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re: Star Trek Space Combat Chat Pages ago I was blown away how the Picard maneuver was pretty much the only instance of using warp in a ship battle. You'd think they'd just program the computer to choose x random points to warp to and fire on their enemy. You'd see 'dog fighty' stuff like the ships blinking in and out of view in order to try to get a good enough/long enough firing position on its enemy.
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Jul 17, 2014 23:51
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Arglebargle III posted:There have been four Earth impacts with kiloton range or more energy in the last 15 years, for a total of two serious injuries. Where might I read about these?
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Jul 18, 2014 00:15
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Occasionally some god drat gold comes out of the Miles O'Brien thread in gbs:Pththya-lyi posted:All credit goes to my boyfriend for figuring this out: Hard Clumping fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Jul 18, 2014 |
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Jul 18, 2014 00:15
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Doctor Butts posted:re: Star Trek Space Combat Chat Pages ago Hardly hard science, but I used to play on a space combat MUSH ages ago that had instant warp-speed that you could enable/disable after a short recharge cycle. It loving sucked, honestly. All strategy and concepts were lost because you'd literally be bopping in and out of warp so fast you'd macro the whole chain of commands, because you couldn't keep up with it. It was nothing but a huge mess of ships blinking in and out and in and out, hoping to blink close together so they could get off one salvo and cripple the other guy's ability to blink around like that. That was the moment I decided I far preferred, for sci-fi universes, "jump points", "jump gates" or "can reach light speed near stars" kind of jump drives. If anyone acted logically with the level of Trek tech it would be really, really silly looking on TV. And it's really lovely in games.
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Jul 18, 2014 00:38
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Scifi pretty much HAS to underplay how much impact computers have on everything, because nobody (not even fans of Excession) wants to read about the life and times of an unmanned missile bus. It's up to you whether you'd rather the setting try to justify it (like with Andromeda's only-biological-minds-can-navigate-slipstream gimmick) or just ignore it and hope you won't notice.
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Jul 18, 2014 00:44
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Crosscontaminant posted:Scifi pretty much HAS to underplay how much impact computers have on everything, because nobody (not even fans of Excession) wants to read about the life and times of an unmanned missile bus. It's up to you whether you'd rather the setting try to justify it (like with Andromeda's only-biological-minds-can-navigate-slipstream gimmick) or just ignore it and hope you won't notice. Why I like the idea of having to go somewhere specific to activate a jump drive, honestly. It combines the best of two worlds and does it without being nearly as brutal to things like logic. Namely that between jump points, you're moving at sub-light speed, where things are going slow enough that human reaction time might figure in. It works good from a narrative perspective, too. The way Trek treats Warp Speed it's pretty watchable but I really didn't like the modern BSG jump style. You can jump anywhere at all you want it seems, as long as you have the coordinates, making NONE of it make any sense travel wise. ED: And yes they jump, at least as far as I can tell, almost the entire length that they've jumped the entire show by the end all willy nilly. Easy to miss that with all the plot holes collapsing in on themselves, but I still think it's the worst FTL method in modern sci-fi as a result. They did joke about Firefly being "speed of plot" but really, I don't even think there was FTL in that show, since everything happened in a single solar system.
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Jul 18, 2014 00:55
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Crosscontaminant posted:Scifi pretty much HAS to underplay how much impact computers have on everything, because nobody (not even fans of Excession) wants to read about the life and times of an unmanned missile bus. It's up to you whether you'd rather the setting try to justify it (like with Andromeda's only-biological-minds-can-navigate-slipstream gimmick) or just ignore it and hope you won't notice. A great man for ideas, Niven. Characterization and plotting, not so much a lot of the time, but ideas, certainly!
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Jul 18, 2014 01:00
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Nessus posted:Like many good ideas, I think Larry Niven did that one first. He had some pretty revolutionary sex ideas. Like he would probably gently caress a non-sentient space vampire if it suited his neckbeard.
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Jul 18, 2014 01:12
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Hard Clumping posted:Occasionally some god drat gold comes out of the Miles O'Brien thread in gbs: ...which was all a long term plot to get a new single Dax, for his bro Bashir. That's some A+ level wingmaning.
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Jul 18, 2014 02:31
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This is a lovely image, but I'm still amused by this: Voyager murdered the cast of The West Wing.
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Jul 18, 2014 03:51
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Doctor Butts posted:re: Star Trek Space Combat Chat Pages ago You could easily justify why they don't do that by quoting energy requirements or heat requirements or something. Maybe warping so many times in quick succession would critically damage the warp core.
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Jul 18, 2014 03:57
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Blazing Ownager posted:The way Trek treats Warp Speed it's pretty watchable but I really didn't like the modern BSG jump style. You can jump anywhere at all you want it seems, as long as you have the coordinates, making NONE of it make any sense travel wise. I actually think BSG has far and above the best depiction of faster than light travel in modern sci-fi. They can literally jump anywhere, as long as they can make the calculations to do it. Because Galactica doesn't have networked computers, their effective jump distance is way lower than the cylons, making them a way bigger threat. Sure, if they absolutely had to, they could skip the calculations, but the risk of jumping into a star or some other object greatly increases. When they had to make that huge jump towards the end of the series, they played up how crazy dangerous it would be compared to their earlier jumps. It worked really well for me.
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Jul 18, 2014 04:19
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It's not just the networked computers, but just the fact that the Cylons are much, much better at calculations. Like it took them hundreds of jumps to get from Capirca to where they were at the end of Season 2, but when Athena defected and plugged in a Cylon Raider brain for them, it was three jumps to make them the same distance. All of the super-long-distance-jumps were accomplished with the help of Cylon brains, I think.
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Jul 18, 2014 04:25
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Yeah, and the idea of jumping being something that gets more and more random and unpredictable the farther you try to go (or the less time you took to calculate an apparently recursive function) made a whole lot of sense. It was like if the Infinite Improbability Drive were reworked into a serious idea. There's a maximum safe jump distance boundary that's actually more like a time or computation limit. It's cool.
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Jul 18, 2014 04:25
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I always figured the drive bent space so the calculations had to take into account gravity wells, so the further you're going the more gravity you have to deal with, and eventually it just becomes overwhelming. Technically you could jump across the entire galaxy but you'd have to account for like 50 billion stars loving with spacetime.
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Jul 18, 2014 04:47
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The fact that these calculations took time was the most important aspect of it. It meant that you couldn't safely dodge things with no warning and as show in the first episode of the series ("33"), coordinating multiple ships to ftl to a planned location required actual logistical coordination to make sure everything went well.
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Jul 18, 2014 04:55
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Hipster_Doofus posted:Where might I read about these? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object#Historic_impacts
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Jul 18, 2014 04:57
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Snak posted:The fact that these calculations took time was the most important aspect of it. It meant that you couldn't safely dodge things with no warning and as show in the first episode of the series ("33"), coordinating multiple ships to ftl to a planned location required actual logistical coordination to make sure everything went well. Well, they kept an always-precalculated set of emergency coordinates ready, so effectively they could jump the fleet at will with no warning; the bigger limit there was that the drives of some of the civilian ships took up to a minute to power up for a jump.
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Jul 18, 2014 05:18
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I was always surprised that Trek never came up with a canon explanation for why warping in combat didn't happen a lot, like suggesting it dropped shields or something. Though it also would have not addressed the bigger problem, which is that if you have an FTL drive and a rock you basically can destroy anything without ever needing to engage in a fight.
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Jul 18, 2014 08:27
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Phasers don't work well in a warp field, which was the primary motivation for developing torpedo weapons according to the TNG tech manual. Enterprise through that out the window but it's not very important. I like Starfleet Command's answer: you don't fight at warp because there's not enough surplus energy to do it well.
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Jul 18, 2014 08:53
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Barlow posted:I was always surprised that Trek never came up with a canon explanation for why warping in combat didn't happen a lot, like suggesting it dropped shields or something. That's always been my assumption. Some combination of shields, weapons, and evasive action draws too much power from the core, so making a safe jump to warp would require compromising in one of those areas and putting everyone at risk, either from enemy space lasers or their own engines blowing up in their faces. I wonder if that's also why the bridge lights dim in combat. They need every tiniest scrap of power available just to not get themselves killed in combat situations because Starfleet ships aren't generally built for battle. One hungry ensign on deck 37 tries to microwave a burrito and blows all the fuses.
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Jul 18, 2014 09:02
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Barlow posted:Though it also would have not addressed the bigger problem, which is that if you have an FTL drive and a rock you basically can destroy anything without ever needing to engage in a fight. I dunno about that, warp doesn't impart kinetic energy. You'd probably just end up with a collapsed warp field andan embarrassed looking rock.
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Jul 18, 2014 09:03
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Arglebargle III posted:Phasers don't work well in a warp field, which was the primary motivation for developing torpedo weapons according to the TNG tech manual. Enterprise through that out the window but it's not very important. Fun fact: the game that SFC is based on (Star Fleet Battles) assumes that all combat happens at warp speeds, tens or hundreds of megameters apart. Speed 1 is equal to the speed of light. You can't go faster than warp 3.2 because And yet somehow, manned fighters are a good idea...
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Jul 18, 2014 09:04
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SFC 2 realized that that was stupid and made it so that 0-31 is impulse and if you want to power down all your weapons you can warp across a grid. Waaay less temptation to go AFK while approaching a location.
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Jul 18, 2014 09:44
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I really enjoyed STID's "ok I'm just going to nudge you out of your warp bubble...by shooting you a lot" part. Also when them people got vented into space at warp speed!
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Jul 18, 2014 14:56
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Hard Clumping posted:I've just scoured Google and can find no evidence of this, and I feel betrayed. Be prepared for some leftover pizza, Arglebargle III. Revenge is best served re-heated. I did slightly better than you but not by much.
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Jul 18, 2014 15:35
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MikeJF posted:I dunno about that, warp doesn't impart kinetic energy. You'd probably just end up with a collapsed warp field andan embarrassed looking rock. Impulse engines in the other hand: fully capable of accelerating entire ships to near light speed in a matter of seconds! Those things should be able to crack a planet like an egg.
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Jul 18, 2014 18:45
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Galaxy class ship, according to google, is 4.5 million tons. Travelling at half the speed of light ("warp 0.5" in TMP), it has kinetic energy equivalent to a 15 petatonne nuclear blast. That's 15000000000 megatonnes for people who don't know the crazy end of the SI prefixes. About 100 times the amount of energy as the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. At current energy consumption that would power modern society for over tens of thousands of years.
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Jul 18, 2014 18:57
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Galaxy class ship, according to google, is 4.5 million tons. Have we ever seen a starship warp directly into a planet?
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Jul 18, 2014 19:45
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qntm posted:Have we ever seen a starship warp directly into a planet? Only time I recall it happening is in the Enterprise Romulan war novels.
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Jul 18, 2014 20:17
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Galaxy class ship, according to google, is 4.5 million tons. What's the estimate on the energy released when the protoearth a crashed into proearth 1? The thing that made the moon and gave us pathetic earthlings a nice magnet.
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Jul 18, 2014 20:37
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Thom12255 posted:Only time I recall it happening is in the Enterprise Romulan war novels. Which caused a chain reaction of dilithium fires throughout most of the surface of Coridan. Pretty brutal way to start a war.
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Jul 18, 2014 20:37
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Arglebargle III posted:Phasers don't work well in a warp field, which was the primary motivation for developing torpedo weapons according to the TNG tech manual. Enterprise through that out the window but it's not very important. I think it was either DS9 or Voyager that started having ships firing phasers at warp willy-nilly (after the TNG edict of phasers not working well at warp speed).
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Jul 18, 2014 20:50
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I think it was either DS9 or Voyager that started having ships firing phasers at warp willy-nilly (after the TNG edict of phasers not working well at warp speed). "Their shields have always proved useless against our weapons!"
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Jul 18, 2014 21:09
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qntm posted:Have we ever seen a starship warp directly into a planet? The TNG episode with the Soliton Wave experiment almost plowed it into a planet, and I think they figured it would have destroyed the planet.
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Jul 18, 2014 22:21
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tickle monster posted:Sure, if they absolutely had to, they could skip the calculations, but the risk of jumping into a star or some other object greatly increases. This line always bugged me. Tigh says it in the pilot as some big dramatic thing "we could find ourselves in the middle of a SUN" look buddy, do you know how Infinitesimally Small the probability is of that happening? Yeah sure it's possible you could jump into a sun but you're a literal insane person if you think that's a legitimate threat.
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Jul 18, 2014 23:10
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Hard Clumping posted:This line always bugged me. Tigh says it in the pilot as some big dramatic thing "we could find ourselves in the middle of a SUN" look buddy, do you know how Infinitesimally Small the probability is of that happening? Yeah sure it's possible you could jump into a sun but you're a literal insane person if you think that's a legitimate threat. Yeah, but presumably you could find yourself near a gravity well and not be anywhere near orbital velocity. That's effectively the same thing. Yeah obviously you're aiming for the big empty, and your jump accuracy is basically what determines if you have to be worried about coming out too close to a large gravity well. "The red line" is probably the range where those odds become statistically dangerous. Plus isn't basically a thinly-veiled Han Solo quote? More than anything it's just a line to explain to the views the nature of the limitations to their FTL.
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Jul 18, 2014 23:16
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FuturePastNow posted:The TNG episode with the Soliton Wave experiment almost plowed it into a planet, and I think they figured it would have destroyed the planet. and its antimatter 
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Jul 18, 2014 23:23
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Snak posted:"The red line" is probably the range where those odds become statistically dangerous. If that's true, if it's *statistically dangerous* and the probability is that they actually have to worry about that than the show must be set in a reeeeally small area of the galaxy, which contradicts that fancy cgi galaxy panning from their current location to earth they showed late in the show. Seriously, even adding the danger-ranges of gravity wells and planets and all stellar poo poo that could be dangerous, that is Nothing considering the massive space between them. "WE MIGHT JUMP INTO SOMETHING" holds no dramatic weight, especially since we never actually saw it happen.
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Jul 18, 2014 23:27
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Hard Clumping posted:This line always bugged me. Tigh says it in the pilot as some big dramatic thing "we could find ourselves in the middle of a SUN" look buddy, do you know how Infinitesimally Small the probability is of that happening? Yeah sure it's possible you could jump into a sun but you're a literal insane person if you think that's a legitimate threat.  gravity wells stretching the fabric of space-time increased probability
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Jul 18, 2014 23:32
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