Subsurface Heating Tech should be available from the start

[rittstar]

what do you think how should the system desinged, share your thoughts, listen to this

first of all, all depends your situation on Mars

some players avoid cold wave desasters and/or cold zones by choosing their spot wisely

>>and this tech becomes obsolete and its nothing more then wasted research time just to open the next tech slot.. all for a building you dont need at all

some players want new challenges and choose specifically a cold spot or even harder masochist players want to land their first rocket on that cold icy place on that nice mountain top, and/or choose game rule COLD WAVE guaranteed to have this everywhere

>>the tech is absolutely essential for the real cool looking icy cold zones and should not been researched first, and if you are unlucky you dont see it for a while or maybe never

the building is already expensive enough to build, to research it first is hard, where it can be that you have to research for a long time without even seeing it on the table

i mean humankind is watching Mars since decades very closely, we know how cold it can be and how to avoid it before we decide to go there

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solution, make this tech/building available from the start, you could change the tech itself to something like reduce energy/water/buildingcost or increase working range, something like that.. not that much of a big change in my opinion

what do you think how should the system desinged, share your thoughts, listen to this

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

Theres a lot of early techs that feel, like they decided that all branches should have the same number of techs, then got too many on one feild and had to add more to balance things out.

Between needing a tech for bulldosing, the way high tech vertical farms are less productave than a standard farm and having to reinvent the wheel to get basic production facualtestheres a lot of busiy work in the low boughs of the tech tree.

 

[SillySMS]

I disagree with most of the points here.

1) Subsurface heaters are not necessary for cold maps. So long as you can keep up with the higher electricity consumption, have sufficient excess water production to buffer any pipe leaks, have infirmaries to deal with sanity losses, and keep your outdoor production running with at least 1 nightshift worker, it doesn't even really do any damage except to your water towers. I've run coldwave-maps several times and run without any subsurface heaters through the first 1-2 coldwaves.

2) This adds a gameplay decision for coldwave maps: do you invest the science to research subsurface heaters and then invest into the resources to run them, or do you just mitigate it? Otherwise, new players may just blindly think they need subsurface heaters everywhere.

3) While less relevant to maps without coldwaves, it's not the only situational technology that can just be a research roadbump. The tech to reduce workers needed for fusion reactors becomes useless with the Eternal Fusion breakthrough. Dust repulsion isn't terribly useful if you're running primarily other energy-producing buildings. Fueled extractors is... honestly mostly just useless in my experience. This is part of why there are anomalies to open up research opportunities.

4) It's gameplay. Playing on maps with cold waves or cold spots is supposed to be hard.

5) No amount of knowing about it beforehand will stop the fact that Mars can get extremely cold, more than cold enough to freeze up machines to the point at which they need repair unless everything is kept warm... which requires input of energy. About the one silly thing about it is that you can't just install electrical heating elements to keep things warm... and a lot of the aboveground buildings could be built to lose heat very, very slowly*.

*Three things spring to mind: heavy multi-layer insulation, white paint (to minimize radiation losses), and raising everything a bit above the ground to remove direct conduction losses.

6) Switching over to the complaint about farms: the point of going from hydroponics to regular farms is that going from Martian soil to something you can actually farm in is far harder than portrayed in The Martian. There's a lot of stuff in the soil like perchlorates that have to be removed before growing large amounts of crops. Hydroponic farms avoid this by not dealing with Martian soil... at the cost of being much more in the way of machinery and power than a regular farm.

7) If it makes things more sensible, just pretend the farms in Surviving Mars are actually multi-story farms just like the hydroponics, and that you're just changing from growing in water to growing in soil. The only reason that isn't done on Earth is that it's easier to move sideways onto more farmland than vertically... but with dome space at a premium, and the facts that you need to supplement natural sunlight and remediate the soil anyways...

In general, remind yourself that many of the early techs are not supposed to represent inventing the necessary technology... it's about figuring out how to do it on Mars with Martian resources, without importing it from Earth. Catalysts made from rare materials, high-performance machine tools, complicated alloys, microcontrollers, high-precision instruments, all of these things are hard to make.

On Earth, it's not a problem, since you can have FedEx overnight-ship a proprietary microcontroller made only by one factory in Belgium, have a 5 mL bottle of acrylonitrile hydratase shipped, have a high-performance turbine made out of some ridiculous alloy like inconel shipped to you. An NMR machine? Buy one. Electron microscopes? Buy them.

On Earth, globalization has permitted easy purchase of an incredible variety of specialty goods that are often needed in just tiny amounts... but God help you if you can't get that specialty good. Smoke detectors are built by the millions, but each (at least of the ionization kind) requires a tiny amount of americium-241, which is only made in nuclear reactors, requiring an expensive separation process. Cheap and economical here on Earth, because Earth consumes enough americium-241 to justify having a small industry around its production. Not so on Mars, where you would need to build some very elaborate equipment that goes largely unused because the entire colony needs less than a milligram per year.

The early tech tree in Surviving Mars is in part figuring out "okay, we can't just buy Specialty Part 4038A, how do we either make 4038A or do without it?". Really, this is the most unrealistic part of the game: to keep a high-tech industrial base going, you need more specialty goods than there are Martian colonists; it would be effectively impossible to sustain a Martian colony at a decent standard of living without regular shipments from Earth.

8) While the decommission protocol is mostly a gameplay conceit, it is not a trivial thing. On Earth, plenty of high explosives to assist in demolishing buildings. On Mars? Are you going to produce small quantities of explosives locally? Are you going to stuff hundreds of kilograms of dynamite into a very very expensive rocket? Are you going to try to figure out how to cut the supports just enough so that a drone can pull on a cable and bring it all down, specifically not on top of said drone?

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

Heres the thing about the farms though, 2 things. Firstly yes theres issues with soil chemiustry, too much iron, too many percholates, peroxides in the top soil an utter derth of nitrates no organics to add crumb and structure, concerns over the effects on cell walls of silicate fines (I'm a geologist I can go on about this) but, I can go on about this. These are known problems, no one is shlepping out to a plannet where the summer high is more drect than a scottish winter thinking they can pop some radishes in natave dust and chow down. These are really all issues that should be solved before touch down.

Secondly the vertical hydropponic farms that are the worst option? well on earth theres projects where we have vertical farms using LED light that are producing 350 times more food per unit of area than conventional farms for some crops. They shold not be the craptastic never actually adiquate b plan. ( random citation of a project in indiahttps://www.thebetterindia.com/79003/ajay-naik-goa-hydroponic-farm-software-engineer/ ) multi-level hydroppnics are far far more productave and space efficent than the game gives credit for.

 

[SillySMS]

Heres the thing about the farms though, 2 things. Firstly yes theres issues with soil chemiustry, too much iron, too many percholates, peroxides in the top soil an utter derth of nitrates no organics to add crumb and structure, concerns over the effects on cell walls of silicate fines (I'm a geologist I can go on about this) but, I can go on about this. These are known problems, no one is shlepping out to a plannet where the summer high is more drect than a scottish winter thinking they can pop some radishes in natave dust and chow down. These are really all issues that should be solved before touch down.

Secondly the vertical hydropponic farms that are the worst option? well on earth theres projects where we have vertical farms using LED light that are producing 350 times more food per unit of area than conventional farms for some crops. They shold not be the craptastic never actually adiquate b plan. ( random citation of a project in indiahttps://www.thebetterindia.com/79003/ajay-naik-goa-hydroponic-farm-software-engineer/ ) multi-level hydroppnics are far far more productave and space efficent than the game gives credit for.

A lot of that argument misses several things:

1) If you compare per-tile yields, hydroponic farms are actually quite comparable to regular farms. Per tile, hydroponic farms running leaf crops produce 1 food/sol, costing 1 colonist, 0.2 water, and 1.7 electricity. Regular farms growing a soy/potato rotation run at 0.95 food/sol, costing 0.6 colonist and 0.44 water per tile. While in practice regular farms will become more productive per tile once you improve the soil, hydroponics is quite space-competitive and water-competitive, with the primary drawback being that it's more labor-intense, rather realistic considering the sheer amount of machinery necessary for a hydroponics farm.

2) The soil adaptation technology is not "put plant in ground", it's "make the ground". Doing so in bulk and troubleshooting problems with it is a significant technical challenge, one that becomes much easier if you have botanists on-site. An early Mars colony, supported by hydroponics farms and shipments from Earth, is by far the best place to figure out how to remediate Martian regolith into usable soil.

3) The sort of crops grown in hydroponic farms usually have a very low caloric content. Not so much of a problem in the industrialized parts of Earth, where people are eating too many calories anyways... at least so long as they're being careful not to add 1000 calories' worth of croutons, salad dressing, and meat to 200 calories' worth of leaf vegetables, anyways. On Mars, where space is at a premium, you are going to have to be very concerned about growing enough calories. The one staple crop that might be amenable to hydroponic farming I can think of is rice. I know that's done in some research labs, but I have no idea how that compares to traditional rice farming in terms of caloric yield per unit area.

4) There is no theoretical reason why you can't build a regular, soil-based farm on top of another soil-based farm. It'd be absurd here on Earth, because then you have to put artificial lighting in for the lower layers, support tons of soil and crops above the ground level, and essentially steal tons of farmable soil from another plot of land, versus the sensible idea of just plowing the acre of farmland you would've taken the soil from. However, those economics change radically for a theoretical Mars colony. You need supplemental lighting anyways, you need to remediate the regolith into farmable soil anyways, and the structural supports can be built much lighter thanks to weaker gravity and negligible winds.

5) There is a very good chance that high-calorie staple crops like wheat, corn, etc. are generally more efficient at utilizing an acre of sunlight than typical hydroponic plants... and when every acre of sunlight costs you ~20 acres* of solar panels to generate, that counts. And yes, this realistically means soil farms on Mars really should consume electricity just like the hydroponics farms... a lot of electricity.

*Sunlight at Mars is about 1/3 as strong as at Earth, and I am pretty sure typical solar panels are about 15% efficient at converting sunlight to electricity. That works out to a 20:1 ratio of solar panels to Earth-level sunlight you can generate.

6) Taking a look at that article, the hydroponics racks for lettuce tend to be very closely spaced. You'd need bigger separation for even dwarf variants of your staple grains... they simply grow too tall.