Weltall, the game, not the book -- huh??

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:He was running short on star by the end of the game. I would have established operations around the nearby stars before reaching that point because if you deplete your nearby resources before establishing new sources you'll be in big trouble.

And he would have fought the berserkers outside his system defenses, it would have been safer.

Not really. His forces would be split up and that would allow the All-Predator to defeat them in detail (the total force might be greater, though, IMHO, not sufficiently so)

As I read it the Berserkers used those nearby systems (but not the stars themselves) for replication. If he had expanded to them some time ago they would have run into his defenses rather than empty systems.

Jacob Holo wrote:Under normal conditions, Wong Fei would have eventually expanded to a second star, if for no other reason than he would want to maintain his economic advantage. However, the appearance of the All-Predator shifted the game into a desperate hold-or-die last stand.

Any attempt by Wong Fei at interstellar expansion during the attack would have either been quickly destroyed or would have required a massive investment in combat units to defend. Both options would have diluted his resources at a critical point in the game. Furthermore, even if he had established a permanent presence in more than one system beforehand, he would probably abandon them to the All-Predator with little or no fight, deciding instead to consolidate his defenses (which is clearly his preferred playstyle).

Trying to expand during the attack would obviously have been a very bad idea. I'm saying why didn't he do it well before? Send out some production capacity that could bootstrap into full starlifting.

Use that to build up both more production capacity and defensive units. The production capacity immediately departs at the first sign of any substantial hostile force but the forces remain--the Berserkers run into a pile of defenses and no planets to mine and are promptly finished off.

Since lightspeed has a major effect on giving orders I would assume considerable scripting capacity exists to allow units to react with a certain amount of sanity without orders from home. 20 years ago I was playing a game that allowed enough in the way of stock orders that you could send off a colony ship, not interact with it again and come back to a developed planet--is that a lost art?? (Of course a human could have tuned it a bit better.)

Jacob Holo wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:First, it could just be improper phrasing of saying "third of the extractable mass" because, as the star grows dimmer, you extract less power from it to power your star lifters, so it becomes progressively more difficult to lift mass out of it.

I don’t think the power requirements for the star lifting operation would be too large a challenge once the operation is well underway. The massive amounts of hydrogen being collected represent a logical alternative source of power for the star lifters as the process moves into its later stages. Any civilization in a position to consume their star in this manner would be swimming in fusible material.

Great gobs of hydrogen isn't really that useful a construction material anyway--starlifting only makes sense if you're fusing the hydrogen you pick up. Thus power should be a non-issue unless you need a lot of it to create elements past iron.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Great gobs of hydrogen isn't really that useful a construction material anyway--starlifting only makes sense if you're fusing the hydrogen you pick up. Thus power should be a non-issue unless you need a lot of it to create elements past iron.

Stars (except Population III stars) have a lot of other material besides hydrogen and helium. The majority of the mass of any single element in any regular star system is in the star, not out of it.

Proportionately it's much less, but you don't need to use the hydrogen. Just dump it back onto the star. The benefit of lifting everything except hydrogen out of it means you also extend the star's life.