Inter-planetary economy?

Potentially, yes. Still speculation though and I don't see how a whole T3 farm in SupCom or a Fusion Generator farm in TA was any different as a "single breaking point". Generally if you blew up one they all had a cascade failure.

I thought up the TED on the spot as one possibility for a hypothetical question. No need to see anything more into it than that.

Then don't clump up the fusion plants? Generators come in other sizes too.

There are also going to be energy nodes like the geothermal points from TA. Energy nodes provide high energy for cheap, which makes them valuable points to capture during an invasion.

Every time you break up an economy, it becomes easier to isolate and destroy a player. But it's a dynamic that goes both ways. It could end up incredibly good, such as if you destroy the energy complex on an enemy planet and they're now in crisis. It could end up very bad, such as if you haul your energy into position and it gets immediately blown up. But I guess this sort of stuff has to be tested.

I don't know if the discussion has been focusing solely on the specific implementation you posed. It provided an acceptable framework with which to discuss some of the issues inherent in trying to represent a localized economy.

An alternative representation could very well be ground based energy/mass transfer stations that use "teleportation" as their transfer mechanic. With these you can discuss the issues with how a rocketed/cannoned engineer can build one once it is deployed on a new solar body. How does the engineer have the energy to build one to begin with? Does a power/mass storage module have to be sent along with the engineer or does an engineer inherently have enough internal storage to build exactly one of these devises?

Basically the central questions to how a localized economy could be represented in these games remain pretty similar:

How does matter/energy get to the target initially so you can build your link?
How does the link operate? Is it an orbital platform (which fits with the gas giant scenario)?
Are there two kinds of link station/platforms or does one handle both resources?
Will there be a connection mechanic, by which pockets of planet/asteroid groups could be cut off from others by losing a link in the middle(somewhat like Perimeter)?
How does the link to the global economy work? Does the local pool get absorbed in immediately on building a link structure or does the global pool only get tapped locally if the local one is below a certain threshold?

...there are many more, but you get the idea. Different scenarios have been discussed in this thread that addresses or touches on some of these questions, and some are still unanswered/fleshed out. The specific implementations are tools to solidify approaches to concepts, nothing more.

The thing that makes a topic like this interesting is that, so far, the developers have stated that they haven't made up their minds about whether they will go with a localized or global economy.

I'm torn on the idea of a global vs local economy, because there are so many neat features you can do with a local economy, but it could just clutter gameplay.

And of course, the most obvious problem is slippery-slope, where once you start losing things, you start losing them fast, and the other player only grows, creating a disparity between them, which would be widened by local economies.

I still would like to see them at least experiment with the idea. I have a few of my own:

1. global resources, localized storage
As it sounds, all production is globalized, but each planetoid has it's own local storage component, and in order to expand on that component, you have to build more storage. It would simply mean that the more storage you have on each planetoid, the more time you have if you dip into the negative before you hit 0. The big problem is that it might be difficult to explain away with fluff.

Small ones:
-localized economy, with the ability to build a cannon that builds and launches economy buildings to other planetoids (with LOS on the planetoid or an engineer in proximity), to promote faster growth but still maintain the concept
-localized economy, but if a certain building is build on two or more planets, it creates a network to be combined with the global economy. Can be used in conjunction with localized storage. Alternatively, you could have it so that you can build multiple buildings that increase the connection (say, 1/5 of the economy is shared, up to 5 buildings). This way, it all isn't riding on just one.

I don't know. I think there's a lot of potential, but it would have to be carefully balanced to prevent it from messing with everything. Perhaps someone will mod this stuff in later.

I haven't seen much recent discussion of this topic I assume it will heat back up after multiple planets are introduced in the alpha. mrj90k wrote a short book on this topic in the General Discussion. Have the Uber devs come down on this issue either way?

IMO commanders should always be able to pull from the teams resource pool regardless of what planet they are on. That just makes sense to me. If you want to conquer a new planet you have to send a commander. That seems to be the story of the game anyway.

However unit production, turrets, other faber units and the like should pull only from that planet. That said there could (and probably should) be some sort of energy/mass transfer station that links the pools or shuttles resources, and also has some amount of storage, but as and that isn't too cheap. You could even make that a feature of T2 storage. Maybe an orbital unit. It doesn't really matter to me what it is as long as there is some economic structure on each planet.

I'm thinking energy should be a resource that is shared between planets and metal should be local by default. If you want to justify it in some way you could say energy can be transferred through zero width wormholes across a star system, while metal needs to take the slow road. I would even be even in favour of making metal transferred by little automated (and self replenished) flying drones so that even two different bases on the same planet would be restricted in how much metal they can transfer and it would make bases look a little less static (to save server processing power the drones could make one way trips from the metal extractors/storage to the required location, utilising their own metal as part of the delivery) . The same drones might also be able to utilise natural resources directly during base construction for a resource boost.

Some ways how this would change gameplay:
. There would be some advantage to new and existing base worlds by the transfer of energy between worlds, thus encouraging expansion/invasion
. There would still be a start up cost of metal resources required on new worlds
. Some worlds would be able to specialise, either focusing on energy production or processes that consume vast amounts of energy
. Some worlds would be better factory planets because they have in situ metal resources, invasions would be best staged from them
. If different unit classes (tech level equivalent) use different energy to mass ratios then there would be a reason to make metal-cheap/energy-expensive (low class/tech) units when setting up from scratch on a new planet

As an additional gameplay tweak since energy would be shared it would be quite vulnerable, so it should be made easier to deal with slightly less then optimal power. I suggest rather then downgrading performance of every energy using structure and unit a automatic rotating blackout could be instituted. At its initial stages a rotating blackout could involve several individual structures randomly tuning off for a few seconds, but at major levels of neglect it could involve whole planets taking turns at going dark. In this way a strategy could be to take out an enemy energy base world and then just wait for the predictable black out to make vulnerable each of the enemy bases in turn.