The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Funny you should ask.  I just finished a project to generate a sortable list of planets, including planetary hazards.  You can see it at http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/List_of_planets (http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/List_of_planets)

Yeah, that's not what I meant. How many hazards per second are there on class 2? Class 3? It seems like there's a huge jump in lighting danger between those two, for instance. What the numbers in that table mean is what I'm getting at.

Ah, well, having just code-dived in that area, I can answer this.  The relevant section of code, for any who are interested, is in planets/lander.c:PlanetSide().

This table gives the chance out of 256 that a hazard is generated; I believe it's called each tick, which, from the comments on PLANET_SIDE_RATE at the top of the file, appears to be 35fps:

Hazard	|1	|2	|3	|4	| 5	| 6	| 7	| 8
Tectonic	|0	|0	|3	|6	|12	|24	|48	| 96
Weather	|0	|0	|3	|6	| 9	|18	|36	| 72
Thermal	|0	|0	|3	|6	|12	|36	|72	|146

Sorry for the ugly format, but the tables this BB system generates are awful, and only moderators can embed raw HTML.

The thermal surface hazard breakpoints that correspond to the above hazard classes are at <50,<100,<150,<250,<350,<550,<800, >=800. For reference, the orbital color breakpoints appear to be <-150, <-50, <50, <150, >=150.

So, what can we learn from the above?

• Hazard levels 1 and 2 are not dangerous at all; the first real dangers start at level 3.
• With a few exceptions, each hazard level is 2-3 times nastier than the one before.
• At equal hazard levels above 5, flames are more frequent than quakes, which are more frequent than lightning.  I believe this is to balance the difficulty of dodging each hazard, so that each hazard class represents approximately equal danger to the lander.
• Once the temperature goes over 800, it doesn't make any difference to the number of flames.

Hope this satisfies your fact-craving!

While very interesting, it's not really worth a sticky is it?

That honestly should be changed.
At least for earthquake and lightning.

level 1 hazard could still have 0 impact but level 2 could be set to 1.
With Earth being an exception to the rule, or just being changed to hazard level 1.

That might be logical, but since the purpose of UQM is to reproduce the original game's behavior (with the exception of clearing unintended bugs), it's not likely to change.

Why bother to worry about Earth's activity? You can't even land on it.

Good point...

Well, it should still be accurate.

Anyway, I see that they didn't bother to balance L3 weather. Its '3' occurrence rate is WAY more dangerous than the others' '3' occurrence rate.

Also, I move that a mod split the relevant part of this thread into 'Star Control II fact #6 - Hazards' or something.