Chemical corrosion should be more potent were you have an atmosphere that is conductive to corrosion.

After all chemical corrosion is a chemical reaction that may need the presence of oxygen or some other reactor.

Space could not have the necessary conditions to promote chemical reactions of the corrosive kind.

Also space is cold... more precisely devoid of heat..... so any "chemicals" would be frozen??? Or may lack the necessary energy for the chemical reactions to occur.

Don't compare Terran earthquakes to what you could find in alien worlds.

As another poster said you could find pillars of earth shooting from the ground.

You could have geysers sprouting all of a sudden pushing the ground like a cork from a champagne bottle hitting the lander.

Earthquakes could be radically different than what is experienced here.

But also earth plate tectonics is relatively mild. We only have a few LARGE plates.

But an alien world might have many more plates grinding against each other producing much greater earth movement. Imagine something like a small hill sprouting up all of a sudden and then suddenly disappearing or turning into a valley. Imagine the earth behaving more like blocks of ice on stormy waters.

Radiation could affect the lander because plating for landers will be thinner than for spaceships.

Landers were not designed for prolonged space flight. They were made for terrestrial purposes. Therefore the plating cannot be too thick as it needs to fly in an atmosphere and possible against various gravity forces. Thinner plating and weaker shields would mean that it would be more susceptible to radiation and a very strong radiation source should be able to penetrate the lander shields/plating.

We can have super tornadoes/hurricanes or invisible pressure storms where the atmospheric pressure triples/quadruples either way causing damage to the lander.

Well we're 7 pages in, but just wanted to chime in too.

I like the less serious look, but not a big fan of the stuff jutting way out into space. However if the planets get some more detailed atmospheres I could see this style working out really well once its animated. That silly looking purple planet might look really cool with some crazy colored clouds, etc swirling around the planet.

Personally I'm not a fan of the look. SC 2 and (ahem) 3 had cartoonish elements, they kept with the more scientific/realistic approach to planet appearance. I really like it that way. The original Frontier Elite had a great planet fall ability. I like Spore but its goofy and I don't see SC goofy in that aspect. 

Spathi weren't goofy? Or Utwig with their Ultron?... Please.

Comic relief characters in an otherwise serious game about the fight between slavery, genocide, and freedom. With censored scenes of violence, concubines, and harems.

No the characters were goofy in their own right. That can be attributed to species differences. I remind you of the "Great Insult". However in the aspects of Newtonian physics and planetary physical attributes, I believe that the designers did a great job keeping it close to realistic without making it a burden like the 3000AD series of games or even the original Frontier Elite.   

I give you Planet Bob!

Since i didn't have enough money at the time i received my invitation to the founders party, i'm a bit late to said party.

I for one dislike the cartoony planets and want to have my voice heard on that, but having read these 7 pages on it it seems they are already set in stone.

Any comment on fundamentally changing them get a "we know what we're doing" kind of respsonse, and comments saying "i like it but it needs a bit more of X" gets a response that "X is/might be in the pipeline".

This tells me the only hope we really have if you can use settings so you can switch between cartoony and realistic. 

Some people suggested mods but i dislike having to mod a game just to get it on a level i might enjoy.

Oh well, i already paid so i'll be getting the game anyway, but so far being a founder doesn't seem to be very meaningful to me.

For what it's worth, i would like to point out this quote by Vaelzad on the first page:

What is the point of exploring a solar system when you can tell what planet is the unique one just by looking at the map? Why are you procedurally generating 100's of planets when we can, according to your explanation on this new way of displaying planets, pick the one we want to visit and ignore the others?

In SC2 i found some rainbow planets by exploring, others by paying for the information. In the reboot i will apparently just have to enter a system and look at the planets? 

Forcing the player to visit every planet was not tedious when i played SC2, no. 

Oversimplifying is far worse in my book.

The interesting element of this is that the planet types were color coded in Star Control 2. You could actually know what subset of planet types they were by looking at their color and their position in the solar system. Granted the system was not very clear at all, and that is what ultimately is the question. Do we remove the system completely to decide if you wanted to visit the planet or not? If we don't remove it we need to improve it to make it useful. If we don't remove it, is just navigating to each planet in a solar system fun or is it just tedious? If it's just tedious is there something that can be added to it to make it a fun experience. I'll say that right now this decision hasn't been 100% locked down and is still open for debate and change. Also, just seeing the type doesn't communicate what is on the planet's surface. So even a boring looking planet may have something interesting hiding on it. 

For your question, i can only answer for myself: i personally did not find having to visit each planet tedious (and again, the story gave lots of hints on specific planets or at least solar systems to visit). As i was 13 at the time i cannot remember ever reading an actual review but none of my friends ever complained about it either.

I am glad to hear that the design not 100% locked down and that there will probably still be incentive to visit other (hopefully all) planets in a system.

Since some are indeed happy with the cartoony look my hope is that it will end up as a setting that can be changed based on player preference, however i know of course that this means extra work for you guys and might be wishful thinking.

Also, reading my own comment back it's sad to realize that my first post here was pretty much just negativity, so to balance it out i'd like to say that i absolutely loved the Mukay movie in the vault, felt like it would have fitted right in with SC2's alien species

Basically, you've just answered that we have to look at all planets in a system.

When I visit a system in SC2 I explore every single planet. Why? 'Cause you never know what secrets any planet can hold. Color coding or not makes zero difference in fun levels to me. It's fun to explore new places, period. It's fun to meet unexpected. Even if I knew that some planet is too hot to land on, I'd still go there even just to scan it.

Is navigation tedious? Sure, but sometimes you meet aliens on your way, so the mechanic needs to be there. Maybe you need to expand on THAT. Like going through asteroid/mine field mini-game to reach some planets or blowing up some abandoned asteroid point defenses that block your access to its surface abandoned outpost. Like fighting a space monster (mini-boss fight) that didn't like the color of your exhaust openings. Like collecting parts (useful or not isn't known until you analyse them) around blown-up to bits Star Destroyer ship of unknown origins which decaying orbit promises amazing fireworks in an hour.

That's kinda fun I'd like my navigation to be spiced up with. Color/visual coding planets to entice player to visit it or not makes no difference to me. After those kinda events I wanna relax and just stroll through a peaceful vacuum enjoying a nice, relaxing space soundtrack and not being harassed by ugly Vux.

You know what part of the fun is? I know there are a lot that will disagree with me, but to contrast my earlier sentiment about those "Oh my god, TREASURE PLANET!" moments, there's also those "I spent 15 units of fuel to come to this 1-planet system, and all it has are cyans? Bada nana- BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! (That's uh...that's the 'Price is Right' failure ditty.)" But you can't help but laugh at yourself and move on to another system.

I definitely think you should have some idea of what each planet is generally like just from looking at them on the solar system map.  At least it's general type, giving you an idea of how hostile the environment might be.  System defenses would hint at some type of life on the planet.  I think conveying the most basic and general information about each planet visually is a must have type of thing.  You wouldn't want the player to enter every solar system and have nothing to tell them anything at all about any of the planets... 9 grey balls in every system would be a bad thing.

But conveying only the most basic information like type of planet, atmosphere or not, a hint at what the environment might be like, and it anyone might live there.  This provides the best of both worlds, giving the player a lot of information about the solar system as a whole while still requiring players like Hunam to visit every world for the same reasons they did in the first game.

I liked the colour coding and distance hints in SC2.  I was pretty happy once I figured it out.  It's a good system imo.  It's subtle enough for the folks who like to explore every planet, but gives enough info for people that just want to hunt exotics.

I think you should keep the system in and make it more useful. There's nothing stopping someone from exploring every planet if they want to.

I personally felt that the planetary exploration became tedious after a point. I wish I had a way to skip it once I got closer to end-game.

The idea of scanners from a previous thread would come into play here. I'd eventually like to scan a whole system at once, rather than go planet-by-planet. (And I could still go planet-by-planet if I really wanted to.)

^ The reason it becomes tedious is 'cause there's not much variety of stuff to explore. After an hour of playtime it's the same 9 red, green, blue, gray, yellow etc. planets. With "limitless" capabilities of the current H/W it is possible to expand on that and make it 25 planets with 5 super rare types and add other 25 rare cosmic phenomena that'll entice system visitation. Make an achievement for it and it'll actually make sense to explore eveything even after the main story is done.

This is a good idea for the devs to keep in mind,  If it turns out that exploring planets becomes boring/annoying at a certain point in the players progression, this could be used to resolve that issue.  You give the player "end game scanners" that remove the need to explore planets individually once that has passed the phase where that is what the player is doing.

Finding a balance of realistic and cartoony is kinda of hard, but doable!

- Shade A.I

Yes, SC2 did it, but i just figured something, they did it the other way round (from what i've seen so far at this early stage, of course).

In SC2 traveling the universe (space, solar systems, planets) and even combat was kind of realistic (except for bouncing of a planet tiny compared to your ship), then you talked to alien races and they were very cartoony, yet the story was, to me, so deep and engaging it didn't seem like a cartoon at all, yes the Spathi and Pkunk were funny, but the Kohr-Ah were about to sweep the galaxy killing everything in it's path and, if you took too long with the game, this was not idle threat but actually happened.

With planetary landings in SC2 i personally always had the idea that you landed on a section of the planet and were not in fact going completely around the planet when going off one end of the screen and reappearing on the other side, but that this was just a way of avoid getting stuck/trapped like pac-man games had.

Now having looked again at the concept art in the vault, it looks like the planets as they are are not just cartoony representations for the planets we visit, but are actually so small that you can go around them in your lander in not much time.

This, to me, breaks something fundamental in the perception of the game, going, in my opionion, too much in the direction of cartoony/unrealistic for everything.

It's early days yet, of course (can't say that enough), but while the new SC might end up very enjoyable, if it ends up in a fully cartoony universe it will just not be the "real" SC universe that i've come to love.

This al seems very negative of me once again, i'm sorry, i'm not trying to be but it's really hard to put into words why the cartoony planets feel so wrong to me.

I can only hope everyone can see it less as me whining about it and more as me being passionate about the roots of SC and hoping the new game will be just as great as SC2 was or even surpass it, while still being recognisable as a SC game.

I'm not super fond of comical cartoon style art. In that I don't like it much.

I do get why this MUST have an attractive distinctive style. But if those planetary nubs were dialed down a bit.. until say a ship comes in for a closer look, then I would be less concerned.

All that being said, and obviously iterated on for the last 7 pages for both sides of the perspective. All you can do is take a look and see how it feels. We'll provide feedback and be a single point of data for the dev's to use.

Resurrecting this for new founders.

It's not necessary to bring back old threads. 

Let sleeping dogs lie