08-28-2013, 08:35 PM
Ah, food as armor.
For readers not fully up on CW rules, there is a technique for buffering your ships/colonies from combat damage. Such damage is doled out against everything in your colony in proportion to how much there is of it. So if your colony is 5% factories (by mass) then 5% of incoming damage will hit your factories. So clever designers started "ballasting" their ships with extra structural units to add mass. They even avoided using the precious hi-tech "super-light structural units" and built ships with heavy ordinary structure for this purpose. Hence, in my own thinking, I have put a low priority on researching Light Structure. There is no provision in the game for "armor", but in effect that's what we're talking about here.
But now we have this concept of using food as ballast. Interesting.
Personally, I think Farms in orbiters, enclosed colonies, and ships ought to consume Life Support capacity (in addition to fuel). So to run a large orbital farm, you'd need a large investment in biological infrastructure, water systems, etc. Maybe something for the suggestion box.
For readers not fully up on CW rules, there is a technique for buffering your ships/colonies from combat damage. Such damage is doled out against everything in your colony in proportion to how much there is of it. So if your colony is 5% factories (by mass) then 5% of incoming damage will hit your factories. So clever designers started "ballasting" their ships with extra structural units to add mass. They even avoided using the precious hi-tech "super-light structural units" and built ships with heavy ordinary structure for this purpose. Hence, in my own thinking, I have put a low priority on researching Light Structure. There is no provision in the game for "armor", but in effect that's what we're talking about here.
But now we have this concept of using food as ballast. Interesting.
Personally, I think Farms in orbiters, enclosed colonies, and ships ought to consume Life Support capacity (in addition to fuel). So to run a large orbital farm, you'd need a large investment in biological infrastructure, water systems, etc. Maybe something for the suggestion box.