ different to a nuke hit. Currently I feel an asteroid is just a bigger nuke with a much less interesting graphical effect.
Unless the size relation is so that the planet is completely destryed. Then it is kinda like a boring one shot version of the annihilazer.

It would even add risk vs. reward in some cases.

Say you're in a 2v2, and on one planet is the base of an ally and of an enemy, if you hit your enemy with an asteroid small enough to kill the enemy comm but not destroy the entire planet, yeah they're out of a commander but your ally is also hit by some small rocks that'll destroy some structures, maybe even damage his commander and army.

It wouldn't be a huge loss, but it'd add some much needed depth to the mechanic.

I think The slow wave of destruction flowing over the planet destroying each individual object on the planet would be a good idea. that added "OH SH*T" to add to the "F*CK" that your planet just got Halley'ed

I wouldn't be surprised if Ben has something really awesome in his mind but still hasn't got the time to give the effect mwoar luv.

Anyone know if plants disappearing is a bug or an intended feature? Because that's all I seem to get when I smash planets. Any plans to fix them.

Planets shouldn't disappear unless the two planets have the same or maybe very very close mass values.

How long has it done that? Seems pretty silly to me that a new effect hasn't been added for that.

planets should just have a uniform density, and changing the size slider should change its mass too, because I always forget to decrease mass with the radius size...

Eh, personally I like Having the choice, so I can make lower mass large objects.

Not sure, but yeah just lower the mass values of your KEW planets/moons and itll work out fine.

Well to be honest, the current implementation might be in fact physically correct. More correct than anything posted here.

If we assume the target planet has a diameter of 1000m and the moos is one fifth of this size (200m diameter). I do not have any information of the density that Uber used, but I will take the density of basalt, which I found on a site about stones and is something around 2960 kg/m^3. This is way denser than material we find in asteroids like Tschurjumow-Gerassimenko with a diameter of roughly 4 km. But anyways, this gives us a mass of 1,55 * 10^12kg for the planet and 12,3 * 10^9 kg for the moon. Pretty impressive so far.
Even better, we can calculate the energy the moon has just before it hits the planet. A quick search in some old physics books from highschool will turn out a formula for the gravitational potential and the binding energy of that potential that is:
E = G * M * m / r with m and M is the mass of both bodies and r equals 600m as this is the distance where both shperes touch.
So how much is it?
2,12 * 10^9 Joule (or 2,12 Gigajoules)
But how much?
You find a scale here. It is somewhere in the region of the energy of an average lightning bolt. Definitely to less for molten stone or cool giant planet exterminating explosions.

Don't you ignore the fact that the moon is not just "falling" into the planet, but has rocket engines placed on it? Let's assume they have a really powerful trust. Really powerful.

Yes. And to be honest, for those kind of collisions most energy would come from the initial speed of the projectile. Sadly it is really hard to estimate the velocity of a smashing moon within the game.
Assuming the moon travels it's diameter a second (that is 200 m/s) which is really a lot, given that the game stutters really hard during the impact animation, you end up with a kinetic energy of 246 * 10^12 Joule (246 Terajoules). That is 5 magnitudes more than we get from the gravitational potential.
So we end up by the amount of energy an average hurricane releases in one second, and still far under 1 mega tonne of TNT. (oh look, that explains why the impact size is actually comparable to a nuke )

Well, the whole point of this wall of text was actually to point out to the interesting fact that the devastating effects shown in the OP just comes from the fact that our earth has so much more mass. And if you scale that system down the energy goes down really really fast, so fast that you will end up with a "poof" instead of a monumental crater.

I don't feel 200m/s or 720km/h is a lot for a moon to move around at. It's rather extremely slow. Google tells me our moons orbits us at 3683 km/h.

And for pretty craters you don't necessarily need high amounts of energy.

@crizmess I think something is wrong there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event For example, is on a magnitude of over 10 to 400 times greater than what you're saying. I understand that the scale is different, and speed is different, but to be roughly 200 times less powerful? I'm a skeptic.

They mention a speed there:
"travelling at a speed of at least 11 kilometres per second"
11000 m/s
11k !!!
That's where the energy is coming from and that feels more "right" for an impact speed, simply because it is a speed you dont see in normal live.

200 m/s is like a nice poke compared to that.

Question is how much of that impact speed is due to the size of the earth and its resulting gravity, but if a moon in PA can get to 11 km/s then it can do quite a bad impact as well, the mass of the moon and the planet it hits dont really matter that much.

Wasn't our moon formed by a giant asteroid collision? Something like a bunch of debris sent out of the atmosphere and then condensing into the moon we have now. Similar graphics.

it was it's actually been represented in 3D animation quite alot