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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Author Topic: Some Ideas on the Story  (Read 6047 times)

Muchoman798

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Some Ideas on the Story
« on: March 15, 2014, 01:15:59 PM »

I've been following StarSector for a while (admittedly losing track at the name change.) Reading about the lore, the different ships, and the development process has been great fun, despite not yet purchasing the game.

Over the last few weeks, a lot of time has been poured into looking at this game in depth. Thinking about the lore, I've come to think up an idea.

What if the Domain hasn't fallen? What if the sector is either too isolated to contact or some sort of experiment (similar to ghouls in fallout?)

Well let's test the isolated theory.

In the thread "The Lore Corner," it was mentioned that the sector will have about 1000 star systems in it. I did some math based on that, which brought me to the conclusion the sector will have to be 160 light years across. This lines up with another set of statements, saying it'll take six months to cross the sector and five days to move between systems (which are ~5 light years apart.)

If we do some more math, the sector in which the game takes place is about 75,000 light years from Earth (200 years for the 14th Domain Naval Battle Group to reach the sector at ~1 light year per day.) This places it on the outer rim of the Milky Way, opposite Earth. It is entirely reasonable that, in the lore, the sector is completely isolated from the rest of the Domain. It is also reasonable that any other sector of the Domain would be very, very far away.

Keeping on with doing some math, and putting the story under scrutiny (sorry for looking to closely,) I wanted to see how long it would take for a transmission from Earth to reach the sector. Once again looking at "The Lore Corner," I saw that it takes several weeks for news to propagate in the sector. I'll take that as up to three weeks; say 20 days. If the sector is 160 light years across, then the transmissions travel at 8 light years per day. Okay. So, it would take about 25.5 years for a transmission from Earth to reach the sector. In the 206 years since the Collapse, there would have been time for a signal to reach the sector.

There has been enough time.

Surely, if the Domain had collapsed so completely, someone would have said something to this group of colonies. Perhaps a maintenance worker scheduled to arrive at the star gate, or farmers indicating their food wouldn't make it to the sector. I have no doubt some signal would have been sent.

Again, looking to the lore, the Collapse happened incredibly suddenly with literally no sign. Supply ships simply stopped coming. Everyone waited in their seats for the gate to light up. The Collapse is a name given to the calamity within the sector itself, not from any outsider.

Then, shortly after this great fall, a ship filled to the brim with Domain soldiers flies in. This is a ship which would have been sent three years after the gate was built. Only three years. I understand that many of the crew were disgraced, but why not send them to a sector which was well established so they could be studied upon arrival? That being said, if this crew were truly meant to be a study on the long term effects of cryo sleep, why would there be tens of thousands, and why would the sector they were flung to have no prior knowledge to their arrival? Perhaps the logs had been destroyed, but an infrastructure would have needed to be present to properly examine them. And only a few hundred, surely, would need to be sent.

I may be reading way too far into the lore of Starsector here, but I think this all points to the Domain wanting to conduct an experiment on these poor souls. Perhaps they wish to learn what would really happen if there were a collapse, if humanity could survive. We have little indication as to the ethics of the Domain, and so cannot know if they would truly do this.

Well, these are just my thoughts, and I'd love to hear all of yours :D
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Gothars

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Re: Some Ideas on the Story
« Reply #1 on: March 15, 2014, 03:11:27 PM »

 :) welcome to the forum Muchoman! It's always fun to speculate and make up fan theories, although I have to warn you that much of the data you'll find is outdated and, from the beginning, was meant more as atmospheric text than as a riddle for us to solve (with a "true" solution to be discovered). Oh, and David has replaced Ivalyo as lore master, which invalidates those old posts further.

Anyway, that said:
I think one line of questions is essential when thinking about the dilemma the Sector is in: what makes the Sector the Sector? What constitutes the outer borders of the sector, and why was the domain not a continuous empire in the first place? As it seems all worlds within the sector are relatively easy to reach from each other, yet the next worlds are so far that there is no contact whatsoever (or is there?). What is all the space between the Sector and the  Domain filled with, why is it not colonized?


If the Domain is able to travel withing the galaxy from each star to its neighbor within days and capable of terraforming virtually any kind of planet, it would be natural for it to grow continuously. That would eliminate the potential of really isolated Sectors ever forming.
I don't really see a way to answer these questions within the constraints of our real world astro-physics (although my knowledge is painfully lacking). One attempt could be that the Sector is in fact a globular cluster, i.e. a sort of mini-galaxy with a few (hundred-) thousand stars. About 150 of those surround the milky way at distances of several thousand light years. But don't buy your tickets yet, globular clusters contain hardly any heavy elements, dust clouds or planet systems, so they're no real candidates for the Sector.

So, all that I can think of is that the Sector's existence has to be attributed to some special properties of hyperspace which are unknown to us. Those could be two things:

- Hyperspace does "expand" under certain conditions, making the time needed to travel through it much longer.

or

- Hyperspace does "contract" under certain conditions, making a trip much shorter.


In the first case, the Sector could be a cluster of stars somewhere in the galaxy, surrounded by "slow" hyperspace. Maybe slow hyperspace is the norm, and the Domain was actively looking for bubbles of fast hyperspace, in which high speed trade and communication enables interstellar civilization. Or maybe it's the opposite, and the Sector is surrounded by one of few "deserts" in the Milky Way, we don't know.


In the second case, the Sector might actually be located in a neighboring galaxy. Assuming hyperspace travel gets much faster outside of interstellar space (in intergalactic space), it might be one of the first extra-galactic colonies of the Domain. That would certainly account for its isolation. I don't think that's as likely as the first case, though, It's stated clearly that the Domain is located in the milky way, after all.


What I want to get at with all this is simple: since we don't know any of the properties of hyperspace, which are essential to even explain the existence of the Sector, there is unfortunately no point in using travel times or distances as evidence to verify either an "isolation", an "experiment" or any other theory.



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The game was completed 8 years ago and we get a free expansion every year.

Arranging holidays in an embrace with the Starsector is priceless.

Muchoman798

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Re: Some Ideas on the Story
« Reply #2 on: March 16, 2014, 07:43:36 PM »

I think that hyperspace expansion and contraction idea is fantastic. I like to think about it in a different way, after reading and digesting what you said.

Star Wars has a hyperspace system, so far similar to this one (and Star Control's. *cough*) The big difference, though, is that there are hyperspace "lanes" through which it is much faster to travel. Actually... The lore of Starsector in terms of transport is incredibly similar to Star Wars (they had nav beacons which were akin to the star gates.) Anyway, maybe there are lanes of space which have much higher speed, and allow proper trade and transport.

In fact, there is some speculation that such a thing may exist in the real world. Some people postulate that there may have been "fractures" in spacetime after the big bang, during inflation. These fractures would have light speed at or around that at the time of inflation. It would work well here, by saying hyperspace came into being at the same time as normal space, and these filaments formed.

It would also deflate the idea that the sector is not so isolated. They could simply be at the end of a filament long forgotten, meaning it could take millennia for outsiders to reach the sector. And maybe transmissions travel on these filaments at higher speeds as well, hence why there has been no contact, and why an "off" signal could reach the stargate, but maybe not an on signal.

Fun stuff, this discussion :D
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Gothars

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Re: Some Ideas on the Story
« Reply #3 on: March 17, 2014, 12:39:01 PM »

This may sound strange, but in the meantime I completely reversed my view on why the Sector exists. Gothars from yesterday is a fool, it's completely explainable within what we already now about the lore. Will post about that later.


Anyway, this fracture thing sounds interesting, do you happen to have a link?
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The game was completed 8 years ago and we get a free expansion every year.

Arranging holidays in an embrace with the Starsector is priceless.

Muchoman798

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Re: Some Ideas on the Story
« Reply #4 on: March 17, 2014, 03:46:19 PM »

I first heard about it on "Through the Wormhole," here's the episode. Go to 39:00, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC97GsUWhhc  . Enjoy Morgan Freeman's lovely voice :D This is fringe stuff that is very likely untrue. It contradicts inflation, which is very well established, and has lots of evidence going for it. Still, it is an interesting idea that truly does hold some water.

I have two other links for you as well. One is to a part of the wikipedia article on inflation, talking about how minute quantum fluctuations led to the structure of our universe, which, logically, extrapolates to potentially causing weak points. The other is to the wikipedia article on the "Variable Speed of Light Theory," (which should be called "conjecture" not "theory,") which is what the dude in "Through the Wormhole" is talking about.
Inflation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)#Effects_of_asymmetries
VSL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varying_speed_of_light

Starsector is a sci-fi game, so it doesn't matter how potentially true things are (like hyperspace, stargates, etc,) but it's cool to pull from real world ideas (like hyperspace, stargates, etc.)
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