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

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Author Topic: Are Black Holes too forgiving?  (Read 12211 times)

From a Faster Time

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Re: Are Black Holes too forgiving?
« Reply #30 on: January 09, 2019, 08:57:34 AM »

Colonizing a star seems too crazy, like Looney Tunes crazy.
Why, more crazy than traveling space, lasers, flying a chunk of metal through the air, teleportation, phasing into different space? I am not saying literally anything goes, but where exactly do you draw the line of science fiction and why? Because Dyson Sphere is a thing in science fiction.
We can already travel in space.  The Hyperspace thing is a necessary game mechanic to make the universe work, in a sense.
We already have lasers, we just haven't weaponized them.
Teleportation and "phase-space", I suppose we can't say 100% they don't exist in any phase whatsoever, and they're there for a game mechanic to show off the capabilities of high-tech anyways.
Dyson Spheres are about building a megastructure around a sun to harness its energy, not about colonization.
I cannot continue to exist near the surface of the sun as an intact human being.  I would not even be fortunate enough to continue to exist as a liquid.
Not a single building material we have is a solid at the temperature of the surface of the sun.  Most of them aren't even liquid.  Tungsten is one exception as it's barely a liquid at that temperature, but that'd vaporize too if the sun was just a bit hotter, not even 100K hotter.

That's just heat, I'm not even going to mention the crushing surface gravity.
This post fills me with dread for humanity. Conveniently shuffling over stuff you can't explain such as hyperspace, teleportation, phase ships, again waved away as "game mechanic"
But when we come to colonizing suns with example as a Dyson sphere and living on the shell of it while using the core as an energy source, suddenly it's not realistic enough, suddenly "it's not possibly by todays materials and theories"
Apparently even standard sci-fi concepts are too daring for todays mind to include in a sci-fi game that isn't trying to be a simulator. Yeah, magic, random humor. Not like this hasn't been the attitude from humans upon hearing any new revolutionary tech of theories through out humanity. Planes, electricity, computers, phones, cars, practically all of the technology we have right now or even the idea that earth isn't flat was not "magic" tier at some point, yeah, I am sure people said "yeah, I totally foresee that in a thousand years or two, people will be able to explain and harness all of these things.

I agree with the initial suggestion that black holes be deadly. It isn't like you are springing a surprising trap on the players if falling into a black hole is deadly. Implying that you would be is very disingenuous.

The real danger here is to the AI which doesn't seem to be able to navigate already as-is. This could possibly corrected by just adding a behaviour to have AI fleets avoid the vicinity of black holes at all cost unless they were going in for a specific reason (to fight or resupply a base in orbit).
If that would be the case, there would be the possibility to lose pursuers by taking a risky trajectory in an event horizon. So some added gameplay and more work on the AI for the dev. Over all the idea sounds nice to have, but doesn't seem like it's highly important considering the implementation isn't exactly "free"
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iamseron

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Re: Are Black Holes too forgiving?
« Reply #31 on: January 09, 2019, 11:34:03 AM »

If that would be the case, there would be the possibility to lose pursuers by taking a risky trajectory in an event horizon. So some added gameplay and more work on the AI for the dev. Over all the idea sounds nice to have, but doesn't seem like it's highly important considering the implementation isn't exactly "free"

I don't think this is one of those games which boasts that the AI follows the same rules as the player. You could just make the event horizon or some other perimeter a literal barrier to the AI but allow the player to pass through and fall in if they were unwary. Or any other similar hacky solution.
« Last Edit: January 09, 2019, 11:35:42 AM by iamseron »
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From a Faster Time

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Re: Are Black Holes too forgiving?
« Reply #32 on: January 09, 2019, 11:36:16 AM »

I don't think this is one of the games that boasts the AI plays by the same rules as the player does. You could just make the event horizon a literal barrier to the AI but allow the player to pass through and fall in if they were unwary.
That would certainly be faster and easier to implement, but at the same time luring huge fleets into black holes is quite satisfying.
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Midnight Kitsune

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Re: Are Black Holes too forgiving?
« Reply #33 on: January 09, 2019, 11:54:58 AM »

One thing I would like to mention is the "out of fuel" mechanic while in hyperspace: For those that don't know, when you run out of fuel in Hyperspace, you drift to the nearest stellar hyperspace exit. IE  if a player was unlucky enough to run out close to a black hole system, be it storms blowing them off course or a loss of a tanker in a fight, they could end up drifting into a black hole system and most likely lose their entire fleet due the suggested mechanic.
Hell it should be a "game over, player is dead and save is deleted" situation because how the hell would an escape pod be able to reach FTL speeds? Also, most people don't realize, IIRC, that time flows much MUCH slower in a black hole. Like if you were to ever cross the event horizon and somehow get back out, it could be decades or even centuries later. Hell, I think even the ISS astronauts experienced the temporal differences between Earth and the ISS due to being further away from the planet's gravity well.

My point is, is that if you are going to go for realism, for realism's sake, you might as well go full bore and make them a "You died" game over and delete the save if they ever cross the Horizon
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From a Faster Time

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Re: Are Black Holes too forgiving?
« Reply #34 on: January 09, 2019, 12:26:21 PM »

One thing I would like to mention is the "out of fuel" mechanic while in hyperspace: For those that don't know, when you run out of fuel in Hyperspace, you drift to the nearest stellar hyperspace exit. IE  if a player was unlucky enough to run out close to a black hole system, be it storms blowing them off course or a loss of a tanker in a fight, they could end up drifting into a black hole system and most likely lose their entire fleet due the suggested mechanic.
Hell it should be a "game over, player is dead and save is deleted" situation because how the hell would an escape pod be able to reach FTL speeds? Also, most people don't realize, IIRC, that time flows much MUCH slower in a black hole. Like if you were to ever cross the event horizon and somehow get back out, it could be decades or even centuries later. Hell, I think even the ISS astronauts experienced the temporal differences between Earth and the ISS due to being further away from the planet's gravity well.
I don't know the application of this to the game for a better experience, but I have to admit, it's fun to think about. Thank you for your post. Both the absolutely catastrophic sequence of events if you run out of fuel near a black hole, and the time dialation and how it would effect the rest of the galaxy and so on...
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Wyvern

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Re: Are Black Holes too forgiving?
« Reply #35 on: January 09, 2019, 12:43:27 PM »

Well, if we're going with that, then crossing the border of a planet should be game-over, too, because there's a planet there!  Your ships crash into the ground.  Clearly.  What's this 'fly in front of things' notion?  The game-world is 2D!  You can't do that!

(It does bother me, though, that the debuff for being too near a black hole is labeled "Event Horizon".  Sure, the mouseover text makes it clear that you're only 'near' the event horizon, but at a casual inspection it looks like it's saying you're -in- the event horizon, and that's just... no.  'Photon Sphere' or 'Ergosphere' might make better terms; the latter technically only applies to a rotating black hole, but either refer to extremely-distorted but still theoretically-possible-to-escape regions near a black hole.)
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Retry

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Re: Are Black Holes too forgiving?
« Reply #36 on: January 09, 2019, 01:14:23 PM »

Colonizing a star seems too crazy, like Looney Tunes crazy.
Why, more crazy than traveling space, lasers, flying a chunk of metal through the air, teleportation, phasing into different space? I am not saying literally anything goes, but where exactly do you draw the line of science fiction and why? Because Dyson Sphere is a thing in science fiction.
We can already travel in space.  The Hyperspace thing is a necessary game mechanic to make the universe work, in a sense.
We already have lasers, we just haven't weaponized them.
Teleportation and "phase-space", I suppose we can't say 100% they don't exist in any phase whatsoever, and they're there for a game mechanic to show off the capabilities of high-tech anyways.
Dyson Spheres are about building a megastructure around a sun to harness its energy, not about colonization.
I cannot continue to exist near the surface of the sun as an intact human being.  I would not even be fortunate enough to continue to exist as a liquid.
Not a single building material we have is a solid at the temperature of the surface of the sun.  Most of them aren't even liquid.  Tungsten is one exception as it's barely a liquid at that temperature, but that'd vaporize too if the sun was just a bit hotter, not even 100K hotter.

That's just heat, I'm not even going to mention the crushing surface gravity.
This post fills me with dread for humanity. Conveniently shuffling over stuff you can't explain such as hyperspace, teleportation, phase ships, again waved away as "game mechanic"
But when we come to colonizing suns with example as a Dyson sphere and living on the shell of it while using the core as an energy source, suddenly it's not realistic enough, suddenly "it's not possibly by todays materials and theories"
Apparently even standard sci-fi concepts are too daring for todays mind to include in a sci-fi game that isn't trying to be a simulator. Yeah, magic, random humor. Not like this hasn't been the attitude from humans upon hearing any new revolutionary tech of theories through out humanity. Planes, electricity, computers, phones, cars, practically all of the technology we have right now or even the idea that earth isn't flat was not "magic" tier at some point, yeah, I am sure people said "yeah, I totally foresee that in a thousand years or two, people will be able to explain and harness all of these things.
Really?  Expressing the absurdness of setting foot on the sun is what fills you with dread?

Let's be clear, you haven't suggested colonizing a habitat or other orbital station some distance around the sun and colonizing that.  You haven't suggested building a Dyson Sphere around the sun for its power output and colonizing that (which is silly since Dysons have always been about harnessing the energy of a star and not about colonizing it, but I guess if you can build a Dyson colonizing the outer shell is feasible).  And I haven't denied any of these.

What is outlandish, however, is colonizing the star or black hole itself.  Colonization, in the context of StarSector, involves setting foot on the entity directly (or presumably inside the entity with aerostatic colonies in the case of Gas Giants.  You can't set foot on a star or a black hole for painfully obvious reasons.  Orbital stations (mining/habitat/research) are a different thing entirely and the player can't (yet) construct these for themselves.

No, colonizing stars is not a sci-fi staple.  That old joke about colonizing the sun at night doesn't count.  No, building a Dyson Sphere around a star (which actually is a sci-fi staple) is not the same thing as "colonizing" it, not in the slightest.

And Earth was first theorized to be spherical with its circumference estimated by the 3rd century BC at the latest.  The Hellenistic model isn't that new.
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RawCode

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Re: Are Black Holes too forgiving?
« Reply #37 on: January 10, 2019, 12:57:30 AM »

Quote
old joke about colonizing the sun at night doesn't count

exactly that joke i refer, but it was about flying to the sun at night.

game should not have features impossible for new player, it should be easy to learn and hard to master, this is not my opinion, it's industry standard.
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