Yer they just flaoted away alon with all the asteroids erm wait a sec......
Yer they just flaoted away alon with all the asteroids erm wait a sec......
They are either in orbit around the sun or planet and they will move away from were they were dropped, or they still had some momentum from when they were last used and would move away from where they were dropped in that direction, or they are not in orbit and will eventually fall into the sun, these are your 3 options, there isn't an option where they sit motionless in space at the exact coordinates they were dropped, I mean physics, really!
So you dont think they would stay in orbit in the ring with the Asteroids ?
Which is what we are, or at least I am, talking about.
And your right I am not an astrophysicist, but I think they would stay in orbit with the asteroids.
No they won't, you understand how gravity works right? perturbations in planetary rings are common and most rings will only last a few million years, Saturns rings are predicted to be gone in 100m years, however we are not talking abut asteroids, we are talking about tiny limpets, gravity perturbation alone will result in them being ejected from the rings quite quickly, either that or they will be pulled in and impact on a large asteroid. Lets be clear, despite popular belief, planetary rings are not stable structures. Also we have the geo-magnetic fields of large gas giants, and unlike ring asteroids limpets are manufactured from highly refined and often highly magnetic materials that would be much more affected by the geomagnetic fields.
As to stellar asteroid belts, the same applies only worse. There is a reason we have leading and trailing Jovian asteroid clusters, small asteroids are easily perturbed by the gravity of the large gas giants, they get accelerated out to wider orbits or slowed down to enter the inner system, this is why we have to watch the skies, the orbits of asteroids are always being changed by gravity. The smaller they are more easily they are affected, and limpets are indeed quite tiny. Nothing in space is stable, orbits change all the time, the smaller the object the more easily the orbit is changed, even the pressure of light affects the orbit of objects, sometime directly by pushing, sometime by heating up the surface of asteroids and creating plumes of gas.
Satellites in orbit around the earth need regular adjustments to maintain position, the higher the orbit the less adjustment, but even high orbit satellites need to have their orbits adjusted every few years, near earth orbital satellites sometimes multiple times per year. The moon, the sun, tidal forces, even solar wind pressure, these all affect orbits, and Saturn has 146 moons, one of them larger than Mercury. The asteroids in the rings and belts aren't in stable orbits, the limpets aren't in stable orbits, they are in the game of course because FDEV doesn't fully model the effects of gravity, the concept of stable orbits doesn't really exist except in our imagination.
For the sake of argument, Lagrange points exist. For many practical purposes, look at the next 5-20 years, not millions.
For the purpose of Limpets, they can stay there indefinitely. And they can DEFINITELY stay there until I finish off a nearby pirate. And I'd rather collect them back than resupply. You can say it's a waste of time to do so, but I'm not the only one who'd like to do it.
For the purpose of Limpets, they can stay there indefinitely. And they can DEFINITELY stay there until I finish off a nearby pirate. And I'd rather collect them back than resupply. You can say it's a waste of time to do so, but I'm not the only one who'd like to do it.
[deleted my post, it was jokey but contributed little]
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I've always thought they should be ammunition in the limpet controllers rather than stored in a cargo rack.
I always thought the controllers ought to be generic launchers and you had to carry fixed purpose limpets for each function so collector and prospector limpets were different things but just needed a single launcher.
I will check the rings in Boran in 100million years and we will see whos right !!
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That would be painful though. I don't want to decide how many prospectors vs collectors I'm going to need for a job.
Yes.
To be honest I don’t want to either, the idea came to me from reading some of the posts over the years suggesting effectively that what was needed was a small sized low mass controller that would do everything at least as well as the existing best controller in each category.
I think Felicity Farseer (an in-game engineer) would be more than happy to design reusable limpets if people crowdfunded a campaign for her. She'd have a nice support against Big Limpet AND would profit quite a bit.
Like how Toyota designed off-road cars. They're made to never break down because it was not profitable for a Japanese company to have very many service shops around the world. And now everywhere where there's harsh conditions (no roads, sand, mud,...) you see people predominately buying a Toyota.
(Edit: What I meant to imply is that it would be nice to either have an event which introduces them permanently or a reoccuring event that makes them available for a limited time.)
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