Evil Tricks

engine damaging mines

don't the mines drift into the hole too?

If they don't that would be awesome.

I've put a frigate with good sensors in a nebula before, and just selectively attacked passing colony ships...not too original but quite effective at limiting enemy colonization.

Mines would indeed head into the black hole as well.

More for roleplay value than strategic use, I've rerouted warp points so it's necessary to go from black hole system to black hole system before getting into my empire's systems in a few games. By the time I can do this, enemies aren't really a threat anymore anyway...but it's a silly way to amuse myself while building up to other things.

It's silly for anything to sucked into a black hole just because it's in the same system with it. Their gravity is no stronger than the star they came from. You could orbit a black hole just like you can orbit a star you just can't see them.

I believe the general concept is that the hole has already sucked in all the planets in the system, thereby increasing its mass well beyond what the original star had.

Also, if it helps, think of it as a zoomed-in view where the warp points are much closer to the 'star' than in a normal system, and the added work on the engines to counter the gravity at that low orbit is why each movement hex represents a smaller distance.

Yeah, yeah, OK, I'll buy it if the system is a lot "smaller" (I mean really, really smaller) when it's a black hole system. The mass of the swallowed planets (how exactly did that happen) would hardly make a difference though. It's phoney, but does add some fun to things .

As the star expanded in its old age, it would engulf the inner planets...their mass, melted/evaporated, would join with the star's original mass. Ok, ok, the planets didn't get sucked in, the star grew outward towards them. Better?

At some point, theoretically, the star would use up enough fuel to collapse down into the ultra-dense core which, again theoretically, is in the middle of a black hole.

The increased gravity effect is much the same as you would get if you put several bricks on a standard mattress. Distributed across the whole thing, there will be small depressions for each one. Put them in a pile in the middle, and you have one huge depression...anything round, placed on the edge of the mattress, would head towards the center. Substitute planets for bricks, and you get the idea.

Yes, you'd have to be darned close to the hole to experience the movement that SE5 gives in those systems. A ship might well get rended apart by the structural strains before it got moved that much. But we're playing a sci-fi game and it's more fun to swirl towards the drain...

Note that Einstein himself didn't like the concept of black holes, but had no better explanation for what he was seeing in his calculations. Human science is still rather far away from studying in depth anything other than the EM spectrum. There are only a few solar neutrino detectors built around the world so far, for instance, and the technology behind them is evolving with each one.

I thought you were implying that the planets were sucked into the black hole. My point was that the mass of the planets wouldn't make much of a difference in the final mass of the black hole (compared to the original star.) I understand how they work. Like you said it's only for fun. BTW, it's NOT fun to lose a fleet to a black hole! LOL!

Watch where you're driving!

My favorite "evil" trick is to build minefields at all my planets. sounds boring so far? I use the Tachyon mines from the Junkyard mod. Sure you can "attack" my planets, but will you be able to do anything afterwards? Another evil trick is to make a fleet composed entirely of small vessels designed solely to capture enemy ships. that works pretty well with the tachyon mines. Cripple their ships, then Hijack them.

My evil trick? Capture other planets by invasion to get their technology. Then, bring in 75-100 million of my species on a freighter, swap out for the alien population, move away and eject the cargo. Mass murder count as evil? Just askin'...

LOL hear this one,
get a cloaked ship with mines that have a cloak
send him into an enemy sys
AND...
deploy the mines in a circle around your ship
Decloak

can you think of what happens next?