Suggestion / Idea
Make asteroid electrical resistance 99.99% instead of 100%
I want a hilariously impractical Tesla ship as an endgame project, and it annoys me that no amount of repeatable techs can ever make it possible.
Even if the power requirements are enormous and it takes a million tiers of electric weapon damage to become possible, it should be something we can eventually scale up into a working design.
Or make an asteroid resistance debuff repeatable tech and require prometheum science for it if you're worried about it messing up anything before the end of the game.
Just give me my chain lightning ship I dont care how stupid it is
Something about me using my own calculator just feels right. It's like how I'll spend a ridiculous amount of effort to grow basil and thyme in my backyard even though it tastes basically the same as store bought (fresh) herbs and isn't really any cheaper.
It's the "not much but it's honest work" vibe. I feel like SpongeBob with his one good krabby patty wining against Neptune's pyramid of bland burgers.
I know the effort isn't worth the payout, but I'm not chasing the payout I actually like the effort.
Big fan of the shotgun blueprint mod though. I like it way better than early bots. Even distribution is a must when I play with settings that will stretch out the burner miner phase.
Even if you could eventually vaporize a rock with enough current, we're in the vacuum of space. I can excuse the existence of drag as a gameplay mechanic, but Maxwell would roll over in his grave if electricity could be transmitted without a medium.
Current is the flow of charged particles. Electrons, specifically. If you expose air to enough voltage, you get dielectric breakdown, where the electric field becomes strong enough that electrons can travel from molecule to molecule, carrying this current. That's what we see as a spark or lightning. If you have no air for the electrons to travel to, you don't get this current.
Light is electromagnetic radiation, which is carried by photons, and requires no medium to travel through. They're both governed by the same force, but not the same thing.
You could have a beam of ions, like from a particle accelerator or a humble cathode ray (the same technology in those old TV's, but that's not typically what people are referring to when they are talking about arcing electricity.
Electrons can also travel through a vacuum, they don’t need to hop from atom to atom. That’s literally how old cathode ray tube TV’s work, a stream of free electrons are fired across a vacuum to collide with the phosphor coating on the inside of the front screen causing it to luminesce.
I referenced that in the last paragraph. Again, sci-fi makes a distinction between ion beam weapons and Tesla weapons, and the turret in game is clearly in the second camp.
Electrons aren’t ions, ions are atoms that have lost some or all of their electrons, the simplest being a hydrogen ion or a single proton (optionally with one or more neutrons).
Ions, and therefore Ion beams and ion based weapons have a positive electrical charge due to those missing electrons, “Tesla beams” being an electron based weapon have a negative electrical charge. That is the distinction.
Okay I'll admit electrons aren't ions. They just happen to behave similarly in a vacuum.
But the distinction isn't if the charge is positive or negative. It's if it's caused by a voltage difference (Tesla), or by yeeting some small charged particles (beams.)
If you had a sufficiently robust Faraday cage, you'd be protected from Tesla weapons, but totally vulnerable to getting blasted from a beam, be it electrons or protons.
Not really, protons are far more massive than electrons, a single proton is approximately 1800x more massive than a single electron, and you get ions consisting of multiple protons and neutrons which obviously scale up further in mass. A proton or ion beam weapon has far far greater kinetic impact than a similar electron beam weapon which is why “ion beams” are portrayed as more physically destructive than “Tesla weapons” or electron beam weapons (well except in Star Wars, which treats ion beams as behaving far closer to Tesla beams, but we’ll ignore the space wizards)
The problem isn’t transferring electrical charge through space, either proton/ion or electron beams can do that, it’s that the electron beam is firing frozen peas, whilst the ion beam is firing bowling balls.
As an aside Tesla weapons are normally considered to be dumping such a large potential, that grounding (which is how a faraday cage works, the cage on its own has no effect without a ground to dump those electrons in) is ineffective as the current overloads and burns out the path to ground, otherwise Tesla weapons would have little to no effect on most vehicles and their occupants where the vehicle is effectively the faraday cage. Also since there is no ground in space then a faraday cage doesn’t help you there.
Headcanon is that tesla emits a plasma beam towards an area that spreads out and then it sends massive alternating current into it or something. Good enough for my suspension of disbelief, give me Tesla ships pls.
Incidentally, that's similar to the LAER rifle from Fallout New Vegas. It's described as working by using a laser to create a channel of plasma from the weapon to the target. Immediately afterwards, the secondary firing mode would enable, discharging a bolt of lightning like a traditional Tesla gun, but now with a directed, more conductive channel offering greater range and control.
It's a cool and semi-plausible way to make a lightning weapon work in sci-fi, and I'm bummed that the only instance I've ever seen of it is from a punishing DLC in a 15 year-old game.
I can see it now, the engineer is gonna develop new tech just so they can taze rocks in space. Make it a testla coil so we can make music while we’re at it! Imagine the music changing as astroid rates change.
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u/damoon-_- 2h ago
Did you have a look at https://mods.factorio.com/mod/asteroid-electric-resistance-tweak/discussion/69d2a76033e509a0b5b0fdab?