Weekly grab bag for the (abbreviated) week preceeding Jan 11

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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jackS
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Weekly grab bag for the (abbreviated) week preceeding Jan 11

Post by jackS »

This was a short week (<2 days) for the grab bag, so it's not unexpected that there weren't a lot of questions. Nonetheless, here goes this week's venture into grab-bag land.
Q:Who has artificial gravity in Vega Strike? Is it Star Trek -type artificial gravity (magic), or 2001 type artificial gravity?
A: I'll answer the second part of that question first - VS, unfortunately for the realism factor, uses the Trek-esque (or should I say 'Roger Penrose's explanation of how the brain works'-esque?) "principles of physics not yet discovered by the minds of the 20th/21st century [CE]" explanation for how gravity is a force as easily manipulated as we now manipulate EM fields.

What evidence is there in game or in previous pieces of VS canon to support this claim?

1. All FTL travel in VS utilizes wormholes, which is to say, roughly, punching a hole in the fabric of space-time. As the effects of gravity are (assuming Einstein had his head screwed on ok and my memory serves me correctly) determined by the geometry of space-time, the ability to rearange the geometry of space-time implies the ability to directly affect gravitic forces. This is not as strong an argument as it seems, since most forms of FTL are, even if not necessarily "magic" due to theoretical constraints, "magic" due to practical constraints (like needing more energy than that likely to ever be produced by mankind or other equally easy to overlook details) and "magic" is handwavy enough that it's harder to say that it actually entails any other "magic".

2.Tractor and Repulsor beams. While these could potentially be generated via something other than gravity control, gravity control is definitely the number one suspect on the list.

3. "Inertial Dampeners" AKA the anti-(pilot turning into)raspberry goo device. While humans can, and have, sustained no lasting injuries from instantaneous meetings with 30 gravities of acceleration, sustained accelerations of more than 20-30 gravities (which several vessels in VS are capable of in the default configuration [higher difficulty settings lower all of the acceleration stats]) would not be survivable, let alone flyable conditions for the pilot. Hence, the handy-dandy magic of "inertial compensation" This is the clincher, even if the other two aren't convincing, that VS tech includes artificial gravity manipulation of the seriously voodoo variety.

So, briefly -
VS artificial gravity - really really artificial
Believability - Low
Universe necessity - Fair
Gameplay necessity - Very High

First part of the question - who uses artificial gravity? Basically.... everyone. Some use it more than others. To answer a perhaps more interesting question "which groups (excluding the ancients and TWHON who can be assumed to have developed anything any of the current species have come up with) independently developed artificial gravity?"
A: The Rlaan, the Humans, and the Aera. The Uln got all their pre-contact tech from the ancients, so they're disqualified - also they were still using Good ol' fashioned newtonian (this being the 2001 option from the initial question) force via rotation, so it's a moot point. The Klk'k hadn't developed artificial gravity pre-contact, and no other groups reached space (or, indeed, even the industrial age) on their own, so that sums up that.

Biggest users of artificial gravity - the Rlaan. Not only have grav drives completely eliminated reaction drives from Rlaan spacecraft, but Rlaan use of artificial gravity is key to their ability to handle sustained planetfalls on many worlds in any degree of comfort, given their somewhat less than average-gravity origins.

here's another one
Q:What does the RBL portion of the sector names stand for?
A: RBL in the sectors with names of the form RBL-# stands for "Rimward Bad-Lands" so named because the density of the jump network is greatly decreased in these regions, which (mostly) lie in the (vaguely) rimward direction of the rest of the known jump network.

and finishing off this week's grab-bag,
Q:When does Vegastrike take place?
A: ~ 1200+ years from now. Let us say that, for reasons of number worship, VS begins in the 8th month of 3276 C.E.

until next week, keep those questions coming :)
Last edited by jackS on Thu Jan 22, 2004 6:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
peteyg
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Post by peteyg »

This is a really good thing to have going. I'm glad that it looks like it will be a regular occurrence!
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Post by hurleybird »

We should star a project to put the Vega strike history and the vega online manual into an actual manual which could be ordered online.

We would need to get all of the information, and put it in PDF format, than we could use cafe press to put our PDF on a book (this actually can be done). If we made a box we could ship it with a manual and a CD, how cool would that be? :D
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Post by Silverain »

hurleybird wrote:We should star a project to put the Vega strike history and the vega online manual into an actual manual which could be ordered online.

We would need to get all of the information, and put it in PDF format, than we could use cafe press to put our PDF on a book (this actually can be done). If we made a box we could ship it with a manual and a CD, how cool would that be? :D
I've been informally working on this. The online manual is only in first draft though, with work still needed on the installation and setup sections. History of course awaits JackS' OK.

I presume that on next release of Vega Strike a PDF of the updated manual would be included? (I know pontiac had mentioned some program or somesuch that converts wiki pages into a PDF).
THOUGHT CRIME! [points finger] THOUGHT CRIME!
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Post by pontiac »

Silverain wrote:I presume that on next release of Vega Strike a PDF of the updated manual would be included? (I know pontiac had mentioned some program or somesuch that converts wiki pages into a PDF).
I don't have a link ready, but you can search on the phpwiki page.
There is a section for plugins and a few of them are supposed to convert wiki format to html/pdf/....

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Post by kbi »

Unbelievable. This is the weirdest thing. I've been fleshing out the new wiki and one of the remaining things needed is a present date. I've been keeping my eyes out for a present year in the old wiki material I've been reading and the only mention of a date that I ever found was that it was the 33rd century. So a couple days ago I decided to pick a number at random number and go with it. I've already used it to calculate Humanity's age of spaceflight and one other race's as well.

But this evening I decided I better come here and make a post about the date I had decided upon before I dug too deep a hole using it to calculate the other races and their development timelines. I don't read this forum, but scanned down before making my post. This thread caught my eye and when I read jackS's post above... I think my jaw was open for a while. Guess what my exact number was...

Now that's freaky.
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