References to shipping offworld to Earth seem odd, surely only asteroids?

from Offworld Forums

Some of the descriptions of shipping offworld and the offworld market refer to both Earth and the asteroids. Shipping oxygen and food to the asteroids certainly makes sense, but surely not Earth? It seems extremely hard to imagine any of these resources being economically produced on Mars and then shipped to Earth at a profit. The game doesn't have much back story, but other colonys in the asteroids is easy to imagine, and production on Mars shipping to them makes sense, why not just stick with that?

 

Yes, I know this is an incredibly minor point. Just amuses me whenever I see the text.

10,623 views 1 replies
Reply #1 from Offworld Forums Top

If you want to be very strict:

  • Rockets that launch should start tilting over immediately because to get in orbit rockets need horizontal velocity, not vertical velocity. Even if rockets go for mars-escape velocity, going to orbit first is still the most efficient. They would also need to be launched into specific directions depending on the target orbit (let's just say pre-escape orbit). On earth rockets go up first because the lower atmosphere is too thick to go fast, Mars does not have this problem as much.
  • The atmosphere is too thin to generate enough power to really power anything practical unless dust storms kick up the windspeed to near mars-transonic speeds (200-250m/s)
  • Mars rockets (assuming they use liquid oxygen and hydrogen as fuel) would use about 160 units of fuel to launch 100 units of cargo into orbit, and more to ship to beyond mars.
  • Fuel blimps should be massively sized, because hydrogen (from electrolysis) takes a lot of volume per mass unit. Steel would take 10x the fuel to ship because it is a lot more dense and the containers are a lot smaller.
  • For that matter, suborbital rockets using suborbital trajectories would be a lot more efficient and faster for shipping, because continually hovering with down pointing thrust is awfully inefficient.
  • By mass, electrolysis reactors would produce 8x more oxygen than fuel.
  • About 2x the oxygen from electrolysis is excess oxygen because the Stochio 
  • Farms while frozen/off would continue to produce a little food during the day because sunlight is still coming in.
  • Micrometeorites would with some frequency destroy farms and other window-dependent structures.
  • Solar panels would produce variable amounts of electricity depending on the time of day, facing, angle of attack and the varying distance between mars and the sun.
  • Mars is not be made up of plateaus separated by cliffs without any slopes. If OTC mars has slopes trucks would be a lot more viable than fuel powered rockets or blimps.
  • Blimps (floating on lighter than mars-air) do not exist on mars because the air is lighter than any solid material so the naming convention doesn't apply.
  • Colonies wouldn't have to continually use oxygen, because it can be recycled from CO2 with proven technologies.

I probably missed a few, but these are the ones off the top of my head.

Just saying.