The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

- Can auto-pilot sequences be skipped? They're quite boring, you should be able to simply jump to destination, if nothing happens along the way...
- Is there a way to "buy" crew, just like fuel?
- Earthquakes are easy to avoid, but lightning and flames seem so... unavoidable. Are they just a matter of luck?

Thanks!

No, but you may find other ways to speed up travel.


Yes, in the shipyard section of the starbase.


Lightning and flames are hard to avoid, but not impossible. If a planet is too dangerous, you should consider not landing on it.

Who on Earth would skip the wonderful hyperspace travels? That music rocks. ;D



A good example is Venus; it's full of worthless minerals and it's climate ranking is 8. 8 equals death.

I remember practically every time I play, I take one look at venus and say....**** that =p

In regards to the first question, no, they can't be skipped.  Mainly because while you're travelling through hyperspace, there's a chance you'll encounter other ships, even if you're not within another alien's "territory".  And the game wants to give you the option to avoid other ships, which you can usually see approaching.

Also, you CAN dodge hotspots, though it is hard. Lightning however, is unavoidable.

I know how to read planet statistics...
I meant how to evade those hazard AFTER you've landed.
Lightning and starting flames seem to be istantaneous, so there's no way to avoid them... or?

Well, for hot-spots, the best thing is to keep moving. Also, get the upgrade for speed and fire-resistance as soon as you can. (from the melnorme)

If only a back pedal key existed...

Yes, reverse speed would be useful :)
Another question: planet orbits have different colors, does it have a useful meaning?

Yes, ask the commander and he will tell you a story about bananas(with meaning ofcourse).

He said planet orbits, not planets themselves...

Planets with orange and red orbits are very hot, expect hotspots on their surface. Planets with green orbits have surface temperature very close to that on Earth, and therefore many of them can support life. Planets with grey orbits are much colder than Earth, and planets with blue orbits are the coldest.

So THATS why every planet in a supergiant system is orange...

From Hayes:

Thanks for the orbit tips, however i see many planets with temperature under -200° support life! :D

Obviously, they are not water-based life -- perhaps ammonia or some colder-freezing solvent?

Maybe they're bacteria? No scale is provided =p

Could be russians, they seem to survive just about everything. ;)

I doubt we can survive conditions much harsher than what you Norwegians can. :)

LOL =p

I once read this book that had a scene in it of a man drinking vodka to keep himself warm in winter siberia...the vodka, while not frozen, still took on the temp of the outside air (like, -60'c) and as he drank it, his intestines froze, almost instantly...

Was a good book =p

I would say that the creators took the thought path that life wants to exist in the universe at large, with that said green orbit worlds will generaly foster life that we would recognize and likely in abundance.  Planets in grey (but not blue) could also harber life (in theory).  Planets in the red zone aren't likely to have much life and planets in the blue zone are the same though life generaly has a better chance on the blue zones than red zones (to be abundant let alone there).

There is even a going theory (read modern/current theory) that there is life at Europa given it's primary element of water and it's nearness to jupiter.

Most life and life giving materials would be boiled off of mercury but there are other energy sources besides the sun for life to flourish...

lastly our theories involving life pretty much require liquid water somewhere for life to have a chance, stretch that theory a bunch and life could exist with liquid anything... (actualy somone mentioned amonia, also silicon can mimic many of the carbon based functions).

Hey, come on. The coldest temperature measured in Norway is something like -52 degrees Celsius, while the russian record is close to -80. :)

I've personally experienced temperatures of below -40C, and it was... pretty damn cold. A friend of mine was doing military service while a cold wave swept the northern part of Norway, and temperature dropped to -50. One interesting thing about that kind of cold weather, and I have this from first-hand sources (it was even on the news), is you can actually go out on the porch with a fresh, boiling hot cup of coffee, throw the contents up into the air, and it will instantly freeze and fall like snow. Now THAT'S cold.

A bit on the side of the thread, I guess, but it's an anecdote well worth sharing.


EDIT:

Sander Scamper: what book would that be?

Profound_Darkness: The possibility for life-harbouring environments on Europa is, IMO, one of the most interesting questions that the world's space programmes are dealing with at the moment. They're currently designing probes that will melt their way through the ice caps, into what will hopefully be an ocean below, perhaps teeming with aquatic life. Am I the only one who's excited like a little kid about this?

I think the russian record was more like -60 C...

I saw it on Dangerman, a series on Discovery Channel not so long ago, and he showed us that you CAN do that boiling cup-trick.. :)

Well, you stand corrected:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalextremes.html



It's pretty incredible when you just hear about it, but a lot more incredible when you find out it's actually possible...

I read from Guinnes World Records that the coldest temperature ever measured on Earth was -89C in Siberia.

Hmmm, I stand corrected too, it seems. Not until now did I notice that the temperatures listed in the link I provided above, were given in Fahrenheit, not Celsius...  :-[



I just checked the Guinness World Records website, and strangely, I couldn't find any info on the coldest place on earth. This was the closest entry:
http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/content_pages/record.asp?recordid=53932

I was, however, able to find data from a source I think is pretty reliable:
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/YongLiLiang.shtml
According to all this, the coldest place on earth is actually Vostok Station, a russian research station in Antarctica.

I guess by now I'm pretty much the only one interested in this subject, so I'll leave it at rest now. Sorry, but I AM a bit of a nitpicker.  ::)

[quote author=VOiD
Profound_Darkness: The possibility for life-harbouring environments on Europa is, IMO, one of the most interesting questions that the world's space programmes are dealing with at the moment. They're currently designing probes that will melt their way through the ice caps, into what will hopefully be an ocean below, perhaps teeming with aquatic life. Am I the only one who's excited like a little kid about this?[/quote]

A few sad things on this direction.
1> there is a place on earth that was picked to test this spacecraft.  In the antarctic there is the posibility of a frozen over lake from around the time of the dinosaurs that may have geothermal energy.  It was decided not to send the probe there since there is too much of a chance of the probe bringing life from the surface down with it inside the ice that it must melt (as in bacteria cling to the spacecraft and then hang out in the melted water that the spacecraft must decend through).  Another thought for deployment was drill based but sterilizing the oil that is used to drill with is nigh imposible.

2> as of yet they haven't thought of a cheap + light + effective method of steralizing the outside and internals of a spacecraft so that we don't bring life from earth to europa.  There are bacteria that can remain dormant even in vacume and are shielded from other solar/cosmic radiations by the ships own shielding enough to possibly survive to Europa.

Between those it is likely to be a while (last I heard) before we send a spacecraft off, and then the orbits have to be right...

On the subject of sterilization, thanks to the life tests that were done on a martian spacecraft a while back (don't ask me which one, it's been a while) it was found that not only wasn't there life present but the martian soil has anti-life properties (read hydrogen peroxide).

on yet another aside, the amount of money dedicated to space exploration is a pretty sad thing... on the plus side the x-prise should be won shortly (if not already).  There is a private spacecraft which has all but succeeded at getting the x-prise. (last tidbit I heard was on a discovery HD mini-segment a couple of months agoe).

Well, yeah. Ever since we ventured off into space there have been problems. The issues of sterility is hard to resolve, especially since any object travelling through space is bombarded with particles all the time. If one was, for instance, to build such a lander/driller/watercraft in perfectly sterile conditions in a facility in space (to avoid bringing bacteria from Earth along), it would only be sterile until it was sent off.

But then, this is the sort of things the space program has to face all the time. I'm certain that the issue will be resolved in one way or another, perhaps not next year, but some time in the decades to come. I'm certainly not in a hurry. I'd rather they took their time than see the worst case scenario (craft lands, finds life, bacteria from earth kills off said life).


True. Now, not being an American, I confess I haven't really followed NASA spending very closely, but I suspect I am right in saying that they don't have the kind of means they had back in the mid-60s.

Already, other countries are looking to space. The ESA and the Russian space administration has been cooperating with NASA for years, but I'm looking forward to see what China can do, with their economic boom of late. With over a billion inhabitants, the work force is certainly in place, and they seem to have the vision necessary to make the plunge into space.

I'm just waiting for Bill Gates to buy the moon.


I don't remember the name of the book, sorry to say...I wish i did =/

heres another sad tidbit about recent space events; there was a proposal to go back to the moon, maned missions and all.  It was rejected because it was too expensive.  It turns out someone proposed re-using the saturn V (since it can carry what nearly 5 shuttles will in one blast off) but that was axed because the people felt that we should go to the moon with something new and going with the saturn V was seen as going backwards technologicaly.  Even though the saturn V was safer and carried larger payloads farther into space than the shuttle (and was cheaper to operate).  The reason for the proposal being too expensive was the cost of developing and deploying a new space vehical able to go to the moon.

(some interesting tidbits)...
The moon landings were due in large part a way to divert the public's attention from the bay of pigs (do I have that name right?) insident in Cuba (where the US tried to send former cubans back to Cuba in a coup attempt).

The reason the saturn V was retired was to keep the saturn V (all in all a better vehicle for long range/large payload missions) from competing with the new shuttle.

Lastly. the shuttle still runs on computers in the range of 8087, 8086 and 80286 processors (though I think some components/computers have gotten an update to 486).  The reason is mainly that complex microelectronics become unreliable, even in very high altitude of earth.



I too cannot wait to see what some other countries do with space.

Yeah, in 1961...i think...CIA funded about 1400 middle classed men in a complete fiasco of an uprising against Fidel Castro in Cuba The Bay Of Pigs)  It only made Kennedy look weak, and escalated the cold war, so they did this as a diversion. Exactly.

Wow, I actually used something I learnt at school!

I can't wait for the first extra-terrestial life samples brought back to earth from Europa. At first we are happy that our germs have not killed the Europa's bacteria, but when tables turn and we get a 'The dead walk' scenario here...

Naturally it would be cool to find life on Europa. AGAIN religions would have to re-think their ways. And mostly all the people who state clearly "There is no extra terrestial life, period." see the error of their ways and hopefully we will see mass-suicides.

It wouldn't surprise me if a large number of new religious factions were formed and mass-hysteria would start to spread all over the world. It would be cool.

And this is just for bacteria.
Imagine if they bring back a 15 Kg salmon. And it tastes good ;D

You're cold, cruel and vicious. I like it.  ;)

Until a real-life alien hits them on the head, it seems more likely to me that they would just pass it off as fake.

Much as some people are trying to do with the moon landings...
"It never happened, it's just a big conspiracy! All the 'photos' and 'footage' were done in a movie studio!"

That's actually true, I still got all the old stages in my basement. It's the same place were we did other classics such as "Chernobyl", "Communism" and "WW2"  :P

Not to mention the Holocaust, Three Mile Island, and Roswell.

lets also not forget the lessons of 911, operation desert storm, and war of the worlds. no wait, skip war of the worlds, that really happened :P

~DEFIANT

Jeeze, your all forgetting the biggest governent conspiracy of all!

America!

That said, I think it would be AWESOME if we could one up christianity yet again by proving that not only is the earth round, its also not the centre of the universe, and there IS other life around.

I don't think Jesus ever said anything about the existence of life on other worlds, or, indeed, if He was dying for their sins too...

... or if He did, the guys writing the Gospels didn't think it was important enough to write it down.

Just speaking from people I know personally, plenty of Christians find no conflict between the concept of extraterrestrial life and their religious doctrines.  If there are Christians who can't stand it, it's their problem, not Christianity's.  :)

Also, silly boy.  America exists.  It's DELAWARE and SOUTH DAKOTA that don't exist.

Sure, they show up on maps.  But have you noticed that all maps are made by cartographers?  What do they need to hide?

(Oh, and yeah, lightning is totally random, and firetrails aren't.  Both can eventually be defended against, and this is The Real Answer for both.)

Quite true, there isn't anything in christian faith that implies, let along spells out the existence (or lack there of) of other life in the universe.  There are people who have extended their beliefes to sugjest that their isn't however...

On the topic of maps: get a look at globes and maps made in america compared with other countries (particularly in the recent past).  The north american continent is WAY bigger than reality...

Um, there shouldn't *be* any difference on globes -- if there were the globe would be actively inaccurate in a way that would make keeping directions and such constant very difficult (and if you can't at least use the globe for seeing what direction something is from something else it's useless as a globe)..

On maps, yes, the size of the North American continent depends a lot on the projection used. I think it's silly to claim that this difference is because of local prejudice, though -- all projections of a 3-D globe onto a 2-D surface will involve some distortion. The old-fashioned Mercator projection that you're probably referring to (which was originally a *European*, not American invention) is useful because it maintains an absolutely undistorted relationship between north, south, east and west as two directional axes, allowing you to accurately navigate by compass bearings, even though it ignores the effects of there being a north pole and south pole.

In that one, yes, North America is much larger than it should be compared to South America, mainly because spreading a globe into a flat surface that way stretches things out immensely if they're closer to the poles, and North America is closer to the North Pole than South America is to the South Pole. I should note that northern Eurasia is similarly stretched, and the most obvious problem with the Mercator projection is that it makes Greenland look bigger than Australia (which it isn't). It's purely a mathematical result of the projection used, not some Greenland nationalists' desire to make Greenland look important.

The more modern projections (wherever you buy them) are usually picked because nowadays most maps are for educational purposes rather than being used as nautical charts, so some distortion of north, south, east and west is acceptable if the continents are more realistic in size. You'll notice that on most world maps that show size accurately, the directions are "bent"; the meridians curve, so that you can't just point upwards on the map and call it "north". That would be really inconvenient for a sailor, but it's the only way to accurately show the curved surface of the globe so that things don't get stretched out of shape when you draw them.

Woah...

Didn't it take the 1990s to make the papacy officially declare that the world was round?

heck, it took around 100 years for the NYT to print a correction for their assertion that Goddard's idea of 'rocket propulsion' was impossible because there was nothing to push against in space.

1992, to be exact, the year they finally found Galileo "not guilty"...
http://www.dslnorthwest.net/~danwilcox/galileo.html

Back to the topic's origin, a rookie question:

My "Point Defenses" don't work, at least i never saw them shoot or protect me... I have plenty of Shiva Furnaces, so what's wrong?

Have you tried firing them?  ::)

Your point defences are bound to your secondary key, you have to hold your secondary weapon button down to activate point defences.  These lasers are very very short range and you need a lot of point defense lasers to take out some of the heavier wieght projectiles in the game (though you may as well add more weapons to kill the ships fast instead).

A lot of Buddhist Sutras talk about life from "other worlds."  Literally.  We Buddhists have every base covered.  ::)

Remember, for point defense, you have to BUY it first, from the melnorme. Also, make sure you have enough energy to fire. (say a quarter full or so)

Otherwise, all you do when you press the secondary firing button is waste good finger energy... :P

My finger energy is wasted typing to you all, when I could be playing super-melee!...

I always just use the basic hellbore configuration, nothing gets even close.

Ok i got it... the Point Defenses only shoot if there's a target in range. You can't shoot at nothing just to test them.

Thanks anyway for your obvious replies ;D

And what is the basic hellbore config if I may ask?

2x Crew
1x super fuel
3x tracking
4x shiva
1x dynamo
2x hellbore (front 2 slots)

If I am missing something or have gone over, thats ok, because it's deadly whatever way you config it really.

I prefer my one-shot-kill configuration to the rapid-fire configuration you have here -- all four weapon slots loaded with Hellbores and only 3 shivas. It can be frustrating if you miss, but you rarely do, and on small ships you can kill them just by tapping the fire key once. Incredibly satisfying.

Deadlier if you go with 3x dynamo, 2x tracking (you really don't need 3 to hit most of the time).  Usually after that (the 2 hellbores in the front), you can devastate and push around both Ur-Quans like they're Umgahs.  Continuous rate of fire, bay-bee!

Well, I also like loading up on laser defense, infact, its very fun to kill a ship that way, hard yes, but very, very interesting....

I prefer my config because the side firers rarely wrap around enough to hit anything but close range.

My config doesn't get hit.

Hmm, I tend to have a laser defence in there (in place of a dynamo or shiva I think) 'cause I hate asteroids knocking me around.  And it's handy against some enemies that have weak main weapons.

Since I am exploring heavily right now (trying to fill out my database) my config is rather different, my lead ship can take out others rather easily but it's time consuming compared with the romp around the galaxy config there.

You don't need too, with that config, you have three extra slots free. I would fill it up with 2 dyamos and 1 laser defense.

After a full-immersion i've finished this great game. So, i'm no longer a rookie ;D
A couple of things i didn't understand though:
Why did the Urquan destroy all ancient human monuments when they shielded Earth?
When i finished the game, the Korah had already exterminated most of the races :-/. Is it because i was slow? Could they be saved somehow?

1) Kzer-Za doctrine mandates that all other alien races have their cultures completely restructured to absolutely respect Kzer-Za authority at the top of the Hierarchy. In order to do this, they suppress the original cultures of the species they enslave as much as practicality will allow, in order to destroy elements of racial pride and traditional social order that might manifest as a nationalist movement against the Kzer-Za. The practice is actually relatively common in real life among historical empires.

2) Yes, you were too slow. You should be able to stop the Doctrinal Conflict before the Kohr-Ah cleanse anyone at all.

That's not neccissarily a bad thing. It makes it a lot easier to obtain certain devices once everyone is dead. The first time I played UQM through, I just barely finished in the time window between the annihilation of all other races and the annihilation of myself. Tough cookies for them.