The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I was just thinking here. I know the precursor vessel is a good deal larger than every other ship but do you really expect me to believe that it can fit 12 capital ships in its skinny hull? And if it's not actually stuffing escorts inside it, why do I not have to pay additional fuel for my support team?

The reason I even bothered to post a question like this--one which I'd normally dismiss as unnecessary--is that it got me thinking about a possible modification to the game. Or in the case of a Star Control sequel, something worth taking a look at. What if the flagship was limited by two escorts at the start of the game, and had to find upgrades that allowed it to ferry more buddies through hyperspace?

Well, if the other ships in some way or another "tag along" (either to the outside or to the inside) of the vindicator, it will STILL need extra fuel (since the total mass of the whole "complex" increased, and more mass means more fuel needed)..

However, we don't know hyperspace travel and fuel consumption algorithms at all, so we don't really know..

One maybe more likely situation, is that the captain has a contract with the buddy ship's crew, that they pay for their own fuel. After all, they get money from you, maybe the starbase, and ofcourse they get protection and great adventures from you..

And ofcourse the argument that wins it all: "Err.. What about the crew dieing when you hit them with your little Shofixti dart???" :P

I think we can assume that the cost of travel in hyperspace is "flat-rate". It's no different for a vindicator with nothing but a fuel tank and a vindicator armed to the teeth with hellbore cannons and shiva furnaces, nor is it different for a lone vindicator than it is for a vindicator with a full flotilla of escorts.

So, here's my fancruft theory:
the cost is incurred by the projection of the "bubble"/gravity well in hyperspace that the vindicator travels. It costs to move this bubble, but it doesn't really cost to expand it, or it's large enough that it never has to be expanded.

I think either Halleck's theory is correct, or the ships do sit inside the hull (or maybe docked to the outside.) Especially if you go with arne's interpretation that a cruiser is only 30 meters long, or a skiff is 10 meters. These sizes take up nothing when compared to the scale of the MK1 in the intro, with all the ant-sized people standing around it.

I always thought that ships are not inside the Vindicator, but are just hanging near the main ship in the hyperspace "bubble", maybe even attached to the Vindicator by some-kind-of-a-gravity-generator or etc.

If you watch bicycling races you'll see that people often glide behind the leader, there's a little 'suck' there. Since the leader doesn't have this it's unpopular to be the leader, sometimes a whole caravan of people will just slow to a crawl cuz on one wants to go ahead and pull.

A similar thing happens with boats. I kayak a bit. If you get behind a boat you can surf on it's wake, it's essentially a perpetual downhill so you can just sit there going like 10 knots or so. The wake is there anyways so it doesn't cost the boat anything.

I'll say the bad word again:

In SC3 there are some movies which clearly show that the escort ships fly with the mothership instead of being docked. Of course the mothership in SC3 doesn't fly in Hyperspace though.

This effect also happens with birds, that's why they fly in "V" formations. It's all to save energy.

So, I think having other vessels ride on the vindicator's "hyperspace wake" would be pretty logical.

Also, we know that impulse drives are used for hyperspace propulision, since getting more "antimat thrusters" for the vindy makes you go faster in truespace and in hyperspace. So, the ships could be thrusting with their impulse drives to keep pace.

Okay kids, you know that works on Earth because there's matter that causes resistance right? The object or person in the lead is "breaking" this resistance down a bit for whatever's immediately behind him. But space is vacuum, so I doubt tail-gating the ship in front of you makes flight any easier.

This is hyperspace, not truespace; the rules are different.

For instance, you need to constantly thrust or you come to a stop. That's friction. In hyperspace!

This is, of course, not the case in sc2 truespace or in real-life space. So, I don't think we should be making any assumptions one way or the other about the rules of hyperspace other than what we can deduce from the game.

Remember also that the Mark I is a Precursor tug.  It might be designed to drag a large ship (or multiple small ones) through HS.

Some data:
- There are 12 slots.
- Size of the escort is irrelevant to this. A slot cannot contain 2 scouts, even if you could fit 6 scouts in the space occupied by 1 Avatar.
- Modules are irrelevant to this.
- Fuel use is independent of escorts.
- Speed is independent of escorts -- slower escorts are dragged along at the Vindy's speed.
- While the Vindicator is much larger than other ships, its frame is too thin to accommodate escorts within it.

Conclusion:
- There are 12  discrete locations in which ships can be berthed. These could be docking to external ports, or something to do with the Hyperspace field.

Supposition:
The 12 berths are vortices in the Vindy's hyperspace field. Ships can only travel with it if their hyperspace engines are nestled within these vortices (that is, some of the ship can extend outside... which is how an avatar can fit while 2 scouts cannot).

Wild speculation:
These berths are arranged in a dodecahedron.


Idea:
In a 'difficult mode' extension to UQM, the default escort capacity could be 8, upgradeable to 12 if you bought a special engine module. This would of course make you just a little bit slower...

How do they cram 12 ships onto the Vindicator?

Three words: "It's a game."

If you guys want to fit it into "reality" you've got bigger problems than 12 ships in a hyperspace bubble..

Why does the enemy always attack one ship at a time? Why are there asteroids and planets out in the middle of nowhere when dropping from hyperspace? Why can't I explore a solar system quicker by splitting up my fleet? etc.

;)

Oh and one more thing.. When birds fly in a "V", or nascars tailgate one another it's called drafting. I do it when on a long highway trip. Pull behind a big rig, set the cruise control and relax. The trucker is litterally plowing through the air and providing less drag on my car. It actually does save a bit on fuel economy.

Perhaps hyperspace is full of nebulea dust and the big precursor ship is plowing the way?.. ;D

Sounds cool... as long as you don't wind up getting crushed because you're in his blind spot.  ;D

The way I always imagined Hyperspace working was that it was another, much younger universe -- still red-hot and much smaller than ours because it wasn't that long after the Big Bang.  You don't really travel any faster there, but space is much smaller, so a few meters in HyperSpace can translate into a million meters in TrueSpace.  QuasiSpace is even faster, and green, because it's even younger and therefore smaller and hotter.  And that's why HyperSpace is full of all those weird bursts and whirly bits: it's chunks of matter forming and breaking apart in a high-energy environment.  Anyway, that's why you have drag in HyperSpace: all the matter in the universe is crammed into a fairly small space, and therefore relatively dense.

All of that is, of course, completely made up by yours truly.

Anyway, I always thought the twelve ships were because it's a Precursor tug, and it's pulling them along with some kind of tractor-beamy thing (much weaker than the Chmmr beam, so it's not useful in combat).  There's a limit of 12 because it only has twelve beams, and you need one per ship, no matter what size the ship is.

Sounds reasonable within frame of SC thinking. :)

also its possible that the tug has 12 zero point space generators. basically the ship is turned into a null state in which it only exist as data or exist elsewhere until retreaved. It would be a variation and in some sense the inverse of zero point energy. 8)

In astrophysics, it is often useful to use the Lagrangian formalism. And the fundamental principle of Lagrangian mechanics is that you should minimise bS.

Oh, wait, that was dS.

The point stands.

You really hate zero point energy, don't you? :)

I don't like people making up stuff and cloaking it in technobabble. I don't mind people asking questions about these things.

ZPE just happened to be convenient to these people. As have Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the Pauli exclusion principle, the classically forbidden region, and others.

But you can't have science-fiction magic without techno-babble.  Naming magic with completely new words doesn't work well because they're unfamiliar.  SF is rife with people using "wormholes" to transport items whole sans adverse effects, using hyper or sub space for travel (psuedo scientific uses of higher dimensional theory), grey goo (nanites run-amok), and time machines that allow disruption of causality.   ;)

There's a difference between clear, understandable (at least relatively) explanations for elements of a hard sci-fi story, and just using five dollar words to confuse people so they don't ask questions.

That is, of course, for hard science fiction. I wish people would stop assuming all sf is "based on reality", and thus it's some kind of crime to use fantastical technology. It's not. Please stop calling Star Trek on warp technology. PLEASE.

That wasn't really to anyone in this thread. I agree, ZPE is the latest magical buzzword so people can have their characters fly across the universe in two seconds and still pretend they're writing a hard sf story.

My earlier statement was incorrectly phrased. I said,
"I don't like people making up stuff and cloaking it in technobabble"

I meant,
"I don't like people making up stuff and trying to explain it with things that we already know perfectly well how they work, and it doesn't do that; as opposed to trying to explain it with things about which we do not have knowledge."

It'd be like someone trying to explain a science-fiction-y propulsion system by using an analogy with the way a kid moves the shopping cart he's stuck in. The kid is exploiting the rolling friction of the wheels. No such effect exists in space.

The other option is, of course, not to say how it works. That is the route that SC took, and it works fine.

Well, fine until someone asks a question about it. Then you get all kinds of wild speculation, see: This thread. ;)

What's wrong with getting "geeky" about our favorite games? All in fun dude, relax..

Get geeky. Don't get geeky badly.

People discussing properties of hyperspace bubbles, creating theories about alien service starships, using words like "Hyperspace", "Zero Point Energy", all this under a thick layer of technobabble... is there anything this game can't do?

Trouble is, with theoretical science, there is often few people who understand it well, and understandings are often temporary. You might base a book, game, movie or series off of one technology, only to find that quantum physicists later decide that it is no longer a viable possibility. Space warping to the nearest star requires as much energy as the sun will burns in its lifetime, worm-holes cannot exist, zero point energy is not harvestable, dark energy is just a property of space/gravity, etc. Soon nothing will be possible! :'(



That's actually an excellent solution, and one of my favorites.



Actually, the Star Control series, like its Starflight predecessor, says that interstellar travel is made possible by passage through "Hyperspace."

Is Hyperspace travel a viable possibility in modern theoretical physics (I really do not know, I am just asking?)

Explanation attempt 1:  Let's assume the reason there is drag is that there is some opposing force to the MASS of your fleet.  In this, I would say fuel economy is conserved because your twelve escorts have much less mass than the Vindicator. 

Of course, this may not be true, and you can adjust the modules (and therefore mass) of your ship and not get differing fuel econ (other than additional thrusters).

Explanation attempt 2:  If mass varies and fuel econ doesn't change, but changes when thrust does, what's the other factor?  The only thing I can currently think of is the size of your hyperspace 'bubble.' 

Let's assume that when you push into hyperspace, you have a sort of 'hyperspace field' around your ship, like Star Trek's warp field.  If this is what causes fuel to be expended, then you can excuse the 12 ships by assuming the bubble you project is large enough to contain them all.

This is the more sensible explanation, as your thrusters (appear to) give identical thrust in realspace or hyperspace.  At the very least, they are useable in both spaces and have similar effect;  So, the fuel expended is to power some sort of hyperspace generator.

Of course, you don't exit hyperspace when you stop expending fuel, but this is not exclusive of the idea above.  One could use a 'hyperspace generator' to 'push' or 'move' or both.  The idea here is that it is required for both.

Edit:  I just started a new game and there's something pertinent to this thread in what Hayes has to tell you about fuel.  To probably misquote but hopefully carry the meaning of the message through, he says that since your ship is so big, the Vindicator requires massive amounts of fuel.  This implies that a 'normal' ship that isn't capable of carrying hundreds of people has far, far greater fuel efficency, and this in turn gives a reason as to why one's escorts don't require additional fuel;  They truly are small fry.  Though deadly, majestic small fry.