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[Karnewarrior]

I haven't even started foresting yet, actually, I'm waiting for more atmosphere and temprature.

Actually, I'm kind of interested in a mars with 100% atmo, temp, and water, but zero trees... But I'm scared this game might go to sol 400 if I try. We're already halfway there and I'm only at 33% temp...

[Akura]

It's slow going, yeah. I expect they intended you to use several GHG factories and forestry plants to get it done at any speed. Of course, GHG factories use a lot of power and fuel, while forestation uses a lot of space.


Now that I think about it, GHG factories make almost no sense. They use power, yet also burn fuel. Shouldn't they produce power by burning the fuel, and create greenhouse gases as a byproduct? I could accept that they wouldn't produce net power compared to the cost of manufacturing the fuel in the first place, but it shouldn't consume power like that. Secondly, fuel is produced from water + CO₂ taken from the Martian atmosphere(according to description), so how is it creating a greenhouse effect if it's using the CO₂ that's already in the atmosphere? Only the water in that recipe comes from outside the atmospheric system, but even then the water could come from water vaporators(and thus from the atmosphere) rather than underground deposits.

[Il Palazzo]

I'm guessing the idea is that they produce greenhouse gases more potent than CO2. If we were to take the consumables at face value - i.e., only what's in the fuel - then that'd mean methane. But then again that's already what the fuel is (according to description), no need to process it further.
However, if we assume there are some additional, and hidden, resources used, like fluorine or sulphur, that didn't warrant their own resource supply chain, then you can get to four magnitudes more warming than what you'd get if you left the CO2 in the atmosphere, and two to three orders of magnitude more than what you'd get from releasing methane.

[wierd]

I think they imply sulfur, as acidified rain is one of the consequences of doing it to aggressively.

Fluoridated carbon compounds would likewise cause chaos in other ways. Mars already has a significant problem with stellar radiation reaching the surface, adding gasses that actively rip apart ozone molecules with their decay products seems counter-intuitive.


Really, if we are going to keep with the game's themes, I would say terraforming should only be possible *AFTER* completing the 'Goddenberry' missions, since how else are you going to get the equivalent of 1/3 of earth's mass required to make mars heavy enough to sustain an atmosphere thick enough anyway?

The alternative is to dome over the whole damn planet so that you can compress the gas behind a barrier that resists solar particle erosion.


But hey- it's a game. Have fun.

[Il Palazzo]

That bit about Mars not being able to sustain atmosphere is a red (getit?) herring. A somewhat realistic timescale for terraforming is hundreds to thousands of years. The time scale for significant atmosphere loss is on the order of millions of years. It doesn't matter as far as human settlement goes. If it becomes a problem at some point in the future, you just top up the atmosphere using the same processes you used for terraforming in the first place.

[Karnewarrior]

Plus, you use magnetosphere generators for late-game terraforming to prevent atmo erosion. Not everyone gets Goddenberry, some of us have to deal with trading in massive, infinite, labor-free production of rare metals for... like, 100 rare metals.