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space wars will never actually happen because the economics will always be prohibitive, if any violence occurs it will always be completely asymmetrical because otherwise it's just not worth the energy expenditure to move poo poo around at any substantial distances, and anything that is so valuable as to warrant violent conflict in space (like rare elements or something) will also be so valuable that nobody is going to risk destroying it by having a stupid fight over it even orbital conflicts will always be extensions of relatively limited surface warfare, and the only things you really want in orbit are comm and sensor equipment, and you never want to physically destroy a satellite if you can help it because you don't want to fill useful orbits with dangerous debris, so it's all going to about disrupting your enemy's ability to interact with their sats instead this is assuming that things continue the way they are now, where ideological conflicts are just façades on top of economic conflicts driven by the private wealth that runs the state. mature international capitalism finds unrestricted warfare between major states to be unprofitable, which sadly is why the conflict in the ukraine is going to be loving catastrophic on a local level but isn't going to cause ww3, re: britain refusing to even lay down sanctions because rich russians own half of london, etc
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Mar 11, 2014 10:12
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Heresiarch posted:space wars will never actually happen because the economics will always be prohibitive, if any violence occurs it will always be completely asymmetrical because otherwise it's just not worth the energy expenditure to move poo poo around at any substantial distances, and anything that is so valuable as to warrant violent conflict in space (like rare elements or something) will also be so valuable that nobody is going to risk destroying it by having a stupid fight over it replace the word 'space' with 'land' or 'air'
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Mar 11, 2014 10:14
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theadder posted:replace the word 'space' with 'land' or 'air' i don't think you understand the difference in energy requirements here edit: or am i misunderstanding your point
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Mar 11, 2014 10:20
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Heresiarch posted:i don't think you understand the difference in energy requirements here i guess im thinking any society rly like this would already need an energy source beyond our comprehension also wars are rly wasteful already so we'd probably continue it
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Mar 11, 2014 10:23
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my point is that we're wasteful and stupid yospos bithc
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Mar 11, 2014 10:26
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points taken
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Mar 11, 2014 11:23
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coffeetable posted:anyway followin up spaceship chat from a page or two back, of course the death star completely eclipses the entire diagram and the ID4 mothership has like eighty of those city destroyers plating its underside honestly i love diagrams like this no matter how much wild guessing and aliasing is involved, see also http://merzo.net quote:Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy lol
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Mar 11, 2014 12:08
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just saw the new cosmos, it was p great
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Mar 11, 2014 12:30
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read wool, got to the third book and put it down. i know self publishing is the new poo poo but working with an editor will vastly improve your work mr internet author man.
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Mar 11, 2014 12:44
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Jet Age posted:read wool, got to the third book lol what are you 17?
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Mar 11, 2014 12:59
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ie "It was the uprising that filled whispers and occupied sideways glances" occupied sideways glances? "His wife was poking some great, overly full balloon with a needle, and Holston wanted to get that air out of it before she poked too far." kind of ran out of metaphor here but that's okay keep writing "He almost asked Nelson what was wrong before it occurred to him: The man was worried all these instructions were for naught, that Holston would walk out—like everyone in the silo feared all cleaners would—and not do his duty. Not clean up for the people whose rules, rules against dreaming of a better place, had doomed him." colon comma hyphen hyphen. this dude writes like my work emails and that's not good. then a sentence within another sentence!
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Mar 11, 2014 12:59
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AlsoD posted:lol what are you 17? yeah i know i didn't want to use 'it's YA as gently caress' as an insult because good YA fiction is important but this is YA as gently caress
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Mar 11, 2014 13:01
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my vote for the worst analogy ever goes to "In zero gravity dice never stop tumbling, and for the next day Geary felt like he was watching a pair endlessly rolling and never coming up with a result."
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Mar 11, 2014 13:01
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Jet Age posted:colon comma hyphen hyphen.
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Mar 11, 2014 14:18
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theadder posted:i guess im thinking any society rly like this would already need an energy source beyond our comprehension war is good for business
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Mar 11, 2014 14:31
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angry_keebler posted:this is an engineering problem that could in principle be solved and would work to shield a non-accelerating spacecraft from ir detection by a point observer awesome. it does kinda bum me out that scifi style space ship battles will never happen but idk the engineering and design that would go into making a Real Life Space Warship like this is waaay more interesting
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Mar 11, 2014 16:07
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angry_keebler posted:even if such a material even exists they could still just look at the sky with a regular telescope and watch for glint from the heat shield. okay, you paint it black (more work for your radiators) so they watch for unexpected star occlusions and pretty soon have a good enough idea of your cross section and speed that they are probably getting pretty steamed about your evident sneak attack seems like you'd need a shitload of telescopes all over the place to find that i mean its definitely possible but i really don't think that kind of visual anomaly would be trivial to find
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Mar 11, 2014 16:12
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Trig Discipline posted:just saw the new cosmos, it was p great please don't troll
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Mar 11, 2014 16:54
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the military probably has a space war plan already set up, it's their job to come up with plans for literally everything
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Mar 11, 2014 16:58
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another problem is that if the FTL problem is ever solved then we automatically have super weapons capable of destroying planets and probably even stars
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Mar 11, 2014 17:07
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Gus Hobbleton posted:another problem is that if the FTL problem is ever solved then we automatically have super weapons capable of destroying planets and probably even stars these will be the least of our problems if we ever manage to violate causality
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Mar 11, 2014 17:10
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Just-In-Timeberlake posted:then how did the bugs bomb us smart guy please the goddamn bugs whacked us, johnny
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Mar 11, 2014 17:23
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Just-In-Timeberlake posted:then how did the bugs bomb us smart guy inside job
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Mar 11, 2014 17:31
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:seems like you'd need a shitload of telescopes all over the place to find that the biggest concern for the attacker is time. if the stealth ship turned on its engines so it was moving fast enough to reach the earth in a month and drop a bomb you'd see the exhaust. the farther away you start, the faster your initial speed could be, but your enemy's detection radius is directly proportional to your operational travel time there's not a lot of wiggle room on avoiding ir detection of your exhaust, but if you are far enough away and turn on your engine when your base is in conjunction with the earth then maybe your exhaust will disperse enough that a different mission with a similar engine could be launched to confuse the defenders and let you do a fast stealth attack otherwise it's a single low power burn and then seveal months or years of jogging along the gravity ring, and that gives the defenders several months of observation time so even modern day amateur astronomers would have a better than fair chance of seeing enough occlusions to call up space command. in a world where we're aware of adversaries that might want to sneak attack us we'd probably invest in a network of good quality optical space telescopes with ccds and enough data processing to do a full sky scan every few weeks. if we keep three ir observatories, one in orbit, one on the moon, and one orbiting mars, then the stealth dish only gets the attacker so far before they can't keep their radiators angled away from all three observatories which isn't so say the sneak attack is impossible, a combination of luck and timing could probably work once. hitory repeatedly shows that low probability attacks work the first time they're tried, if for no other reason than some rear end in a top hat in a middle management position in a defense agency personally thinks the unlikely attack is impossible so he actively hamstrings efforts to prevent the attack to come in under budget on some specific line item
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Mar 11, 2014 17:51
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Heresiarch posted:these will be the least of our problems if we ever manage to violate causality well this is assuming that solving the ftl problem also solves the causality problem because they kind of go hand in hand
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Mar 11, 2014 18:02
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angry_keebler posted:the biggest concern for the attacker is time. a good post, ty for your thoughtful contributions keebler 
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Mar 11, 2014 18:22
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angry_keebler posted:the larger the radiator, the farther away it can be seen even if its average temperature is relatively lower you're also completely dismissing emissivity which is what confounds attempts at using black body equations in any practical application scuff up some paint on the leading surface and we're halfway there
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Mar 11, 2014 18:25
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i enjoy watching science fiction space ships shoot lasers at each other
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Mar 11, 2014 18:25
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Gus Hobbleton posted:well this is assuming that solving the ftl problem also solves the causality problem because they kind of go hand in hand i like the futurama solution where they just increased the speed of light
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Mar 11, 2014 19:31
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qntm posted:i like the futurama solution where they just increased the speed of light or the other futurama solution where it isn't the ship that moves but the universe around it!
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Mar 11, 2014 19:33
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Jet Age posted:read wool, got to the third book and put it down. i know self publishing is the new poo poo but working with an editor will vastly improve your work mr internet author man. yeah the writing could use a bit of help but i liked the story enough that i still enjoyed it v  v
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Mar 11, 2014 23:08
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well, if Almost Human doesn't get a renewal at least that was a  note to end on, dangling plot threads be damned.
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Mar 12, 2014 01:10
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yeah i liked the last scene of that episode too, nicely sappy
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Mar 12, 2014 03:16
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Cocoa Crispies posted:the champagne bottle takes fuckin' forever to get there to actually christen the thing though Elder Postsman posted:hahaha i'd forgotten about that, how freaking dumb. wtf star trek the champagne bottle idea was cool but the execution was offensively terrible. even in 1994 this was not good cgi. and it looks worse in full motion, the stills do not do it justice. $35 million earth dollars to squeeze out this turd and it looks worse than b5's lightwave / video toaster effects. high school a/v clubs did better 
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Mar 12, 2014 04:26
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Trig Discipline posted:yeah the writing could use a bit of help but i liked the story enough that i still enjoyed it v i was listening to it as an audiobook which doesn't help
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Mar 12, 2014 04:27
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Jet Age posted:i was listening to it as an audiobook which doesn't help oh yeah, my wife said the audiobook of the second one was terrible and boring
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Mar 12, 2014 04:30
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but i still grant you that the writing isn't perfect. it's not piers anthony levels of bad or anything, but it could definitely use a better editor at some points
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Mar 12, 2014 04:31
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out of boredom i watched nucosmos too flashy by half at the outset and then a terrible, jarring transition into the terrible atheism animation neil tyson is a decent host and has pretty good patter a lot more calm and contemplative than i first feared, but there are still many episodes to go overall it could have been worse, but the atheist content was really poorly shoehorned in, especially the unironic use of "thought police" Stymie fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Mar 12, 2014 |
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Mar 12, 2014 04:38
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Trig Discipline posted:but i still grant you that the writing isn't perfect. it's not piers anthony levels of bad or anything, but it could definitely use a better editor at some points i like charlie stross on this - http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/03/why-i-dont-self-publish.html don't do this poo poo yourself because its not what you are good at and others will do it more cheaply and efficiently. i dunno if Howey had traditional publishing options but i think he would have benefited from a little help
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Mar 12, 2014 04:45
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just cover your starship in pagancow posts 'cause it's not like anybody reads those
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Mar 12, 2014 05:57
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