Solaris Station: A solar map concept

[Tyrant]

https://hackmd.io/@Tyrant/Solaris

Basically, a new medium-high population map where your proximity to a star makes space burn you. With a new engine concept using refining of raw light and some other propietary features.
Forgot to make a forum post, and work on it has been super slow, so now's a good time to tell me that it's awful what you think about it and what you'd like to see on a medium ish sized map.

[RelentlessGarbage]

This sounds pretty neat! Very much an engineering-focused map, since on Cogmap or Donut if the engineers don't set up the engine the consequence is "we lose power 40 minutes into the shift," whereas here it would mean "the station turns to ash." This would obviously be a huge amount of work, but the payoff could be quite interesting.

I'd advise having a much higher population of engineers relative to the rest of the station crew, given how important they are in preventing everyone from dying horribly. And, since the heat shield is so important (and sabotage would be so severe), there should be some way of repairing it when someone inevitably blows up a TTV and takes out a huge chunk of it. Even with a loose singulo, there are ways to rebuild the engine and limit the damage, so there should be something similar here.

Not sure how the debris field would work - asteroids in low solar orbit would probably be quite rare, and having you map-transition from a hellfire zone right next to the star into a relatively safe and cold part of space wouldn't make sense. Perhaps you'd have to teleport or use pod warping to reach the mining and debris field levels? Adding a preset teleporter or making the mining shuttle more accessible to all crew might alleviate issues associated with it being harder to get to the other Z-Levels.

Also, as a minor thing, being so close to a star would probably mean the station would have to deal with a lot of solar wind that would push it away. Adding some thrusters to the back of the station that would keep it in its low orbit would be a nice detail.

[Tyrant]

Higher engineering population is a good thought. As for the heat shield, it's proposed to be a bi layered shield (with the south facing departments having shielding there too, and the areas attacked by solar radiation are recalculated as the shield is changed (destroyed or constructed) and the shield is buildable.

As for the debris field and mining field, they're canonically really far apart, so the teleportation is implied. I'm not sure what the in game reason is for going from the inner frontier system to the outer frontier system and then back to the station is, but I was just going to use some similar handwaving.

The thrusters are something i considered actually, for adjusting the orbit during the game. My idea was that you could change the orbital height and therefore the solar output, but that was a little too meta. Still plan on orbital adjustment rockets being in place and firing occasionally, because as you say, the solar wind adjusts its trajectory somewhat randomly, so maintaining course is a constant effort.

[RelentlessGarbage]

The thrusters are something i considered actually, for adjusting the orbit during the game. My idea was that you could change the orbital height and therefore the solar output, but that was a little too meta. Still plan on orbital adjustment rockets being in place and firing occasionally, because as you say, the solar wind adjusts its trajectory somewhat randomly, so maintaining course is a constant effort.

Oh, that sounds neat. I just meant add thrusters to the backside for visual effect. :p

[Tyrant]

yeah it was a bit much so i scrapped it, but the thrusters would still be a nice visual addition