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Post by Peter on May 18, 2009 10:28:24 GMT -5
OK, this is the thread for discussing ideas for the characters, races, ships, factions and storyline of the Endless Void. It's also the thread for me to post my background summaries Species of the Void: - Cauchemar. The 'good guys' of the setting, despite being utterly alien to everything else. Not that the setting really has good guys. The most humanlike species, although with their ability to create illusions, they aren't quite there.
- Euryale.
- Medusa
- Erinyes
- Emissaries. Essentially the Combine Advisors of the setting
As I'm not completely sure exactly where the inspiration for these came from myself, anyone who identifies a source gets a free cake (delicious and moist or otherwise). Channeling:Channeling is the practice of using advanced technology to manipulate space and time in bizarre and unpredictable ways in order to, well, go places quickly. The races mentioned above are those which produce hypersentient beings capable of actually figuring out where to go and how to manipulate things to get there. This is mostly the game's WH40k influence coming in - you need someone to guide you to the point in space and time that you want to reach. I believe that drew inspiration from Dune, although I could be wrong. While Channeling can be used to travel into the past, nobody does - how far this comes down to people being unable to see back in time, and how far it comes down to some inherent element of the laws of physics is unclear. Assumptions which break the laws of physics (clear squishy bits in the science fiction): - AFAIK, nothing exists which could be exploited to create artificial wormholes, and I'm pretty sure that stable or 'metastable' ones would require some pretty impressive phlebotinum.
- The Spire. IIRC, the idea works if the whole universe resembles the Spire, however.
- Psionics have not been given a plausible explanation, and the setting features entities which are able to make an observation without any interaction.
- Several things have been assumed 'hard' on the basis of evidence for which I am not presently able to provide a full citation.
I'd say that puts this setting at "Imported Alien Phlebotinum" on this scale.Suggestions for cool additional fluff material would be greatly appreciated. That includes nice little passages of text to fill up some of the whitespace that I am using way too little.
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Post by dragonlord on May 18, 2009 11:42:28 GMT -5
On Channelling and the potential for time-travel, Time's Eye by Arthur C. Clarke deals with a similar issue. While they aren't created using psychic means there are microscopic wormholes used for communication purposes, they're only large enough to transmit photons. Wormholes can be created that lead from the present to the past or the future, indeed there are lots of references to people using them to observe the construction of the pyramids, etc, however they only allow the passage of photons in directions with the correct causal linkage. Thus you can observe the ancient Egyptians but can't send them a message and while you could send a message to the future you would have no way of knowing if it was received. Only wormholes between the present and the present allow two-way traffic, if you try and send a photon in the 'wrong' direction it results in the collapse of the wormhole. Admittedly your wormholes are a bit different, but I think simply saying that there is some sort of causality enforcement would be sufficient. There would always otherwise be the question of why some unscrupulous Emissaries or Sirens didn't use time travel.
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Post by Peter on May 18, 2009 12:20:44 GMT -5
The idea of wormholes/channels which collapse if used incorrectly could be quite interesting.
Psychics don't actually create the channels in most cases - ships are equipped with special engines that do so instead. Only exceptionally well-trained clairsentient psychics can actually work out the numbers that need to be fed into those engines to produce a channel to an appropriate time and place, so backwards time travel could potentially be prevented by saying that psychics can only see into the present.
Actually, that works pretty well for Sirens - Emissaries are a bit more powerful, but I think they may actually be afraid of the past. I haven't explored reasons why, but it could make an interesting twist.
Emissaries are mysterious, ancient and incomprehensible like all good space opera precursors.
Ninja edit: I've moved this thread to a new home in B&C for now.
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Post by Peter on Jul 24, 2009 9:25:19 GMT -5
I'm actually wondering how hard the science-fiction really needs to be at the moment - the original plan was simply to keep things as hard as possible, subject to the existence of some form of gravity control (so that wormholes can be created) and the kind of clairsentience needed to make traversible wormholes possible.
At the same time, softer, more escapist science fiction will inevitably make something approaching a fun and enjoyable game a lot easier to achieve (because 'realistic' space combat amounts to two sides firing an absolutely ridiculous torrent of every kind of peculiar weapon imaginable at each other, which is a little boring). Something more like 'magitech' would be much easier to justify in the fluff, and much easier to implement in-game.
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Post by Adam on Jul 25, 2009 9:09:32 GMT -5
You're right there.
Can't help wondering, isn't your laser drive highly inefficient? Converting energy into light and thence into heat? (In sci-fi drive technology, antimatter is your friend.)
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Post by Peter on Jul 28, 2009 5:12:56 GMT -5
Actually, antimatter is not 'my friend'.
While smacking a particle into its antiparticle might give back the combined rest-mass of both particles in energy (compared with the tiny amount of strong nuclear potential released by nuclear fusion), antimatter isn't really that hot as far as energy sources go.
Using present-day technology, an antimatter-powered coffee machine would have a circumference of 4km, and cost £1,000,000.01 per cup of coffee so produced*. I am disinclined to believe that this cost will ever decrease enough to be useful in practical drive technologies.
Star Trek warp drives use annihilation reactions because for some reason 'only' antimatter can power the Warp Drive. They also produce their antimatter by devices which are essentially based on foul heresy and witchcraft (and, no, I am not including magical 78% efficient 'quantum inversion chambers' in my setting (especially when they are 56% more efficient than creating matter and antimatter directly from energy...)).
*Based on the price of Sainsbury's Basics instant coffee.
EDIT - and apparently also based on coffee being served at 1000 degrees. Whoops.
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Post by dragonlord on Jul 31, 2009 17:28:34 GMT -5
All things decrease in cost with bulk production, present day particle colliders are not exactly directed towards massive production of antimatter (for the most part directed production of antimatter is limited to enough to annihilate with the matter particles in the other beam). In addition to which you are assuming that antimatter would have to be created using man-made devices, if you could find a natural source that you could harvest, or a natural energy source to harness in the creation of anti-matter. I believe in one Arthur C. Clarke novel (I know I've quoted him a number of times, what can I say he's one of my favourite sci-fi authors) they harvested antimatter from the magnetic flux tube connecting Io and Jupiter. I'm not sure how realistic/feasible that actually is, but you get my meaning of possible natural sources.
In the grand scheme of things a relatively minor whoops, though perhaps not to the person you served the 1000C coffee! ;D
I'm not saying you should use antimatter or that there is anything inherently wrong with your laser drive just thought I'd point out that you can get around the witchcraft star trek uses. I would though point out that it might be more efficient to just direct the extremely hot waste gases of your fusion reactor out of the back of the ship, and if you wanted to, use some of the power produced to accelerated them with some electric/magnetic fields.
Just thought I'd let you know on this that there are a few (admittedly somewhat fluffy and nebulous) possibilities for stabilising, at least temporarily, a wormhole. Mostly this relies on manipulating the quantum wavefunctions allowed within a space such that there are more wavefunctions allowed within whatever is trying to keep you wormhole open than outside. There is a real effect called the Casimir effect that causes a very small pressure acting from regions where more wavefunctions are allowed into regions where less wavefunctions are allowed. I have come across a number of things that use 'Casimir engines' or similar to exploit this effect in basically creating an anti-gravity to keep the wormhole open. Of course this relies on the existence of a 'quantum foam' style space time in which wormholes continuously appear and disappear, which is itself, while quite possible, still a highly theoretical concept. There is also a difference between stabilising a nano-scopic wormhole and enlarging one to allow the passage of a large spacecraft.
I would also just query how this would work given that pressure weapons generally rely on being in some sort of gaseous/liquid medium.
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Post by Adam on Aug 2, 2009 16:37:44 GMT -5
I would also just query how this would work given that pressure weapons generally rely on being in some sort of gaseous/liquid medium. How about the warhead clamps to the outside of the target's hull and starts delivering resonant sound waves into the interior? It could even possess a scanner that detects the target material's natural frequency and replicate it, which would be quite an effective destructive technique, I think.
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Post by dragonlord on Aug 3, 2009 11:06:55 GMT -5
That could work, it would effectively be a bit like a very high speed pneumatic drill vibrating against the surface of the ship.
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Post by Adam on Aug 3, 2009 14:36:25 GMT -5
Yeah, kind of. Except keyed to the natural frequency of the target, so you'd end up with sections of hull doing Tacoma Narrows Bridge impersonations. Although the effect would be mitigated by composite-material construction, which I imagine most people would use, so the warhead would only be able to destroy one layer at a time. A missile might then contain a number of such warheads, linked together or programmed carefully such that they target subsequent layers. Six or seven sonic emitters planted next to one another could rip up a segment of hull quite rapidly.
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Post by Peter on Aug 4, 2009 7:52:27 GMT -5
Adam's essentially right - the charge digs into the armour and then tries to make the exterior bulhead resonate, potentially shattering entire layers at a time - when they work. The sound waves propagate through solid media at low frequencies and high amplitudes (I'm not going to try to calculate the resonant frequency of a fictional spacecraft, but I'm pretty sure the general principle for structures and harmonics is that low frequencies rule).
Their most common use is to strip away heat-shielding and exterior armour, leaving the ship incapable of making an emergency landing in an atmosphere (the intent behind the armour is that it only ablates at high temperatures, allowing the crew to survive landing in an atmosphere even though the ship will become unusable).
As for creating and sustining wormholes, I'm probably going to leave it at the assumption that anyone who can artificially create a wormhole that would be usable should already have the means to sustain it. I'll admit to being a lot more comfortable with space that can be considered Euclidean.
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Post by Adam on Aug 4, 2009 8:52:58 GMT -5
While thinking idly over supper yesterday, I came up with an odd-but-interesting means of attaining high speeds on ships using wormhole technology. A ship is launched towards a black hole, on an oblique trajectory that will lead to it orbiting the black hole several times - accelerating all the way - before being sucked in. The engine contributes, but the black hole's gravity does a lot of the acceleration work. The ship gets faster and faster, spiralling towards the centre of the black hole, then just before it hits the event horizon, the black hole gets linked to another, artificial one, becoming a wormhole (or a wormhole is opened in front of the ship, either one would do). The ship is spared from spaghettification, and blasts out of the other end of the wormhole at phenomenal speeds. It's a bit odd, but it's a curious idea nevertheless. Your ships probably won't be good for space warfare if their engines are crap enough to need black holes for serious acceleration, but the idea ties into a universe where no space battles are fought at all - automated ships fly around the galaxy at near lightspeed without ever stopping, flying along carefully calculated trajectories, steering using their interstellar-hydrogen-powered thrusters and the gravitic slingshot effect provided by planets and black holes. Shuttles link up with these ships, possibly using wormholes generated and maintained inside the ship, and ride along like hitchhikers before being released again, enabling planet-to-planet transport at obscene velocities in a highly efficient way compared to launching and accelerating ships time and again. Anyway, I dunno if that's in any way relevant to Endless Void, but it's food for thought anyway. One of us should use it for something sometime.
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Post by Peter on Aug 5, 2009 8:26:23 GMT -5
It's a possibility, I guess. I've managed to come up with new names for species in the setting, so we now have: - Euryale
- Medusa
- Erinyes
- Cauchemar
Those will probably also be the army lists, with the most typical affiliations being noted down. There will also only be two main sides to any conflicts - the Emissaries, and the Enclaves. Humans aren't going to be explicitly mentioned - I might toy with the possibility of one or more of the species being human or post-human, but it's not guaranteed. I've also come up with a new idea for Spires - basically, they are now the keys to Emissary-controlled wormhole usage. Each is controlled by one of the Emissaries, and houses a huge battle fleet. And anyone who can afford to tag along. I don't think anyone will be playing a 'Spire Assault' scenario, but I may consider it.
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Post by Adam on Aug 6, 2009 5:58:21 GMT -5
No humans eh? That's a new development. Bear in mind that gamers will want a 'baseline' faction they can get behind or relate to - the ostensible 'good guys' - and I'm not sure if a non-human baseline faction would actually work. Every universe has them, from Supreme Commander's UNA to 40K's Imperial Guard. You can try it though, see what comes out of the idea.
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Post by Peter on Aug 7, 2009 8:15:50 GMT -5
No humans eh? That's a new development. Bear in mind that gamers will want a 'baseline' faction they can get behind or relate to - the ostensible 'good guys' - and I'm not sure if a non-human baseline faction would actually work. Every universe has them, from Supreme Commander's UNA to 40K's Imperial Guard. You can try it though, see what comes out of the idea. Good guys? Well, the Cauchemar have the scariest name, so by the law of Space Marine chapter naming, I guess they're the 'good guys'. The setting doesn't have any Tyranids or Orks, so it's not like every race is utterly alien to us humans.
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Post by Adam on Aug 10, 2009 15:58:17 GMT -5
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Post by Peter on Aug 18, 2009 3:35:11 GMT -5
It's quite an interesting article. I'm assuming that wormholes are essentially temporary (how far a channel folds space and how far it tunnels through non-space likely varies from channeler to channeler). The three big science-fiction capabilities of EV are hyperefficiency, nanotech and gravity manipulation (this isn't used to justify the others, even though it sometimes can be). Oh, and 'hyperefficiency' in this case doesn't refer to over 100% efficient systems, merely ones which I feel are unfeasibly efficient.
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Post by Peter on Aug 20, 2009 6:11:13 GMT -5
I just found out about an interesting alternative method for shooting sonic mines at people. Just have the explosion create an atmosphere. I'm probably going to relabel the charge as a 'seismic' charge, because the whole sonic thing isn't actually as funny as I apparently thought when I wrote that in. It also makes a lot more sense, as that's how I envisioned it, and how it would probably be described if they spoke English within the setting. That gives four types of missile - Plasma charges (create a massive sphere of plasma through which a sound wave travels)
- Seismic charges (produce a seismic wave within the interior bulkheads and armour plating of a craft)
- Dark Energy charges (cause dark matter to accumulate at a point, hurling the enemy craft around through gravitational repulsion or shredding it through attraction. A little soft, but I have to explain the gravity manipulation somehow)
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Post by Adam on Sept 21, 2009 9:19:06 GMT -5
Coming back to this after some time (forgot to reply! Sorry ) I have to ask... where's the fourth? But anyway. You can explain gravity manipulation by using gravitons. One of my favourite this-could-be-antigravity theories is a mirror or coating that reflects gravitons, stopping them from hitting atoms and thus enacting the gravitic force (assuming that's how they work). If gravity is indeed produced by particles, maybe they can be steered by special electromagnetic fields, or used as a method of propulsion, perhaps by trapping them in a cyclotron (torus-shaped particle accelerator) and then releasing them.
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Post by Peter on Sept 25, 2009 11:09:03 GMT -5
You can explain gravity manipulation by using gravitons. One of my favourite this-could-be-antigravity theories is a mirror or coating that reflects gravitons, stopping them from hitting atoms and thus enacting the gravitic force (assuming that's how they work). If gravity is indeed produced by particles, maybe they can be steered by special electromagnetic fields, or used as a method of propulsion, perhaps by trapping them in a cyclotron (torus-shaped particle accelerator) and then releasing them. I think I might have something that isn't appallingly squishy as an explanation for the cool gravity manipulation effects, so I'm probably going to roll with it. The basic principle is that 'dark matter' is currently observable only through its mass, so if you can come up with another way to move the stuff around, you can have as much mass as you like, wherever you like. This assumes that you can supply enough energy to move the dark matter around, but most people think nothing of waiting around for their wormholes to form. I also have some changes to fleet wing compositions in the pipeline (while a decisive, 600 capital ship per side bloodbath might look cool, I'm afraid I'm going to have to tone down most of the ships.) Other question: Is it me, or has Nathan turned up on the forum?
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