The new planet textures seem to provide information as to what we will find when we go surface prospecting, once people figure out what it all means.
Does that mean that the planets actually have proper "biomes" now, though?
So, if I see a patch of ground which is, say, red then it might mean it's a metal-rich area where I'm more likely to find metallic elements?
To digress for a minute, one of my favourite things to do in KSP is to build giant interplanetary mining rigs.
There'll be a "mothership" which everything else attaches to.
It'll have a cargo-bay which contains some small satellites which are fitted with a variety of scientific instruments (the scansat mod) and it'll also contain the actual mining vehicles too.
I position myself in an equatorial orbit, deploy each satellite, move it into a polar orbit and then give them half an hour to map the planet surface below.
Once the scan is complete, I have a map of the planet surface which I can use to pick the landing-zones for my mining rigs.
I then decouple part of the mothership, which becomes a shuttlecraft.
I drop one of the mining rigs, collect it with the shuttlecraft and then land it on the surface to begin mining.
Shuttlecraft regains orbit, collects another mining rig and I take that down to a different location.
I'd love to be able to do something similar in ED.
You enter orbit of a planet and deploy some kind of "prospecting drone".
Maybe a C3 module would contain 1 drone and take longer to scan a planet, a C5 module would have 2 drones and be quicker and a C7 module would have 3 drones and be super-fast.
After the drones finish their survey you can recover them and decide where to drop the mining rigs.
You pick a biome, depending on if you want metals, minerals or whatever else.
You land your ship and another module deploys a "mining rig" via the same hatch that deploys SRVs.
Maybe C2 is 1 mining rig, C4 is 2 rigs, C6 is 4?
You can then take off again, go to another planet and do it all again.
After an hour or so you could return to the mining rigs, land on top of them (using a similar "screen" as the cargo scoop uses) and transfer what they've collected, or just recover the rig completely.
If there's anything wrong with ED's gameplay it's that it's all a bit "trivial".
You fly your ship, arrive at your destination, deliver cargo (or whatever) and you're off again.
You don't really spend a lot of time doing stuff in one place, in great detail.
I'd love to see something that required the player to spend a lot of time interacting with a planet at length, somehow.
The mining scenario is just one example but I'd be fine with anything that provided similar opportunities.
Just seems like the whole thing relies on the planets having proper, consistent, properties which could be explored.
Which is why I'd be excited to know if the changes for 3.0 do give planets properly defined biomes.
Does that mean that the planets actually have proper "biomes" now, though?
So, if I see a patch of ground which is, say, red then it might mean it's a metal-rich area where I'm more likely to find metallic elements?
To digress for a minute, one of my favourite things to do in KSP is to build giant interplanetary mining rigs.
There'll be a "mothership" which everything else attaches to.
It'll have a cargo-bay which contains some small satellites which are fitted with a variety of scientific instruments (the scansat mod) and it'll also contain the actual mining vehicles too.
I position myself in an equatorial orbit, deploy each satellite, move it into a polar orbit and then give them half an hour to map the planet surface below.
Once the scan is complete, I have a map of the planet surface which I can use to pick the landing-zones for my mining rigs.
I then decouple part of the mothership, which becomes a shuttlecraft.
I drop one of the mining rigs, collect it with the shuttlecraft and then land it on the surface to begin mining.
Shuttlecraft regains orbit, collects another mining rig and I take that down to a different location.
I'd love to be able to do something similar in ED.
You enter orbit of a planet and deploy some kind of "prospecting drone".
Maybe a C3 module would contain 1 drone and take longer to scan a planet, a C5 module would have 2 drones and be quicker and a C7 module would have 3 drones and be super-fast.
After the drones finish their survey you can recover them and decide where to drop the mining rigs.
You pick a biome, depending on if you want metals, minerals or whatever else.
You land your ship and another module deploys a "mining rig" via the same hatch that deploys SRVs.
Maybe C2 is 1 mining rig, C4 is 2 rigs, C6 is 4?
You can then take off again, go to another planet and do it all again.
After an hour or so you could return to the mining rigs, land on top of them (using a similar "screen" as the cargo scoop uses) and transfer what they've collected, or just recover the rig completely.
If there's anything wrong with ED's gameplay it's that it's all a bit "trivial".
You fly your ship, arrive at your destination, deliver cargo (or whatever) and you're off again.
You don't really spend a lot of time doing stuff in one place, in great detail.
I'd love to see something that required the player to spend a lot of time interacting with a planet at length, somehow.
The mining scenario is just one example but I'd be fine with anything that provided similar opportunities.
Just seems like the whole thing relies on the planets having proper, consistent, properties which could be explored.
Which is why I'd be excited to know if the changes for 3.0 do give planets properly defined biomes.
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
