We'll need bigger stations anyway if they ever decide to up the player counts per instance.
Why not larger stations/ports?
- Thread starter ScarecrowES
- Start date
There seems to be a hidden assumption here. It's one that seems to be common to a lot of modern sci-fi. I blame the it on the Culture.
Super cool books of course but they seemed to have near infinite resources for building stuffs. 100 mile long ships? No problem just call in a favour from your local GSV. Sorted. Nobody ever asked where all the metal was going to come from.
Elite strikes me as more realistic. You can't just summon umpteen gazillion tons of material out of nowhere. Even if it's possible to build a massive hundreds of miles across station does anyone have any idea how much the thing would cost? And if it's got to be spun up then I'd imagine you can't build it up over the centuries in stages like a ground based city because the mass would likely need to be properly balanced.
I'm not saying there isn't room for bigger stations but unless you're tunnelling into a dirty great big asteroid there must logically be some upper limit on what we can expect.
Super cool books of course but they seemed to have near infinite resources for building stuffs. 100 mile long ships? No problem just call in a favour from your local GSV. Sorted. Nobody ever asked where all the metal was going to come from.
Elite strikes me as more realistic. You can't just summon umpteen gazillion tons of material out of nowhere. Even if it's possible to build a massive hundreds of miles across station does anyone have any idea how much the thing would cost? And if it's got to be spun up then I'd imagine you can't build it up over the centuries in stages like a ground based city because the mass would likely need to be properly balanced.
I'm not saying there isn't room for bigger stations but unless you're tunnelling into a dirty great big asteroid there must logically be some upper limit on what we can expect.
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Yes there is the cost but you would think that the higher populated systems like Sol and Achenar would have a bigger station after all they are more visited then most other systems
Exactly. COnsidering we can fly something larger than a modern jumbo jet in through the mailslot, it's fickin' gigantic. Additionally, the interior space of a large mass like that will have a very large amount of surface area, even if it were simply a single layer, which these definitely are not.
As CMDR Heydan Seegil said, that's way too far back for that to be an issue any longer. If we have the technology to build ships, infrastructure in cities on planets is a complete non-issue.
Why? They're extremely limited in terms of size compared to even a smallish planet with an atmosphere. The stations would make more sense in such systems as a transfer point for materials or, essentially, trading posts.
I've just remembered the old square-cube law. I'm sure everyone is familiar with it but just in case anyone isn't it goes something like this:
The mass of an object is proportional to the cube of it's size, what with it being a three dimensional object. According to Wikipedia the surface area only goes up by the square of it's size. So what? Well there's something else that only goes up with the square too and that is the cross sectional area of a structural member.
If anyone remembers accidentally snapping pencils in half when they were a clumsy kid you might also remember that the ability of the pencil to withstand being snapped is dependent only on the cross sectional area of the pencil. The length of the pencil provides no extra strength.
So what does all this have to do with building a super large space station? Well a bigger station, as has been pointed out doesn't need to spin so fast so you get to save on sick bags at the airlock. Unfortunately it also means the bigger you are the harder it is for the struts and the beams it's comprised of to do their job.
It's not going to be spinning very fast so I'm not convinced that it's going to fly apart, but I think it might suffer from the opposite problem.
Very large, very massive objects, appear to have this strange desire to become very small, spherical objects of equivalent mass. The new shape is far more stable, but it's somewhat hard to get the spaceships in and out. Also I'd imagine the folks living on the station aren't going to be very happy either.
TL;DR Significantly bigger space stations require either a new design or much stronger materials to keep their shape.
The mass of an object is proportional to the cube of it's size, what with it being a three dimensional object. According to Wikipedia the surface area only goes up by the square of it's size. So what? Well there's something else that only goes up with the square too and that is the cross sectional area of a structural member.
If anyone remembers accidentally snapping pencils in half when they were a clumsy kid you might also remember that the ability of the pencil to withstand being snapped is dependent only on the cross sectional area of the pencil. The length of the pencil provides no extra strength.
So what does all this have to do with building a super large space station? Well a bigger station, as has been pointed out doesn't need to spin so fast so you get to save on sick bags at the airlock. Unfortunately it also means the bigger you are the harder it is for the struts and the beams it's comprised of to do their job.
It's not going to be spinning very fast so I'm not convinced that it's going to fly apart, but I think it might suffer from the opposite problem.
Very large, very massive objects, appear to have this strange desire to become very small, spherical objects of equivalent mass. The new shape is far more stable, but it's somewhat hard to get the spaceships in and out. Also I'd imagine the folks living on the station aren't going to be very happy either.
TL;DR Significantly bigger space stations require either a new design or much stronger materials to keep their shape.
Bruce Bruce Bruce... Do cool gameplay mechanics first, and then force the lore to work afterwords.
I was thinking that the physics constraints might actually lead to some cool new designs.
An existing station made bigger would be dull and boring, but a new ultra rugged design might look cool. I was thinking it might have a lot of of stone in it which would make it look Roman or Greek and you could justify it on the grounds that stone is incredibly strong in compression.
An existing station made bigger would be dull and boring, but a new ultra rugged design might look cool. I was thinking it might have a lot of of stone in it which would make it look Roman or Greek and you could justify it on the grounds that stone is incredibly strong in compression.
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Smaller stations and ports for the win.
Go to bed
Or some new materials, too. Materials science surely has progressed in the last thousand years of Elite's history.
^^^I would love to see this.
But, speaking as a fanboy, the worst thing about ED is its terrible localised instancing. If they improve instancing, I would jump for joy.
I understand you have these questions, but in the end they are pointless simply because whatever decision someone (an author for example) makes about a scifi/fantasy universe he creates you can always ask: "Why this? Why not that?"
And if the author had chosen 'that' you could have asked "why not this?"
The development of the Elite universe is an ongoing process.
Perhaps, it might be even the result of this question you ask now on these forums, in the future of ED development FD will implement a new class of rare mega station. It could be double the size of the biggest we have now in the game. It might be able to let large capital warships dock inside of it.
I would welcome such an addition for sure. I welcome everything that enhances variation in this awesome space sim.
But for now the universe is as it is.
What I would even like better than a mega-station is truly different Imperial and Alliance station designs.
I think that would make the Imperial and Alliance part of this universe feel truly different.
Imagine having been in Federal space for ages and then coming into an Imperial system and being confronted by a truly Imperial looking station, with those well known fluid Gutamaya lines. It would feel almost alien. I think that would be so awesome.
Nah, you just release a swarm of self replicating construction bots in a ring system and come back in a few months, job done
Any consideration of construction times and difficulty is always going to be influenced by our own technology, I am sure they have it sorted in the future.
Yeah Nah.
Theres a lot of scale mismatch around windows.
Theyre done nicely to give sense of being huge, but I think a room would be two windows high and not with a tall ceiling.
Scale in general in Elite Dangerous is pretty screwed up. Cockpits are a perfect example of this. They were designed to look right from the pilot's seat, but make absolutely no sense in terms of scale. No person would ever design real ships with the pilot sitting a dozen feet from the front window with displays that far away. I could go on and on about seat position in relation to windows and yadda yadda. Not to mention the fact that the Anaconda cockpit (for example) is actually SO large you could actually fit a large modern fighter jet in there. Scale in ED was obviously set up only for the sake of providing perspective, and without any attempt at realism or forward thinking.
As to comments about station variety... I'm for this as well. It would make a great deal of sense, and would be much more immersive, if different factions had different styles and designs for ports as they do for ships.
And as to the make-up of the mega-stations, gravity need not be an issue, and there is reason to believe that massive stations offer greater options for layouts than the smaller centrifugal stations we currently have.
Imagine something akin to a large cylinder-type station - like the rings of an Orbis station expanded out horizontally like a big washing machine tub. Gravity would be roughly the same throughout. Somewhat like the arms on the Citadel in Mass Effect. In such a large rotating station, even a multi-story building wouldn't experience a gravitational difference from the top story to the bottom. Plus, how awesome would it be to look out your window and see skyscrapers in the sky above you?! And as for docks... I think it would be cool to dock at a specific "arm" of the station, and see numerous docking platforms with ships loading cargo and passenger terminals, etc. And a landing platform servicing multiple hangar bays - so you'll land on a platform, request hangar access, and pass multiple hangars on the way to your own. And you can watch other ships drift by your hangar on the way out to the docking bay. Would give you a real sense that this is an occupied world and things are happening that YOU aren't specifically involved in.
The most common handwave in the space genre is artificial gravity.
Unfortunately, too many think they are Maverick and Goose. Hint: It's thirty years later. You would get spacesick, now.
Unfortunately, too many think they are Maverick and Goose. Hint: It's thirty years later. You would get spacesick, now.
This topic keeps coming around and is nothing new, scale isn't screwed up as Mike Evans explains.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?p=843670&viewfull=1#post843670
why is everyone so caught up on gravity and stuff, that doesn't matter if you just make it longer instead of wider, as for the post apocalyptic thing, that makes more sense although if the federation for example can keep making capital ships, a. they obviously still have the recourses if they can do that and b. they have to make them somewhere
Frontier: Elite II and FFE did have a larger class of station, orbital cities, that were much rarer and only found in a few key systems (Sol, Achenar, Eta Cassiopeia and a few others). I agree that it would be nice to see these return in some form, although I have noticed that the stations in these places are often of the largest Orbis type (with the large ring around the docking hub)