Fractal Softworks Forum
Starsector => General Discussion => Topic started by: Alrenous on April 12, 2012, 03:53:48 PM
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My hypothesis explaining three puzzling aspects of Starfarer. Forgive me if these have already been explained.
The idea is that flux is specifically gravitational fluctuations. The ship's reactor provides power by transmitting spatial manipulations across gravitationally shielded conduits. Normal transmission is in the form of solitons. 1. Entropy builds up in the system through the creation of standing waves at various harmonics. When these standing waves at peak push more energy into the capacitors than they can handle, they short out. Flux vents are specialized grav-wave dissipation devices, and the visual effect from full-on flux blowing is due to ragged space warps. Perhaps quantum foam amplification.
The reactor also uses this space-warping capability to travel.
2. Fleets slow down near planets because the space is already warped; there's backpressure.
Fleets slow down near other ships for exactly the same reason; the space-warping reactors interfere with each other.
Ships use a different engine for combat manoeuvring. 3. This is why travel speed and combat speed aren't simply proportional to each other. Also, it is how enemy fleets entangle each other - they intentionally emit gravitational noise to short out the delicate transportation space-warping process. (Similarly, the contrasting planetary slingshot interaction.) Perhaps defenders turn on the noise at the last moment, whereas attackers aggressively fire up the noise, interfering with their own space-warp manoeuvring, and thus part of the reason they have fewer ships available to deploy.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading the idea as much as I did coming up with it.
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i dont know what it is you just said, or the context they were used in,
but i agree and approve of it.
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...That sounds... Legit.
We need Iscariot here.
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Nu-uh, I'm not touching this with a ten foot pole.
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Argh! technobable my arch nememsis you have dont it to me again!
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Nu-uh, I'm not touching this with a ten foot pole.
Got that right. Left it on the word "spacial." :D
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Sounds awesome. I approve...
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It sounds as reasonable as the rest of quantum mechanics, so why not?
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3. This is why travel speed and combat speed aren't simply proportional to each other.
dont be silly, travel speed (Ts) and combat speed (Cs) are related as such
Ts = 100 + Cs/2
Im pretty sure thats some sort of proportion. Cant figure out which type at 4am though
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Unless of course you are referring to actual travel speed (as a function of how fast you are moving between planets) and how it doesnt relate at all to how fast you are moving around the battlefield.. Blame time. Time screws it up
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/bow
Nu-uh, I'm not touching this with a ten foot pole.
/bow at this too.
i dont know what it is you just said, or the context they were used in,
Just a thinking thing I do. I could try to stop, but it wouldn't work.
dont be silly, travel speed (Ts) and combat speed (Cs) are related as such
Ts = 100 + Cs/2
Im pretty sure thats some sort of proportion.
Huh, I didn't know that. It is a kind of proportion. It isn't a simple proportion. Though it is the very next simplest.
My problem is that you can't fly at {100+Cs/2} in battle. So there's something different about battle as compared to travel.
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Read it all. Understood parts of it. What I understood made sense. I think Alex (or someone else) should try to incorporate this into the official lore, it fits pretty well with what I've read of it.
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Read it all. Understood parts of it. What I understood made sense. I think Alex (or someone else) should try to incorporate this into the official lore, it fits pretty well with what I've read of it.
I agree that it should be placed in lore.... Somewhere :-\
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The sad thing is that I understood 90% of it.
Spudsy
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My hypothesis explaining three puzzling aspects of Starfarer. Forgive me if these have already been explained.
The idea is that flux is specifically gravity wave thingies out of whack. The ship's reactor provides power by transmitting these wave thingies across shielded conduits. Normal transmission is in the form of independent gravity wave thingies forced out its tailpipe. 1. Gravitational vibration 'n' junk builds up in the system through the creation of waves at different frequencies than the the other gravity wave thingies being used to power the reactor. When these standing waves at peak push more energy into the capacitors than they can handle, they short out. Flux vents are specialized gravity wave thingy dissipation devices, and the visual effect from flux venting is due to space distortion from all the gravity mucking about. Perhaps due to it amplifying the jiggling of super tiny particles between waves and particles.
The reactor also uses this space-warping capability to travel.
2. Fleets slow down near planets because the space is already warped; there's backpressure.
Fleets slow down near other ships for exactly the same reason; the gravity wave thingies they're emitting interfere with each other.
Ships use a different engine for combat manoeuvring. 3. This is why travel speed and combat speed aren't simply proportional to each other. Also, it is how enemy fleets entangle each other - they intentionally emit gravity wave thingies to short out the delicate transportation process of the other ships. (Similarly, the contrasting planetary slingshot interaction.) Perhaps defenders turn on the noise at the last moment, whereas attackers aggressively fire up the noise, interfering with their own space-warp manoeuvring, and thus part of the reason they have fewer ships available to deploy when selecting 'all out attack' as opposed to 'defending'.
Auf Englisch.
You're welcome.
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Only problem I can see is that explanation doesn't say why ships slow down in nebulae, or why the space is "warped" around planets, causing the ships to slow down while traveling.
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It works I guess, but still:
Only problem I can see is that explanation doesn't say why ships slow down in nebulae...
And another thing: Flux vents are specialized grav-wave dissipation devices, and the visual effect from full-on flux blowing is due to ragged space warps.
If I understand correctly (and I very well might not), adding vents to your ship in the refit screen increases the speed at which your ship PASSIVELY decreases your ship's flux buildup. If so, why is there no visual effect from that venting? Is it just not in the game yet (bitchin' if that is the case), or is it that there just isn't enough flux being vented to create a visual effect?
In any case, I'm not trying to prove the OP wrong, I just like this kind of "how does it work?" kind of conversation/debate.
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If I understand correctly (and I very well might not), adding vents to your ship in the refit screen increases the speed at which your ship PASSIVELY decreases your ship's flux buildup. If so, why is there no visual effect from that venting? Is it just not in the game yet (bitchin' if that is the case), or is it that there just isn't enough flux being vented to create a visual effect?
In any case, I'm not trying to prove the OP wrong, I just like this kind of "how does it work?" kind of conversation/debate.
I'm guessing there is no passive flux venting graphics because its not interesting, active flux venting is an important game mechanic and thus needs a visual representation. It's a game after all.
EDIT: Or it's because it might get to visually intensive to have all ships show venting rates all the time, there is already so much to keep track of for the player that it would just complicate things too much.
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I don't know, myself I'd love to see some minor flux venting effects. A little "steam" out of the sides of your ship or something.
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I don't know, myself I'd love to see some minor flux venting effects. A little "steam" out of the sides of your ship or something.
Maybe the graphic effects aren't what is actually seen but augmented reality, the flux venting is picked up by sensors and only excessive venting is shown in order to signal weakness?
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I shouldn't have posted in here. Now it pops up in my updated threads all the time and I have to endure all this pseudoscience.
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Passive flux vents can't be seen because they're not intense enough. By analogy, at just the right angle you can see heat waves coming off a heat sink. However, if a heat sink is sinking enough heat, it will incandesce. If you were emergency cooling a nuclear reactor with a heat pump and cranked the pump into the redline, perhaps it could happen. (I don't think there's ever a real engineering reason to risk melting your heat sink, because I've never seen one glow.)
Shields build flux because they also resonate, and it takes power to damp the vibrations. If you didn't damp them, they'd build up just like flux and eventually rip the ship apart. Red shields use the same principle as noise-cancelling headphones. Blue shields employ a Pascal's Demon device to feed it directly into the conduit network.
Auf Englisch.
You're welcome.
Thanks!
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http://sheol.org/throopw/tachyon-pistols.html
Also:
Relativity proves that FTL travel is identical to Time travel (to help your research, the technical term for time travel is "Closed timelike curve"). Time travel makes Causality impossible, since it can be used to create paradoxes. So if you have Relativity and FTL, Causality is impossible. If you do not have Relativity, FTL is not Time travel, so you can have Causality. Or more mundanely you can have Relativity and Causality, but no FTL/Time travel (the latter is the opinion of physicist Stephen Hawking, he calls it the chronology protection conjecture).
Basically, no matter what you do, FTL requires you to discard large tracts of physics and accept that it exists because you want it too. And in games and fiction, that's ok! I don't understand why we have to make fools of ourselves explaining it. Ok, I do understand that, shooting the sh*t about this kind of stuff is nerdy and a lot of fun, but I do hope none of it becomes canon-- trying to explain our silly game too much would be treading in hostile and unfamiliar territory.
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Hyperspace makes you the tachyon bullet, though.
Thanks for the reference, I can now think about it easily. Hyperspace travel doesn't just let you teleport in normal space, it makes you teleport across reference frames.
So let's say instead of A firing an instantly lethal bullet at B, A fires themselves to where it looks to A where B is. Since they also teleport across reference frames, they won't emerge from hyperspace where they originally observed B to be. The only way to ram B with their hyperspace ship would be to teleport across to B's reference frame, in the process murdering the grandfather paradox along with B.
However, intriguingly, B can see A arrive before they see A leave. As long as it remains hyperspace and not hypertime travel, this can't result in any paradox. Since B can see A arrive before they witness the departure, A can witness their own departure. They can't interfere, however, as any signals they send back to the departure point have to take the time to travel back. If they try to use hyperspace, the reference frame teleportation will take them back to slightly later in their original reference frame.
Or, from the reference frame formerly known as A, a hyperspace cannon fired at where A thinks B is at eight seconds would be seen to appear by A roughly seven seconds later. By this time B has moved some more. A can solve the equation and lead the shot the necessary amount, but it will always work out to be exactly like shooting B with a beam of light.
This is one of the reasons not to believe in normal wormholes. Since they don't transform reference frames, they can lead to grandfather paradoxes.
Also, an actual tachyon pulse would appear at the target and race back to the tachyon lance, charging it, whereupon you decide to fire it and it discharges again. While this seems cool, it's just the amazing ability of the human brain to imagine impossible things. Your brain is (classically considered to be) entirely made of physics, yet it can consider decidedly unphysical and impossible events. I dunno, I'm not sure how that's possible. Even more cool impossible things: the tachyon pulse would start at its greatest penetration and then rip its way outward on the way back to the lance.
This can be got around by having very fast tachyons, that go backwards in time a negligible amount. Equivalently, a very slow negative temporal speed.
Come to think, this is sort of how a tachyon pistol would work too. Actually if A sees B killed at four seconds on B's clock, A would see a bullet appear in B, and fly out backwards, and then A would have to catch the bullet in their tachyon pistol or the universe would blue screen. Unfortunately this still wouldn't work because entropy isn't symmetrical. When the bullet arrived in the barrel, it wouldn't be able to collect its tachyon explosion into tachyon gunpowder. It would become more ordered, yes, but there's nothing forcing it to that particular order. Which in turn means nothing is properly arranged to propel the bullet out of the barrel.
I found this out thinking about reversing time. Imagine a log burning. If time is reversed, the smoke will fall instead of rise and absorb energy instead of releasing it and become more ordered rather than less. But the whole point of entropy is that the smoke can't know what it was before it was burnt. It could be any number of carbony compounds. It won't turn back into a log, it will just condense into random stuff. It will try to maximize enthalpy instead of minimizing it, meaning it will probably be a chunk of what we'd call hyper-sensitive explosives. And not in the shape of a log, just whatever ground it happens to land on.
Of course maybe it will still rise because gravity may also be reversed and Earth would be quietly dismantling itself. I'm not sure, I'd have to think about it some more.
But if time were reversed, people wouldn't start walking backwards and forgetting things, they'd just all keel over dead. Individual processes reverse, not systematic processes. Reversed, they don't work together the way they do forwards.
Okay I thought about gravity some more. There' two competing theories, the quantum and the Einsteinian.
In the first, gravity force is the result of absorbing gravitons. In reversed time, it would be a process of gravitons streaming in from everywhere towards masses, and you'd feel a push downard from them if you got in the way. (I think. You feel a small pull every time you emit a graviton, by Newton's Third on the pull you'll cause on the target. It cancels out from emitting them in all directions, though. In reversed time, you'd instead feel a small push when you absorb them, going the other direction.)
In the second, gravity is the result of space being curved. In reversed time, space has the same curve.
In either case, stuff still falls toward Earth. Just, in reversed time, people float and smoke sinks in air.
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Speaking of sanity i have been trying to the one thing which i cant seem to explain is how energy wepions increase in power as flux is rased the OP doesn't explain this either :-\
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Speaking of sanity i have been trying to the one thing which i cant seem to explain is how energy wepions increase in power as flux is rased the OP doesn't explain this either :-\
As the resonance (or whatever you want to call it) in the reactor increases, some of the extra energy is "spilled" into the lasers, increasing their force. The reactor controls can't keep the energy from "spilling" into the laser turrets, but try to limit it, as it could potentially overload the system if too much is "spilled". Because of the increase in firing power from the lasers, they also build up flux faster, which is why the flux doesn't dissipate faster from being fired by the guns.
Clean that up, and use it if you want :) It's the most plausible explanation I can come up with, other than *balance*.
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So i sent Alex a message yesterday containing a link to to this thread, this is his responce
The conclave of top-level flux theorists is still debating the finer points of the physics involved. As such, we're not prepared to issue an official statement at this time. Rest assured, citizen - the Hegemony Administratum will issue a Sector-wide priority bulletin if the situation changes.
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(Note: Please put one massive IN THEORY in frount of everything i am saying. Also it would still be usefull to read at least my first post.)
I have been thinking about energy production for the ships and have come up with a somewhat more plasuable idea, black holes!
First alittle background on black holes, the avrage balck hole is formed from a star that is above the chandrasekhar limit or about 2-3 solar masses* larger than our own star running out of fule at the end of it's life and then colapsing under the force of it's own gravity. When this occurs the star cloapses to a point of infinate denenty. at this point the gravit become so intetnse that it causes an infinite curviture of spacetime past the event hryzion, or in layman's terms nothing can excape from a black hole.
Now let we clear one thing up as Steven Hawking once said "Black holes ain't so black!" what he was trying to say was that if one were to observe a black hole very closely you would find that it emmits a form of radation specficaly Hawking radation** at a rate that is inversly perpotanal to its mass. The simple way to say this is that as mass increses, Hawking Radation decreses. If one had a balck hole that had a mass of slighty more than a thousand million tons, now this is very light for a balck hole so light infact that it can only ocur at the tempitures durring the first 10 million fentiseconds*** (i know that it is spelled wrong...) after the big bang.
If we continue to consider that same balck hole haveing a mass so low it would emmit energy at a rate of about ten thousand megawatts. one could conseaveably exctract even greater amounts of power if they were able to create their own black holes that were smaller (ie: mid to high tech ships)
I have to go my study hall is ending so i will get to why you explode when you die instead of implodeing when i get home
<!---Notes--->
*one solar mass is about 1.9891 × 10^30 Kg
**Hawking radation comes not from the black hole but from the "empty" space infront of the event horizion. Before going any farther i want say that empty space is not empty because you always have virtual particals zipping in and out of exastance. these partacals are formed in pairs and have energy of +1 and -1, so they annialte eachother but near a black hole the gravity can be such that the negative energy partical can be sucked into the black hole leaveing the positive energy partical to be "emmited" as Hawking radation.
***one fentisecond is equal to the time it takes light in a vacume to travle the dimater of a nutron, it is quite litilerly the ultiment spilt of the second.
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flux is simple heat from reactor and weapons, there is nothing with gravity or magic, more heat generated - harder to cooldown hull.
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flux is simple heat from reactor and weapons, there is nothing with gravity or magic, more heat generated - harder to cooldown hull.
If it is so simple, then please explain the engine boost from not having any flux, and the reason why it's called flux, and not heat. Not intending to sound hostile, but I think you're over-simplifying it.
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New, competing theory: flux is temporal instead of spatial oscillations. Obviously, time is secretly purple.
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Don't make me go Steven Hawking on you ;D
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Necro?
Anyways, I've always thought of flux as the heat weapons build up by firing. Any other relatively simple solutions to this?
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I saw flux as being like static buildup of energy/electricity. Since you are in space, there is nowhere for the energy produced by weapons/systems/shields to go, so it just sits on your hull. "Flux venting" is actually just the venting of conductive gasses from the ship, allowing all of that energy/electrical buildup to be released without harming the ship or its crew. This would also explain why ships appear to be covered in electricity when they overload. The ship's built in capacitors overload, so they are forced to release the energy over the surface of the hull, rather than allowing the capacitors to degrade from storing to much energy, which could possibly malfunction and release all of that electricity inside of the ship, frying systems and cooking the crew inside.
As far as the difference between combat speed and travel speed, I always just thought that a ship had two sets of engines. One set of "maneuvering jets" for use in combat, allowing the ship to perform more agile movements, which are needed in combat. The second set of engines, the "travel" or "hyperdrive" engines allow the ship to move at extreme speeds at the cost of very little maneuverability outside of a set path. Thus, a Burn Drive, is just a very short pulse of the hyperdrive engines, allowing the ship to reach greater speeds at the cost of mobility. This would explain why ships use supplies to travel, besides stuff for the crew, the ship has to be able to constantly vent its flux to maintain travel speed for a long period of time. So supplies represent gas containers that would be used to vent flux
Just my 2 cents on it.
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I've always though the speed different in battle and campaign map is just because you have that need to be more maneuverable in battle. Going at high speeds, it's kinda difficult to turn around, like tank battle during the World Wars and modern times. Slow down to aim!
Now, any more simple solutions to the mysteries of flux and co.? :D
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Not a chance! Why simplify it when you can overcomplicate the *expletive* out of it?
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Sometimes I wish moderators could tone down on the *delete* stuff, but that's their job, what can I do? I just want to enjoy a joke a little better. ;D
Anyways, go on and I'll provide an explanation for the rest of us non-sciencey people. ;)
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Why did they delete this it is not spam it is discussion about the lore of the game >:(
I spent 3 days researching and writing each one of those posts! I can't find ANY way in which they violate the rules! So why were they deleted in the first place!!! (ya i'm a little *deleted* off!)
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Arg, never mind. It was a joke.
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Actually, I did that myself. I was trying to keep this thread civilized, and expletives are not conducive to that.