It's time again for this week's Q&A grab-bag
So, without further ado, or poorly constructed SC2 references:
A:I, regretfully, must claim ignorance as to what exactly "Black-Paralysis" is, but I'll do what I can to answer the question anyway.Q:Is it possible that the Rlaan-Briin would help the Confed...
...in developing a hybrid fighter using rlaan engines and power systems?
I say this 'cause this would be one of the main ships in Black-Paralysis
Firstly, when the Rlaan work with the Confederation to develop much of anything, it's almost always the Rlaan-Briin that represent the Rlaan in such endeavors. So, the question boils down to whether the Rlaan would be willing to/interested in working with the Confederation to build a fighter (The Rlaan-Briin directly working with the Confed would be a bit like saying "Oregon has decided to contract with France to build new military equipment...")
At this point, knowing more about what you mean by "hybrid" would make answering this easier, but I'll give it a shot anyway.
If by hybrid, one means a fighter that is designed to be flown by both Humans and Rlaan, then no. If by hybrid one means either flown by Humans and Rlaan-Briin, or just Humans but using technology from both Confed and Rlaan, see below:
Depends a lot on when. As much as the Rlaan-Briin are extreme Anthro-philes, it does not change the fact that Humanity and the Rlaan are not actually allies, mereley in a mutually beneficial peaceful relationship. Provided that humanity is not in imminent danger of losing to the Aera, or absent any new major threat seen in what the Rlaan view as the extended forecast for their own existence, they aren't going to give up anything they percieve as a military advantage to a group they view as competitors, if friendly competitors, for supremacy. Given the tendency of those monkey-boys from earth to take apart and reverse engineer anything you send them, unless they feel it's a dire necessity, they aren't going to part with anything that isn't at least a generation or two out of date.
So, is it possible, sure. However, is it likely that there's going to be a confed/rlaan uber-fighter in the works? Not given the state of things at the point in time that play starts in VS.
If a fighter were to be developed by a joint team, using older, declassified Rlaan engine and power systems, one would still have to ask what the Rlaan were getting in return.
The most likely scenario I can see for such a project in any time period near the start of VS is that the Rlaan government would approve export of civilian grade engine and power technology for licensing in a Confed military project aimed at accomodating Rlaan-Briin civilians wishing to do their best impressions of a Lincoln brigade, while opening up new design opportunities for Confed engineers. Too much overt support of Humanity might re-open the conflict across the Rlaan/Aera border, and if the Aera were only looking to harass rather than occupy, though the previous conflict showed neither in danger of losing to the other, the increased economic strain on the Rlaan in defending the near-Aera worlds and repairing and replacing lost goods/personel/services would greatly hamper their plans to capitalize on the ensnaring of Humanity in a viscious war by boosting their exploration and colonization programs.
A:Humanity has, throughout the past, been an oft balkanized lot. Humanity in the VS universe is no different. While the bulk of human power and population has, for various reasons, aligned itself with one of the major or minor meme-groups (Andolian, Forsaken, High-Born, Mechanist, Merchant, Purist, Shaper, Unadorned) there are many colonies, that, for reasons of either intense pluralism or adherence to a tertiary meme-group (such as the inhabitants of Vegan-ville, the citizens of the "Brotherhood of Militant Agnostics" [motto: "I don't know, and neither do you!"], or those last gasps of the dying nation-states, "New-x" for varying values of x). In the wake of the Mankind's first notable interstellar fraternal conflict, the demolishing of the Light-Bearers by the Andolians [detailed (vaguely) in "A Brief History in Time and Space"], with efforts by the major powers to construct what became the Confederation, the bulk of the lesser powers realized that, while they may not get along all that well with each other, if they did not in some way present a united front of resistance, they would likely be consumed by the major powers. As such, they threw their collective weight into the negotiations forming the Confederation, and, counter-intuitively, gained, through their co-operation, a guarantee of protection of their individual and often separatist modes of life. Those that did not band together are now only records in history books, having been overrun, subverted, co-opted, or in other ways gobbled up by the major powers. The Forsaken, having A) no love for the powers that had done nothing to stop the leapfrogging onto colony worlds that had been slated for their slowboats, and B) taken to the belief that, due to the events of the past, the Confederation's protection would be at best hollow, and at worst a pretense for tyranny, the Forsaken declined the offer from the LIHW to be part of their collective bargaining agreement, and instead focused on the settling the Diaspora sector, ignoring, to the best of their ability, the creation of the Confederation.Q:Who are the LIHW (League of Independent Human Worlds?), why are they independent, and are the people there friendly?
So, to summarize: Why are they Independent? Because, while they are a part of the Confederation, they do not align themselves with any particular major power in or outside of the Confederation.
As to "Are the people there friendly?" - that varies widely depending on where you're from and what LIHW planet you're on. The LIHW worlds range from the most libertine of environments to authoritatian regimes that, while limited by Confederation regulations in what they can do to their population, do all that the laws allow. In general, one assumes the larger spaceport communities to be sufficiently friendly to Confederation Citizens (A Confederation embassy and its garrison tending to be located in such places tends to mellow any eccentricities of the local mood). However, travelling to a backwater bar in a dark alley is best done only if one is familiar with the particular ideology or ideologies that dominate that part of the colony.
A:There are multiple means of communicating between ships, depending on the equipment that each ship mounts, the nature of the communication, and the distance at which it must be conducted, different technologies are employed.Q:How fast are the methods of communication in Vega Strike? What is used for communicating between two ships within a star system, and how fast is it? Also, what is used for communicating between two different star systems, and how fast is that?
For System to System:
The only practical ways to get a message to another system are to either send a courier ship or get a relay station to send a message probe through the wormhole linking to that system. Some vessels carry their own message probes for work outside the relay network.
You need not contact that particular relay station directly, as relay stations throughout the Confederation are part of the above mentioned linked network. One need only contact the nearest or otherwise most convenient. This intermediate relay station will, based on the urgency of your message, use one of the following 4 methods to deliver it to the next relay in the system:
For Insystem:
1. Emergency/Command and control communique priority:
Using a modified mini-jump drive, a ship (almost exclusively, either a relay station, large vessel, or communications specialty ship, as smaller ships do not tend to have room to mount such) creates a small wormhole between its present location and the vicinity of its sender, and pulses the message through using standard Confederation EM frequencies. Highly energy intensive, but when time is of the essence, it's what you need.
2. Directed Burst Transmission
This is a normal transmission over standard EM frequencies as partitioned by the Confederation. Most communication takes place via laser focused directional microwave antenna. As lasers have very low effective bandwidth, being mono-phase and mono-frequency, they are used only for calibrating the focus of the multi-phase, multi-frequency, multi-amplitude pseudo-parallel emission, directional microwave array.
3. Omni-directional Burst Transmission
Same as above, except that everyone gets to hear it. Useful if you're on the cheap with comm equipment or just don't have a good lock on the location of the craft you're communicating with. Encryption is a must if you don't want the whole neighborhood to know what you're saying.
4. Spread Spectrum Omni-Directional Continuous Re-transmission
Common use: Distress Beacons/Warning Bouys/People who find an intense need to speak in ALL CAPS and feel that they can run away if anyone decides to express their annoyance.
Is this currently modeled correctly in VS? No. I imagine parts of it (the relay network) will work their way in. Whether or not we'll introduce some form of light-lag for communications - who knows?
A:Quite - but implementations of true AI are limited to research stations and university planets. This limitation is the result of several different events and trends in the past of the VS universe.Q: How advanced is Artificial Intelligence in the VS universe?
1. General Paranoia
Ever since the first moderately succesful forays into AI were made by humanity centuries ago, there has been some overarching distrust of true artificials, especially since many of the early models proved to have dangerously high risk of sanity loss. Research beyond this point has thus been, not only difficult due to the nature of the research, but heavily hampered by regulatory restrictions. The Rlaan appear to have never had much interest in building thinking machines, and the Aera are hostile to the concept of introducing a new entity which may at any point come to oppose them. Therefore, we will limit the the rest of the discussion to humanity (A discussion of whether the Ancients or TWHON used true AIs would be tangential).
2. Limited Usefulness vs. other technologies
However, the much more stunting trends for AI were, from AI research itself, auto-generated expert systems, and from the fields of genetics and cybernetics, SuSims (Super Simians) and SuSim Cyborgs. For those tasks which humanity had no interest in doing itself, humanity had already developed viable alternatives that it knew it had a great measure of control over. For dry computational tasks and rule interpretation the expert systems' lack of self-awareness was a blessing rather than a burden. For physically manifested tasks considered too menial, too dangerous, or too monotonous, the SuSims and SuSimCys proved cheaper, more reliable, and, through advancements in genetics, easy to dominate. Only for those applications where it was difficult to keep the organic components of the cyborg alive were robots necessary, and for only for a few of those applications did it make sense for the robots to be independent operators, and for only a fraction of those did the independent operators need intelectual capacity.
3. The Nano-Plague
Even in those societies where the use of SuSims was seen as inhumane or otherwise frowned upon, as with many technologies, the Nano-plague disrupted AI research. Having to switch from cheap, efficient nanite vats to slow and, particularly for such a complicated process, ponderously expensive nano-forges to produce AI "Brains" did as much as anything to discourage AI research.
Thus, the true AIs are few and remain, especially to themselves, objects primarily of research interest.
Much more common than the true AIs are PaIs: Pseudo-artificial Intelligences. PaIs are wet-ware embedded in hardware - genetically engineered brain-in-boxes that distribute the tasks of thinking between the organic and inorganic components. Commercial PaIs are almost universally designed as idiot-savant systems, capable of limited self-motivation and direction, easy to manipulate, but capable of extraordinary problem solving power for the problems they were designed for and trained to assault. PaIs tend to be able to present more natural user interfaces than the expert systems they compete with, tending to be at least vaguely self-aware, and much more responsive to and on emotional levels. In particular, niche market and custom built models are limited only by legislation requiring that entities surpassing a specified set of standardized metrics cannot be considered property, and must be registered as either custom children or custom dependent employees. While the difference is clear for low end models, standards aside, most will agree that the line between a high end PaI and a designer cyborg human is exceptionally blurry.
).... but until there's something to discuss 