They're apparently heat exchangers, not solar panels. Don't ask me where this was explained, it was a long time ago during Premium Beta, when the first non-Coriolis stations appeared.
Scale
- Thread starter Thisdale
- Start date
They're apparently heat exchangers, not solar panels. Don't ask me where this was explained, it was a long time ago during Premium Beta, when the first non-Coriolis stations appeared.
Why are solar panels bugging people - is it not nice to have redundancy and diversity in your energy supply. Perhaps fusion/anti-matter is used for the heavy industry, but residential, recreational or other facilities run off solar, or batteries, or tubs of photosynthetic genetically engineered algae separating hydrogen from water, or bacteria making diesel?
.
As for ship scales, it would be nice to see the Lynx Bulk carriers back, or to see hundreds of thousands of small ships chugging back and forth between planetary surfaces and station orbits, but I don't think any of us have got the bandwidth to support all of the client positional updates, or the CPUs to support those traffic volumes.
.
And if Elite's ships are too small, other space games have even tinier one man ships.
.
(The one tonne of gold vs one tonne of clothes is a valid point though, you could slow traders credits/hour values right down if they had to solve an inventory management (i.e. knapsack problem) each time they docked.)
I guess most of your ship is empty when you carry Palladium, considering 1 cubic meter already weighs 12 tonne, a cubic meter of Gold is over 19 tonne.
It would make trading more interesting if you had to deal with volume and weight, but as the market works now you'll still fly around with a mostly empty ship with a container of palladium.
I plainly missed that explanation.
However it doesn't explain why they are designed to look exactly like 20th century solar panels rather than heat exchangers, for which orbital stations are unlikely to have a huge need compared to ships. While this is always debatable particularly as we don't have many practical examples, a chunk of the energy in orbitals such as the ISS goes towards heating as space tends to be cold and the astronauts would rather not.