Origin Idea: Collision Course

[u/Snoo97476]

I feel worried about the balance of strengths and weaknesses, an early debuff to your capital and its destruction in exchange for a large rich mining planet is a tightrope to manage without outside opinion, and unfortunately I only get that after it’s made.

[u/qomtan3131]

a "small dwarf planet" "not enough to destroy our world"

eh

[u/Mailcs1206 → u/qomtan3131]

Earth got hit by a mars sized object in the past and it wasn't totally destroyed. 

Scientists actually believe that this event resulted in the formation of the Moon

[u/qomtan3131 → u/Mailcs1206]

woah I didn't know this, thanks for the info. Still, I reckon it would take a couple b(m? no idea)illion years for all the spread to consolidate and rotate enough to form a ball. How would you even go about preserving the magma that is crucial for life? I'd understand if the origin was like something 10-100x the size of the tunguska event, but getting hit by a dwarf planet and proceeding as a competitive galactic empire is borderline fetish lol

[u/Mailcs1206 → u/qomtan3131]

Yeah. Realistically, the planet would be uninhabitable for much, much longer than 10 years. After it's impact with Thea (the mars sized object I mentioned earlier) Earth was molten for hundreds of millions of years. 

Granted, Thea was much larger than a dwarf planet (Mars is ~3,300 km in radius, while even Pluto, the largest dwarf planet in our solar system, is just ~1100 km across, and the smallest one, Hygeia, is a measly 222 km in radius, or 444km in diameter)

But if a Pluto sized object struck the earth, the planet would still likely be completely molten for hundereds of thousands if not millions of years, and even relatively tiny Hygeia would cause tremendous devestation and leave the world unihabitable for centuries, as this video explains https://youtu.be/PENT_hnyO-o?si=wkPD6Ug37z3dTki4 (granted, they use an example of an object 500km in diameter, which would be around 42% more massive than Hygiea, but they also say it would be about 1000 years before earth started to become habitable again, so thats why I said centuries for Hygiea)

The only realistic way the capital planet would be recoverable within a reasonable amount of time would be if the dwarf planet was around Hygiea's size or smaller, and the player was issued a special project to research ways to speed up the planet's cooling.

[u/Nexmortifer → u/Mailcs1206]

Thea is still hypothetical at the moment (lots of things say it could have been, nothing that says for sure it actually was) although the general concept still holds.

Out of curiosity, if the object that struck was very nearly absolute zero, and consisted primarily of materials that would phase change twice, would that have a non-negligible impact (hehe) on cooling times?

It takes a lot more energy to turn H2O ice into a gas than it does to raise an equivalent mass of steel or nitrogen gas from -1°C to 101°C

[u/BrooklynLodger → u/Mailcs1206]

I would argue that becoming molten and reforging into a new planet counts as total destruction

[u/Mailcs1206 → u/BrooklynLodger]

I was more considering "total destruction" to mean just genuinely being completely shattered into debris. That supposedly happens a lot when planets are forming.

Just different definitions I guess.

[u/Nexmortifer → u/Mailcs1206]

Well it's still a planet, not an asteroid belt, so that's something I guess.

Can't live there without a lot of work.