That was supposed to be a jab to star citizen… whatever i guess.
If the only requirement is “full planets”, then we might as well hand the medal to Battlecruiser Millennium now and call it a day.
There’s a danger to this approach however. The sooner INS go to KS and get funding, the sooner they can work on the project full-time (or as near to it as possible), which means that it has a better chance of releasing the game whilst there’s still interest in the genre. If anything, CCP’s EVE: Valkyrie is probably among the greater threats to I:B, as it’s closest in scope. The other games wont directly conflict with I:B’s goals, and therefore this should give INS time enough to get revenue for the MMO at least, that’s my reasoning.
As for timing for its own sake, I think the best opportunity is pre-Holiday 2014. That doesn’t leave much time, but if you start running into the holiday season you’ll end up with your KS sharing the calendar with major releases, which’ll reduce the pool of potential backers. At that point, you’d then have to wait until February-March before it makes sense to run a KS campaign
You should be more carefull about your writings then. One may understand your sentence both ways while only one was intended by you 
But of course I agree with you: funding doesn’t mean everything and I doubt SC will launch anything serious before en of 2015.
By “pre-holiday”, you mean before Christmas holidays ?
I suppose you’re right. When thinking again on the timing, letting the KS mid-august is not the best time as it’s generally the period with most people on vacation. Mid-September might be a good call as nearly everybody’s back to work and more intent on looking for some news.
By the way, now that I think of …
Does that mean there are ground (or more like “interior”) battles meant to be ? Or just that the statio will be hard to destroy and finding the weak points is the objective ?
Yes, in my mind the Holiday season sorta starts in mid-November, with late October for preorders, because families will start buying for Christmas around a month in advance. Unsurprisingly, that’s also when the release calendar starts getting mighty busy.
How about neither? Why assume stuff has to be destroyed?
That seems like a reasonable assumption for a multiplayer arena team game, that there will be a way to destroy or disable it. Though for something that big, I’d expect that only capital ships can do damage to the structure itself, with smaller crafts limited to disabling weapons and subsystems.
And now I wonder what happens if you manage to colony drop such a station on a planet; the wreck would easily be visible from orbit. Yes, I know that probably won’t be possible because limited development resources, but still…
Also, dogfights inside a 15km-sized hangar could be quite epic.
See, I hear 30 km station, which is an order of magnitude larger than the largest ships, and I think “capturable base”. Something that’s not destroyable, but, rather something that your team needs to hold as part of the win conditions.
But then, destroying it would be kind of epic.
The station will be destroyable.
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Now you’re just teasing us.
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He casually comes out of left field from time to time: )
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Something that will take a few days to destroy for balance. If I recall the old forums correctly.
I think that may have just created more excitement in my head than anything else I’ve read recently (and not just on these forums).
I don’t remember the old forums saying much (concrete) about this idea. But however it works, destroying stations that huge? Definitely epic. Presumably it will take a series of assaults to take it down, perhaps targeting different structures on it, piece by piece.
But will it come crashing down?
Of course! Within a few decades, if placed far enough below a geostationary orbit.
Why would blowing it up make it go down any faster?
Well, the explosion could push parts if the station toward the planet, which would cause them to rapidly spiral inward until they hit atmo. The rest would, of course, end up spiraling outward.
This is probably hoping for too much, but I would be super excited to find that the large debris decayed into a volume of effect debris field after a few hours.
Well, it’s official! World is about to end, Infinity-TQFE is launching next week, and people have stopped killing each other in the name of their loving gods. Kichae just said something wrong about space?!
I blame Gravity.
To go down in space (efficiently) you need to go backwards. Pushing towards the planet (what is commonly known as “down”) is often more likely to put you on an escape trajectory than a suborbital one, though if you get both, hitting the planet would come before leaving it’s gravity well. Certainly it will never result in a spiral.
To get an inward spiral, you need a constant backwards (aka. “retrograde”) push. Not very explosion-like, though it is happening to almost everything humanity has ever put in space due to air resistance and tidal effects. Just very very slowly, 2km/month in the case of the ISS.
An orbit that would fully decay within a week-long match, cause by a single explosion, somewhere you’d want to put a 30km space station? Possible, certainly, but exceptionally unlikely to result in anything making it even remotely intact to the surface of anything solid. By which I mean: the most likely scenario might be for something to intercept and land on a small moon…
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Hmm, good point. I didn’t think things through at all.
So, I went back and thought them through. I made a diagram! Please exclude the crudity of this model.
Blue thing’s the planet of course. The light blue ring around it is the atmosphere, more or less. Yes, it’s exagerated. The red dotted lines are the trajectories of forward propelled debris from the explosion. Yellow highlighting on the dotted lines are areas where the debris experiences some appreciable amount of drag. I only allowed the debris one orbit to decay and crash, but obviously in reality it would take many. I also failed to complete one dotted line, but pretend it also just curls into the planet.
The pink transparent triangles show the angles at which debris fired “forward” from the explosion will, ultimately, crash back into the planet. The sketch is rough, but the angles are somewhere in the neighbourhood of 35-45 degrees. The blue rectangle represents the angles at which debris fired “backward” from the explosion will find its way to the planet’s surface, assuming the explosion launches it backwards at less than twice the station’s orbital velocity (where firing backward at the station’s velocity = causing the debris to be stationary relative to the planet’s surface). In other words, so long as debris fired backwards is launched into a retrograde orbit that has a smaller absolute velocity than the space station did, it will decay. Debris fired at a higher speed than this will have a collision zone that’s similar in shape to the pink one, only pointed in the opposite direction.
In other words, unless it is accelerated to above the escape velocity, most debris will crash into the planet at some point or another. Most of it relatively quickly.
I actually think this is of huge benefit here. Yes, indeed, assuming an impressive looking explosion, most of the debris that ultimately intercepted the planet would burn up in the atmosphere, leaving little to nothing to hit the ground, but producing an impressive meteor storm in the planet’s atmosphere! From the time the station is destroyed until the end of the match, the planet could have shooting stars raining down on it. There may be nothing to find on the planet’s surface, but the view would be spectacular.
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in a few billion years
But it is a bug-ridden half-finished mess because of all the corners cut - and the studio will be closed because of this story about using embezzlement money.
Killing each other about money, power, sadism, skin colour, geographic emplacements, ideologies and plain old hate, of course, is still a thriving business.
Sort of. Pushing hard enough down will result the object undergoing a hard lithobraking. Obviously, pushing retrograde is more effective. Also, if you push hard enough once, no need for a continuous push.
Edit : ninja’d
Well, at roughly 1 Earth diameter’s altitude, Wolfram Alpha tells me orbital velocity would be in the neighbourhood of 4.5km/s. I can’t be bothered with doing vector math right now, but as a rough guess it’d probably take about 1.5km/s, either retrograde or direct, to send any piece flying off at a 45º angle, and achieving such a change in velocity within the fraction of a second a (now uncontained) explosion has a significant effect in space… you’re looking at hundreds of gs of acceleration.
Definitively possible, and a meteor shower starting a few hours later would be a brilliant thing to add… but yeah, no need for having bits of the space station rendered on the surface.
So will pushing hard enough up, as long as it doesn’t send you on an escape trajectory first.
If you guys are going to keep discussing orbital physics can you please fork this thread.