Appearance
Cities and orbitals
- The recent improvements of the city generator are rather nice, but our cities are still just buildings randomly scattered. There's no city structure, no roads, parks, etc. It would be nice to have more natural looking cities, especially if we want to put gameplay in and around the cities a well.
- There could be huge domed cities (either built or shielded), where the player could fly in through some kind of gate. See Cowboy Bebop or G-Police
- Cities could have structure in the sense of distinct industrial, agricultural and residental, and mixes use areas.
- There could be cities around the planets which don't have a dedicated spaceport. But there could be missions there to smaller landing pads. (Like heliports in current IRL cities).
- A question: how space-opera we want regarding spaceports? Right now they are quite on the opera side being in the center of cities. On one hand it is not too realistic, but on the other hand I think it is good that the player sees the cities. So I think I'd lean towards the opera side in this question, at least for small ships. Large ships then could have a dedicated spaceport at the outskirts, but small ships could be allowed to fly around cities. Kinda like how semi-trucks are forbidden from residental areas.
- You can now manually land on orbitals, which opens up lots of possibilities.
Orbitals would benefit from manual landing (Gliese is working on that if I'm correct, the prototype was very cool and a lot of flight-computer plumbing is already done) - There could be smaller orbitals where you'd dock externally. Outposts and such.
- There could be really huge orbitals, proper O'neill's and such, with generated terrain and cityscape. Where you'd fly in through a gate, and land on a proper ground-level port or something similar. Just to give the players something to see. Maybe even those close to city missions could happen in some of them.
- There could be really small outpost style cities/ground ports on low population systems.