The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Having some experience studying deep physics since I was kid, it might be cool to have a general thread where people can discuss questions on advanced or hypothetical physics like quantum mechanics, relativity, extra universes and dimensions, things like that. I have a general knowledge in those areas so I can get this thread started if anyone wants to discuss something.

C'mon I'm trying to revive these forums and getting no support. If the fans can't make a real SC3, stardock will and if stardock doesn't do it well enough or in enough time, the fans will, plenty of stuff to be excited about, not to mention the various mods released here.

There's no need to "revive" the forum. If UQM becomes a hotter topic, the forum will be more active. If not, it will stay fairly quiet. There's nothing wrong with that.

Also, random discussions here aren't going to help Project 6014 in any way.

Well it definitely won't gain traction with that attitude. If you applied that philosophy to advertising you'd go bankrupt. Seek out people who played star control in the past, get them interested and explain there is both a fan made and star-dock made version in the works.
In addition to that, having more traffic will in turn increase the likelihood of someone coming here who can actually help. A lot of people have misconceptions about abstract physics with few reliable resources (pop science shows are NOT reliable) so it might help, and it's not random as abstract physics is used plenty of times throughout the star control series.
Oh yeah and then even on top of that I contacted stardock about having some kind of community participation with the dedicated fans and directed them to this website, so if that gains traction they can advertise this site on their site when explaining the history of SC2 and the fan made version.

Star Dock has already posted on this forum several times. They even recommended this site in a couple recent interviews.

But everyone appreciates the enthusiasm. :-) This was one of the greatest games of all time, and deserves more attention.

Wow even many members aren't eager to see it revived. Maybe it's a lost cause after all...like star control....which then ended up getting revived...

Calling it a lost cause after a single day of thread and not even a single negative comment? Someone is a pessimist here.
And, how is revival of the franchise relevant in physic thread and vice versa?

On topic - were there any significant developments recently with the Alcubierre drive?

I did say it could still be revived, and it's sometimes good to be pessimist because then you only have optimism to gain.
As per the drive, the Alcubierre was a clever idea but negative mass has not been discovered to actually exist. On top of that it really isn't possible for it to exist in the current Higg's model because that would require a somehow negative amount of Higg's bosons in a any region of space. There is however the possibility of some kind of warp drive which NASA has taken interest in after miniaturizing the technology from a Jupiter's worth of mass of exotic matter to only a few tons. It would be different than Alcubierre's drive because it would in effect use exotic matter (which I expect is degenerate matter or black holes but don't now for sure because they didn't specify) to use a 4 dimensional distortion in Einstein space to cut the distance between the ship and the next point in Euclidean space which could theoretically allow the ship to ignore the effects of time dilation and length contraction. Such a device would definitely need a lot more research but there is hope it can be constructed in enough time to make firefly come true if we can figure out how to better manipulate gravity without such massive amounts of energy. The problem with creating small black holes using a particle accelerator is first, the density isn't enough, and second even with two railguns pointed at each other the mass of the black hole would be so small that the Hawking radiation would cause it to evaporate almost instantly, not that we would want stable black holes wondering about Earth anyway.
The jump drive on the other hand is a completely different alternative that has very little progress made, the most we can for-see being possibly is a type of "star gate", which is still hundreds of years away from the knowledge we have today. One way it would work is by of course bending space with 5 dimensional curvature to make two separate space-time coordinates occupy the same coordinates. Another alternative which seems similar but is actually different is to use the manipulation of higher dimensions to create a correlation between the probabilistic locations of the tiny mani-folds of space which would flex in a way to create a probability portal, or a location at which the probability of space existing would correspond with two different space-time coordinates. A third way to modify this would be to change the probability field of matter rather than the manifolds of space to create a correlation of the ship into another coordinate instantaneously. It shouldn't be much different than what you're experience already as matter already goes through phases of probabilistic oscillation, the problem would be getting enough energy to do it, controlling the location, and then keeping the general structure of everything the same.

The alternatives to the Alcubierre sound to require even more energy. Have any estimates been made to it?

Lets just say you'd need to multiply the energy used in the large Hadron Collider by at least a million.

That's just six orders of magnitude, still manageable. I have a feeling it would require significantly more than that.

Well a full capacity railgun requires an entire city's electrical supply to operate once. If it's possible to create black holes by slamming pieces of matter into each other, we'd need more than the LHC to collide mere individual particles, we'd need more dense pieces of metal which have at least 10^24 atoms, and that's just the amount of atoms in a cubic centimeter of sponge and even that probably wouldn't be enough because of the hawking radiation effect. I could have sworn a calculation I did a while ago showed that the Earth would only create a black hole with a schwarzschild radius of less than a couple inches.
But anyway, a solid black hole itself isn't what we would need, we would need to in effect create a gravitational well in-front of us to distort Einstein space and somehow ignore it's effects so we could proceed to the next point in Euclidean space. A really deep gravitational well like the one at Sagittarius A would take at least a week to completely fall down, if we could somehow just pass over it unaffected, we would basically just be treating space as though an object in front of us past the gravity-well was closer.

Hoooooold on just a second now. Take a step back. What, exactly, do you think you need to revive a forum? What happens when new people turn up, right now? What do they see? They see a hell of a lot of topics by you, and let's look at what they find in them. You're spouting apparently random suggestions at nothing at all, accusing a non-human character of being a racist stereotype, being generally thoroughly antagonistic, posting walls of text with no concern given to readability - pity the common comma! - and you're doing it EVERYWHERE, throwing out new topics with reckless abandon and no concern for whether a new thread is even necessary. You are not a good poster, and I think you should probably stop.

The fact that you can see so many of my topics or posts at once just proves my point that this site could definitely use more traffic or returns, because if there were more posters or more people starting topics you wouldn't be able to see so much of what I posted, and not only that but I've been on this forum for a long time under a couple different names that I completely forgot the email and password to and even a year ago this website was rather slow. And then thirdly none of my suggestions are "random", in fact true randomness can't even exist in any macroscopic system and only exists at an atomic scale. My suggestions are various inconsistencies I gathered over time that I meant to suggest earlier over a larger span of time that I forgot about until recently. There's probably still more I forgot about and haven't brought up yet. If you don't like my posts, you don't have to read them, even I do that with people some times.

I would rather have a slow forum than a garbage heap.

Kohr-Ah Primat was superb at revival - she necroposted into all sorts of old discussions, and added new insights each time.

That's a good model. Find some old discussion, see if you have anything to add to it, and if you do, then add it. If you don't, don't.

I'm pretty sure I went into detail for all of my posts, my guess is that no one actually cares about the fact that I put out highly detailed content but is just tired of seeing my posts. If you don't like seeing my posts then post yourself, because the only reason I post so much is because i don't see any others posting.

My username on the old SCDB (http://www.star-control.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=8cf2b2e941569c419d0c61f8211c6fa1&) was "Jaychant". Look for my posts there (it's a little hard because I deleted my account a couple times) and notice that I had the exact same idea as you have now. Then look at the new SCDB (http://www.star-control.com/community/), which I've heard is more lively now (and quick observation seems to confirm this).

Just let the forum lay dormant or get active again on its own. If you don't like it, you can go to another forum that's more active.

Yeah but I'm part of the forum, so isn't part of the forum becoming more active my incessant posting? Besides I don't plan on starting any new topics for a while, I just have to wait for these current ones to die down.

You're just overestimating both the importance of "reviving" this forum and the role you need to play in doing so.

To be honest after 2 years it finally seems like all it took was a bunch of posting to annoy people into posting more themselves.

I doubt that's what you were trying to do (you seem to me to be more the immature type than the malicious type), but if it was, you would have been trolling. Annoying people is not a good way to start intelligent, interesting conversations.

Quality over quantity.

I don't think any of the recent posts could be considered "trolling" as I didn't actually insult anyone. At most it would be spamming, and I was in fact trying to post a lot so people would have a variety of things to respond to, the annoyingness I guess is just an inevitable result of that. And if you'll notice I did make a good attempt to explain the different interstellar drives and people are still free to discuss complex physics. I also said I wouldn't start any more topics for a while  and that I was merely waiting for the current ones to die down so other people's posts can actually show up.

As I said, I don't think you were trolling, but you seem to understand that what you are doing is annoying. I'm just saying that's not going to cause intelligent discussions to crop up.

There's no need for you do do anything to make this forum more active. Just let it be as active or inactive as it is.

I suppose I went overboard but I'd like the think the discussions on interstellar drives and degenerate matter was intelligent enough.

Death's is generally a good model, but I propose a revision. Since you're so bad at working out whether you have anything to add, try this method.

Find some old discussion, see if you have anything to add to it, and if you do, then add it. If you don't, don't.

Or I'll just ignore that and add stuff that seems like its worth adding. Besides I said I wasn't going to start any more topics for a while, at least on this site.