Doable landing method

[Lonestar]

Anyone who has read James Schmitz or Murray Leinster may recognize the idea of a landing grid. It's a huge, city-sized framework that mounts to the crust that uses three tractor beams to pull in and launch ships. If you are close to a planet it can reel you in. It would also give a believable reason why you can't land on a hostile planet/station/etc., since they can just tractor you away if you become a pest.

We could integrate the idea into the game fairly easily, I think. It'd mostly be just an explanation of how you land when there aren't obvious docking areas (like on a planet). It might also give us a model for basic planetary defense if a sector is under attack by a foreign faction. Maybe we could say that they could tractor anything smaller than a capship.

What do you guys think?

[hellcatv]

interesting!

[Halleck]

Sounds cool, perhaps only feasible for populous/urbanized planets. (ex. the current landing pad arrangements for bio/desert/etc. worlds are fine)

Waiting for comment by jackS...

[Lonestar]

Anything with a solid crust could have one. They can also be used, according to some old sf short stories in old sf magazines, to float a ring of potassium around an ice planet to capture and utilize more of the star's rays and warm up the planet

[Halleck]

I'm not saying that they couldn't be used on biodiverse/desert/etc. worlds, but that it would be the equivalent of finding a metro/subway system in a rural area (out of place technology).

It's more likely that they would be built on major industrial or trading worlds.

[Lonestar]

In the Leinster stories, any planet would have one. They aren't expensive to build, and you would have to have one to do any sort of trade. The expense of building one would have to be weighed against the expense in fuel and ship size to move hundreds or thousands of cubic meters on and off world.

The concept in the stories is that it gets power from the ionosphere and uses that both for powering itself as well as the colony/city/spaceport where it is.

[GAlex]

mhmhmm...

I don't know...

- How can I bomb these installation if I can be pulled away by repulsor?
- How can I land off the standard routes do do some black market?
- How can I land if this thingy isn't functioning?
- Do I really want to be guided by someone else I couldn't trust?
- How can I escape a planet having killed the Leader and kidnapped his daughter?

[Ryder P. Moses]

"City-sized high-tech installation built into the planet's very crust" and "anybody can have one" don't go together. While these moon-sized orbital elevators and giant gravitic manipulators are nice and all, they don't really fit in a universe where most of the planets are supposedly sparsely populated colonies, and civilization is spread out over thousands of worlds. It doesn't really matter that it's more efficient overall, just like it doesn't matter to that rural neighborhood that overall a subway is cheaper and more efficient a transport system than letting everyone own a car- cars might cost more, but since the financial and industrial burden is spread far more thinly they're pretty much the only viable mode of travel anywhere but the most dense and established urban areas- and even there they're something of a money pit.

Besides, I think the main thing all this 'big' stuff has going for it gamewise is that it can impress you with its scale. If there's one kicking around every planet, that's... not so interesting any more.



What would make a good planetary defense weapon is worthy of serious consideration, though, 'cos the planets clearly need them. Again, not something every world would have (for one thing because feasible weaponry scales for ground-based cannon are so ridiculously beyond anything a ship could have that the whole give-and-take of system invasion would never get anywhere if every little rock of a world had decent defences, and there'd be some 'splainin to do if planets were zapping at starships with puny little light lasers), but 'twould add a little something to yon space battles and maybe make travelling through hostile space a little more interesting.

Personally, I'm inclined towards missile batteries for that purpose, though, rather than fancy gravitic tomfoolery. Huge swarms of big honkin' ICBMs capable of punching through atmo and blowing hell out of a cruiser but clumsy enough that light vehicles stand a chance of getting through, albeit with some serious turbulence.
First, because it's practical- I don't know about gravitics, but energy weapons would lose intolerable amounts of firepower to atmospheric diffusion, gravity is working against kinetic slugs and since you don't want to be firing c-sabots on an inhabited world they'd be so slow and inaccurate as to be ineffectual at any serious range, and all those things cost more in the end anyway. Missiles are something cheap enough to produce that they make viable siege breakers, simple enough that even small planets with limited industrial capacity can mount a few, and get the job done very, very well.
Second, a huge swarm of missiles coming up to meet an orbital bombardment force would just look badass. Far moreso than boring ol' beam cannons, especially invisible gravity-based ones. It'd also give the player a nice interesting game of 'dodge the atomic doom rockets' when landing in hostile territory, whereas trying to blockade-run a planet with beam weapons would be a very short-lived and unfun process.
And third, 'cos just personally ah hets me some handwavium, and all the 'it runs on magic!' technologies kinda hurt the suspension of disbelief. While they're fine for explaining away things like energy shields, which really don't have a more sensible excuse to exist, whenever it's possible to use at least somewhat real technologies without sacrificing gameplay we should.

Energy weapon batteries might work well for one of the alien races, though. Little somethin' different, maybe with interesting properties (like, say, the Ion Cannon batteries from Star Wars- don't kill the enemy, just zap 'em and let your defensive fleet do the mopping up).

[Lonestar]

Well, let's say you are carting a mule full of heavy metal ore a few light years. The physics of accelerating a load that massive require a huge engine. Powering that engine is going to be a bit beyond deuterium, unless you attach an engine the size of the mule itself. The amount of energy spent on that makes it inplausible to be able to do anything but drop the load like a 'hammer of the gods' and hope it hits somewhere where it's recoverable.

However, by having a giant landing grid, you can power you colony inexpensively with built in planetary defense, and on top of that have a method of moving those loads in and out of space without having to deal with the vicious circle of greater mass means greater propulsion requirements means greater mass means... you get the picture.

Of course, I guess you could alternatively solve all of this by going trekkie.

EDIT: Also, regarding the issue of cost, there are a lot of things in VS that defy practicality in that respect. If one of the basic needs of a colony were a landing grid, it might actually be plausible that a person could make a living carrying small loads of cargo from planet to planet.

[chuck_starchaser]

I totally agree with Ryder. Particularly with the statement about, whenever possible, use technologies that are more explainable rather than magic ones, like tractor or repulsor beams. I would add to that the fact that it just doesn't make sense for ships to land on planets most of the time; much more efficient (about 1000 times) to use space elevators for people and cargo. If you wanted to go down to the planet you could leave your ship at the space elevator station's parking lot and take the elevator ride down to planet surface. Most business you could do at the station itself.
Unless, of course, it's a Luna-sized planet, lo-grav, no atmo.

As for planetary defenses, planets without atmospheres (where people live and work indoors, or in cities underground), beams would be okay; and so would be missiles, of course. For planets with atmospheres, orbiting missile batteries would be the clear choice. MUCH less fuel needed than for a rocket climbing up all the way. And by the way, one would imagine only cruisers and battleships would have planet bombardment capabilities, so a planet's defenses would not concern itself with fighters. Orbiting stations would. In other words, the missiles would hit target.

[Ryder P. Moses]

Lonestar: We're talking about drives that can accelerate to C-fractional speeds without tearing apart the ship, are small enough to make fighters feasible, and don't seem to require fuel. Creating another handwavium technology to explain how the first handwavium technology does something that there's no reason to expect it couldn't do in the first place seems like an exercise in pointlessness to me.

As Chuck said, using an elevator in an attempt to create at least some pretense of realistic spaceflight is a different story. They're not my favorite technology in the world, but they get the job done and after all I don't have a better realistic solution on hand.


Chuck: The idea was to create gameplay with a decent excuse. Sure, there are better ways to do things- especially if you have unlimited resources.But having a player get shot down every time he tries to approach a planet is not fun, whereas just barely escaping death in an intense firefight is. We're not looking for the most efficient way to ruin the player's day here, if we wanna go that route we can just give ships realistic acceleration capacities and realistic weapon accuracies, so that all combat is one-shot-one-kill and takes place at ranges of thousands of miles, so that the player just randomly dies the first time he enters a system with a Luddite in it.

'Sides, orbital stations would defeat the virtues of ground-based weaponry- namely that it's hard to kill, cheap to build, and you can make the infrastructure as big as you like for next to no cost compared to floating an orbital construct.

[Halleck]

I agree for the most part... but it would be cool to have one or two of these landing grid things in the game, probably on central trade hub worlds. Think about tokyo, where they have to stack cars in parking lots to fit them it... that's the kind of crazy, metropolis-planet density i'm talking about here.

Also, space elevator stations could become a bottleneck of sorts. there are only a finite amount per planet, and they only have so many docking ports...

Landing grids/landing pads could be used if
1. you have too much cargo to fit it on the space elevator or on the station, so you must go planetside
2. there is no room to dock at the station, you must go planetside
3. you have contraband that wouldn't make it past customs at the station

[chuck_starchaser]

Chuck: The idea was to create gameplay with a decent excuse. Sure, there are better ways to do things- especially if you have unlimited resources.But having a player get shot down every time he tries to approach a planet is not fun, whereas just barely escaping death in an intense firefight is. We're not looking for the most efficient way to ruin the player's day here, if we wanna go that route we can just give ships realistic acceleration capacities and realistic weapon accuracies, so that all combat is one-shot-one-kill and takes place at ranges of thousands of miles, so that the player just randomly dies the first time he enters a system with a Luddite in it.

'Sides, orbital stations would defeat the virtues of ground-based weaponry- namely that it's hard to kill, cheap to build, and you can make the infrastructure as big as you like for next to no cost compared to floating an orbital construct.

Totally agreed; I just wasn't even thinking about player combat, though; as a player wouldn't have a chance attacking a planet. I was thinking for when one faction mounts some gargantuan attack on another faction. I said those missiles would hit their targets; but I just meant the targets would be too big and slow to avoid the missiles; but they could use point defenses to destroy the missiles before they hit. And pressumably they'd be using missiles as well, to attack the space-based defenses. Etceteras. Anyways, all I meant was that planets wouldn't launch ICBM's at tiny fighters.

Landing grids/landing pads could be used if
1. you have too much cargo to fit it on the space elevator or on the station, so you must go planetside
2. there is no room to dock at the station, you must go planetside
3. you have contraband that wouldn't make it past customs at the station

Typically, the largest elevators would be larger than anything a ship could load by like an order of magnitude. If something is so large and heavy a space elevator cannot lift it, then no ship can, as a ship must contend with lifting that same cargo at high acceleration, and with less evenly distributed mechanical stresses.
The station Coffee Bot and I have been working on is 23 x 8 x 2 km in size, has several dozen dockings for medium and large ships, and indoor parking lots for small ships, arranged like niches on the walls in the inner corridor. Each niche has a tunnel entrance you fly into; then your ship gets grabbed by a robotic tow that guides it to a ship air-lock (long story, matching shapes that close on your ship to minimize the amount of air that needs to be pumped), then the ship is pulled down to one of a number of levels, then guided by tows moving on rails to a parking spot where a number of grips hold it in place. Far from done yet, but that's the plan.

Almost as cool as a grid with tractor beams, I'd say

[Ryder P. Moses]

I wasn't thinking of the player attacking planets so much as blockade-running them. Smuggling missions and all that. But yes.