The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

the melnorme (was it them?) mentioned something about black spathi, painted black rods or something and they're all brave-like.  granted, I haven't explored all the stars and planets, but I just didn't happen to run into them.

I guess I was expecting them to appear in SC3, but they didn't.  So are they hiding somewhere in SC2?

No, they don't exist.

Actually, they DO exist, right were the cloaking device is.... (That is next to the portal spawner for the orz's *pretty space*.   ;)

hehehehe

don't you find the mark 2 somewhere around there too?

No wait, you get the precursor data plates and then you can build the mark 2 at your starbase in the betelguese system

now I remember

yes your quite right, but you need to do these things in order to get there

1] get your crew down to one in the precursor ship. but you must do this only through loss of crew in battle. that means you cant reduce your crew to one at the star base. when you get to one, warp out. next...

2] fight a probe, and warp out, and try not to get killed.

3] upon warping out, the black spathi will warp in, destroy the probe, then give you some big lecture on what it means to be brave and fight your battles, instaed of running away.

4] after the talk they say they have something for you, but must test you in batle first.

5] fight the black spathi, but be careful, as there ship is alot more powerful than a normal spathi. forward gun shoots farther and hits twice as hard, and the butt missle will home in better and will track you farther. prove yourself in battle and they will hand over the data plates for the mark 2.

6] take the plates back to the syreen starbase. she will set up the base to build the mark 2.

well, what are you waiting for? go get it...

~DEFIANT

...I can't tell whether I'm being BSed or given real info.

BSed - As you would put it. There is NO black spathi squadron that you can find in the game.

sorry about that denkc. just having a little fun with the new guy. welcome to the board! ;D

shark bait ooh-ha-ha!!
-finding nemo

~DEFIANT

now that I think of it, was "the cloaking device" mentioned anywhere in the game? where the hell did that idea even come up from?

I can't recall..

The makers were considering putting it in, except they could not find a way to make it er.... more interesting than the illwrath one. That coupled with lack of time canned the idea. (At least that is what I have been told)

Then we all had a debate whether it would be sexy.

I remember an episode from ST:TNG, where as you all probably know the Klingons had a cloaking device; the humans had some treaty of war that they would not build any cloaking devices, but someone has - it was a cloaking device that allowed the vessel not only to be hidden from other ships but also to move THROUGH objects, planets, whatever.

I think that's a cool contra to the traditional how-to-make-a-rival-cloaking-device!

think, in battle you just turn on the cloaking shield and the shots move through you.. of course some measurements of balance should be added.

There was a screenshot or some such around with a cloaking device i nthe device list methinks.

That cloak sounds fascinating. And of course, I have already figured out who could use it best. Imagine a Shofixti Scout... Materialising inside a enemy ship! then pick your choise of brave warriors storming the whole thing or just a Very Big Bang.

Well, its not that simple I think. A spaceship is not really empty, it is (usually) filled with some mixture of gasses (breathable atmosphere for the ships crew). So that means the beforementioned shofixti would 'resolidify' in a space occupied with gas and their bodies would in some way fuse with the gas. I think that would seriously erm... ***-up their molecular structure.

Well, space (notably around planetary bodies which is where SC2 fights taker place) isn't really empty either. There's all sorts of molecules hanging around out there, just not very many of them. Any ship anywhere in space, ever that started sliding out of our "phase", and then attempted to "slide" back in would face integrity breaches. Space dust, miniscule meteoritic fragments and the likes can be just as deadly as appearing inside something.

Try to keep in mind that this is sci-fi, so rules tend to get bent.

Thats true, but is the degree of bending that tends to differ. Gnerally speaking, the least bent the rules are, the better the sci-fi. There are ofcourse exceptions to that rule :)

Yeah, but seeing as we're talkign about a ST shiedl where the facts have already been ignored, I felt it prudent to just continue or the same course.

Unless Censored can give us some more specs on the shierld? does it have a matetr-repulsor field that is activated before reentry? Can you actually see our phase while having the cloak engaged? What kind of energy source would be neeeded? And suchlike.

The most topic-appropriate exception being the Star Control series of games.  For example:

• How do the HyperSpace "pushers" work?  Why do you have to be so far away from stars to use them, rather than just switching them on from anywhere?
  
• How does one obtain a "class-IV pan-species psychological profile"?  What "domains" exist other than "Furtive-Hateful"?
  
• How do they measure "esper potential" in human beings?  When did humans start showing signs of "esper potential" (Miss Cleo notwithstanding)
  
• Why does it only take a day to reach Earth from the edge of the solar system when you have a full complement of engines, even though your ships are not supposed to be FTL-capable without pushing into HyperSpace?

The "Star Control Universe" is chock full of examples like this; whatever "magi-tech" they happen to need at the time to service the story, they have.  Whenever breaking the laws of nature makes gameplay more fun, they break them with glee.  I think the reason it works so well is that it's all done with a knowing wink and a smile, and more often than not, it's done as a sly reference to other sci-fi works, e.g., I'd swear that the Ur-Quan's main weapon is the sound effect from the 1960's War of the Worlds movies.

Well, Pluto is only 5 and a quarter light-hours out from the sun, so it looks like the ship is only pushing about 0.25 C. Which is pretty freaking fast, I'll grant.

Actually 0.25c isn't *that* fast, well, not for an elementary particle ;) I'm sure they managed something in the year 21xx


Anyways, I'm studying physics/elec.engin. in the University, well, first year, but still! they gave us a few pointers about Quantum mechanics, and how any particle beam, from a certain frequency, can move through gas as if it wasn't even there! yes, it's real!
think about it - you spray a bunch of particles through a thick cloud of gas - you can't see through it but on the other side all of the particles you shoot come out - unharmed, unslowed, as if the gas wasn't even there!

so I had a thought - if I could change the vibration frequency of my molecules, then from a certain minimum frequency value, I could just walk through walls!

now, theoretically or should I say mathematically that might be possible, but in real life I would disintegreate.

so, physics-ly speaking, if one could come up with such a technique to accelerate the frequency of one's molecules, and still live, he could actually do that.

in TNG they didn't say anything about the cloaking shield or how it works, and I didn't really ask my professor what would happen if the particle beam changed frequency in the middle of the gas, but I'm guessing the molecules might push each other and you'd be "rematerialized" in the right form. or, we could always come up with some creative solution to that :P

To answer the actual implied question in the first post on this thread:

The Starbase Commander told you about them.  He didn't believe the rumor, but was just passing it on.

And they aren't in the game.

To get back to particle quantum physics... what I'm curious about now is if said particle beam would shoot through solid matter as well?

well, the course I had ("had" is too good a word, still need to see how I do in the test  ???) is just preliminary (classical physics - electromagnetism) and so nothing about quantum mechanics; and come to think of it I think he did say it works with gas only and not solids.. but I guess I'll be able to answer that more fully next year, or at worst the one after that.. stay tuned ;)

at any rate, Quantum mechanics is a lot about chances, and there is a function of particle dynamics called "tunneling", where a particle can just fly through anything per given chance.. though I don't know too much about it, just yet.

which reminds me of the barometer jokes (http://www.workjoke.com/barometer.htm) (or: how to measure the height of a building) -- here is the relevant one  ;D:

That's possible even now. It just takes a while. The issue isn't speed, it's acceleration.

well, 0.25c is 74,948 kilometers per SECOND, I don't know if it's possible today to get to that speed. If I'm not mistaken standard satellites move at an average of 8 kmps. Albeit about the acceleration you're correct - that's the actual problem, technologically speaking.

Gah, my lousy U.S. public school education left me believing that Pluto was over 1 light-day away from the Sun.  Numerous astronomy websites, as well as the conversation here, have corrected this shortcoming.

So since it is no longer in service of my original point, let me restate it as "how do the inertial dampers work, given that your ship can almost instantly accelerate to around 1/3 light speed without turning your crew into chunky salsa?"

I'd like to point out that how is that important to enjoying the game? ::)

The ships engines move its entire mass at the same time. No one feels a thing.  The same prinicple is used to move through hyperspace, so the ship doesn't get torn apart. After all, there's a mysterious friction that affects everything in hyperspace, and you don't want your crew or ship to get flattened, do you? :)

Well, it may have been a bit of an understatement when I said "It just takes a while". The thing is, if you keep applying force, you keep going faster; there's nothing to slow you down. It just gets increasingly "harder" to go faster because of relativity.
With the rocket propellents that are currently in use you can't increase speed for very long. But if you use solar sails (which may not be in actual operation, but they are within todays technological capabilities) you will be able to accelerate slowly, but continuously.
I just underestimated the "slowly". I just read that it takes approximately 1000 years in continuous sunlight to go to one tenth the speed of light.

Noone feels a thing when you're moving with a constant speed (in which case the engines aren't doing any work). But when you're accelerating, everyone will feel it. If you're accelerating quickly, everyone will feel it a lot. If you're accelerating very quickly, everyone will feel it for a fraction of a second, and then get smeared over the back wall.
So you need to apply a force in the opposite direction on the people. That's what the idea is of inertial dampers. In sci-fi, artificial gravity can apply this force. In reality, artificial gravity is just sci-fi.

Well, from what I've seen on TV and all, there are three major and accepted ways to do that:

1. Get rid of inertia- Basically, you can move the same mass at a much higher speed, using the same force.  In math terms, you'd be warping the E=MC^2 equation to do what you want; to move more easily. I think many shows refer to this, but they'd rather not go into detail.

You can run into a few problems, litteraly. You'd find yourself with the strength of an ant, because one pound of force can do so much more than before. Instead of taking one step, you could launch yourself into the ceiling. Ouch. Also, human biology may simply not work right under those conditions.

2. Somehow move everything at once- so no one feels a thing. If the ship is accelerating at 100M/S, and you're just standing still., you'll quickly find yourself a pancake on the back of the ship. But if everything was pulled in exactly the same way, you'd never know it.

2a. Gravity is something that can pull everything at once. Everything accelerates at the same speed, and nothing moves out of place. So you won't feel a thing, because you don't feel anything move.  But the ship sensors will tell you that you're going at an insane speed. Once you turn off the gravity, you'll continue to move, because of your inertia.

2b. Warping space is another way to move everything on a ship at once. You don't actually move the ship, instead you shovel large amounts of space from in front of you, and drop it behind you. All of a sudden, you've moved a considerable distance.

Because you aren't moving the ship, once you turn off the warp, you'll lose all the speed that the warp gave you. If you happen to be stuck in the dead of space, you'll have to travel with normal thrust. That means it could take years to get somewhere, even travelling near the speed of light.

It's almost like gravity, except you're actually bending space, and it won't like to be bent. Anything stuck in the warp could be torn into a million pieces, or just look really stretched out. It doesn't really matter, you can make up anything you like here.

Perhaps, hyperspace could be explained as a place where it's really easy to warp space? Inside a solar system, real space is pretty tough, and you'll need alot of fuel and special equipment to warp out of the solar system. Outside of the solar system, normal space weakens, and it becomes a piece of cake to warp through hyperspace.

Even though it'd easy to warp hyperspace, it may not like being warped so much. It could explain the hyperspace fatigue that I've heard mentioned in a few places.

4. Hyperspace may simply "be there", just by getting away from the solar system. As you move away from a solar system, space condenses and becomes thick, and it becomes hard to move. But, for every inch of this thick space that your ship goes through, it's the same as going through a hundred miles of a solar system. Light travels at the normal rate, going just as fast through hyperspace, as it would through an equal amount of normal space.  

A bonus of this, is that if one inch of movement is a hundred miles, one inch of your ship would be just as large. You'd look like a giant travelling through space, and solar systems would  appear to practically fit inside your ship. But as you enter a solar system, and its normal, vacuum space, everything would quickly return to normal. It'd basically be an illusion, after all.



Of course this is all Sci-Fi conjecture, so please pick and scratch at it. It's not like we've gone past the oort cloud and really seen what is there, anyways. We can make up anything, as long as its believable. There are plenty of ways to say it can be done, that's for sure. :)

About the inertial dampers, I think we dont have to wait until we discover anti gravity. We can use diamagnetism to keep us from being pancaked against the back wall. Its already possible to make frogs float in a strong diamagnetic field. So just use massive magnets to repel the crew from the back wall. What that would do essentially is accelerate all the water molecules in your body (mostly) at the same rate as the ship and thus eliminating the feeling of acceleration.

Water isn't evenly distributed in your body, I can imagine that high acceleration rates could lead to stomach related problems...

Well, what did your mom say about eating before venturing into space? You have to wait 30 minutes first. ;D

Magnetic field, you mean. Diamagnetism is a fashion in which certain substances respond to a magnetic field. There are others, such as paramagnetism and ferromagnetism (which are attractive instead of repulsive).

The problem is that you need to get the field strength to decrease further away from the repelling wall. This means you can't have a magnet that's too big (can't cover the floor with them) and you can't put two of them in front of each other without specifically cancelling the fields in between.

As far as the ideas proposed in the ultimate post of last page are concerned:
well, great idea about shovelling space around. Now, any idea how to accomplish that?

With a Space Shovel, duh!

Well you could always say something to the effect of:
(in high pitch) Prepare ship, (back to normal) prepare ship for ludicrous speed. Fasten all seat belts, seal all entrances and exits, close all shops in the mall, cancel the 3-ring circus, secure all animals in the zoo....

All the crew would take their seats (barf bucket included) in a room designed to balance (more or less) all the forces that will affect the crew, and then all engines would go to full speed ahead!

If there will be, let's say, one room like that per crew pod, the fields wouldn't cancel each other out. Also you could change magnet to electro magnet, that way you could adapt the field's intensity to the ship's acceleration.

freddine:
None of the points you made actually refers to what we know in sci-fi as inertial dampers. You just present other ways to circumvent the problem.

At point 1.:
E=MC^2 has nothing to do with inertia. It describes how energy and mass are equivalent. I suspect you meant Newton's second law of motion: F = m a (not taking relativity into account).
I think the trick is to somehow "shield" the gravity on an object, so that it appears to have a much lower mass (or none at all), thereby requiring less force to achieve the same acceleration, and being less vulnerable to being smeared over the back wall.

As for warping space: that's an approach often taken by sci-fi writers. It may or may not be what Star Trek is doing. They do warp space, but they often refer to a "warp bubble", and I'm not sure what that is for. Perhaps they are isolating a piece of space from the rest of the universe, and moving that to another location. If that's the case, they may not need the inertial dampers while moving at warp speed.

Sci-fi that uses some form of hyperspace usually just sees it as another plane in a multi-dimensional universe. You then need some way to move the ship from our normal plane to hyperspace. And you may need another propulsion system to move in hyperspace. Even the laws of physics may be different there.

I should point out that while yes this is a quite dated reference, the "Black Spathi Squadron" was a wink and nod to a relatively short lived TV show called "The Black Sheep Squadron" which ran for 37 episodes from 1976-1978.

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0073961/

I'm guessing the idea would indeed to stop thinking "with the head to the wall" about increasing speed, and rather try being more creative; and the idea of hyperspace being just another dimension is just that;
think about how long, both time and length-wise it would take you to go up from the first floor to the tenth floor of a building through the stairs, or by using the elevator. Hyperspace is just that elevator, enabling you to "warp" (= click the button) into 'solar systems' or normal space (= floor) with relative easiness. Of course, considering physics in hyperspace work for you just as the elevator does, all you have to do is find out how to enter the elevator and how to work the buttons.

Uhm, with a hyperspace shovel? I dunno, but it sure takes alot of antimatter fuel and antimatter thrusters to do it. :P


Oh yeah, my bad. I guess I wasn't thinking when I put that equation down.

I've read the start trek explanation, and it seems pretty messed up. Something about plank units, and expanding warp bubbles, which somehow turns a small speed, into a great speed.  The book did mention that inertial dampeners were needed, though. It's impossible to really tell, though, because it changes from season to season.  ::)


You will have to explain why leaving the solar system gives you a free ride into hyperspace, while retreating from a battle takes a ton of fuel.

No matter how you do it, hyperspace only needs to make FTL easy/possible, while still working with the travel and fuel consumption rules of Ur-Quan. Travel will also have to cause some sort of stress to hyperspace, so it can have a nervous breakdown. :P


Oops, again. Well, I guess if your ship can fly without inertial dampers, you won't need them anymore? ;)

There are alot of races in the Ur-Quan universe. Feel free to mix and match the ideas, so maybe a little of everything is used. For example, I don't think the orz have to worry about getting flattened against a wall, since their corporeal forms are little more than nifty tools.  :D

Possibly strong gravity fields pull you back into truespace. If you want to enter hyperspace suddenly, you may have to overcome that pull.
It's not entirely certain though that you actually momentarilly jump to hyperspace when you warp out of combat.


Actually, unless I'm terribly mistaken, what we currently know of physics forbids any faster-than-light travel of information. With FTL transmission of information, a universal clock could be established, which would break relativity. This would mean that *any* FTL travel, whether through an alternate dimension, or using worm-holes or warping of space, would be impossible.

And quantum entanglement is just "Spooky action at a distance"  ::)

Actually, I've heard of that experiment. All it really proves, is that you can't cheat with lasers, to move data faster than light. Since light is the fastest thing we know of, we have no idea on how to make any information travel faster.

Are we talking about real life physics, or conceptual stuff for Ur-Quan? Because I am confident that mankind hasn't even scratched the surface on science. Heck, we haven't even explored past earth. How could we possibly know what's out there?

On the other hand, I don't have a problem with making stuff up to make a video game interesting. As long as it can answer all the questions about it, it'll work perfectly fine as game science.

There is a theory about black holes stating that a neutrino could escape. And to escape a black hole it would need to travel faster than light.

Wrong. Neutrinos are clad in relativity like all other particles. The only way it could "escape" from the black hole is if it werent even past the event horizon in the first place, but rather in extreme proximity.

Once your past the event horizon thats that. No way out from there unless you have that portable wormhole handy, hell, not even Hyperspace could get you out since it costs five fuel units near an insignificant body like a planet to emergency warp I'd surmise that it would require a nigh infinite amount to escape from a black hole.

So, uh, no. SOL is unbreakable in a conventional universe.

Oh, and dont bother bringing up dimensional fatigue as a means of collapsing Hyperspace. Thats an SC3 conciet and is thus non-canon which translates to being TEH EVIL!!!

No dice. If every one of your tools always break while travelling, none of your tools will make it to the next solar system, and certainly not to Sol. It might not hurt you per se, but you wont get any work done either.

Hmm... I thought according to quantum mechanics information CAN actually be transmitted faster then light...

And ofcourse there's the tachyon... but that's highly theoretical I think.

The tachyon is suggested by special relativity, but no one can really figure out how it would fit into general relativity.

As far as FTL information transfer -- the universe must remain consistent, and it is lazy about making decisions. This means that the universe can transmit information about its recent random choices faster than the speed of light -- but this is not exploitable for us to transmit information. All we can do is 'roll dice' and gaurantee that someone far far away got the same exact roll we did... but we can't choose what roll we'll get.

Well, that's why they travel so slowly, then? They've never had to actually bother with inertial dampers, but they don't want to completely destroy their tools, either. Also, they are shown to be in the water, and you can handle much higher G's when you're full of water, than you could ever do with hollow and collapsable lungs. Would it be reasonable that they just wouldn't care about dampers? Why would you need individual designs for every ship, if they weren't vastly different in one way or another?

Once again I ask, are we talking about real, well known physics? Or reasonable explanations for things in the Ur-Quan universe? Because the arguments for these things will be completely different. And because real life physics are probably better argued in a physics forum.

So far, every single discovery on the universe has been made on earth, from earth, or from the orbit of earth. In the grand scheme of things, there is absolutely no reason that every single cubic inch of the universe has to follow the exact same rules. The only reasons we have now, are that it should happen, and that it would be really nice.

That's the whole point of hyperspace. It doesn't give a damn about the rules of our space. Things can travel FTL, because we say they can do it in hyperspace. So, the only thing that's really needed, is a small and reasonable explanation of how that would work.

oops. I notice this is waayyy off topic from the Black spathi. I think this discussion needs to be moved to a new thread. ::)

I see, thanks for bringing me up to date on this :)

It's a theoretical argument. I probably shouldn't have brought it up in the first place, as I don't know the details. The idea was that if you could send information faster than light, you could get contradictions if the theory of relativity is right.


It's not a matter of things we don't know about yet. It's a matter of a fundamental law which works well in practice having to be simply wrong.
Even special relativity didn't make Newtonian physics unusable, it just made Newtonian physics an approximation for every day usage. For FLT relativity would have to be just plainly wrong. It's not impossible, but "not even having scratched the surface" doesn't mean everything we know now is wrong.


Sure, it's about the fun, not the science. But it appears this thread is (currently) about the science, not about the fun. :)

You're talking about Hawking radiation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation). But that doesn't involve superluminous speeds.

Indeed. In fact, there's no reason that our laws of physics are exactly the same on Earth tomorrow.
Which brings me to one of my favourite filosofical problems, Hume's problem of induction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction).

Actually, the argument you made was that Orz would not care for dampeners ebcause their bodies are just shells. I assumed that this argument postulated that other races need to use dampeners so that they don't get crushed. In that case, it's still no dice, since no dampeners still means fleet of dead Orz in HS, or Orz travelling at combat speed between star systems. Which can't be true, as you encounter them in hyperspace.

Neither of that has anything to do with the physics of the regular universe, it was emrely a riposte to your theoeretical proposition of "If inertial dampeners are needed to survive, the Orz might still not care".

Personally, I doubt that there areinertial dampneres in SC science, and I doubt there is a HS in real science.

As for individual designs, why do you need them for different airplanes? their basically all the same, aren't they? Or individual designs for cars? Or bikes? Or anything? Yes, they are all different. But they're not necessarily THAT different.

In the stories I make up myself I always make sure that every spacefaring species has a totally different way to cross interstellar distances :)

Ah, but that's why I brought them up in the first place; they're specifically mentioned in the SC2 manual: (emphasis added)

---

Collision with Asteroids and Planets
Asteroids are large rocks which endlessly tumble through a solar system, trapped by the gravity of the star and its planets. Due to the sophistication of modern inertial dampeners, colliding with asteroids causes no damage, just a sudden change in course.

Impacting a planet is a different matter altogether. Your ship will be damaged severely, and potentially even be destroyed. Once again, AVOID HITTING PLANETS.

---

The point they were raised in service of was that SC2 doesn't get bogged down in "hard science", it just lets the story move forward, and invents any technologies needed to service the story.

But even then, it was thread-jacking, so I'll not be one to complain that the thread has been hijacked.  ;)

What, like some have rockets, some HS and some... paddle? How many ways are there to travel?

And OXDE, good point. I'd completely forgotten about that (My SC2 manual was borrowed many years ago by a friend who then promptly moved to another country). Still, Orz don't lose crew if they collide with asteroids, ergo dampeners exist. I think.

And if that was your point, I agree. Thread jacking? QWell, the original question has been answered, so it's a free for all now...

Well a couple of ways are...

* cryo suspension and being underway horribly long
* near light speed: your not underway very long... but according to the rest of the universe you are :P
* transfer your consciousness to a robot host body in another solar system via a kind of instant data transfer quantum internet.
* transfer your consciousness through ESP
* teleport yourself through quantum entanglement / tunneling effects.
* warp space around you
* punch a hole through spacetime (create a black hole), this can be done either by gravity manipulation or by simply accelerating your ship till your mass is suffucient to form its own event horizon
* open a wormhole
* simply know where all the wormholes are
* fiddle with time itself
* travel interdimensionally
* convert yourself to energy and transmit youtself at the speed of light.

er... should I continue? :)

Opening a wormhole and fiddling with time itself are basically identical in principle, even if they are rather different in practice.

Also, you didn't include spacefaring but sublight colonies which slowly drift from star to star in no particular hurry.

Ah! indeed, yet another method, thanks :)

So now you have not one or two, but many different methods which people can see as ridiculous.
I think it's better to just go by one, do not try to explain it in too much detail, and then forget about it and get on with the story. Unless the story revolves around the particular mode of travel of a species.

BTW, the "P" in "ESP" stands for "perception". Transmitting anything (including conciousness, whatever that is) through any kind of "perception" makes no sense.

Well, it kinda does when you can percieve things on another planet then you can argue that your consciousness it in fact there... right?
Ok ok its a stretch :P

If the concepts seem so ridiculous, why would a person who thinks that even play Ur-Quan? I mean, if you can't accept how the story works, I doubt you'd enjoy game. The game will break laws of the universe, even laws we haven't discovered yet. No one really cares, as long as it's fun.

You also say that people "can see [the methods] as ridiculous". People believe all different sorts of things about space and technology. There's no way you can please everyone. Not until mankind really discovers some sort of useful spaceflight, and that's not going to happen for a while. But, arguing against something because there could possibly be a dissagreement is foolish. There'll always be a disagreement. It's an important part of refining the explanations.  ::)


Back to alien space tech:
Well, alot of the technology that spacefaring races have is most likely because of the precursor artifacts lying around everywhere. I bet that most of the space technology the races have is somehow related to the sentient mileu. Some of the mileu may have different tech, since they were more isolated at the start, and able to develop it on their own. And that tech would be passed on to the races that were the closest to those mileu.

Add **HYUIVBHJHG** to the list.  Orz seems to think it's faster than flying the *heavy* ship.

You're missing the point. I think one of the reasons SC2 is so great is that while the creators try not to be inconsistent, they don't let realism get in the way of the fun of the game. But that was not the point I was making.

When I see some strange implausible concept in a game or movie, I may raise my eyebrows or laugh about it for a moment, and then I go on.
It's a small negative point if you're supposed to take it seriously. But then if you keep going from one flaw to the next, those negative points add up. That's not really a problem if the game or movie isn't really about those concepts and the rest is ok. But if these concepts have no purpose to the game or movie, then why not leave them out altogether? That was the point I was trying to make. Why have 10 different explanations at which people may raise their eyebrows when 1 or 2 would be enough. Keep the best ones and throw away the others, I'd say. More isn't necessarilly better.

It's another matter if you're going for the absurd humour, where the concept isn't to be taken seriously in the first place. Take the Infinite Improbability Drive for instance. The sillier the better.

The problem with me is I am obsessed with details :)
That is why my stories have millions of years of history, a lot of supporting characters, different cultures and motivations for every faction, every machine is designed right up to the last bolt, and yet... everything connects :D
This also means that every faction has a different approach to technology (some even use magic, so hey), has different strengths and weaknesses and therefore totally different sollutions to the same problem, hence the different forms of interstellar travel.
Oh yea and ofcourse there's the equally detailed designs of alien physiology. No simple carbon / DNA based lifeforms for all, like in most sci-fi ;)

This sounds sooo interesting! Could someone tel me more about this 'maek 2'-thing, and of course Orz's pretty space portal? Can you go there and where itis?

Just curious, have you played the game?

Yes i have played it, though not yet haven't sucesfully finished it...

Don't forget the Precursors Plates.

Actually I don't think most spacefaring races use Precursor technology; most of them discovered Hyperspace travel first and then started noticing all the Precursor artifacts around. After all, without Hyperspace it'd be impossible for them to even leave their own star system.

Precursor tech is supposed to be puzzling, hard to find and usually hard to find any use for (hence the excitement when they found an actual functional Precursor ship) and the artifacts in Star Control 1 probably only work because the races have been working on learning to use them for some time.

Luckily, we don't need to explain how or why we ended up discovering hyperjump engines, because they're one of the things the Humans got ready-made from the Chenjesu in return for assistance during the war. The secret of hyperjump appears to be well-known enough that almost all races seem to discover it early in their "Atomic Age" (hence they refer to planetbound civilizations as "pre-atomic savagery") and the Chenjesu seem to have assumed that Humans would've discovered it relatively soon (hence the Yehat don't consider the Humans as having been in any way "uplifted" and respect them as a natural race).

After all, if Hyperspace were something difficult and hard to discover, it'd make the known universe a whole lot less interesting and less teeming with spacefaring life.

There was an interesting theory I remember a while back about Hyperspace being a creation of the Precursors way *way* back in order to facilitate interstellar travel. It is awfully convenient, when you think about it. It would also explain how Hyperspace can just disappear or break apart or whatever Dimensional Fatigue did to it in SC3, and explain how come only the Precursors had ever invented Warp Bubble technology.

SC3 has many convenient solutions to riddles in SC2, but we prefer not to acknowledge any of that nonsense they invented in this, so called, "sequel".

After all, if the Druuge didn't get their rightful role as "Producers", then it's not the true SC3 :D