ok so we know we will be able to move asteroids at one point for a quick and decisive bombardment but i was wondering if those engines could also be used on planets. assuming that interplanetary transports have limited range could it be possible for players to move their planet to a higher orbit to move out of range from those attacks or in the reverse situation be able to move into range to start an interplanetary attack. this could also be seen as the answer to dealing with asteroid bombardment as well. moving a planet out of the way could be useful in many situations. also if this becomes a thing it would be cool to see the planets biomes change due to the fact that you are moving closer or farther from the sun. like your water would suddenly turn to ice and your navel will be stuck where they are until the planet moves to a warmer spot or ice planets in general move closer to the sun to the point they become desserts and potentially gain water formations.
Could get a bit rough if someone starts throwing planets at your moonbase Knocking a planet out of it's orbit is a huge thing and would probably screw all life on the planet in some way.
I would be very surprised if this was implemented. Personally I don't want it to be - planets should not be move able with engines. There are lots of very good reasons why just strapping a **** ton of rocket engines to a planet would not be a good idea. Although I am sure this will end up at a mod eventually. I would be interested to see a setting where by the full destruction of a planet may produce rouge asteroids though...
im not interested in de-orbiting or smashing planets into each other. mostely how moving planets can be used defensively not so much offensively.
So, if we assume a small element of realism, that engines produce a max thrust, and interplanetary travel follows Force = mass * acceleration. Then yes, you can move planets.... BUT.... It will take forever. assuming you cover a planet in engines, the # of engines to mass of planet ratio gets worse and worse as you go to larger radius's (surface area/volume ratio essentially). And moons and asteroid are the same as planets for this discussion, except they are just much smaller (you could try to argue density changes, but no info on that from uber). And before we get into planet engines vs. asteroid engines, why do we not build planet engines on asteroids? I believe there is a barren airless biome that can be applied to planets, so you need to include that in your hand waving. So, say an asteroid takes a minute to travel, a moon might take 5-10 mins, and a planet might take an hour. Also since you have to build more engines, you have to factor that in. Yes, I am also totally WAG-ing these travel times, because we don't have any of the numbers to do the real math, or even what the final physics math will be, so doing real math at this stage is a waste of our time.
I think that the plan is to be able to alter the orbits of moons and asteroids, but planets will just be too massive...WITH ONE EXCEPTION: Metal planets are planned to be ancient battle stations, where you are able to build on the surface as with any other planet. The difference is that there are planned to be locations on the metal planets which if you control give you control of the station's engines, planet-destroying weaponry etc. Personally, I cannot wait for this to be implemented. EDIT: Apologies, this is badly worded but I hope you get the jist.
I'm not sure we need to make special cases here, when being consistent with our physics gives us essentially that already.
