... I mean odds are all stations will have attendant fleets for defense or even some sort of short range parasyte craft, a type of design that only stations could operate ...
or like others have suggested having some sort of "armed sats" with a lot of firepower and weapons and a very limied mobility to serve as a further line of defense.
Still, some of those ideas would add a lot of clutter to the battle, not sure if with the current command system adding too much complexity would be desireable
I don't imagine we'd add a new class of fighter
just for stations, though we certainly have for faction differentiation. And yeah, as mentioned in the blog post, we did consider defense platforms. Might try out more with them and see if they add to the whole set of systems.
But as you say, keeping clarity to what's going on is a really important design goal behind all of this.
I suppose mods will still be able to set a layer of decor modules underneath a station ...
I imagine so; I'll leave it to Alex to confirm it as a mod-capable ability.
It's all very combat-focused - I assume that's what stations do? But some more protruding girders, docking ports, clamps, maybe even bulky modules that are largely cargo etc. would be nice if the stations actually service ships. Maybe there could be both - stations that are more utilitarian and therefore easier to handle, and pure combat fortresses.
For the purposes of what a player sees in tactical battles, we're keeping everything combat-focused. My though (as mentioned in the blog) is that the station is a spindle-type design so all the civilian modules are hidden "under" this ring of combat modules, so you can imagine that any amount of civilian station is beneath what you see in battle. From there, maybe I find a design for underlying decor modules that doesn't ruin visual clarity, maybe I don't.
Pedantry ahead:
...
Scientifically sound analyses and convoluted technobabble justifications only please!
Haha, well I think your two requests might be at odds and I won't endeavor to fulfill them, but it sounds like you might enjoy the site
Atomic Rockets which covers hard-scifi concepts
comprehensively. Or to put it another way, it's like the TV Tropes of hard science ficiton. Enjoy!
It's fascinating to see this stuff under the hood, thanks for sharing!
NP!
Hey David. What do you imagine stations as? Do they primarily handle planet defenses or are they more like a commerce hub, or perhaps a "gateway"?
In my mind all those satellite things orbiting a planet are its defense platforms preventing people coming and going, and shooting at the planet from orbit sort of things. Will there be other more "military" or "civilian" immobile things we have to deal with?
Maybe an military stations where its a box shaped things with lots of hangars and big 360 turning guns?
Are the rotating cylinder stations the extent of stations we will fight?
The orbital junk is just to show that space-faring civilization is getting up to all sorts of business around a planet. (Or it's space-ruins, like the Rust Belt from the Reynolds books!) So there could plausibly be defense platforms in there, or maybe not. Kinda depends on how we end up using these concepts in the game
As mentioned, defense platforms are possible. Not sure if/how we'd handle them at this point.
I will say that these big round-style stations will be the core of station combat in the Domain; they exist in-game already as a symbol of both economic and military power, so they're going to get lots of meaning infused via participation in tactical combat (and, presumably, the campaign layer goings-on). .... They also take a bloody long time to draw, so I'm not in a hurry to make like 20 of 'em. More on that in the next blog post!
Since ships (if you want to justify it) don't kill their occupants when they go to Burn speed, they must have some way of nullifying the effects of lethal acceleration. If such technology exists then the comparatively miniscule force of a spinning space station and whatever "negative effects" that causes would be child's play to negate.
Canonically, yeah, some kind of inertial dampening technology must exist for any of this to work on the scale/speed it does. I'll let other people get into details about what that might look like.