Nexus 2 - Jupiter incident Sequel! - needs you

[BobTheJanitor]

No such thing as real sci-fi - unless you misunderstand what "fiction" means ,)

I could just as easily employ the same pedantry and accuse you of intentional misunderstanding of the usage of the word 'real' in that phrase... but I think we both know what we're talking about, so I'll try to refrain. 

And of course you could catch the other guy. Employ a higher acceleration than him. Or at least employ projectiles with a higher velocity. And there's no information delay, unless we're talking about combat that is occurring while both ships are traveling at near light speed, and also with an appreciable distance separating them. That's an entirely different kind of combat, but it can still be very entertaining, just look at some of the works in Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space series. I haven't really thought about putting that sort of system into a playable game, but I'm sure some clever developer could puzzle it out. Fire your main cannons (probably employing shells with autonomous semi-intelligent guidance systems in case your target shimmies to the side), go into suspended animation while you wait for it to cross the intervening light years, wake back up as soon as it was about to hit (or as soon as the light from the hit reaches you, which the smart boys say is the same 'time' ... I know when I'm out of my depth, and special relativity is one of those places for sure). I know I'd play it.

And back on the more local frame of reference, sure, you wouldn't build manned ships for space combat specifically. But come on, who do you think those drones would be firing at? Other drones? Just for fun? If there are people traveling through space, and someone wants to stop them, they may employ those drones, sure. But you still have a ship full of squishy humans to get from point alpha to point zeta. Do you think maybe they'd want to be armed, just in case?

And re: human jelly, we have shock absorbing technology now. Just extrapolate until it's sufficiently advanced. Yes, I know that's stretching the bounds of hard sci-fi a bit, but it's one thing to take an existing idea, no matter how crude, and imagine it could outgrow its boundaries, and another to imagine something that works entirely counter to hard laws of physics. (Yes, I know you can squeeze in enough technobabble to make anything seem plausible, but space buggies are never going to turn by banking against the force of vacuum. Unless you replace it with ether, which isn't highly likely to happen in this universe)

And the B5 (human) ships weren't maneuvering in such a way as to turn their pilots into jello. You can spin 180 degrees in a ship that's going at any speed without doing any damage to the pilot. It's not like they're stopping. Their velocity continues in the same direction, they're just facing backwards. Not even the barest perceptible discomfort in that. You can sit in an office chair and spin without being squished to jelly, and do you have any idea how fast the Earth is spinning, while also orbiting the sun? Spin any way you want. But let's hope Earth doesn't slam on her brakes. The White Stars, et al, were employing Vorlon technology, so of course they ran on magic. That's why I called it 'sufficiently advanced technology'. Google Clarke's Third Law if that doesn't seem to make any sense.

Also Forever War was such a great book, and I wish he'd quit while he was ahead. Anything that followed that just failed pretty hard by comparison. One of these days I'll get around to reading something Haldeman wrote that wasn't a Forever ____ book, but I'm still stinging with the letdown of those sequels so much that I'm not sure I want to let myself in for that kind of punishment again.

That went on a lot longer than I had intended. Oops.

[x4000]

How about this: the ship uses some sort of dark matter propulsion system, and it has to bank against the friction of the dark matter that fills space?  There's some technobabble for you. 

[Mánagarmr]

There were some games that were modded to include Newtonian Physics and they turned from rather fun to teeth-grittingly annoying. Space Empires: Starfury was a pretty bland attempt at the Elite-style gameplay of flying around, trading, shooting and buying new ships. Some genious thought that remodeling the physics engine to Newtonian physics was a bright idea. Needless to say, the game became extremely annoying to play after that. I can't tell how many times I failed to kill someone simply because I kept coasting in the wrong direction or the times I've faceplanted on a moon because my ship wouldn't fricking turn in time. *rage*

Realism is nice. But too much of it just kills the fun.

[eRe4s3r]

Well @BobTheJanitor you are of course right

My point was merely that fighters and bombers, and all that, would never be done in space combat. Space combat is "big pot + drones" vs "big pot + drones" at best. Most engagements would even forgo drones entirely i'd assume.

There is simply no place for small ships in fleet combat. Heck look at BSG - you know what the most effective weapon in that universe would be? A Canister mass accelerator. 1 shot by these, and the entire fighter squadrons of the galactica would be wiped out.. 1 shot. You don't even need to aim. just make a canister shot that accelerates to 2% or 4% of lightspeed, that splinters out into 6 billion fragments. The ultimate space shotgun. It would do 0 damage to the galactica, but 100% damage to any fighter in front of that gun.

Next up, you just pommel them with high energy kinetics till they crumble to pieces, because the galactica is so big and wastes SO much space to people and fighters, it has no proper armament or armor.

My favorite past-time in space sagas is to think of the 1 weapon they intentional leave out because it would make all of their shown space combat absurd.

[keith.lamothe]

My favorite past-time in space sagas is to think of the 1 weapon they intentional leave out because it would make all of their shown space combat absurd.

I'm rather fond of that kind of thought experiment too.  Generally it's not a weapon they didn't include, it's the ftl-travel mechanism they did include.  Some ftl methods get around this, but many of them would be the ultimate kinetic-kill weapon.  You can move a 400,000,000 kilogram starship at 1,500 times the speed of light (449,688,687,000 m/s)?  Ok, build in some automation and kick everyone off, and launch it at full speed at the enemy homeworld.  The kinetic energy is about 4*10^31 joules.  I tried to find the reference I once saw that listed how many joules (applied via single blunt impact, i.e. not very efficiently) would be necessary to disrupt an earth-like body but can't find it right now.  One of the things I wish google could answer is "what could I destroy with a kinetic impact of X joules?", but that might run afoul of anti-terrorism measures

In this case, my guess is that it's not a matter of whether you could destroy the enemy homeworld, it's whether you would want to pull your punch a bit to avoid taking out your homeworld in the process if you're too close, but I could be way off.

[Hearteater]

Ahh, the Kzinti Lession:

The Kzinti lesson is, "a reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."

[eRe4s3r]

So funding period ends in about 8 minutes..

Needless to say that with 400k € they obviously set themselves up for failure - nearly half a million for funding something with no completed design documents is pretty bold move, ah well...

[Shrugging Khan]

Damned! I'd have put in my ten bucks if I'd heard of this in time...not that it'd have made a difference 

[x4000]

Yeah, that's a shame, but I guess not a surprise either, as you say.

[BobTheJanitor]

The website doesn't seem to say, or I'm oblivious, or something about the work web filter is blocking it: How much did they make of their goal?

[x4000]

Like 170k pounds IIRC?

[BobTheJanitor]

That ought to be enough to make a good start at least. Maybe they could crank out a playable ship fighting system like Starfarer did and release that for alpha-funding purposes.

[keith.lamothe]

That ought to be enough to make a good start at least. Maybe they could crank out a playable ship fighting system like Starfarer did and release that for alpha-funding purposes.

I believe the terms of the fundraising project were that if the goal was not reached no money would change hands.

[x4000]

Yep.

[eRe4s3r]

What they should be doing is develop the alpha as tech-demo for the combat and barebones 4x elements and then ask only 25% of the price for early buyers and develop as they go and give another option where investors can invest. With nothing real to show even I had a hard time convincing anyone to give money...

Doesn't help that these funding sites are way too low profile, they need to interlink with mainstream media, get some kind of big supporter to push this stuff into the news. The way its now crowd funding large games can never work because these funding sites are like a ghost in the news.