A new take on wormholes

The most appropriate place for Questions, Queries, and Quandaries regarding the nature of the Vega Strike universe and its past, present, or future history. Home to the occasional unfortunate RetCon.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

MC707 wrote:
safemode wrote:Traveling has to have a cost, that means in time and in supply of transportation. Otherwise prices tend toward 0 due to capitalism.
And so should the production of these bots. These bots can self replicate and so the companies would have 0 costs, only to then hard-wired so people themselves cannot make the bots to self replicate. By the laws of supply and demand, companies could produce infinite amounts of these bots without having production costs, which therefore would make the supply of bots increase by almost infinite. This in turn would make the prices of these bots reach infinitely low prices.
I axed the idea of self replicating bots. The new idea is self-combining/aligning bots. The idea against replicating bots is that since we're not talking nano-scale stuff, the bots would have to be fairly complex individually, and it would be outside of the scope of ability of the bots to clone itself. It basically wouldn't be able to have the tools to manipulate the matter sufficiently to create all the materials needed for the electronics controlling the little guys along with the power sources.

Since we're no longer talking about self-replicating bots, we dont have to worry about infinite supply.
safemode wrote:Corporations can hold various aspects of technology without becoming sovereigns themselves. For instance, if Intel and Amd survive another hundred years, they would be the only companies that can produce IC's at the size and quality that they do. Nobody else would be able to fabricate them if they tried. That wouldn't change the fact that they're still just companies. It would not catapult them into some controlling status. We're not talking about 1 man holding the key to the technology, we're talking about publicly traded businesses. They have a self interest, but ultimately that self interest is answerable to their share-holders. Even today, intel and amd produce chips at a size and quality that just about nobody else can match. That hasn't made them anything more than just businesses. Despite everyone (governments and all) depending on their product without an ability to simply produce their own.

Technology in the future is going to get more closed off, more black box and way out of the reach of meddling tinkerers and hackers and mom and pop shops' grasps. As the complexity of it's fabrication increases, the number of entities able to produce it decreases. Not only does the physical difficulty of creating the products force out everyone but the biggest, but the complexity of what it does forces out all but the most skilled from designing it, let alone understanding its function.
Not only it would be illegal to keep the technology a "black box" out of the reach of everyone, it would be impossible as long as long as there is a government powerful enough to enforce laws. They HAVE to make the blueprints public, after the legal patent expires. If they would have technology that only they control, they would have a monopoly that controlled ALL traffic in space, since every ship would need that technology to travel those far distances.
For instance, do you think a puny generics company could create ANY of the medicines that Pfizer has ever created? No. Never. But what happens afterwards? The patent dies off and generic producer companies can produce medicines which took incredible research, knowledge and resources.
This isn't a black box of legal enforcement of trade secrets. This is a black box of practicality and scope. The old school CRT tv's aren't trade secrets in how they function, nor do they have secret technology only available in one place. But do you have the tools and the knowledge to build a working TV? Similarly, a car engine operates by principles generally understood by most mechanics, but can they build an engine ? I'm not talking about taking the block and putting the pieces together, i'm talking about casting the block and creating the parts.

Similarly, again, even comp engineers may be able to understand how a particular IC works. But could they build it? Not if you need a multi-million dollar fabrication plant and the workers and machines to do so. Now imagine almost everything needing to be built in such highely expensive and specific fab plants like that where the material is being operated on at a sub-atomic level.

A soldering gun and some schematics aren't going to help you. Wrenches would be pointless. Screwdrivers to access the bulk-head panel HAHA. What are you gonna do when the bulkhead panel is off? Stare at the pretty fiber optic cables and microscopic circuitry until it fixes itself?

The technology will be so complicated and advanced that the only way it can be created and repaired is with highly specialized, highly expensive equipment that is operated by highly trained and relatively rare technicians.

Astronauts are probably the most trained pilots in the entire world. They have to be part physicists, part engineer and part pilot. That's pretty much the pinacle of multi-faceted knowledge when it comes to what you can expect from a pilot. Yet, if something on the shuttle breaks, the guy up there calls down to the team of specialized engineers that build and maintain the shuttle to find out how to fix it (if it's anything relatively important). And that's with today's tech. Where things like screw drivers, duct tape and a hammer actually can repair something. Now imagine everything is on the level of the core of an Intel I7. Everything. There is no "dabbling" in how to repair that kind of stuff. That's life-long training and research and skills.
safemode wrote:Do you think pilots of VS's ships are going to be able to fix their stuff ala firefly in the future? Maybe some minor electrical wiring issues, some metal fabbing to fix stress damage and such. But definitely not when it comes to anything remotely related to being electronic. The population of VS aren't all quantum physicists, computer engineers, astro-physicists, mathematicians and mechanics at the same time. They're not all going into specialized schools for 35 years to learn everything you would need to learn to be able to even understand how their ship's systems work, let alone fix them and even less so, have the tools you'd need to do the job.

Think of VS's pilots as being the commercial truck drivers of today. That accounts for the vast majority of them. Then scatter in a few who would be considered military pilots and commercial jet pilots. All of those people have varying levels of skill at moving their vehicle around, but that's about where it ends. They're not capable of doing much more than that. and that's with today's tech. VS tech would likely require so many layers of knowledge to fully deal with that you'd necessitate specialization, because there simply isn't enough years in a life to grasp multiple facets.
Do you think today's truck drivers ONLY know and need to know how to move a steering wheel and press a bunch of pedals and buttons? No. Unlike in VS, they need special licenses that take years to acquire, not only to get experience but also knowledge. Truck drivers need to take tests covering unique handling qualities of driving a large, heavily loaded 18-wheeler, and the mechanical systems required to operate such a vehicle (air brakes, suspension, cargo securement, et al.), plus be declared fit by medical examination no less than every two years. They need to know what they are doing and what to do if they suddenly find themselves with an overheated engine. Pilots in VS HAVE to know how to fix stuff ala firefly if they want to survive the coldness of space.
I kind of touched on this in the last quote. But yea, a truck driver today isn't going to repair their turbo on their turbo diesel engine on the side of the road. They aren't going to take apart their ECU and desolder a faulty memory chip and replace it with another one they happen to have on hand. They're not going to be welding subframe connectors back in place if they happen to break free during some really bumpy roads. They're not going to be able to do a majority of the repairs, which is why mechanics exist. Now you can take your mechanic on the road with you ala firefly, but there's just a lot of stuff that you can't bring with you. All kinds of equipment and parts and modules that would require precision calibrations and such that firefly glossed over since it's just a tv show.

Basically you have to either say that for the majority of things either the ship has to have self-repairing circuitry, frequent mechanic visits, or a lot of self-contained replaceble generic "modules" that take care of functions that end up being throw-away and plug-and-play.


But the the whole idea that it's a "Black box" isn't something protected by patents. It's simply out of reach to anyone but the companies that have so much invested in the technology needed to create the stuff. Plus the people needed to design the stuff are employed by these companies, and they dont just grow on trees. in vs Technology is everywhere, people would have a general understanding of it. It's just that unlike today, a general understanding of it isn't nearly enough to tinker with any of it. Even a good understanding of it isn't. You still need the tools and the tools are too expensive for anyone but the biggest companies to deal with. Even the mechanics who do repairs would basically only be installers, not repairers. Parts would have to be either trashed or sent back to the factory. all the tech would be too precise, too exotic for field stuff.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by Deus Siddis »

safemode wrote:Free travel would be a problem since it would make trading a nearly pointless occupation. Traveling has to have a cost, that means in time and in supply of transportation. Otherwise prices tend toward 0 due to capitalism.
Time cost is a given; this is space, there's vast distances that have to be crossed. The transportation costs come not from fuel prices, but the vastly expensive cost of the transports themselves, which are lost fairly regularly to the many hazards of space. Also perhaps the cost of the people competent enough to deal with those hazards, that fly said transports and other craft that aid them.
The nano-plague is more of a plot device to explain past interactions between certain factions/species along with future ones. not so much about anything happening in the game currently.
I don't see how it does that. Seems like the explanation without it is- galaxy occupied by big civilization, big civilization dies, immediately afterwards new sentient species and their civilizations can start up all at about the same time, thus having similar levels of power and interesting interactions. I don't see how a lack of nanites helps make VS' interactions any more or less possible.
It also forces things to not get really out of our ability to create a believable universe. Since if nanites were allowed to exist, you'd basically have a universe of morphable everything. There would be no fixed-shape synthetic objects.
Changing shape is not very useful here. Already even thrust-vectoring is not currently encouraged in VS because thrusters are supposed to be too powerful to not rip apart moving-part systems.

Even without that issue, changing shape doesn't offer any realistic advantage that is universe-breaking. You might just have a more comfortable recliner in your cockpit.
Think of what that means to creating models for the game...or coding the morphing ability.
MD3 support. Silvery shader replaces texture during transition as in Terminator 2 and Battlezone 2 (a decade old game).

Aside of morphing this or that, vertex or bone animation support will be a big boost to VS' graphics, there's alot us artist types can do with that. And it is coming (albeit slowly) with OGRE anyway.
A universe with fixed-state objects makes no sense in a nanite populated situation. And without fixed-state objects, a lot of things simply fall apart in the VS game, logically and practically.
We don't have flying cars or robots doing most things for us or genetically engineered telepathic assassins or flying saucer ray-gun wars. Because despite each fantastical prediction about how much the newest emerging technology will change everything, it doesn't. It only adds another tool to the toolbox, perhaps replacing an older one in the process and then eventually sometimes becoming obsolete itself.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

Deus Siddis wrote:
safemode wrote:Free travel would be a problem since it would make trading a nearly pointless occupation. Traveling has to have a cost, that means in time and in supply of transportation. Otherwise prices tend toward 0 due to capitalism.
Time cost is a given; this is space, there's vast distances that have to be crossed. The transportation costs come not from fuel prices, but the vastly expensive cost of the transports themselves, which are lost fairly regularly to the many hazards of space. Also perhaps the cost of the people competent enough to deal with those hazards, that fly said transports and other craft that aid them.
It's only a given if it's not instantaneous. instantaneous travel (all the time anywhere) would be far less risky, and the risk wouldn't change per distance of destination and origin. It's not about fuel prices, obviously, it's about the time the transport is exposed in space. "Warping" or "teleporting" too often or too easily erodes this economic model, and the game would be nothing without that model driving it.
The nano-plague is more of a plot device to explain past interactions between certain factions/species along with future ones. not so much about anything happening in the game currently.
I don't see how it does that. Seems like the explanation without it is- galaxy occupied by big civilization, big civilization dies, immediately afterwards new sentient species and their civilizations can start up all at about the same time, thus having similar levels of power and interesting interactions. I don't see how a lack of nanites helps make VS' interactions any more or less possible.
Then you haven't read the one true pdf outlining the history, present, and future of the VS universe. It is a device invented to explain why certain factions interacted the way they did, and to limit the technological development so that the game, while based in the distant future, made sense to not have technology that "fit" what we can recreate in-game.

Basically, there's only so much we can do in a game, and we want to be realistic and as believable as possible. It's far too easy to see that technology a thousand years from now mixed with alien races and such is going to be outside of our imagination, but lets just say we could imagine it, then it would be so advanced that we'd have to think what kind of game it would be that occurately represented that level of technology. It wouldn't be something that's playable in any fashion.

So what was done was decide what kind of game was desired, and shoe-horn in a reality that fit the game, rather than try to work the other way around. The only way to do this and still set the game in the future (since such a game wouldn't even really exist with today's technology) is to invent something that halted the development of certain technologies that would be damaging to the realism of the game. Nano tech is just one of the biggest things we'd have to stop if we wanted to be realistic. A universe where nanite tech is allowed to occur would be vastly different from the VS one, and one where we'd even be able to represent in-game. Models would make no sense in a nanite based ship, since it would be fluidic. Indeed, you can't help but imagine that in a nanite run universe, nobody would age, it would be very hard to kill someone, let alone a ship or something and the line between biology and machine would probably not exist anymore. The consequence of immortality alone would be beyond the scope of believability. Outside of aliens or vampires, how do you imagine a universe where the norm is immortality? what kind of economy would exist? Would you even need one anymore? What would it matter of the time it takes to get to places? Why even go anywhere? etc etc. Immortality is only interesting when you're co-inhabiting a universe where the majority is mortal. such a thing would not exist with nanite tech, and nanite tech is almost surely going to become an actual reality. We have nothing like the nanite plague to stop it here.

basically, nanite tech makes things too complicated to fit the game, and a game that would encompass it would be pathetically filled with plot holes. Hence, we make it impossible.
It also forces things to not get really out of our ability to create a believable universe. Since if nanites were allowed to exist, you'd basically have a universe of morphable everything. There would be no fixed-shape synthetic objects.
Changing shape is not very useful here. Already even thrust-vectoring is not currently encouraged in VS because thrusters are supposed to be too powerful to not rip apart moving-part systems.

Even without that issue, changing shape doesn't offer any realistic advantage that is universe-breaking. You might just have a more comfortable recliner in your cockpit.
Changing shape is entirely useful. Especially when you consider ships have to land on planets. Wings and such make sense in an atmosphere, but offer very little in space. It would make sense to re-organize that mass that goes into wings to land on a planet into living squarters for the crew when in space or something similar. Also, shape isn't just the only way the ship would morph via nanite tech. Think saucer separation from star trek, only much niftier beacuse you dont have to worry about dividing a ship up, it just pinches off wherever you need it to because it can. Need a docking bay but dont want a gaping hole in your hull to have someone fire missiles into? easy, the ship just opens a hole to your cargo bay when needed, which would work for docking bays as well. Need to fit inside a docking bay but your ship is too big? easy, simply change the shape so it fits or pinch off a piece and it becomes a shuttle. There are no limits when the material your talking about is fluid, programmable, self sustaining and can grow/shrink at will. Let alone, create the complicated components that are required to build anything, since they're working atom by atom.

Universe breaking, yes. It changes the game so much that we couldn't comprehend that universe. And attempting to would only create one that either wouldn't be able to be modeled in a game (not just talking about graphics models but gameplay models as well), or would have so many holes in it's plot that it wouldn't be worth it.
Think of what that means to creating models for the game...or coding the morphing ability.
MD3 support. Silvery shader replaces texture during transition as in Terminator 2 and Battlezone 2 (a decade old game).

Aside of morphing this or that, vertex or bone animation support will be a big boost to VS' graphics, there's alot us artist types can do with that. And it is coming (albeit slowly) with OGRE anyway.
This wouldn't be like transformers or volume displacement like in T1000. This would be like being able to do what Spore does for character animation but rather than stick a bunch of parts together and have the computer figure out how to move them, it would be the computer figuring out what to make the parts look like, then figuring out how they would work together, and then figuring out how to change the shape and function whenever it needs to given only a purpose or stimulant and to paint it all. Nothing would be able to be really modeled beforehand because there would be no limits to what shapes or features a nanite based ship could have or handle. There would be no volume that has to be maintained, thus there would be no limits to the distortion outside of what would be practical or necessary for the given situation. How do you program that and make a playable game? What would be the point ? What kind of limits would you set, why would you set those limits, how would you articulate the code necessary to describe how to manipulate the object? It would be unique for every situation. Now, an engine that can generate realistic ships on the fly along with textures and such would be nice, now do that with all the growing/shrinking/morphing ability and you got a really cutting edge game engine. Basically, it would require the game to be the artist, you'd have to tell it how. We wouldn't need modelers or ship texturers anymore.
A universe with fixed-state objects makes no sense in a nanite populated situation. And without fixed-state objects, a lot of things simply fall apart in the VS game, logically and practically.
We don't have flying cars or robots doing most things for us or genetically engineered telepathic assassins or flying saucer ray-gun wars. Because despite each fantastical prediction about how much the newest emerging technology will change everything, it doesn't. It only adds another tool to the toolbox, perhaps replacing an older one in the process and then eventually sometimes becoming obsolete itself.
[/quote]

Cost is the only thing prohibiting those things. Cost and the complication of actually using the tech limits it's applicability. We dont have flying cars not because we can't make them, even fairly cheaply, but because flying is much harder than driving and we already have too many people who can't drive behind the wheel.

Nanite tech is not like that other crap though. nanite tech means your body wont age. Now, on the surface you would think only the rich would have it. but it's also free and self replicating. So then basically, nothing that the nanite is programmed to fix or replace would die. Now everyone has the time to learn as much as they want. Time loses most of it's meaning. Revolution ensues . You may have some pockets who refuse the technology, figure out ways of disabling it and such. But that would be seen as a weapon by those who want to use it and there would be war. Problem is, living forever or fixing wounds instantly is probably going to trump the naturalists. So eventually you have a civilization of immortals. I'd say that pretty much changes things beyond tool status. This would happen for every civilization. Then you gotta start thinking, what if the borg could somehow have sex with the T-1000 and a vampire and had a baby? Now what if these babies were everyone. What do you do with that? What kind of economy do you have where you really dont need to buy or sell anything? What would life be like at all? The only obvious conclusion that can be made is that eventually population size is going to become a problem for the galaxy, but how long do we have until that happens? Or perhaps, does our civilizations decide that they have reached stagnation, and need that renewal of new consciousnesses that come with mortality, and bring it back, perhaps by rewriting the nanites willfully to not act on biological tissue.

etc etc. It's just so far different that it makes no sense to compare it to something like cars or flying. And the thing is, we're not far away from it now in our current reality. They say death ill be cured within our lifetime, and while lots of claims are made that never pan out, i dont think they're making a huge leap of faith there when doctors say that. Once it happens, it's a whole new game. Not in the "we just invented electricity" way, but in the "we've become self aware" kind of way.


Now with VS. You have to keep two things in mind. We're mixing WW1/2 style dogfighting with conventional trading. we are already asking users to suspend disbelief that we can't just fire missiles that hit ships from hundreds of miles away and all the fuel related to maneuvering in tight dogfighting, among other things. So you have to basically think of ways to restrain technology, or even in some cases reverse it. Not allow for things that would advance technology beyond what would allow the game-play to even make sense. You can't have the gameplay of VS and allow certain things to exist, it just wouldn't be explainable at all.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by MC707 »

safemode wrote:Cost is the only thing prohibiting those things. Cost and the complication of actually using the tech limits it's applicability. We dont have flying cars not because we can't make them, even fairly cheaply, but because flying is much harder than driving and we already have too many people who can't drive behind the wheel.
They will operate with GPS.


about nanotechnology, read this.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

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Satellites are still susceptible to radiation outtages (solar flares etc). Flying cars would still require licensed pilots. If flying cars were forced into the role that cars are, we would have to lower the requirements to get such a license, just as we've continued to see a lowering in the requirements to get a drivers license today.

I dont see conventional flying cars ever getting anywhere, they're far too impractical. When you can have vertical liftoff and landing with non-polluting aircraft with a less than likely chance of your death if anything goes wrong during flight, then we'll talk.

I dont get the link about nano-tech. Is it supposed to offer a factoid that rebukes the claims above? I read it and as far as i saw, it didn't refute anything said above. Although, it's slightly more positive about it. They touch on the idea of using it to target cancer cells, which is nice and extremely short sighted. Since, if you have a nano-bot that can target cancer cells, and you have a nano-bot that can build objects ala the replicator tech they talk about, then you can easily and obviously see that the tech would lead you to bots that rebuild the dying cells of your body continuously, while fighting infections and repairing badly copied dna, etc. Curing cancer is nice and would be good. Curing death, lots of people aren't too sure that it's a good idea. I for one, would become immortal in a heartbeat, lots of people would want to. But it's not hard to see how horribly bad things will get during such a revolution. I'd just hunker down in a cave and wait it out though, with some raw materials to keep my body replenished as the nuclear wasteland cools down. Either way, nano-tech is not simply going to be 1 tool or 3 or 10. It's a revolution of life akin to the time when cells took in the mitochondria to produce more energy or when they decided to team together to form multi-cellular organisms. It's a symbosis of biology and machine, not in the matrix sense but sorta like in the Borg sense only without the stupid limitations star trek had to put on them to make them not be Q - level powerful. And by nano-tech, i'm talking about the replicator tech type stuff, not the sunscreen crap. I know we have nano-tech today and it's not revolutionary really, nobody is talking about that when they say nano-tech in this thread.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

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safemode wrote:Satellites are still susceptible to radiation outtages (solar flares etc). Flying cars would still require licensed pilots. If flying cars were forced into the role that cars are, we would have to lower the requirements to get such a license, just as we've continued to see a lowering in the requirements to get a drivers license today.
Yeah, satellites are probably susceptible to radiation outages. However, is there a record of a satellite breaking for that in our current days? Not that I am aware of. Furthermore, do you think there will be 1 and only 1 satellite up there? two? not likely. There will be LOTS of satellites, not only to position every car in the face of earth, but also to have backup.

Licences to drive flying cars? I agree, more than likely. Will licenses stop flying cars? No. Have licenses stopped the use of land cars? absolutely not.
safemode wrote:I dont see conventional flying cars ever getting anywhere, they're far too impractical. When you can have vertical liftoff and landing with non-polluting aircraft with a less than likely chance of your death if anything goes wrong during flight, then we'll talk.
I will save this phrase to my email and read it 10 years from now, maybe 20 MAX. I will be reading it again in a quad core netbook, aboard a flying bus. How many people said Wright Brother's airplanes would crash and burn, and never get anyone 100 miles away? many (read the Public showing section).
safemode wrote:I dont get the link about nano-tech. Is it supposed to offer a factoid that rebukes the claims above? I read it and as far as i saw, it didn't refute anything said above. Although, it's slightly more positive about it. They touch on the idea of using it to target cancer cells, which is nice and extremely short sighted. Since, if you have a nano-bot that can target cancer cells, and you have a nano-bot that can build objects ala the replicator tech they talk about, then you can easily and obviously see that the tech would lead you to bots that rebuild the dying cells of your body continuously, while fighting infections and repairing badly copied dna, etc. Curing cancer is nice and would be good. Curing death, lots of people aren't too sure that it's a good idea. I for one, would become immortal in a heartbeat, lots of people would want to. But it's not hard to see how horribly bad things will get during such a revolution. I'd just hunker down in a cave and wait it out though, with some raw materials to keep my body replenished as the nuclear wasteland cools down. Either way, nano-tech is not simply going to be 1 tool or 3 or 10. It's a revolution of life akin to the time when cells took in the mitochondria to produce more energy or when they decided to team together to form multi-cellular organisms. It's a symbosis of biology and machine, not in the matrix sense but sorta like in the Borg sense only without the stupid limitations star trek had to put on them to make them not be Q - level powerful. And by nano-tech, i'm talking about the replicator tech type stuff, not the sunscreen crap. I know we have nano-tech today and it's not revolutionary really, nobody is talking about that when they say nano-tech in this thread.
Nope, it agrees with most you said. Except one specific point:
Kevin Bonsor and Jonathan Strickland wrote:Nanotechnology i­s so new, no one is really sure what will come of it.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by Deus Siddis »

safemode wrote: It's only a given if it's not instantaneous. instantaneous travel (all the time anywhere) would be far less risky, and the risk wouldn't change per distance of destination and origin. It's not about fuel prices, obviously, it's about the time the transport is exposed in space. "Warping" or "teleporting" too often or too easily erodes this economic model, and the game would be nothing without that model driving it.
No one is proposing instantaneous travel. But having free probes that only cost you time to arrange/grow and then time to deploy are not going to cause gameplay problems is what I mean. You shouldn't have to buy probes, just as you don't have to buy fuel, for the game to be balanced and believable. The age of the sail model works here, in this instance.
Then you haven't read the one true pdf outlining the history, present, and future of the VS universe.
Actually, I read it cover to cover.
It is a device invented to explain why certain factions interacted the way they did,
I don't remember any part where the nanoplague was necessary to get such a result.
and to limit the technological development so that the game, while based in the distant future, made sense to not have technology that "fit" what we can recreate in-game.
There really isn't that much you can't simulate in a game with a little abstraction.
Basically, there's only so much we can do in a game, and we want to be realistic and as believable as possible. It's far too easy to see that technology a thousand years from now mixed with alien races and such is going to be outside of our imagination, but lets just say we could imagine it, then it would be so advanced that we'd have to think what kind of game it would be that occurately represented that level of technology.
There are alot of things that still hold today from before human technology started advancing, which happen to be the same stuff almost all games' gameplay is made of anyway. Acquire resources, build things out of said resources that can fight out over said resources, fight over said resources, use resources to repair damage taken in fighting over resoures, etc.
It wouldn't be something that's playable in any fashion.
Only if you decide to take the most fantastic predictions as the only possible and realistic vision of the future, without even more fantastic plot devices keeping them in check.
So what was done was decide what kind of game was desired, and shoe-horn in a reality that fit the game, rather than try to work the other way around. The only way to do this and still set the game in the future (since such a game wouldn't even really exist with today's technology) is to invent something that halted the development of certain technologies that would be damaging to the realism of the game.
That doesn't seem to be the case yet- much of the game tries a number of different gameplay directions, none of which are complete or even fully thought out. Only three guidelines seemed to have emerged so far, imo-

1) There must be resources to manage and fight over. (Currently its planets, jump points and cargo).
2) There must be management of and fights over said resources.
3) There must be fun gameplay in said management and fights.

You can build almost any universe around something that basic.
Nano tech is just one of the biggest things we'd have to stop if we wanted to be realistic.
Even if that's true, FTL and human pilots after 1000 years of computer advancement are much, much, much less realistic (all going by what we know today).
A universe where nanite tech is allowed to occur would be vastly different from the VS one, and one where we'd even be able to represent in-game. Models would make no sense in a nanite based ship, since it would be fluidic.
The properties of flexible objects is much different from inflexible things, but not at all better, just very different. Being able to move stuff around in a 'fluidic' way is going to have serious weaknesses like:

1) Massive energy and therefore greater waste heat is needed to hold a flexible shape steady when you have plasma thrusters producing 10G acceleration for hundreds of tons of ship. If even possible, said ship will produce more waste heat, which means a slower and less powerful ship is possible.

2) Flexible structure means easier to manipulate and give damage to by certain types of attacks. You could make the ship convulse out of control using its own nano-bot control mechanisms, eat its nano-hull with other nanites that wouldn't be able to chew into a solid, armored hull because they're too small for fusion reactors and such or blow it to hell with weapons good against this kind of 'soft' target.

3) Pathways and cavities running through all parts of this advanced 'biostructure' acting as nervous and circulatory systems, acting as both structural and exploitation weaknesses.

In short, this stuff is not a replacement for conventional machines, just another helper explanation to VS' extant repair bots and Rlaan bio-systems. Just another tool in the toolshed, with pros and cons, fields of application and the opposite.
Indeed, you can't help but imagine that in a nanite run universe, nobody would age, it would be very hard to kill someone,
Not with this kind of firepower, in space, in the future. Nanites won't save you from being atomized. Folks being hard to kill would make for some could story writing though I must say.
let alone a ship or something and the line between biology and machine would probably not exist anymore.
So then it will have some advantages of an organism and some of a machine. Kind of like, say, everything the Rlaan make. :wink: :D
The consequence of immortality alone would be beyond the scope of believability. Outside of aliens or vampires, how do you imagine a universe where the norm is immortality? what kind of economy would exist? Would you even need one anymore? What would it matter of the time it takes to get to places? Why even go anywhere? etc etc. Immortality is only interesting when you're co-inhabiting a universe where the majority is mortal. such a thing would not exist with nanite tech, and nanite tech is almost surely going to become an actual reality. We have nothing like the nanite plague to stop it here.
Immortallity from natural death doesn't break anything. In fact it unbreaks things if anything, example:

Can't easily deal with the information age in one lifetime today? How will you do it 100 years from now? The answer is indefinite lifetime.
basically, nanite tech makes things too complicated to fit the game, and a game that would encompass it would be pathetically filled with plot holes. Hence, we make it impossible.
Again, only if you buy the most extreme vision of what is possible with it. If you only go with something we know today is actually possible for the main living races, and reserve assembling any molecules out of atoms and back again for the mysterious ancient dead civilizations with millions and billions of years of experience that got them to that point, then problem solved.

And that's not even conservative, what if you can't build any molecule out of atoms using small machines? IOW, what if you can build some things that you couldn't before, but not anything you want to?
Changing shape is entirely useful. Especially when you consider ships have to land on planets. Wings and such make sense in an atmosphere, but offer very little in space.
Wings and Radiators are similarly shaped structures, thus could be integrated most likely. They've already done it with solar panels and wings. Plus, with engines as powerful as those in VS, who needs wings?
It would make sense to re-organize that mass that goes into wings to land on a planet into living squarters for the crew when in space or something similar. Also, shape isn't just the only way the ship would morph via nanite tech. Think saucer separation from star trek, only much niftier beacuse you dont have to worry about dividing a ship up, it just pinches off wherever you need it to because it can. Need a docking bay but dont want a gaping hole in your hull to have someone fire missiles into? easy, the ship just opens a hole to your cargo bay when needed, which would work for docking bays as well. Need to fit inside a docking bay but your ship is too big? easy, simply change the shape so it fits or pinch off a piece and it becomes a shuttle.
Again, that is a small advantage, if any, that creates major weakenesses. Instead of of waiting days for mechanical bacteria to form a hangar bay and to vent the excess heat it takes to create that, why not just pack one in the first place?
There are no limits when the material your talking about is fluid, programmable, self sustaining and can grow/shrink at will. Let alone, create the complicated components that are required to build anything, since they're working atom by atom.
There are always limits. And there are always downsides. And no one said it was possible to work atom by atom. In fact some folks say it isn't possible.
Universe breaking, yes. It changes the game so much that we couldn't comprehend that universe. And attempting to would only create one that either wouldn't be able to be modeled in a game (not just talking about graphics models but gameplay models as well), or would have so many holes in it's plot that it wouldn't be worth it.
If something this minor creates such huge waves then the game's realism factor is already atomized by FTL and human pilots in 1000 years. Perhaps other things like waste heat management as represented by graphics models and gameplay models too.
This wouldn't be like transformers or volume displacement like in T1000. This would be like being able to do what Spore does for character animation but rather than stick a bunch of parts together and have the computer figure out how to move them, it would be the computer figuring out what to make the parts look like, then figuring out how they would work together, and then figuring out how to change the shape and function whenever it needs to given only a purpose or stimulant and to paint it all. Nothing would be able to be really modeled beforehand because there would be no limits to what shapes or features a nanite based ship could have or handle.
Well then by that logic we shouldn't have aliens in VS because evolution could create any number of shapes for them, we shouldn't even guess. . . Except that some shapes are a hell of alot more efficient at doing certain things than almost others, thus we can rely on just a few possible designs emerging because they are all that makes sense for what they are supposed to do.
There would be no volume that has to be maintained, thus there would be no limits to the distortion outside of what would be practical or necessary for the given situation. How do you program that and make a playable game? What would be the point ? What kind of limits would you set, why would you set those limits, how would you articulate the code necessary to describe how to manipulate the object? It would be unique for every situation. Now, an engine that can generate realistic ships on the fly along with textures and such would be nice, now do that with all the growing/shrinking/morphing ability and you got a really cutting edge game engine. Basically, it would require the game to be the artist, you'd have to tell it how. We wouldn't need modelers or ship texturers anymore.
This seems like hyper-over-analysis. Ships, move, detect, evade detection, absorb damage and deliver damage. There's only those things and only so many ways to do each thing. And there is not unlimited time to reconfigure yourself in a massive overhaul between one of those and the next. Sorry Crysis, but its true. :(
Cost is the only thing prohibiting those things.
Not true. For instance, death rays can't replace conventional weapons because they require power supplies that either don't exist, don't exist yet or have too many draw backs. Thus, like nanotechnology of the future, they fit some applications and not most.
Nanite tech is not like that other crap though. nanite tech means your body wont age.
It will only be atomized when the Andolians drop a million tons of antimatter on your planet.
Now, on the surface you would think only the rich would have it. but it's also free and self replicating. So then basically, nothing that the nanite is programmed to fix or replace would die. Now everyone has the time to learn as much as they want. Time loses most of it's meaning. Revolution ensues . You may have some pockets who refuse the technology, figure out ways of disabling it and such. But that would be seen as a weapon by those who want to use it and there would be war. Problem is, living forever or fixing wounds instantly is probably going to trump the naturalists.
The naturalists would win or hold their own because their societies would not remain so stagnant and be full of death-terrified super old folks who have each grown preoccuppied with avoiding their individual unnatural deaths over other pursuits. Or maybe they would lose and folks would survive until you killed them with directed energy beams and antimatter torpedos. Either way the gameplay is about the same. However with the latter, you can have important characters who've been around for many eras or survive the entire VS series.
So eventually you have a civilization of immortals. I'd say that pretty much changes things beyond tool status. This would happen for every civilization. Then you gotta start thinking, what if the borg could somehow have sex with the T-1000 and a vampire and had a baby? Now what if these babies were everyone. What do you do with that? What kind of economy do you have where you really dont need to buy or sell anything?
But how did we get from a combination of anthropomorphic scifi staples to a resourcesless economy? And what happened to the resource of time?

If you are in space, in an asteroid belt, slowly growing a space fleet out of nanites and the Aera are pulling whole asteroids down to a moon covered in factories (which perhaps also use nanites as part of the constuction process), who's going to have a bigger armada?
They say death ill be cured within our lifetime, and while lots of claims are made that never pan out, i dont think they're making a huge leap of faith there when doctors say that. Once it happens, it's a whole new game. Not in the "we just invented electricity" way, but in the "we've become self aware" kind of way.
People will just act more like they do today, and be more unimportant as they are today, as automation continues to replace them in more areas with the advancement of technology.

Now with VS. You have to keep two things in mind. We're mixing WW1/2 style dogfighting with conventional trading.
World War 1-2 style dogfitting with shelton slides, auto-aiming directed energy weapons, guided missiles you can't in your wildest dreams dodge with any hotshot maneuver, ecm counter measures, jump gates, spec/hyper drives, no ground, no gravity, cloaking devices, weapons that kill beyond aided visual range. . . This is starting to feel just a little beyond WW 3 style dogfitting.

The trading gameplay, which is perhaps currently broken as far as balance and realism, is the only part of the game that tries to stick to anything specifically modern. Only with competent pirates and no fuel expenses. Which won't play much different if you trade elemental titanium and rhodium or soft drinks and sexborgs. So nano or conventional, trade is still about moving different cargo items from A to B.
we are already asking users to suspend disbelief that we can't just fire missiles that hit ships from hundreds of miles away
Actually, they can do that. But actually hitting something that can move at that distance is going to take a beam or a FTL 'drive on that missile.
and all the fuel related to maneuvering in tight dogfighting, among other things.
My understanding was less matter is needed for powerful thrust because what little matter is ejected is accelerated to higher speeds and is pushing against itself harder. In shorter, lots more energy (produced in massive quantities by the awesomely powerful reactors of VS) and lots less matter.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

MC707 wrote:
safemode wrote:Satellites are still susceptible to radiation outtages (solar flares etc). Flying cars would still require licensed pilots. If flying cars were forced into the role that cars are, we would have to lower the requirements to get such a license, just as we've continued to see a lowering in the requirements to get a drivers license today.
Yeah, satellites are probably susceptible to radiation outages. However, is there a record of a satellite breaking for that in our current days? Not that I am aware of. Furthermore, do you think there will be 1 and only 1 satellite up there? two? not likely. There will be LOTS of satellites, not only to position every car in the face of earth, but also to have backup.
Well, the past few years the sun has been very inactive. But there have been times where solar storms have taken out satellites, either temporarily or permanently. Even with backups, 3d gps needs quite a lot of satellites to correctly gauge it's location. If a solar storm hits a portion of the earth, it'll take out all the satellites facing the sun at that time (temporarily or not). All the backups in the world wont help the people in that affected area because they need those local gps satellites. The unharmed satellites halfway across the world aren't going to help them.
Licences to drive flying cars? I agree, more than likely. Will licenses stop flying cars? No. Have licenses stopped the use of land cars? absolutely not.
I didn't say they would stop it. quite the contrary. I said demand would dictate that licenses would become easier and easier to get. So now you have the idiocy of car drivers in the sky. What stops flying cars is the landing and taking off. Runways aren't practical. So long as flying cars need them, it'll never catch on.
safemode wrote:I dont see conventional flying cars ever getting anywhere, they're far too impractical. When you can have vertical liftoff and landing with non-polluting aircraft with a less than likely chance of your death if anything goes wrong during flight, then we'll talk.
I will save this phrase to my email and read it 10 years from now, maybe 20 MAX. I will be reading it again in a quad core netbook, aboard a flying bus. How many people said Wright Brother's airplanes would crash and burn, and never get anyone 100 miles away? many (read the Public showing section).
If you're only using a quad core 20 years from now i'd be scared for you. They have those now. In any case, this isn't people making a prediction about a fledgling technology. Flying cars have been around for decades. They only recently have been able to build one that wasn't hundreds of thousands of dollars. They still need to fix the need of a runway before it's anything more than a toy for real pilots.

The airbus already exists as well. :)
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

Deus Siddis wrote:
safemode wrote: It's only a given if it's not instantaneous. instantaneous travel (all the time anywhere) would be far less risky, and the risk wouldn't change per distance of destination and origin. It's not about fuel prices, obviously, it's about the time the transport is exposed in space. "Warping" or "teleporting" too often or too easily erodes this economic model, and the game would be nothing without that model driving it.
No one is proposing instantaneous travel. But having free probes that only cost you time to arrange/grow and then time to deploy are not going to cause gameplay problems is what I mean. You shouldn't have to buy probes, just as you don't have to buy fuel, for the game to be balanced and believable. The age of the sail model works here, in this instance.
Except you are proposing instantaneous travel. Since the idea states that the nexus' once built can remain there. So you only balance the gameplay for a short period of time at the beginning of a game and then the networks of nexus's just build. There is no incentive to not leave every nexus where it's at and keep building your network. Growing your own and such could work, but it would require rethinking how to go about the nexus once it's built and used. They wouldn't be allowed to remain indefinitely or the longer the player is playing, the less and less actual travel would be needed. And the less and less trading would have a purpose.
Then you haven't read the one true pdf outlining the history, present, and future of the VS universe.
Actually, I read it cover to cover.
It is a device invented to explain why certain factions interacted the way they did,
I don't remember any part where the nanoplague was necessary to get such a result.
Then you glossed over that part in the pdf. The advancement of technology in the direction nano-tech takes you has to be stopped or trading hardly makes sense for _ANYTHING_ other than raw material. If we want a game about trading, then we can't have replicators.
and to limit the technological development so that the game, while based in the distant future, made sense to not have technology that "fit" what we can recreate in-game.
There really isn't that much you can't simulate in a game with a little abstraction.
When you've allowed the fantastic to exist, then the game better be able to render the fantastic. We'd be spending all our time trying to make a rendering/gameplay engine able to handle the fantastic. Sure, you can limit things, but then you'd have to invent a reason why it's limited in some way. And then we're back to the nanoplague problem.
Basically, there's only so much we can do in a game, and we want to be realistic and as believable as possible. It's far too easy to see that technology a thousand years from now mixed with alien races and such is going to be outside of our imagination, but lets just say we could imagine it, then it would be so advanced that we'd have to think what kind of game it would be that occurately represented that level of technology.
There are alot of things that still hold today from before human technology started advancing, which happen to be the same stuff almost all games' gameplay is made of anyway. Acquire resources, build things out of said resources that can fight out over said resources, fight over said resources, use resources to repair damage taken in fighting over resoures, etc.
resource acquiring in a nano-tech universe is simply ore mining at best, although most civilizations would probably simply catch the particles on the solar wind as the raw materials they need. I dont think you have thought it through exactly how drastic things would change with replicating nano-tech. There has been nothing like it in our history. Aging gone, that alone is a game-changer, but then add that the workforce is almost entirely liquidated. What would people do if they didn't have to make things or do things for people ? It's so radically different that the culture would be entirely alien to us, and entirely different from any sort of gameplay that VS has or could strive to have.

not making it that radical would require a reason. A lot of thought was put into it and the only realistic solution was some external force not allowing the technology to exist and come to fruition.
It wouldn't be something that's playable in any fashion.
Only if you decide to take the most fantastic predictions as the only possible and realistic vision of the future, without even more fantastic plot devices keeping them in check.
Stopping aging is not fantastic. They probably wont even need nano-tech to do that, the geneticists are halfway there already (doubling the lifespans of various animals by playing with there dna). But nano-replicating bots that repair cellular damage is the primary goal of the medical side of nano-tech. That is hardly "fantastic" in imagination. The result is and can only be, a constantly self-repairing body. You never age, you can rebuild body damage probably up to decapitation so long as you're near enough material for your nanites to rebuild your body and maintain your brain while it happens. Your body would no longer really be contained by the limitations of biology. nanites capable of repairing dna and cells could simply create arbitrary elements to your body at will. Grow tall one day, shrink to shorter the next. Need muscles one day, be skinny the next. Need bony armor instead of skin, done. Replace your skeleton with adamantium, done. The only limitations would be biochemical, and even some of those could be negated by the bots for a time.

All of that is really not fantastic, it's the direction we're currently going today.

So what was done was decide what kind of game was desired, and shoe-horn in a reality that fit the game, rather than try to work the other way around. The only way to do this and still set the game in the future (since such a game wouldn't even really exist with today's technology) is to invent something that halted the development of certain technologies that would be damaging to the realism of the game.
That doesn't seem to be the case yet- much of the game tries a number of different gameplay directions, none of which are complete or even fully thought out. Only three guidelines seemed to have emerged so far, imo-

1) There must be resources to manage and fight over. (Currently its planets, jump points and cargo).
2) There must be management of and fights over said resources.
3) There must be fun gameplay in said management and fights.

You can build almost any universe around something that basic.
except a nano-tech allowed universe would have no fighting over resources so long as stars exist. We wouldn't need to find compounds or particular materials, all we would need is access to the elements and you'd be hard pressed to create a shortage of the majority of the non-synthetic elements in almost any system.

With a seemingly inexhaustible amount of resources to build anything you want available in every system (stars are nice, as are planets and asteroids) the gemeplay involved with managing them would be boring as hell, and no "job" to speak of involving the manipulation of said resources.

Replication technology kills trading. You would have to come up with a _REALLY_ good reason how you can advance nano-tech but somehow negate replication.
Nano tech is just one of the biggest things we'd have to stop if we wanted to be realistic.
Even if that's true, FTL and human pilots after 1000 years of computer advancement are much, much, much less realistic (all going by what we know today).
Andromeda, wing commander (Their nav comps are modeled after living brains), Dune all have biological pilots rather than machines to handle FTL. Most contend that FTL requires living consciousness to connect on some unknown level to the universe in order to navigate in a FTL mode.

In VS pilots aren't required for FTL flight. They are there to handle the unexpected. For gameplay purposes, we minimize auto-pilot by hopefully making a lot of occasions for the unexpected. You could argue that computers would be so good by then, that an AI should be able to handle everything and just transport the person with the cargo and space-flight would be entirely artificial. Fine, but then you have no game. So we need to invent reasons why that's not the case.
A universe where nanite tech is allowed to occur would be vastly different from the VS one, and one where we'd even be able to represent in-game. Models would make no sense in a nanite based ship, since it would be fluidic.
The properties of flexible objects is much different from inflexible things, but not at all better, just very different. Being able to move stuff around in a 'fluidic' way is going to have serious weaknesses like:
Fluidiic is not flexible. I'm not bending a material here. I'm growing/shrinking/building/changing on a molecular level the material. bending or shifting volume around isn't a requirement. The material would just flow into a new shape.
1) Massive energy and therefore greater waste heat is needed to hold a flexible shape steady when you have plasma thrusters producing 10G acceleration for hundreds of tons of ship. If even possible, said ship will produce more waste heat, which means a slower and less powerful ship is possible.

2) Flexible structure means easier to manipulate and give damage to by certain types of attacks. You could make the ship convulse out of control using its own nano-bot control mechanisms, eat its nano-hull with other nanites that wouldn't be able to chew into a solid, armored hull because they're too small for fusion reactors and such or blow it to hell with weapons good against this kind of 'soft' target.

3) Pathways and cavities running through all parts of this advanced 'biostructure' acting as nervous and circulatory systems, acting as both structural and exploitation weaknesses.
1. It's not flexible. It's fluidic. The structure is rigid but the activity of the nanites can make it flow and change at will.

2. Damage would be healed like a biological system,only we wouldn't need to worry about using broken materials. In an nanite universe, nothing is broken, just not in the right form yet.

3. each nanite is probably going to be identical or capable of producing some type of stem-nanite. In which case, there is no circulatory system. It's like the entire structure of the ship would be able to metabolize and respirate. It's like a smart material. The ship wont look like a living thing on the inside like a cylon ship. It'll look however the person inside wants it to. Say, a regular ship. But the nanites would exist on the surface and inside _everything_. Waiting for the command to change their location's material to whatever is desired or needed at any given time. In most cases the nanites make up the materials entirely. This would be done whenever possible since it would result in the most flexible (not physically) material to work with, as objects made entirely of nanites can become anything you want.
In short, this stuff is not a replacement for conventional machines, just another helper explanation to VS' extant repair bots and Rlaan bio-systems. Just another tool in the toolshed, with pros and cons, fields of application and the opposite.
A nanite isn't a tool in the toolshed. It is all the tools and the toolshed. It's the thing the tool was meant to fix. Everything possible would be made simply out of nanites, not just by nanites. It's way more drastic of a change than simply adding another tool to the civilization's toolbox.

Indeed, you can't help but imagine that in a nanite run universe, nobody would age, it would be very hard to kill someone,
Not with this kind of firepower, in space, in the future. Nanites won't save you from being atomized. Folks being hard to kill would make for some could story writing though I must say.
maybe not atomized. But if your brain survived atomization, nanites could sustain it while they build you a new body.
The consequence of immortality alone would be beyond the scope of believability. Outside of aliens or vampires, how do you imagine a universe where the norm is immortality? what kind of economy would exist? Would you even need one anymore? What would it matter of the time it takes to get to places? Why even go anywhere? etc etc. Immortality is only interesting when you're co-inhabiting a universe where the majority is mortal. such a thing would not exist with nanite tech, and nanite tech is almost surely going to become an actual reality. We have nothing like the nanite plague to stop it here.
Immortallity from natural death doesn't break anything. In fact it unbreaks things if anything, example:

Can't easily deal with the information age in one lifetime today? How will you do it 100 years from now? The answer is indefinite lifetime.
Except now you dont have entire industries. You have population controls beyond what's been imagined now. You have an entirely new economic system that would deal with the change in the new value placed on time . it alters far more than the schooling of an individual.

Are people more intelligent on average today because of the level of technology we deal with or simply because we've removed the limitations the poorer people had to attaining any sort of education to begin with? I think it's the latter. I've met enough people and there have been enough studies of our graduating students lately (at least here in the US) and we have the Internet to prove that people are still stupid as dirt. Despite being able to operate cars and dvd players. In the future, we may just have a bunch of near mentally retarded people at the helm of a spaceship and the spaceship just corrects anything really dumb the person tries to make it do. Also, it's not like people will have to know astro-physics or even astronaught level knowledge of gravity and such to do anything.

No, i dont think you need extended lifetimes to live a normal life in the far future. I do think it would help those looking to advance science in that time.
basically, nanite tech makes things too complicated to fit the game, and a game that would encompass it would be pathetically filled with plot holes. Hence, we make it impossible.
Again, only if you buy the most extreme vision of what is possible with it. If you only go with something we know today is actually possible for the main living races, and reserve assembling any molecules out of atoms and back again for the mysterious ancient dead civilizations with millions and billions of years of experience that got them to that point, then problem solved.

And that's not even conservative, what if you can't build any molecule out of atoms using small machines? IOW, what if you can build some things that you couldn't before, but not anything you want to?
Assembling and disassembling things out of small machines is far closer to us than almost any other tech we talk about in VS. It requires no imaginary forces of physics or other dimensions or anything except the refinement of our ability to build the first little machines. To say we're billions of years away from it is like saying we're billions and billions of years away from a space station on the moon. I think it's far more extreme to think nanite tech isn't within 100 years of current technology than it is to say what i've been saying.

I think if there is any limitation to nanite tech it is going to be the limitation of the time it takes to build something. Some objects may not be able to exist partially constructed for too long without failing in some way.

I'm not saying nanite tech is the panacea of everything, but that it sufficiently changes the universe dynamics so much that the game would be too boring, too complicated, or impossible to create to any satisfaction.
Changing shape is entirely useful. Especially when you consider ships have to land on planets. Wings and such make sense in an atmosphere, but offer very little in space.
Wings and Radiators are similarly shaped structures, thus could be integrated most likely. They've already done it with solar panels and wings. Plus, with engines as powerful as those in VS, who needs wings?
just one example. Others would be growing your ship to handle more cargo or changing the role of it. Shrinking the ship to fit in another or even melding your ship into another. etc etc.
It would make sense to re-organize that mass that goes into wings to land on a planet into living squarters for the crew when in space or something similar. Also, shape isn't just the only way the ship would morph via nanite tech. Think saucer separation from star trek, only much niftier beacuse you dont have to worry about dividing a ship up, it just pinches off wherever you need it to because it can. Need a docking bay but dont want a gaping hole in your hull to have someone fire missiles into? easy, the ship just opens a hole to your cargo bay when needed, which would work for docking bays as well. Need to fit inside a docking bay but your ship is too big? easy, simply change the shape so it fits or pinch off a piece and it becomes a shuttle.
Again, that is a small advantage, if any, that creates major weakenesses. Instead of of waiting days for mechanical bacteria to form a hangar bay and to vent the excess heat it takes to create that, why not just pack one in the first place?
Nanites would require energy, most likely in the form of simple heat. So it'd be more likely that heat would have to be directed to an area of rapid activity. Considering that the materials throughout a ship would mostly be entirely made up of nanites, you would not have to wait for any sort of growing or creating of support systems. The energy absorbed by the nanites todo what they do is put into creating new nanites whenever needed or creating new molecular bonds (or breaking them). Heat isn't hard to come by though, since the hull would be engine heatsink.

Some things will simply have nanites mixed in on them, but most things in a nanite universe would be entirely made up of nanites. Linked together in various molecular organizations to create various materials not only dependent on that organization but also on the material that makes up the nanite. Many flavors.
There are no limits when the material your talking about is fluid, programmable, self sustaining and can grow/shrink at will. Let alone, create the complicated components that are required to build anything, since they're working atom by atom.
There are always limits. And there are always downsides. And no one said it was possible to work atom by atom. In fact some folks say it isn't possible.
we build things now atom by atom using a needle tip. The technical feet is making the tiny robot that can do it, not in proving that it can or can't be done.

By limits, i was thinking in terms of defining objects for the game. You wouldn't be able to enforce arbitrary limits on a shape of a nanite object and that would be insane to try and model in-game.
Universe breaking, yes. It changes the game so much that we couldn't comprehend that universe. And attempting to would only create one that either wouldn't be able to be modeled in a game (not just talking about graphics models but gameplay models as well), or would have so many holes in it's plot that it wouldn't be worth it.
If something this minor creates such huge waves then the game's realism factor is already atomized by FTL and human pilots in 1000 years. Perhaps other things like waste heat management as represented by graphics models and gameplay models too.
Nanites aren't minor. They're far more major than FTL or human pilots can ever be. With nanites, you dont need FTL. You dont even really have "human" anymore. You completely destroy any recognizable economy or industry or political system you might imagine to be used. It would all be different.
This wouldn't be like transformers or volume displacement like in T1000. This would be like being able to do what Spore does for character animation but rather than stick a bunch of parts together and have the computer figure out how to move them, it would be the computer figuring out what to make the parts look like, then figuring out how they would work together, and then figuring out how to change the shape and function whenever it needs to given only a purpose or stimulant and to paint it all. Nothing would be able to be really modeled beforehand because there would be no limits to what shapes or features a nanite based ship could have or handle.
Well then by that logic we shouldn't have aliens in VS because evolution could create any number of shapes for them, we shouldn't even guess. . . Except that some shapes are a hell of alot more efficient at doing certain things than almost others, thus we can rely on just a few possible designs emerging because they are all that makes sense for what they are supposed to do.
It's not about limiting our imagination, it's that we've allowed a certain set of things to occur, and we're unable to give the user the ability to experience it at all. It's like saying we have a game that gives the user a pool to play in, but doesn't model splashing of the water at all, or waves. It would be like if we had an invisible wall in a system just outside of the last planet's orbit that the user's ship would hit against and not allow to pass. It's a limitation in the code's ability to accurately represent something that we're saying is allowed to happen logically, but the user simply wouldn't be able to do or experience. It's ugly the way older games were for having artificial boundaries to movement within an environment that really shouln't have been there but had to due to memory limitations.
There would be no volume that has to be maintained, thus there would be no limits to the distortion outside of what would be practical or necessary for the given situation. How do you program that and make a playable game? What would be the point ? What kind of limits would you set, why would you set those limits, how would you articulate the code necessary to describe how to manipulate the object? It would be unique for every situation. Now, an engine that can generate realistic ships on the fly along with textures and such would be nice, now do that with all the growing/shrinking/morphing ability and you got a really cutting edge game engine. Basically, it would require the game to be the artist, you'd have to tell it how. We wouldn't need modelers or ship texturers anymore.
This seems like hyper-over-analysis. Ships, move, detect, evade detection, absorb damage and deliver damage. There's only those things and only so many ways to do each thing. And there is not unlimited time to reconfigure yourself in a massive overhaul between one of those and the next. Sorry Crysis, but its true. :(
We only have a few dozen types of ships because we have memory limitations and graphic rendering limitations. we're talking about a universe of people, where if their ships were nanite driven, would be unique for each person. Perhaps in subtle ways, perhaps in huge ways. Rather than pick a ship and try to work around it's limitations, the user would simple create a ship best fit to their needs. Rather than rendering 23 models and re-using that memory and textures, you'd have 8000 models and their textures would all be different.

Even if they dont change often, they'd still have to have the ability to change anything about themselves at any time. The time it takes for that doesn't alter the complexity of the coding or rendering at all. It would probably be better if it happened faster than slower, since there would be less frames to show the changing.


The rest i'll have to comment on later. At some point at work today i have to get some other stuff done :)
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

Deus Siddis wrote:
Now, on the surface you would think only the rich would have it. but it's also free and self replicating. So then basically, nothing that the nanite is programmed to fix or replace would die. Now everyone has the time to learn as much as they want. Time loses most of it's meaning. Revolution ensues . You may have some pockets who refuse the technology, figure out ways of disabling it and such. But that would be seen as a weapon by those who want to use it and there would be war. Problem is, living forever or fixing wounds instantly is probably going to trump the naturalists.
The naturalists would win or hold their own because their societies would not remain so stagnant and be full of death-terrified super old folks who have each grown preoccuppied with avoiding their individual unnatural deaths over other pursuits. Or maybe they would lose and folks would survive until you killed them with directed energy beams and antimatter torpedos. Either way the gameplay is about the same. However with the latter, you can have important characters who've been around for many eras or survive the entire VS series.
I doubt naturalists would win. Those with nanites would be nearly unkillable without blowing their brains apart. Any other damage would not work. They wouldn't be fearful of death, they would be fearless of it, believing themselves to be nearly godlike in their own evolution of conquering nature.
So eventually you have a civilization of immortals. I'd say that pretty much changes things beyond tool status. This would happen for every civilization. Then you gotta start thinking, what if the borg could somehow have sex with the T-1000 and a vampire and had a baby? Now what if these babies were everyone. What do you do with that? What kind of economy do you have where you really dont need to buy or sell anything?
But how did we get from a combination of anthropomorphic scifi staples to a resourcesless economy? And what happened to the resource of time?
easy. Nanites use raw elements. Those exist all over the place, everywhere, and every star dumps that raw material into the solar wind constantly in quantities far in excess of what you'd mine from an asteroid. you'd be hard pressed to find an element to be rare in any given system.

Time, time stopped being a resource when we conquered aging and trading of the majority of goods. It's still going to matter somewhat, but it matters so little that we wouldn't even need FTL in such a universe to work.
If you are in space, in an asteroid belt, slowly growing a space fleet out of nanites and the Aera are pulling whole asteroids down to a moon covered in factories (which perhaps also use nanites as part of the constuction process), who's going to have a bigger armada?
I'd just setup collection sails around stars. you'd get far more material that way than by mining lone asteroids. Though, for some of the most heaviest of elements, you'd probably have to go that route.
You also have to realize, a nanite society means almost everything is morphable and reusable. You dont need to build fleets of ships that do one thing or another or factories etc. Ships can land on a planet and be recycled into a factory and then later back into a ship when that use is done. Etc etc.
They say death ill be cured within our lifetime, and while lots of claims are made that never pan out, i dont think they're making a huge leap of faith there when doctors say that. Once it happens, it's a whole new game. Not in the "we just invented electricity" way, but in the "we've become self aware" kind of way.
People will just act more like they do today, and be more unimportant as they are today, as automation continues to replace them in more areas with the advancement of technology.
If you think there wont be a bloody revolution when death is cured then you're lying to yourself. If you dont think the idea of time and all of that will change if you had an eternity to do things, then you're lying.


More later :)
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by Deus Siddis »

safemode wrote: Except you are proposing instantaneous travel. Since the idea states that the nexus' once built can remain there. So you only balance the gameplay for a short period of time at the beginning of a game and then the networks of nexus's just build. There is no incentive to not leave every nexus where it's at and keep building your network. Growing your own and such could work, but it would require rethinking how to go about the nexus once it's built and used. They wouldn't be allowed to remain indefinitely or the longer the player is playing, the less and less actual travel would be needed. And the less and less trading would have a purpose.
The Nexuses have to be maintained. Running out of power, overheating and needing to radiate, getting destroyed by natural and most unnatural means, being stolen, etc., could eat through a large or mid sized network or create downtime faster than you could manufacture and deploy replacements. Especially since the VS universe is supposed to be so turbulent.

You'd have to think about where and how you want your web, and creep it slowly along as you ventured into other space. And then you would still have to maintain it, costing time and effort.
Then you glossed over that part in the pdf. The advancement of technology in the direction nano-tech takes you has to be stopped or trading hardly makes sense for _ANYTHING_ other than raw material. If we want a game about trading, then we can't have replicators.
I don't think that all the natural elements are so easy to find in large enough quantities, that with nanites said elements are cheap to mine, that they can be cheaply and efficiently mined in open space and those facilities that mine them in open space are cheap/compact enough that they can be easily and cheaply protected, that all molecules can be broken down by nanites or that building and morphing things everywhere is more efficient than building them in one place using specialization and then distributing them around the local neighborhood.

This is my main argument, that nanites are in fact very limited by such things as listed above and thus not imbalancing, unfun or unimaginable.
except a nano-tech allowed universe would have no fighting over resources so long as stars exist. We wouldn't need to find compounds or particular materials, all we would need is access to the elements and you'd be hard pressed to create a shortage of the majority of the non-synthetic elements in almost any system.

With a seemingly inexhaustible amount of resources to build anything you want available in every system (stars are nice, as are planets and asteroids) the gemeplay involved with managing them would be boring as hell, and no "job" to speak of involving the manipulation of said resources.
You're talking about even more technologies now, mining stars and such. Who says nanotech can reach that level without hitting a physical limitation wall or that by the time VS comes around nanotech will already be at its peak? And who says nanotech means total distribution of resources evenly? Mature, industrialized systems will still be able to produce more elemental or nanomaterial than a recent colony, thus trade or shipment of resources to the seed colony system will be very plausible and efficient.

In fact, even without nanotech, this is about all that makes sense. Shipping resources from one system to the next being cheaper than manufacturing or mining them in the system where there are needed is really unbelievable and unrealistic as it is, unless one system is just really immature and needs more 'seed', or one system is really lacking in a particular element, like gold or neon or whatever.
resource acquiring in a nano-tech universe is simply ore mining at best, although most civilizations would probably simply catch the particles on the solar wind as the raw materials they need. I dont think you have thought it through exactly how drastic things would change with replicating nano-tech. There has been nothing like it in our history. Aging gone, that alone is a game-changer, but then add that the workforce is almost entirely liquidated. What would people do if they didn't have to make things or do things for people ? It's so radically different that the culture would be entirely alien to us, and entirely different from any sort of gameplay that VS has or could strive to have.

not making it that radical would require a reason. A lot of thought was put into it and the only realistic solution was some external force not allowing the technology to exist and come to fruition.
But you might not have thought through just how radical the a change of total industrial automation, basically unlimited energy and FTL have already changed what is realistic and believable in VS. So lets do that now:

What do people matter, regardless of how long they live, when battles rely on massive machines built in automated factories, in huge quantities? Basically, they are nervous tissue, they help design machines and help command them. That's it. If they want to live to see infinity with their nanoblood, they'd damn well better handle their massive machine infrastructure better than the Aera do theirs, it's as simple as that.
easy. Nanites use raw elements. Those exist all over the place, everywhere, and every star dumps that raw material into the solar wind constantly in quantities far in excess of what you'd mine from an asteroid. you'd be hard pressed to find an element to be rare in any given system.

Time, time stopped being a resource when we conquered aging and trading of the majority of goods. It's still going to matter somewhat, but it matters so little that we wouldn't even need FTL in such a universe to work.
Trade is about moving shit around within a system anyway (jump gates make intersys travel instant and mindless thus irrelevant), protecting or attacking things (the net that collects star droppings must be a pretty wide target to defend).

And the Aera and friends still provide plenty of incentive to go for more resources than you actually need or want, so that your battle fleets aren't smaller than theirs and they can crush you simply because its survival of the fittest. If you don't always put out everything you've got eventually you become a brachiopod in a sea of bivalves or a trilobite fossil in a sea of horseshoe crabs. A better competitor eats your lunch simply because it can and anything that can happen eventually will.
maybe not atomized. But if your brain survived atomization, nanites could sustain it while they build you a new body.
Well then awesome. In a world with weapons that make H-bombs look like jumping jacks I could really use an edge like that. Besides, do we have a universe level explanation for save games? Because this affects gameplay alot stronger- you get your ship and cargo back instantly too, not just your body over time. Nobody complained that Halo didn't limit how many lives you had.
I doubt naturalists would win. Those with nanites would be nearly unkillable without blowing their brains apart. Any other damage would not work. They wouldn't be fearful of death, they would be fearless of it, believing themselves to be nearly godlike in their own evolution of conquering nature.
Maybe or maybe not. If glassing fleets and continents doesn't give you a power trip then living longer certainly won't (no one can live forever, shit happens).
If you think there wont be a bloody revolution when death is cured then you're lying to yourself. If you dont think the idea of time and all of that will change if you had an eternity to do things, then you're lying.
In VS, revolutions = blah. Faster than light, massive automation of everything across solar systems, alien empires, self-genetically engineering spartan super-freaks and crazy ass organ-mechanizers, all of this blows doors wide open. And in the universe document, that is why people of VS' time are described as being so different from us, that we can't even imagine how differently we'd have to imagine things, to imagine them if they were even alot less different, or something along those lines. :shock:

So that boat's already sailed is what I mean.
By limits, i was thinking in terms of defining objects for the game. You wouldn't be able to enforce arbitrary limits on a shape of a nanite object and that would be insane to try and model in-game.
Most folks fly what makes sense, that's all the assumption we need. Obviously, if we wanted to be realistic, we'd already have to model the same amount of ships, because any number of entities can weld bling onto their ships, or add another engine, in a universe with trillions of individuals and enough factories to cover the surface of every rocky body in our Sol system. Already, we cheat, so no loss there.

This goes back to my earlier arguement, that what a VS style universe with massive, massive, massive infrastucture can produce in regards to quantity and variantion, is indistinguishable from what it can produce with nanotechnology. We are already in it that deep.
In VS pilots aren't required for FTL flight. They are there to handle the unexpected. For gameplay purposes, we minimize auto-pilot by hopefully making a lot of occasions for the unexpected. You could argue that computers would be so good by then, that an AI should be able to handle everything and just transport the person with the cargo and space-flight would be entirely artificial. Fine, but then you have no game. So we need to invent reasons why that's not the case.
But we haven't invented reasons for explaining that. It is left unanswered and vague as far as I know. Living pilots are useful because. . . We don't have AI? Nope we have those in the game, in fact as a species that's even considered our claim to fame. Even the grandchildren can't seem to totally obsolete us in the game, yet no real explanation is given why.

So going so hardcore to feel the need to explain away nanotechnology completely seems total overkill, unless questions like those regarding mysterious yet unexplained AI limitations are given.

Or how do you intercept, in game, a ship moving at a natural, inertial 0.1c in 'flight' mode, by any means. That also is unanswered.
1. It's not flexible. It's fluidic. The structure is rigid but the activity of the nanites can make it flow and change at will.
Then that is going to cost alot of energy to break those solid bonds in order to move things around, and it is going to take alot of time as well, and then more waste heat as well.

Either you need energy constantly applied to create a bond like an electro magnet, or you need energy to force those bonded things apart like pulling something off a natural magnet.

And then how do you control it and manage it? That requires building systems to do so (more time, energy, heat) or having them already in place, wasting space and mass.
2. Damage would be healed like a biological system,only we wouldn't need to worry about using broken materials. In an nanite universe, nothing is broken, just not in the right form yet.
Biological systems are complex, weak and slow. They're good at what they do but not better than machines, just different. A combination of the two would just be more of a jack of both trades.

And lossing chunks of matter or melting into slag can still make you broken. We're talking weapons of the future here too. If nanohealing armor is much better, the firepower it has to stand up to is also greater, via the advances of other technologies, like reactors and directed energy weapons, antimatter collection, etc. So believable gameplay balance is maintained.
3. each nanite is probably going to be identical or capable of producing some type of stem-nanite. In which case, there is no circulatory system. It's like the entire structure of the ship would be able to metabolize and respirate. It's like a smart material.
No, you need different elements for different properties in different parts of the ship. A stem nanite would need to give up gold and be given titanium for one role, get cobalt and lose titanium for another, requiring conduits and other excesses. And there is only so much complexity you can fit in a nanite. Going from any specialized use to stem and then some other specialized use in one self contained mechanical cell so many atoms wide is going to be limited by how much information it can store on how to become this or that.

And again, you still have the issue that if the nanites can reform themselves under some control mechanism, an enemy can 'hack' or 'infect' with a 'virus' your awesome nano ship to make it do things you don't want it to. A solid, static ship can't be hacked like that. You have to penetrate its thick skin to kill it.
We only have a few dozen types of ships because we have memory limitations and graphic rendering limitations.
Bingo. That's the limitation, not the story of the nanoplague.

How does the nanoplague explain how unnrealistic planets look without seamless planetary flight? It doesn't. So now we need people to burn up in the upper atmosphere. Or we can lower our standards a little and thereby no longer have a need for the nanoplague, or people burning up in the atmosphere, or whatever explanation works for why AI ships don't move at natural speeds too fast for them to be intercepted by any means, or why AI hasn't replaced pilots.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by MC707 »

safemode wrote:
MC707 wrote:
safemode wrote:Satellites are still susceptible to radiation outtages (solar flares etc). Flying cars would still require licensed pilots. If flying cars were forced into the role that cars are, we would have to lower the requirements to get such a license, just as we've continued to see a lowering in the requirements to get a drivers license today.
Yeah, satellites are probably susceptible to radiation outages. However, is there a record of a satellite breaking for that in our current days? Not that I am aware of. Furthermore, do you think there will be 1 and only 1 satellite up there? two? not likely. There will be LOTS of satellites, not only to position every car in the face of earth, but also to have backup.
Well, the past few years the sun has been very inactive. But there have been times where solar storms have taken out satellites, either temporarily or permanently. Even with backups, 3d gps needs quite a lot of satellites to correctly gauge it's location. If a solar storm hits a portion of the earth, it'll take out all the satellites facing the sun at that time (temporarily or not). All the backups in the world wont help the people in that affected area because they need those local gps satellites. The unharmed satellites halfway across the world aren't going to help them.
In the unlikely event that an entire region of satellites suddenly blow out because of a solar storm, vehicles will most likely have a manual control. OR, have fool proof security systems. In fact, I am going to quote the very page I gave you a link to.
Kevin Bonsor wrote:To make the Skycar safe and available to the general public, it will be completely controlled by computers using Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, which Moller calls a fly-by-wire system. In case of an accident, the vehicle will release a parachute and airbags, internally and externally, to cushion the impact of the crash.

MACRO Industries' SkyRider X2R will also use this fly-by-wire system to safely transport passengers to their desired destinations. Drivers will simply get in, turn on the power and enter the address or phone number of their destination. SkyRider will do the rest. MACRO said that the system will be almost fully automatic, but may allow some manual control. Commands will be entered just by telling the car what you want it to do.
safemode wrote:
Licences to drive flying cars? I agree, more than likely. Will licenses stop flying cars? No. Have licenses stopped the use of land cars? absolutely not.
I didn't say they would stop it. quite the contrary. I said demand would dictate that licenses would become easier and easier to get. So now you have the idiocy of car drivers in the sky. What stops flying cars is the landing and taking off. Runways aren't practical. So long as flying cars need them, it'll never catch on.
You didn't read the page I gave you with the previous link. Again, I will quote my savy friend to save time and energy.
Kevin Bonsor wrote:Moller's latest design, the Skycar M400, is designed to take off and land vertically, like a Harrier Jet, in small spaces.
safemode wrote:
safemode wrote:I dont see conventional flying cars ever getting anywhere, they're far too impractical. When you can have vertical liftoff and landing with non-polluting aircraft with a less than likely chance of your death if anything goes wrong during flight, then we'll talk.
I will save this phrase to my email and read it 10 years from now, maybe 20 MAX. I will be reading it again in a quad core netbook, aboard a flying bus. How many people said Wright Brother's airplanes would crash and burn, and never get anyone 100 miles away? many (read the Public showing section).
If you're only using a quad core 20 years from now i'd be scared for you. They have those now. In any case, this isn't people making a prediction about a fledgling technology. Flying cars have been around for decades. They only recently have been able to build one that wasn't hundreds of thousands of dollars. They still need to fix the need of a runway before it's anything more than a toy for real pilots.
They have quad core netbooks nowadays? Damn, I'm either too outdated or got a nasty amnesia. :lol:

About the runway thing, check this, and also this. As they say, don't trust my words, trust your eyes. :shock:
safemode wrote:The airbus already exists as well. :)
Yeah, though I doubt airbus can stop in front of your doorstep. :wink: So it's probably just a marketing name.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

(btw, i thought you said quad core notebook yesterday, not netbook. 4 hours of sleep a day will do that)

Basically, you're arguing that because we have to make concessions on rendering/modeling both visually and in simulation due to hardware restrictions, that it's perfectly fine to lower the thresh-hold of realism arbitrarily, in this case when it comes to nano-tech. Further, that the nano-plague is more of a lowering of realism than allowing nano-tech.

My goal is to increase the thresh-hold of realism in any aspect of the game possible without destroying gameplay. I dont think allowing nano-tech advanced a thousand years from the current level we're at would be possible given hardware limitations and gameplay limitations. Hence it's a little different from other aspects of the game that are unrealistic, in that, we can't use it not because it's something that is physically wrong, unbelievable, or unpredicted to occur in the time of VS, but because we simply can't deal with the most basic features of the technology on the scale that VS exists in, and those holes would be more unbelievable than not having the tech at all.

Rather than use the inaccuracies or unbelievability of things like reactor output, weapon strength or ship thrust to justify other conveniences, i'd like to see those inaccuracies and other things fixed. They exist soley for gameplay, without any regard for the game's universe dynamics and are almost entirely wrong to exist. Gameplay is important, but it's not something set in stone, the tricky part is being creative with how to manage gameplay and the game universe's reality without being boring to players. It's the creativity aspect that's lacking here, most of the things you listed as also being unrealistic are simply the easy fixes over the years building up. It should all be fixed.

So, maybe the nano-plague isn't the best way to explain things, then we need to invent an explanation for why nano-tech isn't magical like i'm saying it will likely be, and where it seems to be heading conventionally, and why it's been relegated to a simple tool in the toolbox of civilizations like you suggest. It's not going to be something that is just left open ended and unanswered because it's one of those things that even conventionally is thought to bring about a huge change in technology/biology and the economy if certain even conservative predictions come about.

Then the role that the nano-plague plays in the future of VS have to be rethought as well.

But then lets also touch on some of the other things. Huge reactor outputs. Everyone wants bigger, but sometimes smaller is more fun. By restricting firepower and thus allowing us to restrict shields and restricting thrust and thereby allowing us to restrict the reactors we bring more strategy into the game. No longer can you fly around haphazardly blindly shooting at targets and knocking them off while not caring about return fire. While there is always a balance no matter how fantastic you make everything as long as you make them all fantastic equally, it's all much more believable on the lower end of the spectrum than the upper. So all of the energies and damaging ability of everything has to be brought down and we would explain that by limiting the output of the reactor and making the majority of that output go towards the engines requiring more power to work. Since we dont want to degrade gameplay that much we dont destroy the performance of ship maneuverability and explain it by saying that it uses a massive amount of power. Shields would then come next in the power priorities, then weapons.

So we rebalance at a much lower power level, bringing the reactors into believability and weapon damage back to believability. To further bring the balance into order, we make shields something that uses energy constantly while it's on. Not just to recharge. Meaning, the user would "raise" shields only when needed. they wouldn't "weaken" as the ship was fired at, but simply absorb a percentage of energy from the weapon, excess energy being what contacts the ship hull and produces damage. As the ship gets damaged, the shields could worsen. Better shield emitters could pulse out the shields to make use of the reactor's power as best as possible just before an impact to absorb more of the weapon's energy. Perhaps also modifying the rate at which it can absorb weapon fire. Think of it working like a capacitor where weapon fire would require a discharge, negative energy from the shields would be added to the positive energy of the weapon and if there is a positive remainder, that is the energy the hull sees for damage calculations.

So with shields, reactors and engines explained and fixed, on to weapons. Weapons would probably come in 3 flavors naturally. Energy, particle, and mass projection. Energy weapons can be of the type like a laser (heat) in which different wavelengths may cause more or less damage on different types of shields/hulls. Energy weapons could also be defensive or secondary weapons like radiation flooding emitters that could wreak havoc to sensors or various systems of a targeted ship. Particle weapons would be like railguns. Ejecting various types of particles at a target, where depending on what you're shooting, could have all sorts of interesting results at impact. Think, about the collision in a particle accelerator happening on the surface of your hull constantly or on your shields directly above your hull. Both energy and particle weapons may come in beam or bolt form. Then there is mass projection. You got varying sizes of projectiles and types. Some may be bullet like, some may be grenade like. So you'll have tons of variety, while all remaining much weaker in energy and damage level than what we currently have. But then, the shields/hull and such will all be much weaker as well, to put it in line with what is more believable. No magic death rays of unimaginable power. Bigger ships would simple be able to have more or bigger reactors to power larger versions of the guns you have, or more of them, and/or allow them to refire much more rapidly. This means no longer are you going to be able to lone-ranger a carrier or capship no matter how much you've upgraded your little fighter. Big ships == group effort. Strategy > mindless easy gameplay.

Ok, so weapons and all that have been rebalanced to be more believable. Now you have to form alliances with other pilots and go on joint missions to destroy anything significantly bigger than you because it's simply not possible for you to match their firepower or shield ability. Now you're actually playing the game and having to get involved with it's inner workings. But we still have that pesky getting from Point A to Point B problem. 1. It takes a long time simply flying at conventional "dogfight" mode. 2. SPEC is so unbalanced and logically swiss cheesed that all that work at making guns,shields,reactors and engines believable seems like a waste. So the answer is to ditch SPEC, there is no way to logically fix it. Simply putting players into cryo-sleep would be the most believable way to transit large distances without FTL but from a gameplay standpoint it's not doable. So we have to do something else. The Nexus idea was my attempt at fixing this issue. If maintenance is a large enough issue, then i don't have a problem with making the "probes" free since we can be fairly certain they will never build up to dangerous levels. It also allows another avenue of separating yourself in your trading business by having a better network than other merchants and such. Since the nexus's aren't limited to being in gravity free zones, you dont have to worry about spending 5 minutes to fly away from a large planet after lifting off from it.

It also removes "wormholes" from the game's believability. Since Bose-nova's aren't proven to exist (and really dont have much of a theory of existing beyond mine) it is best to make anything of relation based on the same theory rather than have multiple equally unrealistic theories at the same time. That is, VS currently has two equally unbelievable FTL theories. One is wormhole travel, the other is SPEC. Mine has only The Nexus' . Furthermore, the existence of the wormholes is revealed to be (spoiler to hidden PDF) but the means of doing this is another unbelievable technology. The Nexus system doesn't require another imaginary means of hyperdimension/FTL communication. All of the other features that occur in the future related to wormholes and such are better explained when we use the Nexus'.

Ok, so weapons, shields, engines, reactors, FTL intra-system and FTL inter-system have all been rebalanced and fixed. Yielding more interaction with other NPC's/players and more strategy in dogfights/attacks and thus better more immersive gameplay. Now we have to handle trading, which is a huge aspect of the game dynamics. Trading is currently handled as if each planet or space-station was a single shop owned by a single person. First thing is to get rid of that notion, make each planet have multiple cities, all dockable (if they let you) and perhaps even have multiple places you can unload your cargo in them. No longer is the stop at place to sell and buy cargo going to be a hit-and-run. Now you have to explore, interact and possible be interacted with while planetside/stationside. Furthermore, items would be pseudo-persistent. Meaning, production of items would require resources and those resources would be used up in accordance. A lack of resources means no products dependent on them. Such multi-dependent resources would be traded by large trading ships, not your stupid llama that can't carry anything, since they would likely require tons of the material from multiple traders daily. Most multi-dependent resources would simply be out of the scope of a player's trading career. Most gameplay trading would involve much more realistically rare items that one would think a courier would handle rather than a freight train. The majority of what a player will likely trade are things like medical supplies to outposts, people first and foremost (the criminal/wanted/rich or those going to less-popular locales), personal effects, scientific equipment, illegal items (second only to people), and other various rare or randomly in-need items. The majority of couriers (which is what you are as a privateer in-game) would likely have to deal in the transportation of illegal things. Players should find it difficult to not find themselves on either side of the law when acting as a trader in-game. At least not until they've become successful enough to have a large enough ship to trade enough legal goods to make profit.

Now that we balanced the things that we're trading and the local prices, we have to balance the remote prices. This is where the game currently completely falls apart. Taking into mind that news no longer travels instantly, and likely will have to be brought from system to system via the ships that pass through them, we would balance remote prices based on time and in-system availability. This requires no communication of goods from one system to the other to be passed around and grepped. Simply know what is in the system to base your price on. Each base then ratches the price up a certain amount every N seconds that pass. NPC's then handle giving the base those items, and we can cheat by adding some multiplier to what the NPC's trade to make up fro not being able to render and model the sheer number of ships needed to sustain a real economy. But, if even that is not enough to sustain the demand, then the price keeps going up. Run-away prices would be our problem of not correctly balancing the artificial supply and demand, but the player and NPC's can effect that supply and demand through war and attacks on certain bases as well, changing alliances and thus trade-routes. Players would be discouraged from simply waiting a price out with goods while in orbit because they could be beaten by an NPC and the price would plummet before they could offload their own. Remote demand for goods is sent via the news. This remote demand wouldn't effect prices on it's own, what would effect prices is the rate of previous purchases over time vs production. Meaning, it becomes a matter of selling / producing (producing could also mean bought goods) multiplied by a factor of the rate of selling / producing over a period of time. This means if i buy 30% of a factory's output of sexbots and then come back and buy another 30% within a month and their production output is given per-month then my second 30% is going to cost more than my first (assuming nobody else bought any either). Not only would it matter that i bought another 30% while it's stock was lower than before, but it also matters how rapidly I bought that second 30%. If i had bought that second 30% 5 days after the first, it would cost more than if i waited 20 days. Perceived demand would be higher if i bought the second 30% 5 days later, than if i waited 20. Of course, this is also all dependent on time-based resupply of goods that are produced locally (assuming any dependent goods aren't out of stock). Prices may further be modified by the previous cycle's avg cost of dependent goods paid out.
This should handle balancing of prices of goods, and doesn't require the transmission and behind-the-scenes balancing of prices and goods base-to-base. Everything is handled locally as needed. NPC's are the equalizing force behind the supply and demand economy, with only very minor kludging of numbers to make up for the lack of number of NPC's in-game. Like i mentioned above though, most of this economy is handled on a much higher scale than the player will be playing at (and most of the NPC's). Large cargo freighters handle the majority of the economy supply and demand chain. Privateers are specialty traders, and so most of what they do wont be altering the economy's of a system.

Ok, now that we have the economy dealt with, we have to move on to politics rebalancing. There is a serious lack of "factionalism". Part of this is simply lack of campaigns/missions/fixers. But part is because there exists no centralized AI that handles over-arcing faction goals. This faction AI would not exist in a ship, but possibly from within a new special unit called a "capital". The capital can be located anywhere of our choosing, ship, planet, asteroid, nowhere. Giving it a physical location means it can be destroyed, giving it a non-location means it's a pseudo centralized command. Pirates would be in that latter group, most other factions would be in the first. Factions would be allowed to spawn a new "capital" on an appropriate unit of their control if they have enough territory under their control and their old capital is destroyed. In this way, we can wipe out a faction completely, or have one that was brought to near extinction come back. Now what this Faction AI does is play the game like you would play Civilization, only in realtime, and the units dont have to necessarily do what you tell them. Unlike ship NPC's and the player, faction AI's have a much broader picture of the VS universe. This is provided by having information regarding goods from all their bases, and delayed information about any kills/help/non-inclusionary alliances or declarations of war. In addition to supplying missions to players, they also coordinate larger scale objectives and can declare war or an alliance with another faction AI. Alongside that we could also have each planet/station have a president/commander that isn't a real AI but rather a modifier value that is presented as a NPC in-game. Based on prices of goods, amount of piracy in system, hostility level, loss of ships/bases, this modifier would represent a sort of approval rating of the Faction AI. When it reaches a certain level, a station/planet may revolt or go rogue or riot or demand a re-election. This pseudo-reelection could pass if the avg approval of the other bases in the faction are within a given range. What this does is modify certain attributes of the Faction AI (behind the scenes) such that it behaves differently and more in tune to the appease the bases. This can be represented in-game as a new character taking the place of leader of a faction. Etc (think coupes and such). It would mostly depend on the structures we give each faction as to what happens when approval ratings change to certain thresh-holds.

Ok, so now the game is fairly rebalanced. Now it's time to look at the PDF and make any necessary changes to backstory and the future that may be in disagreement with our new alterations. Obviously, anything relating to the nano-plague needs to be addressed. dates are important to look at, we want things more believable so we have to make sure things aren't occurring too quickly between events. Most of the details of the past at the time of TWHON is lost, many of the systems having been totally destroyed and reborn as their stars die and get reborn, etc. So it's simple to just state those things we could ever discover from those things still in existence. Then we can talk about the Ancients who seed the beginnings of most if not all of the current species in the VS game. They're important to mention because it's their technology that we can use to drive certain conflicts from going in a desired direction that is both exciting and engaging to the player at our will. We can make it be artifacts that almost never have an effect in-game when it comes to available tech that the player can use but we can have certain NPC instances of prototypes that involve missions the player participates in. Most of the events regarding the current civilizations in VS are pretty well thought out. Only Nano-plague issues would have to be reworked, and any wormhole/spec related stuff. But usually those would be minor alterations. This would hold true for the future parts of the PDF as well. Although the alterations would be more drastic, since the nanoplague is heavily featured as are wormholes.

The only real issue i'd have with the stories of the current civilizations being unrealistic is that i dont think we have a strong enough religious faction. You really have two ways you can go. Either like some Catholic-type religion's wet dream when it comes to control and power or some type of respected sect ...buddhist monk style. we certainly have fanatical factions, fundamentalist factions, but none similar to either a vatican-on-steroids or buddhist-on-roids faction. Perhaps having both would be best, both knowing some ancient secret or believing in some ancient prophecy and the bud-roids protecting it and the Vat-roids trying to acquire it by beating the bud-roids down and torturing the secrets out of them or something more complicated where we think the first situation is what is happening, but realize that the vat-roids are really protecting everyone because they believe the bud-roids are really being directed by an incomplete ancient instruction that if followed too soon would bring the wrath of TWHON back before we were ready. etc etc. Also the lack of corporations. Corporations would likely be inter-faction much as they are international now. Perhaps even having more unfluence than faction AI's, a few corporations would grow to massive sizes wielding a great deal of power. They'd also likely have close ties to various governments. News of their exploits and rise and fall and mergers should be in the PDF and be a part of gameplay. Corporations would not be controlled by an AI but by the campaign scripts.

We really should also think about the effects of reducing aging medical science would have had by the time of VS, with or without nanites. It means we dont have to worry about a lot of events we want to be a part of the game and the player's character background to have occurred rapidly to be within his/her lifetime. We can spread them out to a more realistic timeframe. At such huge distances, various cause and effects would take much longer to occur, but we can deal with that when a person naturally lives to 200-300 years (if living in a planet with decent solar radiation protection to minimize dna breakdown, copy errors).

ok back to work.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by MC707 »

I doubt a 'balancing' will be received kindly by players. Have you read how many players come pissed off to the forums because a battalion of uln suckers come and blast them each time they get out of a station with a little cargo? Hell, even I have experienced that uncountable times, though I haven't posted in the forums for everyone's sake. We will have to fix the great outnumbering that players receive before we ever weaken their weapons and shields.

I still don't feel the nexus way of traveling as a 'realistic' approach. I mean, correct me if I am wrong, but it hasn't even been theorized by anyone! Wormholes at least have some scientific backup, and SPEC is widely spoken in General Relativity. Whats the only problem with stretching time and/or creating wormholes? Massive amounts of energy. Will that be a problem for a type III civilization? Probably not. But Nexus travel... well at least I haven't heard of.

I agree, though, in the economic, political and religious topics you touched. I believe the economy system could be solved with RedAdder's dynamic economy, though I haven't heard about progress being made.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by Deus Siddis »

safemode wrote:Basically, you're arguing that because we have to make concessions on rendering/modeling both visually and in simulation due to hardware restrictions, that it's perfectly fine to lower the thresh-hold of realism arbitrarily, in this case when it comes to nano-tech.
Not exactly, what I am saying is more that we need to pick a direction and go with it, in regards to this realism vs gameplay/hardware thing. We either explain everything that doesn't make sense with something possible and believable or we don't worry about explaining any of them.
Further, that the nano-plague is more of a lowering of realism than allowing nano-tech.
Yes. Or at least, the invisible and unstoppable but extant and everpresent nanoplague we currently have.
My goal is to increase the thresh-hold of realism in any aspect of the game possible without destroying gameplay. I dont think allowing nano-tech advanced a thousand years from the current level we're at would be possible given hardware limitations and gameplay limitations. Hence it's a little different from other aspects of the game that are unrealistic, in that, we can't use it not because it's something that is physically wrong, unbelievable, or unpredicted to occur in the time of VS, but because we simply can't deal with the most basic features of the technology on the scale that VS exists in, and those holes would be more unbelievable than not having the tech at all.
My feeling is it is limited by physical natural properties that will become more and more apparent as it is explored and developed.

Further, if it is right in front of us, hiding from it with a fantastic plot device just makes an otherwise hard-scifi-ish and prophetic feeling of the game disappear.


Also, an adjacent issue that keeps coming up is the thousand-years-in-the-future thing. You say that much time makes nanotech too incredibly advanced, and I say if that is the case then probably everything is too incredibly advanced as well.

But there is a third voice, coming from other game universe and such that were also set a millenium in the future that offer a back-up solution- loss and stagnation of technological knowledge to wars and disasters. Under such an explanation, nano-tech exists, but is not that advanced, because it is being rediscovered/redeveloped by humans for the third time or whatever.
Rather than use the inaccuracies or unbelievability of things like reactor output, weapon strength or ship thrust to justify other conveniences, i'd like to see those inaccuracies and other things fixed. They exist soley for gameplay, without any regard for the game's universe dynamics and are almost entirely wrong to exist. Gameplay is important, but it's not something set in stone, the tricky part is being creative with how to manage gameplay and the game universe's reality without being boring to players. It's the creativity aspect that's lacking here, most of the things you listed as also being unrealistic are simply the easy fixes over the years building up. It should all be fixed.
That's good for me, I lean towards that direction too.
So, maybe the nano-plague isn't the best way to explain things, then we need to invent an explanation for why nano-tech isn't magical like i'm saying it will likely be, and where it seems to be heading conventionally, and why it's been relegated to a simple tool in the toolbox of civilizations like you suggest. It's not going to be something that is just left open ended and unanswered because it's one of those things that even conventionally is thought to bring about a huge change in technology/biology and the economy if certain even conservative predictions come about.

Then the role that the nano-plague plays in the future of VS have to be rethought as well.

But then lets also touch on some of the other things. Huge reactor outputs.
I'm no engineer, and it'd be nice to some well researched/expert opinions on the subject, but I think this can all be solved with another mostly unaddressed problem that there has been some talk about- waste heat.

You can create all the power you want with the hugest reactor, you can reforge your ship at a molecular or atomic level with awesomely advanced nanotechnology, but guess what? You'll melt yourself into lava if you do. Because you can't get rid of the heat fast enough in a vacuum, to do all of these amazing things at once within any reasonable time frame.

It also might add an interesting element that separates us from other similar space opera type games- the return of the fortress and siege warfare. A ship, has a major waste heat limitation. But a base that has an anchor to an asteroid, moon or planet to use as an unlimited heatsink has no such limitation, and thus can be vastly more powerful, albeit immobile.
So with shields, reactors and engines explained and fixed, on to weapons.
Not so fast with shields there. :D

Remember that jackS said that VS' grav shields came as part of the package with wormholes. You remove wormholes for being unrealistic and what happens to shields? They are still an ugly insult to realism/believability right?

Either we need a layer of "healing" nano-armor to replace their GPM or we need to come up something clever but nearly conventional, like electro magnetically controlled, ion/plasma reactive armor (think modern explosive "sacrificial" reactive armor on tanks, except no sacrificial).
Weapons would probably come in 3 flavors naturally. Energy, particle, and mass projection. . .

This means no longer are you going to be able to lone-ranger a carrier or capship no matter how much you've upgraded your little fighter. Big ships == group effort. Strategy > mindless easy gameplay.
Antimatter warheads on torpedos still makes sense, imo. We don't need to remove them, and we can make them less powerful with realistic explanation if need be. Having Rlaan-style strike-versus-capital craft balancing and gameplay across the board can be done with a whole arsenal of realistic explanations available without removing warhead weapons arbitrarily. Think point defense or very thick/light compartmentalized armor for larger vessels.
Ok, so weapons and all that have been rebalanced to be more believable. Now you have to form alliances with other pilots and go on joint missions to destroy anything significantly bigger than you because it's simply not possible for you to match their firepower or shield ability.
I have been advocating for a while now, what I feel is the most fun, realistical and simply gameplay improvement currently possibly for VS, that'd also solve this issue. The player can own any number of ships, so let them take off with him under AI control, following the orders he issues to them. Currently this can only be done if you have them as cargo in a bigger ship; remove this limitation I say, and taking on bigger enemies or fleets of enemies with your own easy to control fleet investment.

Hired guns don't work because they cost too much, leave as soon as you land, and cost you nothing to lose in combat. They reward the opposite kind of behavior, acting as some weird combination between a useless features and an exploit.
The Nexus idea was my attempt at fixing this issue. If maintenance is a large enough issue, then i don't have a problem with making the "probes" free since we can be fairly certain they will never build up to dangerous levels. It also allows another avenue of separating yourself in your trading business by having a better network than other merchants and such. Since the nexus's aren't limited to being in gravity free zones, you dont have to worry about spending 5 minutes to fly away from a large planet after lifting off from it.
The major gameplay issue/exploit of not being able to intercept ships traveling at high speed under normal propulsion still exists. You couldn't intercept them with SPEC because their gravity well took you out of SPEC, leaving you only about a literal millionth of a second to kill them. Nexus 'probes' don't work because they also can't put you in close to the target for any amount of time.
That is, VS currently has two equally unbelievable FTL theories. One is wormhole travel, the other is SPEC. Mine has only The Nexus' . Furthermore, the existence of the wormholes is revealed to be (spoiler to hidden PDF) but the means of doing this is another unbelievable technology. The Nexus system doesn't require another imaginary means of hyperdimension/FTL communication. All of the other features that occur in the future related to wormholes and such are better explained when we use the Nexus'.
Your Hyperspace idea isn't a bad thing to keep in mind too though. While I was the one who brought up finding the two means of travel through one explanation, I also think having actual ship travel is still a nice feature from the perspective of having a believable feel. Though some of the appeal of Scifi might be in the art of providing the opposite aesthetic effect, wherein things feel surreal or unbelievable.
. . .
Everything else you outlined looks good, except I don't think a stronger religious faction and powerful corporations are needed or realistic. It seems like there might be some evidence that after a society's technology gets to a certain point, religion starts to weaken, fragment and disappear. Corporations are becoming more and more influential at this time or until just recently, but in the distant future they could be combined into the Merchant faction of VS, smaller merchants or have their role taken over by individual factions do to the extreme balkanization and turmoil that'd just be too much for large, slow and rigid corporate entities to survive.

Also regarding trade, in a nano-economy, everything might work even better the way you outlined it. Mass quantities or the rarer elements, anti-matter and any exotic matter, stored energy, mass produced equipment and poorer people would be all the big transports would ship.

Small private pilots would ship important people, scientific specimens and samples, information and messages, art and museum items and in case of the newly established colonies being the destination, anything.
We really should also think about the effects of reducing aging medical science would have had by the time of VS, with or without nanites. It means we dont have to worry about a lot of events we want to be a part of the game and the player's character background to have occurred rapidly to be within his/her lifetime. We can spread them out to a more realistic timeframe. At such huge distances, various cause and effects would take much longer to occur, but we can deal with that when a person naturally lives to 200-300 years (if living in a planet with decent solar radiation protection to minimize dna breakdown, copy errors).
Imho, the longer folks live, the easier the storywriting and the more interesting the stories. In large part because of what you just outlined- characters have to die too soon for realism, for alot of really interesting things to happen to them. Plus, what crazy fun you could have with characters who were alive all the way back during our lifetimes in real life today. Hell, some of the developers could even appear as themselves as characters in the game, having undergone a nano-rebuild sometime in the middle of this century, when the technology became available. :mrgreen:
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

Deus Siddis wrote:
safemode wrote:Basically, you're arguing that because we have to make concessions on rendering/modeling both visually and in simulation due to hardware restrictions, that it's perfectly fine to lower the thresh-hold of realism arbitrarily, in this case when it comes to nano-tech.
Not exactly, what I am saying is more that we need to pick a direction and go with it, in regards to this realism vs gameplay/hardware thing. We either explain everything that doesn't make sense with something possible and believable or we don't worry about explaining any of them.
I'm saying that such a stance is _impossible_ when you're talking about designing and building a game. You have to yield compromises or you will get no where. You will always come up against something arbitrary to limit your story that is easily overcome by player suspense of disbelief granted by being able to do all the other things not limited by whatever that arbitrary thing is.

That is to say, if you explain away 80% of everything going on, the 20% is much easier to swallow than if you explain only 40% of what's going on.
Further, that the nano-plague is more of a lowering of realism than allowing nano-tech.
Yes. Or at least, the invisible and unstoppable but extant and everpresent nanoplague we currently have.
Well, technically in the game, the nano-plague isn't represented or touched on because it's more of a future thing. VS takes place before it comes out of the shadows. Kinda like how "shadows" were a legend to all the races between the two shadow wars in B5.
My goal is to increase the thresh-hold of realism in any aspect of the game possible without destroying gameplay. I dont think allowing nano-tech advanced a thousand years from the current level we're at would be possible given hardware limitations and gameplay limitations. Hence it's a little different from other aspects of the game that are unrealistic, in that, we can't use it not because it's something that is physically wrong, unbelievable, or unpredicted to occur in the time of VS, but because we simply can't deal with the most basic features of the technology on the scale that VS exists in, and those holes would be more unbelievable than not having the tech at all.
My feeling is it is limited by physical natural properties that will become more and more apparent as it is explored and developed.

Further, if it is right in front of us, hiding from it with a fantastic plot device just makes an otherwise hard-scifi-ish and prophetic feeling of the game disappear.
In such a case, it would be important to find an alternative. If we believe that inherent properties of nano tech will yield such restrictions, then we have to spell that out a bit more specifically than just "it can't do that", either with the limitations of energy cost vs ability of the nano-bot to absorb such energy and stay together itself. Or, via the re-discovery idea.
Also, an adjacent issue that keeps coming up is the thousand-years-in-the-future thing. You say that much time makes nanotech too incredibly advanced, and I say if that is the case then probably everything is too incredibly advanced as well.

But there is a third voice, coming from other game universe and such that were also set a millenium in the future that offer a back-up solution- loss and stagnation of technological knowledge to wars and disasters. Under such an explanation, nano-tech exists, but is not that advanced, because it is being rediscovered/redeveloped by humans for the third time or whatever.
The only problem with the loss and rediscovery idea is that it's very hard to believe that the loss is as complete in large civilization spanning multiple worlds compared to what we have to compare to today where city-states were fairly isolationist and cut off and fairly limited in population. Something would have to be construed to explain such a wide-spread loss of technology and knowledge.
So, maybe the nano-plague isn't the best way to explain things, then we need to invent an explanation for why nano-tech isn't magical like i'm saying it will likely be, and where it seems to be heading conventionally, and why it's been relegated to a simple tool in the toolbox of civilizations like you suggest. It's not going to be something that is just left open ended and unanswered because it's one of those things that even conventionally is thought to bring about a huge change in technology/biology and the economy if certain even conservative predictions come about.

Then the role that the nano-plague plays in the future of VS have to be rethought as well.

But then lets also touch on some of the other things. Huge reactor outputs.
I'm no engineer, and it'd be nice to some well researched/expert opinions on the subject, but I think this can all be solved with another mostly unaddressed problem that there has been some talk about- waste heat.

You can create all the power you want with the hugest reactor, you can reforge your ship at a molecular or atomic level with awesomely advanced nanotechnology, but guess what? You'll melt yourself into lava if you do. Because you can't get rid of the heat fast enough in a vacuum, to do all of these amazing things at once within any reasonable time frame.

It also might add an interesting element that separates us from other similar space opera type games- the return of the fortress and siege warfare. A ship, has a major waste heat limitation. But a base that has an anchor to an asteroid, moon or planet to use as an unlimited heatsink has no such limitation, and thus can be vastly more powerful, albeit immobile.
Two things, waste heat is a good point. Overheating is an interesting problem. An interesting side-effect of caring about wasteheat is that it puts a limit on the size of a ship vs maneuverabilty/acceleration.
I dont see weapons as being a source of a lot of waste heat. Superconductivity has no waste heat, so we dont have to worry about a building up of heat from moving all that energy around. so you'd have to explain a buildup of heat due to something else. It's obvious with some projectile weapons but it's not so obvious with most other things. If anything, weapon fire may be a means of cooling a ship down by converting heat into electrical energy which would be transferred off the ship via lasers.

second, siege warfare. Indeed, it would be nice to have coordinated attacks like that. But it requires a rebalancing as a described to make little ships act like little ships and big bases and carriers and such act as such.
So with shields, reactors and engines explained and fixed, on to weapons.
Not so fast with shields there. :D

Remember that jackS said that VS' grav shields came as part of the package with wormholes. You remove wormholes for being unrealistic and what happens to shields? They are still an ugly insult to realism/believability right?
My shields aren't grav shields. They're like a plasma barrier your shield emitter creates for short amounts of time. able to redirect a given amount of energy across it's surface and thus away from the ship. Think of it similar to reactive armor that explodes prior to impact, only without the explosion and loss of material. Different emitters would be able to create varying impulse frequencies and thus power levels of the shields. They are a high cost energywise, item. Think of the plasma shield as like a temporary piece of translucent glass. For energy weapons, some pass through this glass better than others (better shields are better at blocking more things) the energy that doesn't make it through the glass is transformed into heat, heat that chain reacts with the plasma field and causes the energy to siphon from the contact point to spread out around the ship. Now deflection of matter based weapons is done by the plasma having a huge density. Albeit thin, the plasma acts as a kind of goo around the ship. Projectiles hit it as if it was solid, their kinetic energy instantly converting to heat in the plasma and the same dissipation effect as with energy weapons occurs. The shield isn't a solid though, and the mass if it still has enough kinetic energy proceeds through with it's remaining energy to hit the ship. Explosive projectiles will usually detect contact with shields sufficient to explode and explode at that surface. Shields may not be able to absorb both the kinetic and explosive energy so rapidly after eachother and you'll have to suffer that energy damage, though it would be far less than if it had exploded on your hull.

Either we need a layer of "healing" nano-armor to replace their GPM or we need to come up something clever but nearly conventional, like electro magnetically controlled, ion/plasma reactive armor (think modern explosive "sacrificial" reactive armor on tanks, except no sacrificial).
yea, that's the other idea. Ditch shields altogether and just go with a type of self healing armour. Where the limits of performance would be heat capacitance and time. I got no problem with that. Only problem i see is that it makes more sense on much larger ships, than smaller ones where there are so many fragile systems exposed or close to the surface of any part of the hull, you'd have to make the armour extremely powerful to give such ships a chance at surviving any fight, and by connection, any larger ship would be nearly indestructable. Perhaps a use of both is the best way to do it. explain that shields aren't practical on large ships due to the huge surface area you'd have to cover and reactive self healing armour isn't practical on small ships due to the mass it has. Large ships have the reactive armour, small ships have shields. done.
Weapons would probably come in 3 flavors naturally. Energy, particle, and mass projection. . .

This means no longer are you going to be able to lone-ranger a carrier or capship no matter how much you've upgraded your little fighter. Big ships == group effort. Strategy > mindless easy gameplay.
Antimatter warheads on torpedos still makes sense, imo. We don't need to remove them, and we can make them less powerful with realistic explanation if need be. Having Rlaan-style strike-versus-capital craft balancing and gameplay across the board can be done with a whole arsenal of realistic explanations available without removing warhead weapons arbitrarily. Think point defense or very thick/light compartmentalized armor for larger vessels.

i wasn't removing missiles. I didn't even touch on them. Of course there would be missile type weapons (though i dont see why they would still be shaped like they had to be aerodynamic). I also think they should be much more easily targeted and defended against, rather than the nearly guaranteed kill aspect they currently have. For instance, if we're going to grant hands off targeting and navigation once fired to something as devastating as an anti-matter missile, then we have to face the idea that they're not going to be incredibly fast and be able to maneuver quickly. Their energy output would make them easily targetable and their speed and limited engines means that their course is highly predictable. There is no air to swim through in space, so the idea of wildly flying heat seeking missiles in space is retarded.
Ok, so weapons and all that have been rebalanced to be more believable. Now you have to form alliances with other pilots and go on joint missions to destroy anything significantly bigger than you because it's simply not possible for you to match their firepower or shield ability.
I have been advocating for a while now, what I feel is the most fun, realistical and simply gameplay improvement currently possibly for VS, that'd also solve this issue. The player can own any number of ships, so let them take off with him under AI control, following the orders he issues to them. Currently this can only be done if you have them as cargo in a bigger ship; remove this limitation I say, and taking on bigger enemies or fleets of enemies with your own easy to control fleet investment.

Hired guns don't work because they cost too much, leave as soon as you land, and cost you nothing to lose in combat. They reward the opposite kind of behavior, acting as some weird combination between a useless features and an exploit.
I'd much rather fix the way the NPC's interact with the player and vice versa than allow for a stockpiling of remote control ships that the player micro-manages or plays fleet commander with. While it's one way to move the game forward, having the player progress through the ranks to maybe become a faction leader himself, it's not really the goal of the game to do that.

A better solution would be to increase the idea of actually being in a faction and doing things that are a part of it. As a privateer with no loyalties, sure you'll pay a premium to get people to help you, but you should be able to create "partners" with pilots you help out and help you out a few times. If you join a faction, you should be part of a flightgroup and garner help from them and you help them.

I think a your and everyone else's problem is a two part problem. 1. The AI lacks the infrastructure to really interact with other NPC's and the player. 2. The game lacks the missions/campaigns and basic need to work together on tasks. Fix that, rather than ignore it and work around it.
The Nexus idea was my attempt at fixing this issue. If maintenance is a large enough issue, then i don't have a problem with making the "probes" free since we can be fairly certain they will never build up to dangerous levels. It also allows another avenue of separating yourself in your trading business by having a better network than other merchants and such. Since the nexus's aren't limited to being in gravity free zones, you dont have to worry about spending 5 minutes to fly away from a large planet after lifting off from it.
The major gameplay issue/exploit of not being able to intercept ships traveling at high speed under normal propulsion still exists. You couldn't intercept them with SPEC because their gravity well took you out of SPEC, leaving you only about a literal millionth of a second to kill them. Nexus 'probes' don't work because they also can't put you in close to the target for any amount of time.
Welcome to space travel. intercepting something requires you to have a massive amount of acceleration compared to what you're chasing. Such discrepancies in acceleration would be rare for similar sized ships or chasing a smaller ship with good engines. Unlike on a planet, where friction and driver skill puts a limit on your speed so that a chasing vehicle's acceleration exponentially approaches the speed and hopefully surpasses it of the vehicle it's chasing, in space, there is no practical limit on speed (light). So there is no exponential overtaking of the target's speed, there is only the linear one. And when we're talking about initial speed differences of the hundreds to thousands of meters per second and a huge distance to cover, you're pretty much screwed unless you want to chase the ship for a couple hours.

Couple alternatives. Make acceleration more realistic, and so acceleration in any direction would become much slower. Giving people more time to target/match. Or you take the loss. If you're out of missiles or able to fire at the ship, then it got away. Good for them, you'll have to do better next time. It's one of the aspects of space combat.

Nexus' are different from spec in that spec, besides making very little logical sense on any level, though they could be activated near a ship, it wouldn't do much good for a small ship to sit by and let themselves get attacked. Larger prey may have no choice if they dont see it there.

Strategy would have to follow the targeting of smaller ships. Either taking care of it during a dogfight situation, or via traps like a mine field or having friends to surround a smaller ship. Teamwork is where the game would really start to be immersive. You'll have to get it out of your head that you can do most things by yourself.
That is, VS currently has two equally unbelievable FTL theories. One is wormhole travel, the other is SPEC. Mine has only The Nexus' . Furthermore, the existence of the wormholes is revealed to be (spoiler to hidden PDF) but the means of doing this is another unbelievable technology. The Nexus system doesn't require another imaginary means of hyperdimension/FTL communication. All of the other features that occur in the future related to wormholes and such are better explained when we use the Nexus'.
Your Hyperspace idea isn't a bad thing to keep in mind too though. While I was the one who brought up finding the two means of travel through one explanation, I also think having actual ship travel is still a nice feature from the perspective of having a believable feel. Though some of the appeal of Scifi might be in the art of providing the opposite aesthetic effect, wherein things feel surreal or unbelievable.
Obviously SPEC/Warp etc "feels" right, but it makes so much of the rest of the physics you're supposed to believe in the game wrong. Eventually it becomes obvious that if X happens when you are in SPEC or warp, then how can X not happen over here. or vice versa. Basically, not only would you have to break the very same laws of physics you're asking the player to believe in the first place to make your technology even possible, but you have to create more layers of fuzzy physics. One of the benefits of my method is that it doesn't ask you to break your assumptions for it to work, and it doesn't require even more layers of fuzzy physics, and the layers it does ask you to believe are orders of magnitude less fuzzy than the ones involved with wormholes and warp/spec.

Despite what people who wish star trek was real, warp bubbles, while being a necessity for traveling on a compression/expansion wave of space also negates your ship's ability to create that distortion of space around your bubble, by it's very nature. You bubbled yourself off, you're out of the game wen it comes to crap going on outside of your bubble. The only hope you have is to use some type of Gateway system that pinballs you around. That may work, but god forbid your ass ever find itself very far from another gateway. Thus, once again, such a technology would require multiple FTL technologies. Blah.

Everything else you outlined looks good, except I don't think a stronger religious faction and powerful corporations are needed or realistic. It seems like there might be some evidence that after a society's technology gets to a certain point, religion starts to weaken, fragment and disappear. Corporations are becoming more and more influential at this time or until just recently, but in the distant future they could be combined into the Merchant faction of VS, smaller merchants or have their role taken over by individual factions do to the extreme balkanization and turmoil that'd just be too much for large, slow and rigid corporate entities to survive.
You would still need an organizing factor in the development of new technologies and manufacturing of those technologies and such. This requires specialized organizations that would undoubtedly be the mega-corporations of tomorrow. A highly effective government may be able to do it without corporations, but there's yet been one example of such an effective government in the history of mankind.
Guilds and such, they're not concerned with such things, they're more like unions not businesses. There's no such thing as big bulky slow moving large corporations really. Corporations that big are really many smaller individual companies each responsible for their own income etc. The corporation then directs these companies like chess pieces. The smaller companies respond to outside stimulus. The corporation is insulated and only really has to respond to governments and other large corporations or internal politics of it's own infrastructure.
Also regarding trade, in a nano-economy, everything might work even better the way you outlined it. Mass quantities or the rarer elements, anti-matter and any exotic matter, stored energy, mass produced equipment and poorer people would be all the big transports would ship.

Small private pilots would ship important people, scientific specimens and samples, information and messages, art and museum items and in case of the newly established colonies being the destination, anything.
That's the general idea. Get privateers and smaller trading out of the idea of transporting thing that make way more sense as needing to be in huge quantities to be of any significance. That involves a lot of the makeovers to the economy i mentioned. Though, nothing complicated really needs to be done about communicating stock prices and such to each base. All each base needs to worry about is itself. so long as we've correctly balanced the dependent goods to the produced goods and given enough npc's the correct desire to get into trading, the market should balance itself.
We really should also think about the effects of reducing aging medical science would have had by the time of VS, with or without nanites. It means we dont have to worry about a lot of events we want to be a part of the game and the player's character background to have occurred rapidly to be within his/her lifetime. We can spread them out to a more realistic timeframe. At such huge distances, various cause and effects would take much longer to occur, but we can deal with that when a person naturally lives to 200-300 years (if living in a planet with decent solar radiation protection to minimize dna breakdown, copy errors).

Imho, the longer folks live, the easier the storywriting and the more interesting the stories. In large part because of what you just outlined- characters have to die too soon for realism, for alot of really interesting things to happen to them. Plus, what crazy fun you could have with characters who were alive all the way back during our lifetimes in real life today. Hell, some of the developers could even appear as themselves as characters in the game, having undergone a nano-rebuild sometime in the middle of this century, when the technology became available. :mrgreen:
Well i was thinking more along the lines of how we compress events to occur within a single lifetime of a character, rather than have to worry about killing a character off and replacing them to cover a series of events. but the result is the same as far as the benefit of longer lives.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

MC707 wrote:I doubt a 'balancing' will be received kindly by players. Have you read how many players come pissed off to the forums because a battalion of uln suckers come and blast them each time they get out of a station with a little cargo? Hell, even I have experienced that uncountable times, though I haven't posted in the forums for everyone's sake. We will have to fix the great outnumbering that players receive before we ever weaken their weapons and shields.
The best way to fix it is to fix the balancing "fudging" that's been done little by little over time to correct for the other gameplay problems in the game. If we decide to fix the gameplay issues, those fudgings become void ,and the balance becomes completely off. Such things are necessary to fix issues where the NPC's can group together to attack something but you can't seem to get a group together to protect you or attack someone. We're still well below a 1.0 release, so the idea of the game undergoing drastic balancing changes as long standing problems get fixed is to be expected, and if you dont expect it, then you have forgotten what a pre 1.0 version of software is. A drastic rebalance as i described occuring after 1.0 would definitely be met with friction and rightly so, 1.0 says we declare this to be what we intend of the game. < 1.0 says we're not done yet, this current game may not be what you'll play come 1.0

But in any case, if there would be actual valid opinions on why certain rebalancings aren't correct, then those would be dealt with. Everyone who just wants their savegames to play the same are out of luck. Such is the way of that which is in an intentional and stated being of instability and change.
I still don't feel the nexus way of traveling as a 'realistic' approach. I mean, correct me if I am wrong, but it hasn't even been theorized by anyone! Wormholes at least have some scientific backup, and SPEC is widely spoken in General Relativity. Whats the only problem with stretching time and/or creating wormholes? Massive amounts of energy. Will that be a problem for a type III civilization? Probably not. But Nexus travel... well at least I haven't heard of.
The basis of nexus travel is in an actual experiment that was carried out in real life. I extrapolated from it and created my own theory. Now, take into account that the theory you would use to prove wormhole travel is the same one that says that any attempt to travel through one would either destroy you into barely distinguishable sub-atomic particles or convert you to radiation on the other side or require so much energy to open a tunnel big enough for your ship that you'd basically have to be tugging around a star and exotic imaginary matter.
my theory requires no extra dimensional travel, despite how likely they are to exist. My theory requires no special imaginary matter. my method doesn't require you to have a star as a reactor.

Now to get to spec. My favorite BS technology of sci fi. Like i mentioned before, general relativity may be used to explain how you can move a bubble of space across space at faster than light, since space itself is not restricted to the speed of light. The problem is, once you create your bubble around your ship to allow your ship to cheat and ride with that space, how do you create the compression wave of space that will accelerate your bubble? You can't create it before the bubble, and you can't effect anything outside of your bubble once it's created, just like nothing can effect you from outside of the bubble. It's self defeating. You need the bubble, but the bubble prohibits you from doing anything to the space your bubble is supposed to be accelerated in from within the bubble. That leaves you with some type of pinball-like gate system, where you have to hope you exit back into normal space near another gate or you're in for a long journey.

it's this ignoring of the hypocrisy of requiring a space-time bubble to use something like SPEC that makes all of the other aspects of traveling in SPEC retarded as well. The idea that we dont even require the bubble in SPEC is just an oversight, the FTL aspect would require it and would also negate the wave allowing us to move (under our control anyway).

Granted, people have had little problem suspending their disbelief over the tech in movies and games thus-far, but i'd rather go with something else that's less obvious at self-negating it's own existance.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by Deus Siddis »

safemode wrote:Well, technically in the game, the nano-plague isn't represented or touched on because it's more of a future thing. VS takes place before it comes out of the shadows. Kinda like how "shadows" were a legend to all the races between the two shadow wars in B5.
The nano-plague is still there otherwise folks would have started using nanites again, while just no longer relying on them.

It comes whenever it senses you using nanites in conjunction with FTL, and destroys your nanites. If you attack it back while it does so, it destroys you. So it is, to my understanding, past, present and future, it is just a matter of when you decide to trigger it next.
In such a case, it would be important to find an alternative. If we believe that inherent properties of nano tech will yield such restrictions, then we have to spell that out a bit more specifically than just "it can't do that", either with the limitations of energy cost vs ability of the nano-bot to absorb such energy and stay together itself.
A good first question then is, what do we really not want it to be able to do? Construct any molecule? Construct any atom? Not have military or space or any out-of-lab applications?

I think there's plenty of believable/realistic explanations for limiting this technology at any of these and many other borders, it is just a matter of what we think is cool and what we think is uncool for story/gameplay/hardware limitations.
The only problem with the loss and rediscovery idea is that it's very hard to believe that the loss is as complete in large civilization spanning multiple worlds compared to what we have to compare to today where city-states were fairly isolationist and cut off and fairly limited in population. Something would have to be construed to explain such a wide-spread loss of technology and knowledge.
It is also feels like kind of a cop-out to me. But it can still be a good fallback position if for some reason other limits on this tech can't be found.

This is an area where an ancient plague would not be nearly as unbelievable, because it just ravages and destroys all kinds of civilization, knowledge and advancement, instead of always going after one tech infrastructure, whenever it is used in conjunction with another.

It might even make the factions' flavors more believable. Why after a thousand years hasn't biotechnology reached its peak for all factions? Because the plague by lucky chance didn't destroy a lab for such on a remote colony in shaper space. Why doesn't everyone have awesome AIs after a thousand years? Because the only supercomputer that survived was in Unadorned space. Etc.

I would still consider this a backup plan though. Another option would be to move the game back closer to the present, so that it is maybe, 400 years in the future or such. That just leaves less time for past events as a downside.
Two things, waste heat is a good point. Overheating is an interesting problem. An interesting side-effect of caring about wasteheat is that it puts a limit on the size of a ship vs maneuverabilty/acceleration.
Cool.
I dont see weapons as being a source of a lot of waste heat. Superconductivity has no waste heat, so we dont have to worry about a building up of heat from moving all that energy around. so you'd have to explain a buildup of heat due to something else. It's obvious with some projectile weapons but it's not so obvious with most other things. If anything, weapon fire may be a means of cooling a ship down by converting heat into electrical energy which would be transferred off the ship via lasers.
Hmm, I don't know about that, everything has to generate some waste heat I thought. Nothing can be 100% efficient.
second, siege warfare. Indeed, it would be nice to have coordinated attacks like that. But it requires a rebalancing as a described to make little ships act like little ships and big bases and carriers and such act as such.
Little ships might actually have an advantage in some cases against bases, because they can more quickly and easily circle close to the rock, thereby using it as cover. Big ships will spend more time in line of sight with the base and get blasted by its superior firepower.

This was an explanation I was going to use for a latter push for including ground assaults as part of the game and universe, once the engine technology was available (OGRE being one probable requirement).
My shields aren't grav shields. They're like a plasma barrier your shield emitter creates for short amounts of time. able to redirect a given amount of energy across it's surface and thus away from the ship. Think of it similar to reactive armor that explodes prior to impact, only without the explosion and loss of material. Different emitters would be able to create varying impulse frequencies and thus power levels of the shields. They are a high cost energywise, item. Think of the plasma shield as like a temporary piece of translucent glass. For energy weapons, some pass through this glass better than others (better shields are better at blocking more things) the energy that doesn't make it through the glass is transformed into heat, heat that chain reacts with the plasma field and causes the energy to siphon from the contact point to spread out around the ship. Now deflection of matter based weapons is done by the plasma having a huge density. Albeit thin, the plasma acts as a kind of goo around the ship. Projectiles hit it as if it was solid, their kinetic energy instantly converting to heat in the plasma and the same dissipation effect as with energy weapons occurs. The shield isn't a solid though, and the mass if it still has enough kinetic energy proceeds through with it's remaining energy to hit the ship. Explosive projectiles will usually detect contact with shields sufficient to explode and explode at that surface. Shields may not be able to absorb both the kinetic and explosive energy so rapidly after eachother and you'll have to suffer that energy damage, though it would be far less than if it had exploded on your hull.
That's basically the shielding technology used in the Halo games.

The other option is a bit more like reactive armor or the ship's engines, wherein a burst of ions/plasma is fired or directed into (either way by electromagnets) the incoming attack. But this lasts only as long as there is a need for it, there is no bubble of plasma remaining on guard.
yea, that's the other idea. Ditch shields altogether and just go with a type of self healing armour. Where the limits of performance would be heat capacitance and time. I got no problem with that. Only problem i see is that it makes more sense on much larger ships, than smaller ones where there are so many fragile systems exposed or close to the surface of any part of the hull, you'd have to make the armour extremely powerful to give such ships a chance at surviving any fight, and by connection, any larger ship would be nearly indestructable.
Well as things get larger, their volume goes up faster than their surface area, and surface area is how you radiate heat. More shields means more heat. More armor means more mass means more engines means more heat. So smaller vessels have an advantage here, pound for pound.
Perhaps a use of both is the best way to do it. explain that shields aren't practical on large ships due to the huge surface area you'd have to cover and reactive self healing armour isn't practical on small ships due to the mass it has. Large ships have the reactive armour, small ships have shields. done.
Another explanation is that shields produce more heat for what they offer (though they might recover faster) which is better for smaller ships with their more favorable heat dissipation (see above). Larger ships benefit more from armor, because they have the space for vacuum barriers between layers of armor, that help disperse otherwise much more penetrating weapon attacks (with the exception of directed energy weapons I suppose).

An interesting thing about this, is that a faction with better shields might rely more on lighter craft (maybe Highborn or Aera) while a faction with better armor might rely more on heavier craft (maybe Andolians or Rlaan).
i wasn't removing missiles. I didn't even touch on them. Of course there would be missile type weapons (though i dont see why they would still be shaped like they had to be aerodynamic). I also think they should be much more easily targeted and defended against, rather than the nearly guaranteed kill aspect they currently have. For instance, if we're going to grant hands off targeting and navigation once fired to something as devastating as an anti-matter missile, then we have to face the idea that they're not going to be incredibly fast and be able to maneuver quickly. Their energy output would make them easily targetable and their speed and limited engines means that their course is highly predictable. There is no air to swim through in space, so the idea of wildly flying heat seeking missiles in space is retarded.
I guess it just sounded like you were saying that then, you listed all types of weapons currently in game except those that seemed to rely on explosive warheads, namely torpedos, which are also the only thing that allows little ships to lone wolf capitals.

What is really imbalanced are the lighter missiles that kill strike craft. There is absolutely nothing they can currently do to evade these, save for SPEC, when and if that is an option. Missiles in VS are the proverbial 'instant win'.
I'd much rather fix the way the NPC's interact with the player and vice versa than allow for a stockpiling of remote control ships that the player micro-manages or plays fleet commander with. While it's one way to move the game forward, having the player progress through the ranks to maybe become a faction leader himself, it's not really the goal of the game to do that.
Well it'd be real nice to have as an option, especially right now when there isn't another option. It's not like everyone would play that way either, ships are expensive and you'd loose them not infrequently. Part of the fun of the game is going from ant to emporer, for those players interested in those things. Or for players who like to have enough "umph" to push the dynamic universe around a little, like by taking out an Aera detachment with your own little fleet of strike craft.
A better solution would be to increase the idea of actually being in a faction and doing things that are a part of it. As a privateer with no loyalties, sure you'll pay a premium to get people to help you, but you should be able to create "partners" with pilots you help out and help you out a few times. If you join a faction, you should be part of a flightgroup and garner help from them and you help them.
Joining a faction would be an amazing gameplay feature, instead of the usual 'it is an open ended universe, so your on your own kid'. If it is open ended, you should be able to take a side if you want, and reap the rewards of such.
I think a your and everyone else's problem is a two part problem. 1. The AI lacks the infrastructure to really interact with other NPC's and the player. 2. The game lacks the missions/campaigns and basic need to work together on tasks. Fix that, rather than ignore it and work around it.
That is half the game. The other half is building, amassing your own private empire and fighting under your own total command against whatever you want and pushing against the dynamic universe to change how it goes. The two halves compliment each other, and combined you never run out of fun. It's why almost all RTS games have "campaign" and "skirmish" modes instead of only one or the other. Sometimes you feel like hearing a story (that you are apart of) and sometimes you feel like making your own (that you are apart of).
Couple alternatives. Make acceleration more realistic, and so acceleration in any direction would become much slower. Giving people more time to target/match. Or you take the loss. If you're out of missiles or able to fire at the ship, then it got away. Good for them, you'll have to do better next time. It's one of the aspects of space combat.
What I'm talking about is more along the lines of flying with the peddle to the metal at all times, so that the AI can't catch you or vice versa. Then, instead of changing course, fire a probe so that you appear right in front of your destination. Only need to slow down for actual stops.
Strategy would have to follow the targeting of smaller ships. Either taking care of it during a dogfight situation, or via traps like a mine field or having friends to surround a smaller ship. Teamwork is where the game would really start to be immersive. You'll have to get it out of your head that you can do most things by yourself.
Then I really need to be able to buy escorts without a mothership, because motherships and friends don't grow on trees. Benefitting from help is one thing, needing help is another.
Obviously SPEC/Warp etc "feels" right, but it makes so much of the rest of the physics you're supposed to believe in the game wrong.
I only meant your Hyperspace explanation where you are disconnected from 3D space as far as senses and such. The point is then you travel to your destination and this takes time, rather than waiting for the probe to arrive while you fly around randomly, and then you're instantly there all of a sudden. It is a surreal way to travel as far as aesthetics. That is both better and worse for a Scifi game/universe.
A highly effective government may be able to do it without corporations, but there's yet been one example of such an effective government in the history of mankind.
Well there had to be such goverments in the past; corporations weren't always around.
Guilds and such, they're not concerned with such things, they're more like unions not businesses. There's no such thing as big bulky slow moving large corporations really. Corporations that big are really many smaller individual companies each responsible for their own income etc. The corporation then directs these companies like chess pieces. The smaller companies respond to outside stimulus. The corporation is insulated and only really has to respond to governments and other large corporations or internal politics of it's own infrastructure.
But each faction has its own "civilian" version of itself that can operate somewhat separately, like an abstraction of all corporations and merchants working underneath that faction. And then you have the Merchants faction itself, a mega corporation basically.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by MC707 »

safemode wrote:
I still don't feel the nexus way of traveling as a 'realistic' approach. I mean, correct me if I am wrong, but it hasn't even been theorized by anyone! Wormholes at least have some scientific backup, and SPEC is widely spoken in General Relativity. Whats the only problem with stretching time and/or creating wormholes? Massive amounts of energy. Will that be a problem for a type III civilization? Probably not. But Nexus travel... well at least I haven't heard of.
The basis of nexus travel is in an actual experiment that was carried out in real life. I extrapolated from it and created my own theory. Now, take into account that the theory you would use to prove wormhole travel is the same one that says that any attempt to travel through one would either destroy you into barely distinguishable sub-atomic particles or convert you to radiation on the other side or require so much energy to open a tunnel big enough for your ship that you'd basically have to be tugging around a star and exotic imaginary matter.
my theory requires no extra dimensional travel, despite how likely they are to exist. My theory requires no special imaginary matter. my method doesn't require you to have a star as a reactor.
Your theory doesn't need a 'star' as a reactor, but it cannot break the light barrier. Simply not. Not to say move you around. I'm going to quote Dr. Michio Kaku:
"Given the astronomical number of possible planets in the galaxy, a Type II civilization may try a more realistic approach than conventional rockets and use nano technology to build tiny, self-replicating robot probes which can proliferate through the galaxy in much the same way that a microscopic virus can self-replicate and colonize a human body within a week. Such a civilization might send tiny robot von Neumann probes to distant moons, where they will create large factories to reproduce millions of copies of themselves. Such a von Neumann probe need only be the size of bread-box, using sophisticated nano technology to make atomic-sized circuitry and computers. Then these copies take off to land on other distant moons and start the process all over again. Such probes may then wait on distant moons, waiting for a primitive Type 0 civilization to mature into a Type I civilization, which would then be interesting to them. (There is the small but distinct possibility that one such probe landed on our own moon billions of years ago by a passing space-faring civilization. This, in fact, is the basis of the movie 2001, perhaps the most realistic portrayal of contact with extra-terrrestrial intelligence.)"

"The problem, as one can see, is that none of these engines can exceed the speed of light. Hence, Type 0,I, and II civilizations probably can send probes or colonies only to within a few hundred light years of their home planet. Even with von Neumann probes, the best that a Type II civilization can achieve is to create a large sphere of billions of self-replicating probes expanding just below the speed of light. To break the light barrier, one must utilize General Relativity and the quantum theory. This requires energies which are available for very advanced Type II civilization or, more likely, a Type III civilization."

And, as you said, you created that theory. We need something more realistic, and energy for civilizations in the time of VS will be 'magical'. That's the only need that both worm hole and stretching space theories have. Thus, you will not be needing to extract energy from stars to get that energy. Remember 90% of the matter in the universe is Dark Matter, invisible matter for us, unknown matter. We could have elements which could be the size of a bead and power entire civilizations. You might remember, before we knew nuclear power, nobody would EVER have thought a rock the size of a tennis ball could power entire countries. In all that unknown matter, there are tons of possibilities of having elements like uranium but that could have billions of times its energy output and be just those times plentiful.

Read this article for a full explanation.
safemode wrote:Now to get to spec. My favorite BS technology of sci fi. Like i mentioned before, general relativity may be used to explain how you can move a bubble of space across space at faster than light, since space itself is not restricted to the speed of light. The problem is, once you create your bubble around your ship to allow your ship to cheat and ride with that space, how do you create the compression wave of space that will accelerate your bubble? You can't create it before the bubble, and you can't effect anything outside of your bubble once it's created, just like nothing can effect you from outside of the bubble. It's self defeating. You need the bubble, but the bubble prohibits you from doing anything to the space your bubble is supposed to be accelerated in from within the bubble. That leaves you with some type of pinball-like gate system, where you have to hope you exit back into normal space near another gate or you're in for a long journey.

it's this ignoring of the hypocrisy of requiring a space-time bubble to use something like SPEC that makes all of the other aspects of traveling in SPEC retarded as well. The idea that we dont even require the bubble in SPEC is just an oversight, the FTL aspect would require it and would also negate the wave allowing us to move (under our control anyway).

Granted, people have had little problem suspending their disbelief over the tech in movies and games thus-far, but i'd rather go with something else that's less obvious at self-negating it's own existance.
"The second possibility is to use large amounts of energy to continuously stretch space and time (i.e. contracting the space in front of you, and expanding the space behind you). Since only empty space is contracting or expanding, one may exceed the speed of light in this fashion. (Empty space can warp space faster than light. For example, the Big Bang expanded much faster than the speed of light.) The problem with this approach, again, is that vast amounts of energy are required, making it feasible for only a Type III civilization. Energy scales for all these proposals are on the order of the Planck energy (10 to the 19 billion electron volts, which is a quadrillion times larger than our most powerful atom smasher)."

The only problems is energy. If you cut that supply of energy you can stop, so you are not bound to "hope you exit back into normal space near another gate or you're in for a long journey". You have control, just like you do right now in VS.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

Deus Siddis wrote:
safemode wrote:Well, technically in the game, the nano-plague isn't represented or touched on because it's more of a future thing. VS takes place before it comes out of the shadows. Kinda like how "shadows" were a legend to all the races between the two shadow wars in B5.
The nano-plague is still there otherwise folks would have started using nanites again, while just no longer relying on them.

It comes whenever it senses you using nanites in conjunction with FTL, and destroys your nanites. If you attack it back while it does so, it destroys you. So it is, to my understanding, past, present and future, it is just a matter of when you decide to trigger it next.
Sure they're really there. But nanites haven't been in use because of the plague for decades, maybe even centuries, i forget. So it's not so much that they keep trying to use them and get attacked by the plague, it's simply the in-grained fear that stops people from even trying anymore.

If the nano-plague had disappeared 10 years ago in the VS universe, they wouldn't even know. It's currently a boogeyman.
In such a case, it would be important to find an alternative. If we believe that inherent properties of nano tech will yield such restrictions, then we have to spell that out a bit more specifically than just "it can't do that", either with the limitations of energy cost vs ability of the nano-bot to absorb such energy and stay together itself.
A good first question then is, what do we really not want it to be able to do? Construct any molecule? Construct any atom? Not have military or space or any out-of-lab applications?

I think there's plenty of believable/realistic explanations for limiting this technology at any of these and many other borders, it is just a matter of what we think is cool and what we think is uncool for story/gameplay/hardware limitations.
The problem is, you dont want to make a deux ex machina. Even if the thing technically, has the possibility of doing everything we have it doing, if it sounds like we're just arbitrarily giving it abilities that fit various needs across the board, then it's going to suck.
The only problem with the loss and rediscovery idea is that it's very hard to believe that the loss is as complete in large civilization spanning multiple worlds compared to what we have to compare to today where city-states were fairly isolationist and cut off and fairly limited in population. Something would have to be construed to explain such a wide-spread loss of technology and knowledge.
It is also feels like kind of a cop-out to me. But it can still be a good fallback position if for some reason other limits on this tech can't be found.

This is an area where an ancient plague would not be nearly as unbelievable, because it just ravages and destroys all kinds of civilization, knowledge and advancement, instead of always going after one tech infrastructure, whenever it is used in conjunction with another.

It might even make the factions' flavors more believable. Why after a thousand years hasn't biotechnology reached its peak for all factions? Because the plague by lucky chance didn't destroy a lab for such on a remote colony in shaper space. Why doesn't everyone have awesome AIs after a thousand years? Because the only supercomputer that survived was in Unadorned space. Etc.
I'm kinda liking the fallback in knowledge more and more. It almost makes sense that it was the nano plague though. Assume that hundreds of years ago, everyone used nano tech across the board for all kinds of stuff. Their entire life revolved around it, produced their food, built their stuff. Maybe it didn't make up the objects and their ships, but say there were factories that grew all the objects in controlled environments. Now here comes the nano plague and whipes out nano tech. People wouldn't have to start from scratch but they would have a huge set-back. They'd have to relearn how to do everything without nano-tech and rebuild the entire infrastructure of their civilizations. Trillions of people likely would have died.

Using it to explain the differentiation of the factions is good too. Such a devastating event would have the bonus effect of producing a lot of conflict and strife both within factions and between them.

Basically, rather than this ever present all seeing nano-plague, we can say that it was released during a mining operation in a large asteroid cluster and quickly spread through the Nexus network Since we had no technology to communicate that didn't have nanites involved with it, it was impossible to spread news or warning of the plague. Everyone in space died. Entire space stations become ghost cities.

fast forward a few hundred years from that event, now it's simply an inactive loose spread of nanites. The event has made the pursuit of nano tech forbidden under the highest penalties, and it's simply a part of society, you just dont do it. Something that horrible puts fear in anything.
I would still consider this a backup plan though. Another option would be to move the game back closer to the present, so that it is maybe, 400 years in the future or such. That just leaves less time for past events as a downside.
Too much differentiation between factions and such to be able to make it a much less distant future.
I dont see weapons as being a source of a lot of waste heat. Superconductivity has no waste heat, so we dont have to worry about a building up of heat from moving all that energy around. so you'd have to explain a buildup of heat due to something else. It's obvious with some projectile weapons but it's not so obvious with most other things. If anything, weapon fire may be a means of cooling a ship down by converting heat into electrical energy which would be transferred off the ship via lasers.
Hmm, I don't know about that, everything has to generate some waste heat I thought. Nothing can be 100% efficient.
It's not 100% efficient. I suppose depending on the wavelength of the energy weapon, we could have leakage outside of our intended range during the conversion of electrical energy to photonic/ionic. In addition to that photonic leakage (not necessarily being in the infra red spectrum, higher power lasers etc may leak visible light, etc) In addition to that , the loss of energy may be more likely to be in the magnetic field generated during the whole process.

What defines waste output from a process all depends on the purpose of whatever you're trying to do. And heat isn't always the waste product. It's the ultimate waste product, since ultimately everything tends toward it due to entropy, but it need not be in such a state at the machine. For instance, a heatlamp bulb's purpose is to produce heat. Light is the waste product. Light that travels outward and hits surfaces and either is reflected or absorbed. Wherever it's absorbed it losses some energy to heat and so the process repeats until eventually all of the light has been reduced to heat.

Now, we can produce waste products of light, or magnetism etc. It then becomes an issue of if we absorb that waste product ourselves, or it radiates out. If our waste product is something we aren't absorbing then heat buildup wont be an issue, if it is something we absorb, then we have to deal with that. What we absorb may not be in the form of heat right away though, and produce other problems. If it's high energy radiation like UV or gamma, etc, then we could have all sorts of issues with buildup unrelated to simply dispersing heat.

It's not really about not producing heat, it's about if whatever is carrying the heat stays a part of the ship.
second, siege warfare. Indeed, it would be nice to have coordinated attacks like that. But it requires a rebalancing as a described to make little ships act like little ships and big bases and carriers and such act as such.
Little ships might actually have an advantage in some cases against bases, because they can more quickly and easily circle close to the rock, thereby using it as cover. Big ships will spend more time in line of sight with the base and get blasted by its superior firepower.

This was an explanation I was going to use for a latter push for including ground assaults as part of the game and universe, once the engine technology was available (OGRE being one probable requirement).
I'm so uninterested in seamless flight and such that I can't express how much i really dont care about it ever getting done. On the list of important effective things to get done and have it done right with the game, seamless flight doesn't even register. While if someone has that as their sole interest and wants to devote their time to it, nobody would stop them, anyone who cares about making the game more playable and advancing it to the point where it's great would see all the other things we touched on in the few posts above as far more important and effective at shaping the game and defining it. Basically it's a matter of priorities. Does seamless flight define the game, or does everything else that needs work define it? Seamless flight is something I wouldn't spend any energy on until we were talking about version 2.0.
yea, that's the other idea. Ditch shields altogether and just go with a type of self healing armour. Where the limits of performance would be heat capacitance and time. I got no problem with that. Only problem i see is that it makes more sense on much larger ships, than smaller ones where there are so many fragile systems exposed or close to the surface of any part of the hull, you'd have to make the armour extremely powerful to give such ships a chance at surviving any fight, and by connection, any larger ship would be nearly indestructable.
Well as things get larger, their volume goes up faster than their surface area, and surface area is how you radiate heat. More shields means more heat. More armor means more mass means more engines means more heat. So smaller vessels have an advantage here, pound for pound.
While it's impossible to completely escape some production of heat somewhere, i think much more limiting with the shields is the actual ability to emit it at an effective barrier strength. Shields are _MASSIVE_ sinks of energy for the ship. Creating an effective barrier over such a huge cross-section is going to quickly become impractical.

Also, you have to consider that the ship isn't just radiating heat off the surface of the hull, all of the infrastructure of the ship would be able to absorb heat and act as a sink for it.

Also, heat can be converted to electricity when the temp differential is high enough. So a ship's last ditch effort to stave off overheating can be the massive emission of any other sort of energy converted from these heat-scrubbers. It simply delays the inevitable, but a ship's only recourse is not simple radiation.
Perhaps a use of both is the best way to do it. explain that shields aren't practical on large ships due to the huge surface area you'd have to cover and reactive self healing armour isn't practical on small ships due to the mass it has. Large ships have the reactive armour, small ships have shields. done.
Another explanation is that shields produce more heat for what they offer (though they might recover faster) which is better for smaller ships with their more favorable heat dissipation (see above). Larger ships benefit more from armor, because they have the space for vacuum barriers between layers of armor, that help disperse otherwise much more penetrating weapon attacks (with the exception of directed energy weapons I suppose).

An interesting thing about this, is that a faction with better shields might rely more on lighter craft (maybe Highborn or Aera) while a faction with better armor might rely more on heavier craft (maybe Andolians or Rlaan).
the problem with heat as being the only limiting factor is that i dont think smaller ships have enough material to have a heat capacitance to handle the kind of heat you are saying shields produce such that large ships would be unable to dissipate despite their _MASSIVE_ heat capacitance over any practical period of time. That's a massive amount of heat energy wasted in shields, and a small ship just wouldn't be able to absorb and dissipate over time, it would have to dissipate immediately and it sounds unlikely it would have sufficient surface area for that, even if it's volume was small such that the shields wouldn't have to be that big to protect it.

maybe we should ditch shields altogether and go with a more realistic reactive armor. The way it would be reactive is similar to a plasma shield only on a decentralized level and on a much smaller scale. just before something impacts a section of armor (we already sectionalize shields and armor so that's good) we emit a very strong impulse of hyper dense plasma just above the surface of the hull. Heat is produced, but it doesn't become limited by the surface area of a ship, so the same type of effect can be on small ships or large ones, large ones simply have more sections. In any case, This reactive armor "refire" rate is limited by it's plasma reserves, which can only be replenished at a given rate. The waste heat would be non-limiting, since you wouldn't likely be able to replenish shields fast enough for the given area to not be able to radiate away the heat energy (not counting enemy damage).

I like the reactive armor method. It can work for any ship of any size and seems far more believable than centralized shield emitters and such.
i wasn't removing missiles. I didn't even touch on them. Of course there would be missile type weapons (though i dont see why they would still be shaped like they had to be aerodynamic). I also think they should be much more easily targeted and defended against, rather than the nearly guaranteed kill aspect they currently have. For instance, if we're going to grant hands off targeting and navigation once fired to something as devastating as an anti-matter missile, then we have to face the idea that they're not going to be incredibly fast and be able to maneuver quickly. Their energy output would make them easily targetable and their speed and limited engines means that their course is highly predictable. There is no air to swim through in space, so the idea of wildly flying heat seeking missiles in space is retarded.
I guess it just sounded like you were saying that then, you listed all types of weapons currently in game except those that seemed to rely on explosive warheads, namely torpedos, which are also the only thing that allows little ships to lone wolf capitals.

What is really imbalanced are the lighter missiles that kill strike craft. There is absolutely nothing they can currently do to evade these, save for SPEC, when and if that is an option. Missiles in VS are the proverbial 'instant win'.
Well, we need to give missiles realistic movement. If they're really fast, then they take along time to correct course, and they aren't turning on a dime. Turning thrusters should be _VERY_ small compared to the primary thruster pushing it forward. This should give you time to target them and destroy them (you should be able to shoot the missile and destroy it as it corrects course to come at you). Tracking missiles should be much more expensive to minimize their abuse.
I'd much rather fix the way the NPC's interact with the player and vice versa than allow for a stockpiling of remote control ships that the player micro-manages or plays fleet commander with. While it's one way to move the game forward, having the player progress through the ranks to maybe become a faction leader himself, it's not really the goal of the game to do that.
Well it'd be real nice to have as an option, especially right now when there isn't another option. It's not like everyone would play that way either, ships are expensive and you'd loose them not infrequently. Part of the fun of the game is going from ant to emporer, for those players interested in those things. Or for players who like to have enough "umph" to push the dynamic universe around a little, like by taking out an Aera detachment with your own little fleet of strike craft.
Currently, there is no "ant to emperor" really. You're never move to any position of power over anyone else. With a proper campaign / mission setup, such a progression may be made impossible and not hinder the fun of the game at all. But i dont favor doing things just "for the interim" because that's the kind of thing that's given us things like SPEC, time dialation and other features involved with the economy and balance of ships. These half-assed patches are harmful to game development because it takes the pressure off of having to fix the cause of the problem by hiding some of the symptoms. Without that pressure, we're going to be hard pressed to have any developers work in that area, they'll move to something where the symptoms are more visible, leaving our problem to fester and ingrain itself so that years later a complete rewrite will be needed. Not cool.
A better solution would be to increase the idea of actually being in a faction and doing things that are a part of it. As a privateer with no loyalties, sure you'll pay a premium to get people to help you, but you should be able to create "partners" with pilots you help out and help you out a few times. If you join a faction, you should be part of a flightgroup and garner help from them and you help them.
Joining a faction would be an amazing gameplay feature, instead of the usual 'it is an open ended universe, so your on your own kid'. If it is open ended, you should be able to take a side if you want, and reap the rewards of such.
I like open ended and completely dynamic and able to do whatever you want. We currently dont have that. factions aren't really much more than synthetic groups of ships who's really only purpose is to give rhyme and reason to the AI attacking or helping another AI ship or you. That's what i would like to see fixed with the above quote. Take a side, take no side. Such a feature is going to require scripting of course.
I think a your and everyone else's problem is a two part problem. 1. The AI lacks the infrastructure to really interact with other NPC's and the player. 2. The game lacks the missions/campaigns and basic need to work together on tasks. Fix that, rather than ignore it and work around it.
That is half the game. The other half is building, amassing your own private empire and fighting under your own total command against whatever you want and pushing against the dynamic universe to change how it goes. The two halves compliment each other, and combined you never run out of fun. It's why almost all RTS games have "campaign" and "skirmish" modes instead of only one or the other. Sometimes you feel like hearing a story (that you are apart of) and sometimes you feel like making your own (that you are apart of).
Building your own empire is not a part of this game. We dont have the infrastructure involved in managing an empire, nor in dealing with commanding all sorts of other NPC's. It's not simply a matter of missing a feature, it's a matter of completely not being setup to handle it.

Campaign mode follows a plot, a story, that's VS. We just haven't written one yet. It takes place in a totally dynamic universe (will anyway) and that's what makes it special compared to most others. Events in our game would be dynamic and un-predictable, despite it having a plot that is scripted from the get-go. Merging the two requires an elegant solution.

Skirmish mode is a single battle/event. It's no free-roam time. It has no plot/point but it's not campaign mode without the campaign. It's a single non-connected event. VS does not have this, nor is it ever intended to have it outside of some early testing modes of multi-player gameplay.

The idea is that campaign mode in VS is so flexible that you have room to do whatever you want within it. The problem with wanting to be a faction unto-yourself is that that requires whole sections of code and game features that dont exist. It's an entire gameplay format that while is cool in itself, and not necessarily conflicting with anything intended as the way VS would play, it's just not in existence at all right now and would require a lot of work.
Couple alternatives. Make acceleration more realistic, and so acceleration in any direction would become much slower. Giving people more time to target/match. Or you take the loss. If you're out of missiles or able to fire at the ship, then it got away. Good for them, you'll have to do better next time. It's one of the aspects of space combat.
What I'm talking about is more along the lines of flying with the peddle to the metal at all times, so that the AI can't catch you or vice versa. Then, instead of changing course, fire a probe so that you appear right in front of your destination. Only need to slow down for actual stops.
Engine heat soak. Running full throttle just needs to not be sustainable. But you still gotta realize, velocity != acceleration. In space, your velocity will continue to increase because your acceleration is constant. You can increase your acceleration with the engines, and this is what would not be sustainable due to heat soak or limitations of engine thrust, but even if a ship is not using it's engines at all, it can be accelerating faster than you'd hope to be able to catch. Or it could not be accelerating at all and simply have a velocity that would take way too long for you to overtake.

This just means that it's far less likely for you to be intercepted and attacked in the vast expanses of space. Rather, it's at the places you slow down that is dangerous. Anywhere you have to dock or use your nexus or anything where you must be moving very slowly (or matching velocity) is where you can be intercepted and attacked.
Strategy would have to follow the targeting of smaller ships. Either taking care of it during a dogfight situation, or via traps like a mine field or having friends to surround a smaller ship. Teamwork is where the game would really start to be immersive. You'll have to get it out of your head that you can do most things by yourself.
Then I really need to be able to buy escorts without a mothership, because motherships and friends don't grow on trees. Benefitting from help is one thing, needing help is another.
That's the idea behind making "partners/friends". Without the help of campaigns and missions, there is nothing to put you up with other NPC's as your wingmen. So we'd also have to have a function that allowed you to befriend or setup partnerships with other NPC's. This would be an open ended group. You theoretically could achieve part of what you wanted with creating your own empire this way. Though, your empire is made up of "free thinking" NPC's, not simply remote controlled ones. The strategy involved with keeping larger and larger groups together would be interesting. and devastating to any enemies of your people :)
Obviously SPEC/Warp etc "feels" right, but it makes so much of the rest of the physics you're supposed to believe in the game wrong.
I only meant your Hyperspace explanation where you are disconnected from 3D space as far as senses and such. The point is then you travel to your destination and this takes time, rather than waiting for the probe to arrive while you fly around randomly, and then you're instantly there all of a sudden. It is a surreal way to travel as far as aesthetics. That is both better and worse for a Scifi game/universe.
My nexus' dont require hyperspace. SPEC kinda doesn't either. Really you are in a pocket dimension when you create a warp bubble. It's still 3d space, but a separate 3d space. I suppose the dimension containing both 3d spaces could be considered a hyperspace, but you would never interact with it.
My nexus' use something similar to quantum teleportation. It's instant once it is activated, but we can make the activation of it all sorts of fun eyecandy that takes some amount of time to work.

The idea that you can do anything and see anything other than yourself when in warp is retarded. You're in a bubble. The bubble is there to protect you from the effects of the universe on the other side so you can do what you are intending to do to it without that effect nullifying the point of you doing it by having the same effect on the space your ship inhabits or restricting you to limits of matter and light within space. That means nothing either way, no navigation, no sensor data, no signals from either direction. This also means no ability to manipulate the outside space once the bubble is up, which means you're basically going no where. Though it would be a nice way to hide something, the warp bubble is both a necessary and a completely self refuting requirement to warp travel by means of space compression/expansion.

No matter what eyecandy or dribble can be added to traveling under such a means, it's so obviously self defeating, why not just make use of an infinite improbability drive and be done with it?
A highly effective government may be able to do it without corporations, but there's yet been one example of such an effective government in the history of mankind.
Well there had to be such goverments in the past; corporations weren't always around.
governments of the past may not have had things called "corporations" but the nearest things to governments that had similar scales of industry that we currently have had companies that acted like them. West India trading company and such things. Before things like mass production, it doesn't make sense to talk about anything involving this, governments didn't provide services that companies did because the function of a company didn't exist yet.

Governments do one of two things. They either organize entities to provide goods and services or they provide the goods and services themselves. In the ancient world, it was almost always the former, and not the latter. In the conventional world, there is mountains of evidence to the inefficiencies of government versions of industries and businesses vs the private sector's. This is because so long as the funding is detached from their performance, you'll get crap.
Guilds and such, they're not concerned with such things, they're more like unions not businesses. There's no such thing as big bulky slow moving large corporations really. Corporations that big are really many smaller individual companies each responsible for their own income etc. The corporation then directs these companies like chess pieces. The smaller companies respond to outside stimulus. The corporation is insulated and only really has to respond to governments and other large corporations or internal politics of it's own infrastructure.
But each faction has its own "civilian" version of itself that can operate somewhat separately, like an abstraction of all corporations and merchants working underneath that faction. And then you have the Merchants faction itself, a mega corporation basically.
Faction's in the game are kind of confusing. You have a mixture of races/species and guilds. Guilds being treated as "race" specific i would guess. Ie. there are Uln Merchants and Confed merchants. The two aren't connected.

so either it's an abstraction of the businesses in that "field" or they are names of "guilds". They can't be both. The way they are portrayed in the game via the fixers and such it seems more like they are guilds. In which case, it follows a guide of being more like a Union. Members may be leaders of businesses, or independent people, but it's a union.

I'd rather see individual corporations make their existance known as it would be likely that only a few large corporations would exist that would evolve in a universe where the tools and such of life are complex and large/expensive machines. This requires huge investment and expertise and infrastructure, hence either the government is running it or a private business, and if the government was running it, everyone would probably be dead by now from various system failures.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

MC707 wrote:
safemode wrote:
I still don't feel the nexus way of traveling as a 'realistic' approach. I mean, correct me if I am wrong, but it hasn't even been theorized by anyone! Wormholes at least have some scientific backup, and SPEC is widely spoken in General Relativity. Whats the only problem with stretching time and/or creating wormholes? Massive amounts of energy. Will that be a problem for a type III civilization? Probably not. But Nexus travel... well at least I haven't heard of.
The basis of nexus travel is in an actual experiment that was carried out in real life. I extrapolated from it and created my own theory. Now, take into account that the theory you would use to prove wormhole travel is the same one that says that any attempt to travel through one would either destroy you into barely distinguishable sub-atomic particles or convert you to radiation on the other side or require so much energy to open a tunnel big enough for your ship that you'd basically have to be tugging around a star and exotic imaginary matter.
my theory requires no extra dimensional travel, despite how likely they are to exist. My theory requires no special imaginary matter. my method doesn't require you to have a star as a reactor.
Your theory doesn't need a 'star' as a reactor, but it cannot break the light barrier. Simply not. Not to say move you around. I'm going to quote Dr. Michio Kaku:
And, as you said, you created that theory. We need something more realistic, and energy for civilizations in the time of VS will be 'magical'. That's the only need that both worm hole and stretching space theories have. Thus, you will not be needing to extract energy from stars to get that energy. Remember 90% of the matter in the universe is Dark Matter, invisible matter for us, unknown matter. We could have elements which could be the size of a bead and power entire civilizations. You might remember, before we knew nuclear power, nobody would EVER have thought a rock the size of a tennis ball could power entire countries. In all that unknown matter, there are tons of possibilities of having elements like uranium but that could have billions of times its energy output and be just those times plentiful.
Energy in Vs is not going to need to be "magical". You only need magical energy to use wormholes to travel in, my theory doesn't require that. As for "realistic", space stretching travel wont work. It requires a bubble and the bubble means you can't stretch space outside of the bubble. You could use gateways but good luck with that. In any case, "dark matter" is less realistic than my entire theory is. It's a mathematical construct to explain current theories that are admittedly incomplete and full of holes due to both our lack of understanding of all the laws of physics and how they're connected and multiple theories explaining some observations equally as well and both not having been disproved yet by any other observations. Dark energy and Dark matter are kludges with no proof. They're less realistic than gravitons.

Also, unless you're going to discover a new natural element, there are no hidden materials that are going to produce more energy than what you get out of atomic energy. You may find something that yields cheaper, but the only way to get more energy is completely converting the subatomic particles to energy, via antimatter. There's only so much energy in subatomic particles, what makes a level 3 civ a level 3 is how to contain and maintain a chain reaction of anti-matter fueled conversion of matter to energy, or to at will cause a simultaneous conversion.

my theory doesn't require extra dimensions that we have no proof of or even a solid theory to back up. My theory doesn't require matter/energy that doesn't have any proof of existing outside of some math equations based on incomplete observational data and theories. My theory doesn't require eneryg levels in excess of what can only be described as magic. How is exactly is my theory less realistic? Just because it's original and not based on 1950's era imagination and broken dreams? No, it's based on an actual experiment, some fairly stable theories of quantum mechanics and some extrapolation. It requires very little in the way of made up things and obscene energy levels.
safemode wrote:Now to get to spec. My favorite BS technology of sci fi. Like i mentioned before, general relativity may be used to explain how you can move a bubble of space across space at faster than light, since space itself is not restricted to the speed of light. The problem is, once you create your bubble around your ship to allow your ship to cheat and ride with that space, how do you create the compression wave of space that will accelerate your bubble? You can't create it before the bubble, and you can't effect anything outside of your bubble once it's created, just like nothing can effect you from outside of the bubble. It's self defeating. You need the bubble, but the bubble prohibits you from doing anything to the space your bubble is supposed to be accelerated in from within the bubble. That leaves you with some type of pinball-like gate system, where you have to hope you exit back into normal space near another gate or you're in for a long journey.

it's this ignoring of the hypocrisy of requiring a space-time bubble to use something like SPEC that makes all of the other aspects of traveling in SPEC retarded as well. The idea that we dont even require the bubble in SPEC is just an oversight, the FTL aspect would require it and would also negate the wave allowing us to move (under our control anyway).

Granted, people have had little problem suspending their disbelief over the tech in movies and games thus-far, but i'd rather go with something else that's less obvious at self-negating it's own existance.
"The second possibility is to use large amounts of energy to continuously stretch space and time (i.e. contracting the space in front of you, and expanding the space behind you). Since only empty space is contracting or expanding, one may exceed the speed of light in this fashion. (Empty space can warp space faster than light. For example, the Big Bang expanded much faster than the speed of light.) The problem with this approach, again, is that vast amounts of energy are required, making it feasible for only a Type III civilization. Energy scales for all these proposals are on the order of the Planck energy (10 to the 19 billion electron volts, which is a quadrillion times larger than our most powerful atom smasher)."

The only problems is energy. If you cut that supply of energy you can stop, so you are not bound to "hope you exit back into normal space near another gate or you're in for a long journey". You have control, just like you do right now in VS.
Energy is not the only problem, despite being a massive one with space compression. moving across the compressed space is the other problem. Assuming you have the energy. You compress space in front of you and you expand it behind you. Have you moved ? no. Because the distance between you and what's in front of you is only compressed while you are continuing to compress space, turn off your drive and you are back to being the original distance. Now, if you try to cross that compressed space while you are compressing it, it's no longer empty and no longer compressable. OR. you become compressed just like space is being (space isn't really ever empty anyway, so what else would you do to explain the now super dense wall like section of space in front of you? ), thus your are still the same distance away from what is in front of you as you originally were. You cannot travel across compressed space and not be compressed yourself unless you A. Either aren't traveling across compressed space and through some type of hyperspace or B. are riding a "wave" of space from within a bubble of space and not really traveling across anything compressed but being pushed forward faster than c since space is not limited by c.

etc etc. So once again, as i've brought up before. You either need hyperspace and all that totally imagined stuff so far beyond what makes anything in the rest of the game even possible or we go with something a lot more realistic like what i theorized or something else entirely.

Even if you think warp type travel or wormhole travel is possible, if you concede that it requires a magical amount of energy to do, then how do you justify weapons and shields and combat? If i have that much energy on tap to travel, nothing of any physical construct in the universe could withstand being exposed to that energy and not being obliterated. None of the rest of the game would exist.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by Deus Siddis »

safemode wrote: Sure they're really there. But nanites haven't been in use because of the plague for decades, maybe even centuries, i forget. So it's not so much that they keep trying to use them and get attacked by the plague, it's simply the in-grained fear that stops people from even trying anymore.

If the nano-plague had disappeared 10 years ago in the VS universe, they wouldn't even know. It's currently a boogeyman.
I don't think you can buy boogeymen in a universe full of trillions around with advanced technology. Any small or large group could experiment with nanites, and certainly would, to see if there's still shit flying around out there or if it is safe to turn back on the fan. Because with a looming Aera invasion, things are starting to get hot around here.

Putting those two thoughts together, who wouldn't want to set up a nanotechnology research outpost on their border with the Aera? Win-Win. :twisted:
The problem is, you dont want to make a deux ex machina. Even if the thing technically, has the possibility of doing everything we have it doing, if it sounds like we're just arbitrarily giving it abilities that fit various needs across the board, then it's going to suck.
No I'm talking about major differences between major generations of nanotechnology development, not picking and choosing features. An atomic assembler is vastly more advanced than a molecular one, something that works outside a lab is vastly more advanced than something that only works under controlled labratory conditions.

This same decision would need to be made if we go the forgotten technology route.
fast forward a few hundred years from that event, now it's simply an inactive loose spread of nanites. The event has made the pursuit of nano tech forbidden under the highest penalties, and it's simply a part of society, you just dont do it. Something that horrible puts fear in anything.
Still a lame explanation though, imo. The only way that it makes sense, is if the nano-plague was made of nanites, but. . .it didn't attack just other nanites.

It attacked everything technological that was advanced, exposed, easily consumed and in large clusters, just like all plagues in the past have. Structures and machines and ships remained, but whenever the nanites got access to their interiors, they ate out the 'guts' so to speak, unless they were far out of the way and isolated from other potential targets. With the job complete the plague spread out beyond the arm, seeking new target that may or may not exist.

Today, the plague is not irrationally feared by everyone, but so much knowledge was lost that many things that were accomplished through advanced means in the past have been replaced with more primitive means, simply because no one has the know-how to do any better. Only more primitive nano-technology is left, thus trade, only more primitive AI technology is left, thus human pilots, only more primitive society is left, thus many factions.


I dont see weapons as being a source of a lot of waste heat. Superconductivity has no waste heat, so we dont have to worry about a building up of heat from moving all that energy around. so you'd have to explain a buildup of heat due to something else. It's obvious with some projectile weapons but it's not so obvious with most other things. If anything, weapon fire may be a means of cooling a ship down by converting heat into electrical energy which would be transferred off the ship via lasers.
Hmm, I don't know about that, everything has to generate some waste heat I thought. Nothing can be 100% efficient.
It's not really about not producing heat, it's about if whatever is carrying the heat stays a part of the ship.
What I mean is I don't think you cannot make all of the heat leave through the engines, beam weapons, missiles or whatever. Some will get sunk into your ship, bringing it closer to the danger level.
Seamless flight is something I wouldn't spend any energy on until we were talking about version 2.0.
I'm aware you're not interested in SPF, though I believe someday someone will come along that will (and can). And I can't imagine seeing something looking as good as what infinity has in VS for much less than a decade.

But you can already fly close to asteroids, planet and moons, so they already work as cover to be used when attacking a base on any of those things.
Also, you have to consider that the ship isn't just radiating heat off the surface of the hull, all of the infrastructure of the ship would be able to absorb heat and act as a sink for it.
Sinks only help for so long.
Also, heat can be converted to electricity when the temp differential is high enough. So a ship's last ditch effort to stave off overheating can be the massive emission of any other sort of energy converted from these heat-scrubbers. It simply delays the inevitable, but a ship's only recourse is not simple radiation.
I thought that was a given for VS' ships, given how aggressive they are with their energy output versus how small their radiator surfaces are.
the problem with heat as being the only limiting factor is that i dont think smaller ships have enough material to have a heat capacitance to handle the kind of heat you are saying shields produce such that large ships would be unable to dissipate despite their _MASSIVE_ heat capacitance over any practical period of time.
Well my idea of what shields should be are an array of smaller plasma thrusters that act like reactive armor in that they fire at the oncoming weapon (to help counter its momentum) for only so long as it is a threat.

There's no gravimetric magic or plasma cloud floating around your ship at all times that would require heat-producing systems to constantly emit and manage.

I don't think self-repairing nano-armor is all that bad for small ships either though. Certainly not enough that we must consider limitations outside of heat dissipation.
maybe we should ditch shields altogether and go with a more realistic reactive armor. The way it would be reactive is similar to a plasma shield only on a decentralized level and on a much smaller scale. just before something impacts a section of armor (we already sectionalize shields and armor so that's good) we emit a very strong impulse of hyper dense plasma just above the surface of the hull. Heat is produced, but it doesn't become limited by the surface area of a ship, so the same type of effect can be on small ships or large ones, large ones simply have more sections. In any case, This reactive armor "refire" rate is limited by it's plasma reserves, which can only be replenished at a given rate. The waste heat would be non-limiting, since you wouldn't likely be able to replenish shields fast enough for the given area to not be able to radiate away the heat energy (not counting enemy damage).
Exactly. That's been my suggestion for at least a year now. Never been a fan of shields, since there doesn't seem to be a good explanation behind them in the first place.

One possible alteration to consider is that it could be limited by how much damage it can absorb at once, not how quickly its plasma reserves replenish.

Self repairing nano-armor is also a good tech to have in game as well. It could be weaker than real armor, but regenerates slowly, kind of like ammo-less weapons versus ammo weapons, more effective over time but less so initially.
Well, we need to give missiles realistic movement. If they're really fast, then they take along time to correct course, and they aren't turning on a dime. Turning thrusters should be _VERY_ small compared to the primary thruster pushing it forward. This should give you time to target them and destroy them (you should be able to shoot the missile and destroy it as it corrects course to come at you). Tracking missiles should be much more expensive to minimize their abuse.
Making them a little less greatly superior to the agility of strike craft and more expensive isn't enough though. You still need a somewhat reliable way to evade them, and one that involves player skill for gameplay reasons.
Currently, there is no "ant to emperor" really.
On the contrary, that is all there currently is. Trying playing with a llama with starting outfit. Feel kinda ant-like don't you?

Okay, now to save some hundreds of hours of gameplay, just hack yourself a trillion credits and a clydesdale, then load it up with some dozens of goddards, another clydesdale, a dozen pacifiers and admonishers, a couple dozen lancelots and gawains and whatever else floats your space boat. All hail thee, Emperor. :mrgreen:
You're never move to any position of power over anyone else. With a proper campaign / mission setup, such a progression may be made impossible and not hinder the fun of the game at all. But i dont favor doing things just "for the interim" because that's the kind of thing that's given us things like SPEC, time dialation and other features involved with the economy and balance of ships. These half-assed patches are harmful to game development because it takes the pressure off of having to fix the cause of the problem by hiding some of the symptoms. Without that pressure, we're going to be hard pressed to have any developers work in that area, they'll move to something where the symptoms are more visible, leaving our problem to fester and ingrain itself so that years later a complete rewrite will be needed. Not cool.
No this isn't a patch or hack, it is part of the game and part of many other mature and planned-out-in-advance-design games as well, space games especially. It just needs a little polish, and the campaign you are talking about needs to be built more or less from scratch. Both are ways of playing the game, just the first one is more developed because it took less work to implement thus far.
Building your own empire is not a part of this game. We dont have the infrastructure involved in managing an empire, nor in dealing with commanding all sorts of other NPC's. It's not simply a matter of missing a feature, it's a matter of completely not being setup to handle it.
I chose the word "Emperor" to be a little dramatic, obviously you won't get to play as an Ant or an Emperor. :D

But, owning stations and bases with assigned defensive fleets (not implemented, some discussions) and having your own escort fleet (implemented) are what I meant. So I guess more like the lord or Cephid 17, than anything like a serious faction.
Skirmish mode is a single battle/event. It's no free-roam time. It has no plot/point but it's not campaign mode without the campaign. It's a single non-connected event. VS does not have this, nor is it ever intended to have it outside of some early testing modes of multi-player gameplay.
I'm sure multiplayer will get there eventually, and when it does we can have real balance finally- the product of real player versus player balance testing. And combat AI's can be modeled after expert players once the combat balance is in better shape.

But I mean the idea of influencing the game environment by playing the way you want to, as long as you don't get yourself run over, as opposed to following missions, quests or leads in a campaign.

Don't get me wrong, I love campaigns too, as long as their stories have the right mixture of twists and emotion. I just don't feel one is better than the other, and I think few players out there would disagree.
The idea is that campaign mode in VS is so flexible that you have room to do whatever you want within it. The problem with wanting to be a faction unto-yourself is that that requires whole sections of code and game features that dont exist. It's an entire gameplay format that while is cool in itself, and not necessarily conflicting with anything intended as the way VS would play, it's just not in existence at all right now and would require a lot of work.
My experience with the last two stable builds gives me the exact opposite impression.

There is no campaign whatsoever, but you can put together a squadron and kick an arm of the Aera invasion back into the jungle, thereby making the in-game headlines and shifting a delicate imbalance of power slightly in favor of the home team. All the while making ends meet as a mercenary, for your day job. 8)

And remember kids, all it takes is some courage and a pass from a goddard to kill a destroyer, so stay in school and don't do nanites. :mrgreen:
This just means that it's far less likely for you to be intercepted and attacked in the vast expanses of space. Rather, it's at the places you slow down that is dangerous. Anywhere you have to dock or use your nexus or anything where you must be moving very slowly (or matching velocity) is where you can be intercepted and attacked.
If you don't decide to slow down, you are practically invincible. With pods, an interception program for said pods, and deployable mines this wouldn't have to be so.
That's the idea behind making "partners/friends". Without the help of campaigns and missions, there is nothing to put you up with other NPC's as your wingmen. So we'd also have to have a function that allowed you to befriend or setup partnerships with other NPC's. This would be an open ended group. You theoretically could achieve part of what you wanted with creating your own empire this way. Though, your empire is made up of "free thinking" NPC's, not simply remote controlled ones. The strategy involved with keeping larger and larger groups together would be interesting. and devastating to any enemies of your people :)
This could be fun, though I haven't yet seen it done 'right'. If the AI could be made smart enough and wasn't obnoxiously flighty it would be a nice feature to help fill out the game. For players with the cash, buying absolutely loyal escorts (without a mothership) would still be a nice complimenting feature though. I'd use both.
Governments do one of two things. They either organize entities to provide goods and services or they provide the goods and services themselves. In the ancient world, it was almost always the former, and not the latter. In the conventional world, there is mountains of evidence to the inefficiencies of government versions of industries and businesses vs the private sector's. This is because so long as the funding is detached from their performance, you'll get crap.
The trouble is in defining performance. Is the US in such great shape because of the high "performance" of Microsoft and Pepsi? Both are big and have pulled in alot of funding, but neither would give a faction an economic advantage in a war with another faction.
Faction's in the game are kind of confusing. You have a mixture of races/species and guilds. Guilds being treated as "race" specific i would guess. Ie. there are Uln Merchants and Confed merchants. The two aren't connected.
My impression is the Merchant Faction is a super corporation that reaches across most other human factions like a modern global corporation. The civilian versions of each faction are groups of national corporations and small businesses not worth mentioning on the already cluttered faction relations interface (which doesn't even display faction-to-faction relations yet, which it badly needs to do).
This requires huge investment and expertise and infrastructure, hence either the government is running it or a private business, and if the government was running it, everyone would probably be dead by now from various system failures.
Well except you have the fantasy "post-humans" who are set to take over from us mortals and our selfish, balkanized and capitalistic ways. Thinking Andolians, Unadorned, Shapers, Aera, Rlaan, etc.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by MC707 »

safemode wrote:Energy in Vs is not going to need to be "magical". You only need magical energy to use wormholes to travel in, my theory doesn't require that. As for "realistic", space stretching travel wont work. It requires a bubble and the bubble means you can't stretch space outside of the bubble. You could use gateways but good luck with that. In any case, "dark matter" is less realistic than my entire theory is. It's a mathematical construct to explain current theories that are admittedly incomplete and full of holes due to both our lack of understanding of all the laws of physics and how they're connected and multiple theories explaining some observations equally as well and both not having been disproved yet by any other observations. Dark energy and Dark matter are kludges with no proof. They're less realistic than gravitons.
Thats not the point. You have no proof of your theory either (have you posted a source? a video? an article?). The point is, the rest of that 90% of unknown stuff to us gives us space to create.
safemode wrote:Also, unless you're going to discover a new natural element, there are no hidden materials that are going to produce more energy than what you get out of atomic energy. You may find something that yields cheaper, but the only way to get more energy is completely converting the subatomic particles to energy, via antimatter. There's only so much energy in subatomic particles, what makes a level 3 civ a level 3 is how to contain and maintain a chain reaction of anti-matter fueled conversion of matter to energy, or to at will cause a simultaneous conversion.
That is the entire point. Have you ever played the Starflight series? They invented the element 'Endurium'. They exploited the unknown of the universe to explain an energy source that could take them through the stars.
safemode wrote:my theory doesn't require extra dimensions that we have no proof of or even a solid theory to back up. My theory doesn't require matter/energy that doesn't have any proof of existing outside of some math equations based on incomplete observational data and theories. My theory doesn't require eneryg levels in excess of what can only be described as magic. How is exactly is my theory less realistic? Just because it's original and not based on 1950's era imagination and broken dreams? No, it's based on an actual experiment, some fairly stable theories of quantum mechanics and some extrapolation. It requires very little in the way of made up things and obscene energy levels.
As you said in your first post, no one knows where the particles of the bosenova went, nor anyone has proof if you could use them to quantum teleport. This is not about originality, neither. In the end, we can not call neither theory realistic, since neither is a real fact.
safemode wrote:etc etc. So once again, as i've brought up before. You either need hyperspace and all that totally imagined stuff so far beyond what makes anything in the rest of the game even possible or we go with something a lot more realistic like what i theorized or something else entirely.
again, everything here is imagined if you didn't realize it, except for the bosenova experiment.
safemode wrote:Even if you think warp type travel or wormhole travel is possible, if you concede that it requires a magical amount of energy to do, then how do you justify weapons and shields and combat? If i have that much energy on tap to travel, nothing of any physical construct in the universe could withstand being exposed to that energy and not being obliterated. None of the rest of the game would exist.
Not a good point. If you have such an energy for offense, you can just as well have it for defense.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

Deus Siddis wrote:
safemode wrote: Currently, there is no "ant to emperor" really.
On the contrary, that is all there currently is. Trying playing with a llama with starting outfit. Feel kinda ant-like don't you?

Okay, now to save some hundreds of hours of gameplay, just hack yourself a trillion credits and a clydesdale, then load it up with some dozens of goddards, another clydesdale, a dozen pacifiers and admonishers, a couple dozen lancelots and gawains and whatever else floats your space boat. All hail thee, Emperor. :mrgreen:
You're never move to any position of power over anyone else. With a proper campaign / mission setup, such a progression may be made impossible and not hinder the fun of the game at all. But i dont favor doing things just "for the interim" because that's the kind of thing that's given us things like SPEC, time dialation and other features involved with the economy and balance of ships. These half-assed patches are harmful to game development because it takes the pressure off of having to fix the cause of the problem by hiding some of the symptoms. Without that pressure, we're going to be hard pressed to have any developers work in that area, they'll move to something where the symptoms are more visible, leaving our problem to fester and ingrain itself so that years later a complete rewrite will be needed. Not cool.
No this isn't a patch or hack, it is part of the game and part of many other mature and planned-out-in-advance-design games as well, space games especially. It just needs a little polish, and the campaign you are talking about needs to be built more or less from scratch. Both are ways of playing the game, just the first one is more developed because it took less work to implement thus far.
The Patch / hack comment had to do with modifying behaviors of features to do things they weren't originally intended to do without consideration for either the underlying code or the game reality. You can see much of this in spec, but it exists elsewhere as well.

The "ant to emperor" comment had to do not with your ability to become more influential in your ability to effect the game, but in that no matter how powerful you get, you're still just 1 privateer in the game. You'll never be able to interact with the game in a manner other than that you did when you first started. It lacks the infrastructure to make you into a faction leader, or even a flightgroup leader. It lacks the various things that you would be able to do as someone of such a higher status, like negotiate with the leaders of other factions and such, declare war and give commands to other flightgroups and ships or have bases built etc etc. As an "emperor" your gameplay changes from flying around and trading/shooting to managing others. The game doesn't have the infrastructure for the "managing" aspect that would be indicative of being an "emperor" all we have is ant and bigger ant.


Skirmish mode is a single battle/event. It's no free-roam time. It has no plot/point but it's not campaign mode without the campaign. It's a single non-connected event. VS does not have this, nor is it ever intended to have it outside of some early testing modes of multi-player gameplay.
I'm sure multiplayer will get there eventually, and when it does we can have real balance finally- the product of real player versus player balance testing. And combat AI's can be modeled after expert players once the combat balance is in better shape.

But I mean the idea of influencing the game environment by playing the way you want to, as long as you don't get yourself run over, as opposed to following missions, quests or leads in a campaign.

Don't get me wrong, I love campaigns too, as long as their stories have the right mixture of twists and emotion. I just don't feel one is better than the other, and I think few players out there would disagree.
You dont understand what i'm talking about when i say campaigns. I dont speak of a directed plot that the player is basically forced into or requests to be into . The game would have a campaign regardless of what the player does. They can free roam and do whatever they want, the campaign of VS would continue on without them, with the dynamic universe modifying events and times of events throughout the campaign. If the player jumped into plot somewhere along the way, intentionally or accidentally, then they can choose to do missions and such and the campaign would be fine with that. But the player isn't necessary for events to take place. Think of the campaign as mostly gentle nudges given to factions to get them to interact in an intentional way to give the VS universe the feel the time period ought to have. Certain specific events may be scripted to occur under given situations, but for the most part, the AI and dynamic universe are in control. The player can be part of the story or not, but the story occurs and goes on regardless. It starts when the player initiates the game for the first time.
The idea is that campaign mode in VS is so flexible that you have room to do whatever you want within it. The problem with wanting to be a faction unto-yourself is that that requires whole sections of code and game features that dont exist. It's an entire gameplay format that while is cool in itself, and not necessarily conflicting with anything intended as the way VS would play, it's just not in existence at all right now and would require a lot of work.
My experience with the last two stable builds gives me the exact opposite impression.

There is no campaign whatsoever, but you can put together a squadron and kick an arm of the Aera invasion back into the jungle, thereby making the in-game headlines and shifting a delicate imbalance of power slightly in favor of the home team. All the while making ends meet as a mercenary, for your day job. 8)

And remember kids, all it takes is some courage and a pass from a goddard to kill a destroyer, so stay in school and don't do nanites. :mrgreen:
My description of what a campaign should be isn't how it is now. It's how it ought to be once the AI is upgraded and the mission/campaign system is upgraded to handle being that flexible. We currently really dont have any sort of campaigns, and if we did, it likely wouldn't be able to be as flexible as i'm describing them. But i dont think it would require the user to be a part of it for it to work.
That's the idea behind making "partners/friends". Without the help of campaigns and missions, there is nothing to put you up with other NPC's as your wingmen. So we'd also have to have a function that allowed you to befriend or setup partnerships with other NPC's. This would be an open ended group. You theoretically could achieve part of what you wanted with creating your own empire this way. Though, your empire is made up of "free thinking" NPC's, not simply remote controlled ones. The strategy involved with keeping larger and larger groups together would be interesting. and devastating to any enemies of your people :)
This could be fun, though I haven't yet seen it done 'right'. If the AI could be made smart enough and wasn't obnoxiously flighty it would be a nice feature to help fill out the game. For players with the cash, buying absolutely loyal escorts (without a mothership) would still be a nice complimenting feature though. I'd use both.
Friends aren't bought. You earn them by helping others or simply being "famous"/successful. It wouldn't be something related to a fixed number, but helping someone may cause them to bond with you etc etc. They wouldn't be unconditional friends for you to use and abuse though, they're not remote control units.
Governments do one of two things. They either organize entities to provide goods and services or they provide the goods and services themselves. In the ancient world, it was almost always the former, and not the latter. In the conventional world, there is mountains of evidence to the inefficiencies of government versions of industries and businesses vs the private sector's. This is because so long as the funding is detached from their performance, you'll get crap.
The trouble is in defining performance. Is the US in such great shape because of the high "performance" of Microsoft and Pepsi? Both are big and have pulled in alot of funding, but neither would give a faction an economic advantage in a war with another faction.
it's actually the US government's attempt to control certain financial industries that has the US in the financial situation that it's in. One can argue all day about who's fault everything is, and the government always manipulates industries, but when the government manipulates too much, to the point where the industry is forced to follow the funding and the funding is detached from their performance, then you have what we got in 2009. If you could attach firmly, performance of a company to funding in a socialist system, then it would work fine, just as good if not better than private. But you can't really do that in a socialist system, because of the mentality of a socialist regime, anything that ended up performing poorly would simply get more funding, because to kill it and start over or without it would not be acceptable as people would depend on it already.

Performance is easy to define, and it has nothing to do with advantages during war. Performance is simply how much income compares to cost. If the company is pulling more money in than it's spending then it's performance is good. Some services a government performs are no income or always going to cost more than they receive, like fire companies are today. That cost has to be paid by taxes, and it's taxes that would have to be highly controlled and treated harshly in order to keep such services efficient. That complication is why it's always best to have as few of these types of services as possible, because the government's ability to remain efficient is inversely proportional on an exponential scale to how much it has to do.
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Re: A new take on wormholes

Post by safemode »

MC707 wrote:
safemode wrote:Energy in Vs is not going to need to be "magical". You only need magical energy to use wormholes to travel in, my theory doesn't require that. As for "realistic", space stretching travel wont work. It requires a bubble and the bubble means you can't stretch space outside of the bubble. You could use gateways but good luck with that. In any case, "dark matter" is less realistic than my entire theory is. It's a mathematical construct to explain current theories that are admittedly incomplete and full of holes due to both our lack of understanding of all the laws of physics and how they're connected and multiple theories explaining some observations equally as well and both not having been disproved yet by any other observations. Dark energy and Dark matter are kludges with no proof. They're less realistic than gravitons.
Thats not the point. You have no proof of your theory either (have you posted a source? a video? an article?). The point is, the rest of that 90% of unknown stuff to us gives us space to create.
I'm pretty sure i posted the link to the experiment that i'm referring to. If not i'll go grep it, but it does exist. The theory exists as a postulation based on the experiment, the results of it, and features found and theorized to exist in quantum mechanics. None of it was really made up. What i did was connect them together, while eventually the results of the experiment may be found to be something mundane, currently, they could easily suggest something more interesting.
safemode wrote:Also, unless you're going to discover a new natural element, there are no hidden materials that are going to produce more energy than what you get out of atomic energy. You may find something that yields cheaper, but the only way to get more energy is completely converting the subatomic particles to energy, via antimatter. There's only so much energy in subatomic particles, what makes a level 3 civ a level 3 is how to contain and maintain a chain reaction of anti-matter fueled conversion of matter to energy, or to at will cause a simultaneous conversion.
That is the entire point. Have you ever played the Starflight series? They invented the element 'Endurium'. They exploited the unknown of the universe to explain an energy source that could take them through the stars.
There is very little "unknown" about the periodic table of elements. To simply create an element and give it magical properties is retarded, especially when it comes to elements. They have predicted properties based on how many protons/neutrons they have. You dont even need to actually see/discover an element to fairly accurately predict many important features of an element simply by where on the periodic table it would be placed. This is something that's been done time and time again where the predictions of where an element is on the periodic table (when they weren't discovered yet) allowed the scientists to find the element because they almost knew exactly what kind of element they were looking for, it's properties and abilities.

Now, i'm not saying we can predict the abilities of everything and especially not how compounds will behave and such, what i'm saying is that it's retarded to just create an element give it all sorts of abilities, because of all the things we have that aren't known, the periodic table of elements puts a fairly good handle on elements. and Atoms on their own, all have the same components, so one new element isn't going to do anything the others can't. It just sounds dumber than spec.

We're trying to be more realistic, that means working as much within the bounds of "Hard" science as possible while retaining enough sci-fi to make what we intend to do with the game possible. Obviously it's subjective how much is too much fi in the sci fi but I think we can do everything we want to do without creating elements and without introducing things that require enough energy to make the rest of the things we do in the game pointless.
safemode wrote:my theory doesn't require extra dimensions that we have no proof of or even a solid theory to back up. My theory doesn't require matter/energy that doesn't have any proof of existing outside of some math equations based on incomplete observational data and theories. My theory doesn't require eneryg levels in excess of what can only be described as magic. How is exactly is my theory less realistic? Just because it's original and not based on 1950's era imagination and broken dreams? No, it's based on an actual experiment, some fairly stable theories of quantum mechanics and some extrapolation. It requires very little in the way of made up things and obscene energy levels.
As you said in your first post, no one knows where the particles of the bosenova went, nor anyone has proof if you could use them to quantum teleport. This is not about originality, neither. In the end, we can not call neither theory realistic, since neither is a real fact.
the theory is realistic in the sense that it is possible without huge jumps in believability. A theory is not a fact, ever. A theory can be based on facts, how many of these facts makes one theory harder than others. My theory is based on many "facts", well over the amount that wormhole travel and SPEC is based on, what makes my theory not a hard theory that every scientist isn't pursuing is that i make a jump to connect one to the other without any proof of the connection. But the connection is not a far leap for one to make. It is based so much around various relatively known attributes of what is currently accepted physics that it's much more "realistic" than that which has no hope of ever being such. And one can argue that you dont know what he future will bring and all that, but in the context of this game, anything that requires as vast amount of energy as that required to bend space and/or keep wormholes open falls completely outside of the VS universe. With that kind of power, nothing else would make sense that happens in the game. Nothing. Thus any such theory that requires that is out.

safemode wrote:etc etc. So once again, as i've brought up before. You either need hyperspace and all that totally imagined stuff so far beyond what makes anything in the rest of the game even possible or we go with something a lot more realistic like what i theorized or something else entirely.
again, everything here is imagined if you didn't realize it, except for the bosenova experiment.
we're not talking about making a simulation. You are allowed to add in the fi to the sci. It's just the degree that we do it that is being addressed. Less is better, as it restricts things to the less fantastical and makes the game more relevant to players and easier to associate with. The VS universe is a gritty dystopian type future, not one where the fantastic happen. We carefully limit the fiction to that which allows the game to function. This means, if two theories are equally un-proven, then the one which requires less unproven requirements and/or less of a degree of advancement/energy is usually a better choice.

obviously, the most realistic answer is that no FTL exists. But the game requires that FTL exist, it just can't be played without it. So given that FTL must exist, would it be best to choose :
Tech A. wormhole travel : Requires theoretical (read: imagined) exotic matter and/or dark energy. Requires wormholes to actually exist (also theoretical). Requires enough energy to probably power a galaxy to open the wormhole to be large enough for a ship to pass through without speghettification. Also, this theory only helps us system to system, it does not address intra-system FTL.

Tech B. SPEC/Warp travel: Requires self defeating space/warp bubble. Requires Magic level amount of energy to create bubble. Requires Magic level energy to compress space and/or create compression/expansion wave of space to accelerate bubble. Requires impossible means of navigation within bubble (see self defeating above). Requires completely empty space in order to function (have fun spec'ing between galaxies, as that is likely the only place you'll have enough empty space, note: this is an important requirement, as warping space has this annoying habit of effecting that which resides in it. See gravity and entropy).

Tech C. BoseNova travel: Requires quantum teleportation to exist. It does, though so far it's only been done across a short distance. Requires BE condensate to collapse and disappear. It does, and it doesn't require obscene levels of energy. Requires the ability to use quantum teleportation to explain missing BE Condensate and thus the ability to determine the destination of that teleportation (certainly could, as BE condensate is bound by quantum physics). Requires the ability to mask a ship as a quantum entity in order to use quantum teleportation by wrapping itself in a BE condensate (which is a macro sized entity that behaves like a quantum particle and adheres to quantum physics).


safemode wrote:Even if you think warp type travel or wormhole travel is possible, if you concede that it requires a magical amount of energy to do, then how do you justify weapons and shields and combat? If i have that much energy on tap to travel, nothing of any physical construct in the universe could withstand being exposed to that energy and not being obliterated. None of the rest of the game would exist.
Not a good point. If you have such an energy for offense, you can just as well have it for defense.
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No amount of technological advancement will alter the ability for a proton to bond to a neutron and for it's electrons to be bound to the nucleus of an atom. No amount of technology can change or increase these fundemental properties of matter. The amount of energy you're talking about and these other methods talk about requiring are well in excess of reducing atoms to their subatomic particles. What defense would there be to that? Nothing could absorb or reflect it, nothing could contain it outside of a black hole. whatever it's source is would have to be effected by some catalyst to produce such an energy since the energy level is well in excess of that required for fusion/ well in excess of that required to reduce whatever it contacted to high energy particles.

You're talking about enough that is currently only seen in powerful supernovas, if that. It's not simply a matter of becoming advanced enough... Even level 3 civilizations are required to be made up of atoms and atoms can only suck up so much energy before they shed their pieces.

Even if you could imagine a way to weaponize that kind of energy, how would you defend against the energy of a supernova going off ? We're talking being able to defend against enough energy to obliterate an entire solar system. Sometimes enough energy to equal the output of every star in an entire galaxy for a period of time.

If that's a possibility for you then you've got no grasp on anything we're talking about here. A game where that would be possible would be retarded, as what kind of rules would a game where people had access to that kind of power have? Why would there be those rules, though i suppose if you're going to be as bankrupt in the logic dept to allow that kind of ability, you dont need any logic to make up rules of what else you can't do or can do.
Ed Sweetman endorses this message.
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