Would you like Metal Makers in PA...?

I accept your piece of "Fluff" as a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Can it be Nuclear Bananas?

Regular metal sure isn't radioactive though so I don't see how you could make a nuclear reactor out of that. We don't know how commanders are made though so I'll give you that.

The canonical TA commander uses an antimatter reactor in its design. The production of metal could be a nifty side effect of harvesting/stashing obscene amounts of energy in a non explosive way.

Just try not to think about it too hard. The Comm produces metal because it's a nice skill toi have. The exact value will evolve as the game needs it to.

The beauty of TA is that it is so simulated as it is though. You can't just go "hurr gameplay" without considering what it is your gameplay is actually trying to emulate. TA is one of the few games that gets away with as few abstractions as at all possible. And so it's far more possible to think of the mechanics in real terms.

Regular matter certainly is radioactive, it's where the term "background radiation" comes from e.g. carbon dating is done by measuring the amount of radioactive carbon (C14) in a sample. However, what you need for a fission reactor is a self-sustaining chain reaction (one where the decay products act as a trigger for further decay) and that only covers a subset of fissile isotopes. We've currently worked out ways of using Uranium, Plutonium, Thorium and a few other rare earth elements for this. Not bananas yet, unfortunately

For fusion you need hydrogen, which is easy enough to obtain since it is the single most common element in the universe. The issue with fusion isn't the fuel, it's kickstarting the process, and containing the reaction. Antimatter reactors obviously require antimatter, which can be a pain to find (and to store). At the tech level for PA, all 3 would be viable power sources, so picking one is effectively fluff; whichever you like the sound of most, or whichever fits your requirements. Personally I'd go for the most dangerous / explosive one to fit into a Commander, i.e. antimatter, as once you break containment all of the antimatter gets to annihilate at once. Pop goes the Commander, and anything within a couple of miles :mrgreen:

Obviously that doesn't by itself explain why Commanders produce spare mass. It's far less efficient to annihilate matter and antimatter, and use the resulting energy to create matter, instead of just harvesting the matter directly. I'd suggest that instead, since the Commander requires matter to put through the reactor to annihilate the stored antimatter (and it makes little sense to have a store of something you can easily find at your destination), that it would be fitted with low level extractors that work off the surrounding area, filter out any usable metal for fabricating, and send the unusable rest off to the reactor for annihilation. Effectively you explain it as a by-product of needing a steady stream of matter to run your own reactor, a fraction of which is going to be usable mass, and can be filtered out for the creation process rather than used as fuel.

Actually I like this one better than mine. Can I change my answer? :mrgreen:

It was bmb who gave me the drive and inspiration to consider fruit as a viable fuel source. Were it not for his tireless strawman-ing of everything I say to him, we would not have the Radioactive Banana-Sourced Potassium Isotope Reactor.

So thank you bmb. At least you can say you contributed some creative thinking to the discussion.

:lol:

Dammit I now have the Banana Bomber custom unit on my list of mods I'm never going to finish (or even start, most likely). :evil:

Uber should write the RBSPIR into PA lore!

First you search a gameplay that works, then you find the lore for it. Doing it the other way usually ends in crappy games.

As a quick aside;

There are 80 elements that are considered "Metals", 38 of them have Radioactive Isotopes.

ARe you completely dense?

PA is a game that starts with the idea that we blow up planets and then finds the gameplay for it.

You cannot have gameplay in a vacuum. All games simulate something to a degree, and before you go tetris or pong on me, that is supposed to be arranging rods in a nuclear reactor and tennis respectively. Tennis itself being like most sports some sort of metaphor for combat.

The balance between simulation, abstraction and simplicity is the real challenge. "Gameplay" as such doesn't matter beyond the inherent idea of making the game mechanically sound such as factions being balanced enough that both can win.

It doesn't really matter where the metal comes from. If it's good to play with, then it's here to stay. If it isn't, then it'll go away. At this point it's just numbers on a page.

Antimatter annihilation creates a huge amount of radiation suitable for modifying atomic structure. Basically it can behave like a mass fab, one which is always on because you can't exactly turn it off.

What did I JUST post

Tween angst?

Fusion plants work by combining two atoms to create a new atom, with lower mass than the two original atoms combined. Conservation of mass is kept be releasing energy, which makes for a handy power generator. Fusion is possible up to Iron , while still releasing energy in the process (though there is greatly diminishing returns, also everything above iron produces energy when is undergoes fission). With the proper technology and utilization, fusion power could be harnessed as a near-infinite supply of power (I've read that one pickup-truck of deuterium would release about the same energy as 2 million tons of coal). In fact, if we want to go overly-technical, a fusion plant should create mass, but that'd break gameplay.

Creating mass is also possible by the reverse process. We should all be familiar with the equation Energy =Mass * (Speed of Light)^2. If we do a little algebra, we find that Mass = Energy/((Speed of Light)^2). Everything we know of is merely congealed energy. It is conceivable that you could harness hydrogen out of the atmosphere (especially from a gas giant), use fusion to create energy, and use that energy to make buildings, robots, (bananas,) what-have-you.

Be careful, I almost spilled my coffee.

Hehe, ok getting back on track...How about if Metal Makers where required to be built adjacent to a Fusion/GasGiant power plant, so you would have maybe one per side of the powerplant...?

Also, you could make the explosion colossal, if you have a chain reaction go off...maybe to point of destroying that part of the planet (see chenobyl) if enough fusions/p go up in a big Kaboom!

That would mean that you could effectively build a "farm" if you desire, but the bigger it gets then the higher risk you run in destroying a good chunk of your planet if a lucky bomber gets through...hehe, I think that would be kinda fun to defend and fun to attack.

That would also mean that the preference would be to build them on gas giants, as then you would be able to rebuild, should they be destroyed (that is on the assumption that gas giants cant be destroyed..?) but that if would probably take out most of your infrastructure on the Gas Giant, unless you are sufficiently spread out, which in turn makes it harder to defend..

Thoughts..?

We need to see what is going to be happen in multi planetary economy system first, as someone -probably mike?- mentioned before, I think that metal makers are fine since they make the game economy more profound. However, I believe that there needs more cost to have lots of metal makers to discourage turtling play by making them spend more energy or explode like fusion reactor in TA or paragon in FA.

Isn't this pretty much how they work in FAF? OK you can build them without the adjacency bonuses, but it is so much more efficient to build them in a little tessellated template and then if one goes up the whole lot goes up.

I always liked that, but adjacency bonuses are definitely out, so what can you do...

I agree! Not adjacency bonuses, just having the requirement to have them build beside a Tech 2 power plant.