Suns going supernova

[Battle_Tyrant]

I was wondering whats the gamers stance on things like if Paradox added something like after some time your sun gos supernova and destroys everything in the solar system, i know it takes billions of years before that happans but i thought it would be a coll nifty little mechanic, granty would be more annnoy then enjoying they could add somthing that can avert the disaster.

What do you think they should or it would be too annoying

[Petrothian]

too annoying. have to consider what an mechanic achieves when putting them in.

and yah can you imagine a dozen stars going supernova?

only time it can happen more than once is maybe in StarTrek Voyuger (wonder if anyone knows the episode I am refering too).

[Battle_Tyrant]

I think the Episode Your talking about involved the Q continuum

[Petrothian]

:D yep.

[Bashumgood]

sounds like a good crittical event chain, with both positiive and negative uitcomes. but i'dd suggest a very low probability for a single star going nova. Detecetion, research options, with random outcomes.

[Sathra]

I think SOTS 2 had this kind of event.
Mostly it was vaguely annoying since it was just one research project to stop it. Or it would kill a star and you had to rad-shield nearby colonies. Can't remember.

The Wandering Star (or whatever) event was more interesting. Unless you were hiver, in which case it was mostly annoying because of the intercept bug.
It would cause Meteor events on all planets along its path. Killed millions or thousands, but could massively increase resource (and therefore production) capacity on those worlds.

[SkyStream]

the only ways I could see Supernovae in this game is via Crisis events. Either a Crisis event that gets triggered when you try doing stuff to your home star giving you only a couple years before it explodes or a Crisis race who destroys stars and feed off the resulting nebulae.
Or if you give it to the players.... a Dangerous weapon tech that causes stars to go boom very fast but kills your relationships with all the other races and cause ALL Fallen Empires to go after you. AKA, YOU become the Crisis event.

[Space Monk]

The timeframe is a few billion years too short for such a feature to be realistic at all.

[beartrap]

Could see it as a crisis event. You stuble upon an old star and you have the option to study it or prepare for the blast. If you study it you could maybe prevent it and gain a new reactor tech.

[Michael]

Originally posted by Trotsky:

The timeframe is a few billion years too short for such a feature to be realistic at all.

I'm not sure what you mean. It takes billions of years for most stars to go nova (if they are big enough in the first place) but that has nothing to do with whether or not it could fit in the timeframe of the game. We're not talking about a star forming, living out its life, and then going supernova during the course of a game. We are just talking about the supernova happening during the game.

If a given star is 4,999,999,950 years old at the start of the game, and would go supernova at the 5 billion mark it would easily fit in the timeframe of a single game.

I'm not sure if it would add much to the game, though.

[Dray Prescot]

Stars that go supernova are only going to live 10 to 30 million years at MOST, i.e. not long enough to form planets and develope life which would require several Billion years at least. The biggest danger (in the real universe) would be one going off in a nearby star system, which could only happen if it formed nearby to begin with, which isn't going to happen near old well established stars because they would drive away or disperse the clouds that the large supernova producing star would have to condense from. At worst you might have a supernova going off several tens of light years away, which would not be good for habitablity of any life bearing planets at that range, but probably survivable.. The above is true of core collapse Supernova.

The other type takes place in a binary star system where mass is being transferred to a white dwarf star and it exceeds the upper limit for the stable mass of a white dwarf. Since it only has the mass of a white dwarf to work with this type of Super Nova will not be as energetic, and will also most likely not take place in a life bearing system, although one could be relatively nearby since these star sytems will take a lot longer to reach the Super Nova stage.

The other thing to keep in mind is that even a large galaxy like the Milky Way only has several super nova going off per century, and the Milky Way is over 100,000 light years across (with about 100 billion stars). It is reasonably possible that during the lifetime (over 4 billion years) of the Solar System that one or more has gone off while the sun was within 30 light years or so.

So if they paid attention to the real universe, supernova would rank really really low on the scale of threatening events.

Nova events would happen several times more often, but they are less energetic, since they also involve mass transfer in binary systems with lower mass white dwarf stars (than the ones that produce supernovas and the white dwarf does not collapse in Novas).

Solar Flares would be a much more realistic threat to life bearing planets, particularly in systems with cool stars and habitable planets closer to their stars than in our Solar System. Collisons with comets and asteroids would also be realistic threats.

The problem with really cool stars and habitable planets is that planets will probably get tidally locked with one side permanently facing the star, which would be VERY bad for habitablity. The best way to avoid that problem would be to orbit a gas giant. However, remember what happened to Jupiter back in 1994 when a comet broke up into many pieces which then hit Jupiter with tremendous force many times over the span of a month or so.. Looking at Jupiter's moons, you can see what happens when those pieces of comets and asteroids come wizzing by your habitable world in orbit of that Jupiter liker gas giant. So again keeping those moons habitable long enough to develope advanced forms of life will be unlikely.

At the other extreme stars that are several times the mass of the sun just do not live for billions of years in a stable state. And that ignores the fact that over half the stars that are formed are in multi star systems, which will have bad affects on formation of habitable planets.