Atmosphere?

Am I the only one that thinks the Kickstarter Air Fabbers look way cooler than the in-game Air Fabbers? Am I a bad person for thinking this?

But I digress, have you guys ever thought that wings might be necessary to keep the air unit afloat on a planet that is massive enough to have an atmosphere? It makes sense that the unit can use its thrusters alone to maneuver in spess, where Gravity is so low that you could probably do a handstand with your tongue.

For that matter, why do we even need Landers? We can just send Air Fabbers rocketing towards new asteroids. There really isn't anything keeping them bound to an asteroid aside from happy thoughts and game balance.

Just look at how the Air fabbers fly in game.

Mike

Yes you can.

If there's no atmosphere, and you can fly, you 100% have the engine power to escape the planet. Planes can't do this because they require an atmosphere to fly, and as they get higher, it gets thinner, until they cannot climb any further. It takes no more thrust to hover over the surface of an airless world than it does to fly away from it; there is nothing above an airless world that will serve as an upper boundary, if you can fly near the surface at all.

Most importantly, gravity is strongest the closest you are to the planet. If you can hover/fly above it (near the surface) without an atmosphere to use, then the higher it goes the faster it can go, as it has less gravitational "drag".

There's only two options: Airless worlds have no aircraft, or they have to be able to leave the planet.

Edit: This of course leaves fuel and control out of the equation. Fuel I believe is a non-issue as we have armies of robots that can nanolathe, essentially the peak of technology, resulting a mastery over energy and mass. Electricity powered engines already exist, so, I'm not worried about that. Control is the bigger issue - need to be able to maneuver in all possible directions. But that's a lore-solvable problem.

Personally, I would like to see aircraft require an atmosphere, or be extremely limited without one (e.g. ground-effect thrust flight only, limited in height to a few meters off the ground).

It's An Alpha™

We also had battleships that could fly not too long ago, and I'm pretty sure they were doing that with submerged propellers. Designed work in water.

My quasilogical excuse stands strong.

So on planets in order for an Air Fabber to build things it needs to fly around doing passes like a bomber and can only build a little bit per pass?

Mike

I was thinking more along the lines of circling its target, continuously building with a turreted nanolathe. You know, kinda like how AC130s circle their targets in crappy FPSes, but with less boom and more green constructo-spunk.

Hm.... I see a very bad nsfw fan fiction coming.






(I'm soo sorry for this post.)

An atmosphere not only provides a source of lift, but abundant reaction mass for the plane to thrust off of. Space-bound engines are always less powerful because they must provide their own thrust material.

Honestly I don't care whether or not air units can physically operate on planets without atmospheres. You can already do loads of things (nanolathing...) that can just be explained as techno-sorcery or whatever lore you want. Gameplay is the key here.

Have any of you guys played supcom without air units before? It was a totally different game, and while much slower, felt more tactical. I personally had a lot of fun playing without air units some of the time. It made map control much more permanent and there was no such thing as comm sniping (except teleports, but that was rare).

Anyway, I think that making some planets land only would add to gameplay and make the game more fun. It forces players to make use of multiple tactics. Many players just rush air and harass you endlessly with bombers and fighters. They just eschew the use of other units because "air can go everywhere". Well on a normal planet a chasm is just a partial barrier for your base, but on a moon its a friggan invincible wall (except for orbital units, or landers, or unit cannons etc). It makes the players change their tactics more based on the type of planet they're currently fighting on.

Imagine you're losing the game and you need to hold back a massive invading force from a player who has been specializing in just unbeatably gigantic swarms of bombers. He's got planets full of air factories, there is just no end to them. What can you do? Nowhere is safe, from just one kind of unit. He just builds landers, and drops his horde onto the next planet, re-using the same tactic over and over. But what if your commander was on a metal planet with no atmosphere? You'd buy yourself the time to turn the game around by building asteroid bombs (or some other strategy) to destroy his factories while he tries to convert production to tanks because his air spamming tactic wouldn't be all powerful. It prevents players from overspecializing and makes them actually build complementing unit types.

I feel this is vital for planets to have a different feel, and not just a different texture. Like this is the "trench warfare" planet, and this is the "lightning raid" planet, while this is the "massive sea armada" planet. Having a player look at a planet, and think, "I'll need to build unit x to dominate this landscape" makes, in my mind, a much better game.

since it's set far enough into the future / realm of scifi one can assume that you could justify any choice of "need air" or "don't need air" story-wise.
So it comes down to: Do you want to limit the use of aircraft on certain planet types?
Which is a pure game-play/design decision.

I for one wouldn't mind to limit aircraft to atmospheric use as it would offer:
- additional variation in planet local strategies (as with naval and even land forces on certain planet types)
- an additional separation from the orbital layer

It would come down to how often such planetoids appear to fit the overall design.
Also you would have to ensure that the game-play balance would work in cases air isn't usable. Otherwise, I don't see any disadvantages from setting some local restrictions on aircraft.

I agree, this is pretty much what I said above, but much more succinct. Thanks for that lol, I bet most people ran from that wall of text.

At first I was leaning more towards Mike's point that we dont nescesarily have an explanation on whether the air units need air or not and that these units will be applicable universally.
However,
Giving the planets more diversity than just biome appearance can really change up the strategy.
We have water planets that will mostly allow Naval with the exception of a few possible islands that we can stage air units on, rendering a land strategy almost impossible.
We have planets that have so little water that Naval is useless.
We could have planets that lack atmosphere which then eliminate air units abilities.
Older RTS games have always had this balance issue, where air units are the toughest to balance, and in alot of cases become the classic win because they are applicable in all situations when balanced or just blatantly made in massive numbers.

The 4th unit type coming into play is the orbital which can then be applied to any planet, and perhaps a way can be found to make them more effective over celestial bodies that lack atmosphere.

Also, I can already see asteroids similar to those in the kickstarter that just have 2 air factories and a massive shell of aircraft swarming on it.
I am not opposed to the idea of unit cannons firing pods filled with aircraft at the planet below though.