Realistic-style mod

Post by **dandandaman** » Tue Jul 22, 2003 3:04 am

MKruer wrote:The carbon nanotube idea would be analogous to trying to protect a ships with nylon string. Its possible but you would need one hell of a ball. So from my stand point its not practical.

Not if it is done right (we don't have the tech to make it now, but this *is* in the not too distant future). Great strides are being made in all types of materials science these days. New super strong alloys have been found recently (in japan?), carbon nanotube reinforcement is already used in many (albeit expensive and specific) not to mention the new polymers etc that keep getting created

Manufacturing of these, specifically the nanotubes, is also bound to only increase in quality and productivity (welll, most likely), so it makes sense that in 100 or so years, nanotube cables will be possible of the type envisioned

Dan.a

if you want some links to some of this stuff I could find for you...no time now

Post by **mkruer** » Tue Jul 22, 2003 3:19 am

dandandaman wrote:
MKruer wrote:The carbon nanotube idea would be analogous to trying to protect a ships with nylon string. Its possible but you would need one hell of a ball. So from my stand point its not practical.
Not if it is done right (we don't have the tech to make it now, but this *is* in the not too distant future). Great strides are being made in all types of materials science these days. New super strong alloys have been found recently (in japan?), carbon nanotube reinforcement is already used in many (albeit expensive and specific) not to mention the new polymers etc that keep getting created Manufacturing of these, specifically the nanotubes, is also bound to only increase in quality and productivity (welll, most likely), so it makes sense that in 100 or so years, nanotube cables will be possible of the type envisioned

Dan.a

if you want some links to some of this stuff I could find for you...no time now

Sure I am always interested in increasing my knowledge on the subject. But I still think the outcome would be the same. They could be using carbon nonotube casings on the missile/torp. In which case even when it hit it would still penetrate. The best solution might just be to reinforce the hull

DiGuru · Post by **DiGuru** » Tue Jul 22, 2003 3:20 am

PeteyG wrote:
DiGuru wrote:If we want to be able to use fighters, we need shields and some inertial supressing thingy to make them handle like airplanes and not make the pilot into some wallpaper, and we cannot use computers, we have to make weaponry into toys for the damage they do...
I disagree strongly. We just need to use a little creativity to make it work.
To handle the G forces: (which don't even need to be SUPER high) Pilots suspended in liquid! nano-hardened internal organs! or something!

Sure. It can be done. We make the rules after all, so anything we want can be. If we want humans to be Godly, never die, being strong as a robot, all owning their own planet and be Emperor, all having more resources than the whole Earth as it is today, having the power to destroy a solar system just by wishing it, that can be done. Why not? Easy. We make the rules.

On computers: There are many many disadvantages to relying solely on remote or automated technology. There are many bonuses to computer aided human control.

True. But why use computers or fighters in the first place? If people never die and can blow up planets if they want to, why would they need computers or fighters in the first place? They would be redundant.

Weapons: Who says weapons have to be hideously overpowered? Not me. Fighters are fine just as long as we make sure lasers aren't the Ultimate Weapon.

True. But we can make humans the Ultimate Weapon!

DiGuru wrote:But do we stop there? We want engines to use power to accelerate, and stop us when we release that power, don't we? We want space to behave like the air around us! And it is too large! It should be small! And empty, no nasty collisions!
No! Fighters don't need to be that way. We just gotta balance it. And with some limited jump capability, there's no excuse why ships shouldn't get close enough to be in danger of bumping into each other.

Hm. That's hard. We want fighters to be the ultimate fighting machines? How are we going to balance them? By making fighters unable to destroy planets? Or suns? Or... what? Capital ships?

Ok. We want large ships to take longer to destroy by a solitary fighter. And planets would take even longer. Suns would be really hard.

DiGuru wrote:And that's it. We only need some kind of jump engine. All other things we could want, exist today. And that's the goal for this mod.
Well... surely we could take into account reasonable advances in technology over the next x years until the time the mod is set. I mean, we all know that technology won't freeze between now and the future. We'll come up with new alloys for hull construction, new biotechnology, maybe even a little bit of fusion... we just don't want to go crazy and develop shields, holodecks, or transporters or something.

Sure. No problem. Everything can be done if we want it. I would like to be all powerfull. That would be easy. And I would want other players to be just so-so. Hm. Or would I? Wat would be the fun?

DiGuru wrote:That is, unless we require fighters...
We should. I'm telling you, we should.

Sorry I was a bit sarcastic in the above post. That wasn't personal. But where is the border? What do we sacrifice to make fighters possible? Well, most other space sims did so, so we have ample choosings. Do we want one more? Or would it be best not to bother making another one?

DiGuru · Post by **DiGuru** » Tue Jul 22, 2003 3:22 am

PeteyG, it is your department, if you truly want it to be like that, we will do it. That's why I was so brutal. You decide about this.

DiGuru · Post by **DiGuru** » Tue Jul 22, 2003 3:31 am

Ok, MKruer. I won't bother you again. I will not say that something is realistic, while it differs from Rylix. Everyone knows that Rylix is The Mod!!!

If you say so, it is good. If I say something else, I'm lying.

Sorry.

Rylix is The Only Way to Go! There is nothing else! All other things are crap or competition that has to be removed!

Hm. Sorry. Had to say it at some time. Here it comes: You're an Admin. You can do whatever you want with the board. We have to agree with you. We have no choice.

Sorry again. I do mean it. But whatever I (or we) say, you will say that Rylix does that better. It doesn't matter.

WE KNOW.

Do you think it is possible to do something that is not Rylix as well?

DiGuru · Post by **DiGuru** » Tue Jul 22, 2003 3:59 am

Sorry. I probably shouldn't have done the last few posts. I think I'll go to sleep. Tomorrow is another day.

peteyg · Post by **peteyg** » Tue Jul 22, 2003 4:03 am

DiGuru wrote:blah blah blah

d00d! d0n'7 83 a l4/\/\3r! $3r1|_|zly!!

I did mention in that last post of mine that we must be careful and not go crazy on the future technology. The line is drawn where things start to get too 'Star Trek'. Or at least, that's the standard that I've been thinking of. Sprinkling in of some hard scifi to grease the wheels and make things work (like a little bit of jump drive) is okay.

DiGuru: Don't worry about it.

Post by **mkruer** » Tue Jul 22, 2003 5:03 am

DiGuru wrote:Ok, MKruer. I won't bother you again. I will not say that something is realistic, while it differs from Rylix. Everyone knows that Rylix is The Mod!!!

If you say so, it is good. If I say something else, I'm lying.

Sorry.

Rylix is The Only Way to Go! There is nothing else! All other things are crap or competition that has to be removed!

Hm. Sorry. Had to say it at some time. Here it comes: You're an Admin. You can do whatever you want with the board. We have to agree with you. We have no choice.

Sorry again. I do mean it. But whatever I (or we) say, you will say that Rylix does that better. It doesn't matter.

WE KNOW.

Do you think it is possible to do something that is not Rylix as well?

I might be an Admin but I am not the project lead. hellcat would ultimately decide. I am just factoring in that fact there are only so many people working on this "sim" and you should not deviate from the fundamental truth. People flock here because they want to return to the first person shooters. True that they also want a twist, but what you are inferring is to make a strategy game. There are many other engines out there that would be much better suited to this then VegaStrike

But as hellcat keeps telling me, if you want it, you do it.

On the lighter side of things PeteyG and I have come up with a good solution as to the back history of Rlyix that. That mean that we should be able to get two mods for one. Then people will find out how much is sucks to be stuck in an older ship.

Shrike · Post by **Shrike** » Wed Jul 23, 2003 4:50 am

MKruer wrote:Last thing on stealth. If I am over rating it then everyone else in severely under rating it. Perhaps it is because you donâ€™t full understand how it works.

Well, I know fully well how it works today in real life. If you are referring to some made-up "future stealth" that I haven't read about yet, then I probably wouldn't be aware of how it's supposed to work.

Stealth is just a technique to overcome certain kinds of sensors, such as radar, or audio. Airplanes try to be stealthy in the areas of radar and heat, while submarines are more concerned with audio. An F-22 stealth fighter may be quite stealthy in the heat and radar spectrum, but it's loud as all hell. A submarine might be quiet as a mouse, but it's still a huge magnetic anomoly.

And any sort of stealth technology will have some way around it. To refer back to your earlier example, no matter how quiet a submarine may be, it's still going to show up when nailed with active pinging.

Obviously, if I'm in a gigantic CapShip, I'm not going to be nearly so concerned about being stealthy as someone trying to sneak up on my six in a kamikaze rig, so I'll just fire up the Aegis and spew a 100 million watts of energy in all directions if that is what it takes.

Stealth has it's place, but it's really not going to help much against massive, crushing brute force detection methods.

And really, does the Destroyer give a damn about running active pinging when it's on the trail of a sub? Not at all. Sure a sub will know precisely where that destroyer is, but it won't be able to get close enough to do jack about it.

Shrike · Post by **Shrike** » Wed Jul 23, 2003 5:26 am

MKruer wrote:Ok where to start. Ah lets try realism.

Here is realism for you. In the future the real future, do think that a private citizen could even own their own ship. Not likely, even corporations would find it difficult to own anything substantially larger then a shuttle.

Woops! You are projecting the future, but failing to take the future into account when you do it.

According to Drexler in chaper four of "Engines of Creation" (the last sentence in the chapter):

http://www.foresight.org/EOC/EOC_Chapter_4.html

"Assemblers will be able to make virtually anything from common materials without labor, replacing smoking factories with systems as clean as forests. They will transform technology and the economy at their roots, opening a new world of possibilities. They will indeed be engines of abundance."

Using nanotech assemblers will bring the cost of manufacturing anything down to roughly the cost of the raw materials. What costs 20 billion dollars to produce today, will cost 20 dollars to produce in a few decades. It won't cost anything to take a handful of disassemblers/assemblers and toss them on an asteroid and come back in a month or two to pick up your new ship.

The greatest expense will probably be the intellectual property expense of licensing someone's ship/engine/whatever design. Still, I'm willing to bet there will be some really bitchin open source designs out there, free for anyone to download and use.

100 years ago, there were prople predicting that cars would be too expensive for the common man to own. Henry Ford blew them away. The same will happen with space.

FlyingAce · Post by **FlyingAce** » Wed Jul 23, 2003 5:31 am

I WANT MY NANOBOTS! the problem w/ nanobots, is someone could infect evryone in the world w/ "biological maintainer" bots that sopposedly keep u healthier, (i.e. clean out arteries), but can be made to simulate a heart attack at the push of a button.

(HEHE, off topic

)

Shrike · Post by **Shrike** » Wed Jul 23, 2003 5:42 am

FlyingAce wrote:I WANT MY NANOBOTS! the problem w/ nanobots, is someone could infect evryone in the world w/ "biological maintainer" bots that sopposedly keep u healthier, (i.e. clean out arteries), but can be made to simulate a heart attack at the push of a button.

I think I'm more scared of someone releasing a rogue nano that does gene sequencing and then disassembles anyone who doesn't match a certain profile. The Japanese are right up there in the top 3 in the nanotech race, and I just can't get over the feeling that they've never quite forgiven us for that whole "nuke" thing. Those are not people who forget something like that easily, and they've been kicking ass for as long as anyone.

EDIT: w00t 256 posts!

Post by **mkruer** » Wed Jul 23, 2003 7:09 am

Shrike wrote:Well, I know fully well how it works today in real life. If you are referring to some made-up "future stealth" that I haven't read about yet, then I probably wouldn't be aware of how it's supposed to work.

Stealth is just a technique to overcome certain kinds of sensors, such as radar, or audio. Airplanes try to be stealthy in the areas of radar and heat, while submarines are more concerned with audio. An F-22 stealth fighter may be quite stealthy in the heat and radar spectrum, but it's loud as all hell. A submarine might be quiet as a mouse, but it's still a huge magnetic anomoly.

And any sort of stealth technology will have some way around it. To refer back to your earlier example, no matter how quiet a submarine may be, it's still going to show up when nailed with active pinging.

Obviously, if I'm in a gigantic CapShip, I'm not going to be nearly so concerned about being stealthy as someone trying to sneak up on my six in a kamikaze rig, so I'll just fire up the Aegis and spew a 100 million watts of energy in all directions if that is what it takes.

Stealth has it's place, but it's really not going to help much against massive, crushing brute force detection methods.

Could not have said a better myself, but your 100 million watts in all directions would be like try to light a cathedral with a single candle given the distances. Even if you were using EMP the damming effects would still be limited to a few thousands of kilometers. In the end space is just too massive to brute force ping away. You would literally need millions upon millions of ships just to cover a system, that that does not necessarily mean that you would find what you are looking for anyway.

Shrike wrote:And really, does the Destroyer give a damn about running active pinging when it's on the trail of a sub? Not at all. Sure a sub will know precisely where that destroyer is, but it won't be able to get close enough to do jack about it.

What you say is more the exception then the rule. The sub probably got caught with the preverbal, pants down. When it comes to hunting the sub has the advantage one on one, thatâ€™s why the ships have to have huge support craft because if it was one on one, and it was war, (shoot first ask questions later) the ship would have been sunk? Need proof? Go back to WWII a handful of subs sunk more then half of all the ships. the other thing is that a sub vs a ship is not really a good comparison anyway. A better one would be a sub vs a sub. And in this case the one who is more quite and can sneak upon there enemy usually wins.

Post by **mkruer** » Wed Jul 23, 2003 7:45 am

Shrike wrote:[Woops! You are projecting the future, but failing to take the future into account when you do it.

According to Drexler in chaper four of "Engines of Creation" (the last sentence in the chapter):

http://www.foresight.org/EOC/EOC_Chapter_4.html

"Assemblers will be able to make virtually anything from common materials without labor, replacing smoking factories with systems as clean as forests. They will transform technology and the economy at their roots, opening a new world of possibilities. They will indeed be engines of abundance."

Using nanotech assemblers will bring the cost of manufacturing anything down to roughly the cost of the raw materials. What costs 20 billion dollars to produce today, will cost 20 dollars to produce in a few decades. It won't cost anything to take a handful of disassemblers/assemblers and toss them on an asteroid and come back in a month or two to pick up your new ship.

I am very well aware of this theory, but I donâ€™t fully believe it for some other reason. Listed in Rylix,

Flaw? Perhaps? Grounds for not relying on it absolutely, and until someone can prove physically other wise I will keep with my beliefs on the subject. BTW did you know when Richard P. Feynman â€œthere is plenty of room at the bottomâ€

Post by **mkruer** » Wed Jul 23, 2003 8:49 am

Before everyone flames me back I would just like to state that the idea of a realistic mod is misnomer. Unless we go with what is here, today, and not anything theorized or even experiential, we will be forever bickering over what is possible as what is not. From that aspect we would have to essential limit ourselves to what exists now, and that would lead to IMO a very slow and boring game.

Form this point of view you can only have a stylized mod that perhaps relies on more substantial facts then other mods, but in the end its still fantasy

FlyingAce · Post by **FlyingAce** » Wed Jul 23, 2003 4:16 pm

MKruer wrote:Well the relative cost for a car has gone up. The original cars used to cost something like 2 months salary, I would like to see someone purchase a car for that cheap. But more to the point 50years ago they said we would have flying cars too. The good thing is that history points to more failures then successes. So from my POV I erred on the side of caution. With Rylix I took the limited change of technology, unless I could see no other way around it.

we may not have flying cars, but we are developing cars that drive themselves

http://www.path.berkeley.edu/
http://www.path.berkeley.edu/PATH/Publi ... ,27-97.jpg

(and the newspaper report was from '97!)

Shrike · Post by **Shrike** » Thu Jul 24, 2003 1:29 am

MKruer wrote:
Shrike wrote:Well, I know fully well how it works today in real life. If you are referring to some made-up "future stealth" that I haven't read about yet, then I probably wouldn't be aware of how it's supposed to work.

Stealth is just a technique to overcome certain kinds of sensors, such as radar, or audio. Airplanes try to be stealthy in the areas of radar and heat, while submarines are more concerned with audio. An F-22 stealth fighter may be quite stealthy in the heat and radar spectrum, but it's loud as all hell. A submarine might be quiet as a mouse, but it's still a huge magnetic anomoly.

And any sort of stealth technology will have some way around it. To refer back to your earlier example, no matter how quiet a submarine may be, it's still going to show up when nailed with active pinging.

Obviously, if I'm in a gigantic CapShip, I'm not going to be nearly so concerned about being stealthy as someone trying to sneak up on my six in a kamikaze rig, so I'll just fire up the Aegis and spew a 100 million watts of energy in all directions if that is what it takes.

Stealth has it's place, but it's really not going to help much against massive, crushing brute force detection methods.
Could not have said a better myself, but your 100 million watts in all directions would be like try to light a cathedral with a single candle given the distances. Even if you were using EMP the damming effects would still be limited to a few thousands of kilometers. In the end space is just too massive to brute force ping away. You would literally need millions upon millions of ships just to cover a system, that that does not necessarily mean that you would find what you are looking for anyway.

Of course as you go outward it scales, but that isn't what we're talking about here. We're talking about stopping a fighter (or its missles) from getting close enough to a CapShip to hurt it. For that we don't need to flood an entire solar system with detection energy, we just need to flood enough to cover the effective range from which the fighter (or its missles) can hurt us.

As for space being too massive for brute force pinging:

In the case of using photons, it takes no more energy to project a photon 1 billion kilometers than it does to project a photon 1 kilometer, but then photons wouldn't be used to "ping" since they aren't expected to come back. They would be used to see if anything interfered with their travel on the way out, whether they ever came back would be irrelevant.

Radar sure, the farther out you go, the weaker the waves bounce back, but radio waves take too long to get anywhere. You wouldn't use radar in space for anything that you needed to know right away, unless you were only interested in a close-in area.

Shrike wrote:And really, does the Destroyer give a damn about running active pinging when it's on the trail of a sub? Not at all. Sure a sub will know precisely where that destroyer is, but it won't be able to get close enough to do jack about it.
What you say is more the exception then the rule. The sub probably got caught with the preverbal, pants down. When it comes to hunting the sub has the advantage one on one, thatâ€™s why the ships have to have huge support craft because if it was one on one, and it was war, (shoot first ask questions later) the ship would have been sunk? Need proof? Go back to WWII a handful of subs sunk more then half of all the ships. the other thing is that a sub vs a ship is not really a good comparison anyway. A better one would be a sub vs a sub. And in this case the one who is more quite and can sneak upon there enemy usually wins.

Well, no. Apples and oranges -is- what we're discussing; fighters vs. capships. Capship vs. capship is quite another discussion. I've taken the position that any advantage which a fighter might gain via stealth, can be overcome with massive detection capability in a capship.

Shrike · Post by **Shrike** » Thu Jul 24, 2003 2:20 am

MKruer wrote:
Shrike wrote:[Woops! You are projecting the future, but failing to take the future into account when you do it.

According to Drexler in chaper four of "Engines of Creation" (the last sentence in the chapter):

http://www.foresight.org/EOC/EOC_Chapter_4.html

"Assemblers will be able to make virtually anything from common materials without labor, replacing smoking factories with systems as clean as forests. They will transform technology and the economy at their roots, opening a new world of possibilities. They will indeed be engines of abundance."

Using nanotech assemblers will bring the cost of manufacturing anything down to roughly the cost of the raw materials. What costs 20 billion dollars to produce today, will cost 20 dollars to produce in a few decades. It won't cost anything to take a handful of disassemblers/assemblers and toss them on an asteroid and come back in a month or two to pick up your new ship.

I am very well aware of this theory, but I donâ€™t fully believe it for some other reason. Listed in Rylix,

Flaw? Perhaps? Grounds for not relying on it absolutely, and until someone can prove physically other wise I will keep with my beliefs on the subject. BTW did you know when Richard P. Feynman â€œthere is plenty of room at the bottomâ€

FlyingAce · Post by **FlyingAce** » Thu Jul 24, 2003 2:48 am

also with the car idea: cars only cost so much cuz u buy them from dealers. cars also lose most of their value the second it leaves the dealer's lot.

DiGuru · Post by **DiGuru** » Fri Jul 25, 2003 6:48 pm

I would like to apologize for my last few posts. It was 5 AM, I drank too much and I was a bit irritated. It won't happen again. Sorry about that.

DiGuru · Post by **DiGuru** » Fri Jul 25, 2003 7:10 pm

Economics are less and less about producing things, services become more important all the time.

You can buy a 3D-printer nowadays. (http://www.zcorp.com for an example.) They are used to make prototypes and products from which we only need a few. For example, when a surgeon needs a replacement bone, more and more they just 'print' one!

And it doesn't stop by solid, plastic objects. You can 'print' a working circuit board as well. Or an engine. And the scale is not very important as well, it can be any size, microscopic up to the maximum dimensions of the parts that fit the printer.

It's not nanoassemblers, but does that matter? There won't be much use for factory workers in the near future.

Yes, real estate, materials, information and personal services would be worth money. But not much else. And it would be limited mostly by the power requirements and the smart receipes (programs and construction plans) that would be available.

All in all, it would probably be closer to 'materializing it out of thin air' than 'building' it. It is done today.

Duality · Post by **Duality** » Fri Jul 25, 2003 8:14 pm

It can only print inanimate objects right??

With certain types of elements like metal, fiber, rubber, plastic, etc..

DiGuru · Post by **DiGuru** » Fri Jul 25, 2003 8:22 pm

MKruer, you have a very good point: what is a realistic mod?

So, how are we going to define it?

MKruer and PeteyG, if you both come up with a nice storyline, that would be great. But we still have to define our framework.

What references do we use? I was thinking of using only things that exist today (if possible) and extrapolate them a bit into the future. But as Shrike pointed out, things will be changed a lot by then. We cannot possible do a realistic, realistic mod. We don't know. And even if we did, we cannot use computers that are as smart as they will be by then.

What do you all think?

We should make a list of things we want to use, see how they are today and discuss their possible evolution.

We could base it on some other 'story universe', but I think together we can come up with something that is just as nice!

DiGuru · Post by **DiGuru** » Fri Jul 25, 2003 8:26 pm

Duality wrote:It can only print inanimate objects right??

With certain types of elements like metal, fiber, rubber, plastic, etc..

Yes. But if the printer is large enough, we could just 'print' a whole spaceship to our liking!

Although I think we would have to fit the hard parts, like engines, sensors etc. afterwards.

EDIT: You could make animated objects, like an engine or something by combining parts together. But more and more objects are made to be solid-state anyway.

DiGuru · Post by **DiGuru** » Fri Jul 25, 2003 11:28 pm

The largest problem with 3D printers nowadays, is that it is still quite hard for the bulk processes to mix materials in one object. Although they can make parts have different colors at the moment, so that will probably not take very long. There are other methods that can mix and match materials easily, but they're slow.

When you combine the current methods and project them 5-10 years into the future (it is quite new after all, those printers didn't exist that same time ago), it might be a lot easier to mix materials and work fast.

When that is easy, I can think of several ways to make entire machines made of moving parts in one go. For example, you can use compartments filled with soluble materials. Or separate them by films that only stick to specific materials.

At that point, there is no real reason entire objects, like cars, couldn't be made at one go.