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Kristopher

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Posts posted by Kristopher

  3. Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

     

    Ummmm' date=' not to put too fine a point on it, there are plenty of things in physics that appear to be just goofy to the layman, but that's just because they are outside of common experience. The technical term for this is Naïve physics. In that link, note that at the end of the examples there is a note about the hard death of absolute simultaneity, which is at the heart of your question.

     

    See that chair? Looks solid, doesn't it? You can sit on it and everything. But on the subatomic level, the chair is 99.999% empty space. Isn't that just goofy?

     

    Nope, not really that goofy, it's simply a matter of the electrical repulsion of trillions of atoms, IIRC.

     

    Here is a sledge hammer. Here on Earth' date=' it weighs sixteen pounds. And it takes sixteen pounds of force to swing it. On the Moon, it weighs only about 3 pounds. But it still takes sixteen pounds of force to swing it. Isn't that just goofy?[/quote']

     

    Nope, not really gooy, force and inertia are a matter of mass, not weight.

     

    Here is a huge bolder and a tiny pebble. The bolder should drop faster than the pebble' date=' since it is heavier. But that clown Galileo proved that both fall at the same rate. Isn't that just goofy?[/quote']

     

    Not really. (Way way back as a kid, my first thought upon learning that was that the force of gravity depends on the mass, but the higher the mass, the more force is required to accelerate the body at the same rate.)

     

    The sun rises in the morning' date=' moves overhead, then sinks at sunset. Obviously it moves around the flat earth. But no, the earth moves around the sun. Isn't that just goofy?[/quote']

     

    Not really.

  5. Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

     

    "Appears"???

     

    What phrasing should I have used that wouldn't have taken up three more lines and wouldn't have draw a different nitpicky response, that would have summed up that fact that the motion of both the source and the "observer" have to be taken into account for Doppler shift of light or sound, while not obscuring the main point that Doppler shift and Relativity aren't the same phenomenon?

  6. Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

     

    The light hits the front of the train first.

    The light hits the front of the train and the back of the train at the same time.

    The light hits the back of the train first.

     

    All of these are true; which version is true depends on the observer's motion relative to the train.

     

    I really don't know how to put it more plainly than that.

     

    Yeah, I get what you're saying, I've gotten that all along.

     

    What I've been saying is, how the hell?

     

    The light appearing to do something different, I can accept. The light actually, physically doing all three and more? No, that's just goofy.

     

    And I don't know how to put it more plainly than that.

  7. Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

     

    Leaded candidate for the first story arc is as follows:

     

    First, the background. Through deceit and double-dealing, rogue elements of four factions, each for their own reasons, were lead to create a "synthoid" (artificial person) navigator -- Perfectionists (humans dedicated to the controlled genetic advancement of the species), Sinvat-hoc (alien species who mastered their own genetics to the point that all members of the species are created to serve specialized role), Dewin (alien species who almost all possess at least a minor "touched gift"), and android representatives of the former robot slaves of the Propiet warrior culture. None of the factions understood what the others actually hoped to get out of the experiment.

     

    Of course, there was a quadruple-cross (at least), and the synthoid navigator and the ship she was being shipped on disappeared.

     

    The player characters come in when they're hired to locate the ship, "all expenses paid", by one of the factions. Of course, they're not going to be told what they're looking for, but instead they'll be fed a story about a kidnapping or something.

     

    As they follow leads, they're going to realize that someone has covertly installed a sort of beacon into their ship in such a way that they'll need a "spacedock" and probably a dim-drive engineer, to remove it without causing a lot of damage to the ship's dim-drive (which is what generates the field that allows the ship to enter otherspace and thus make FTL transits). This is going to link them up with the eccentric NPC who will become their ship's mechanic, hopefully.

     

    When they finally find the ship they're looking for, it's wrecked and dead in space, having been fired on at exactrly the wrong moment as it made an otherspace transit. The crew is dead and the systems ruined. Luckily, the sythoid navigator is still in hybernation in her chamber, and a few other strange items can be recovered from the ship as well, including some kind of experimental biocomputer mainframe.

     

    The synthoid navigator is actually mindlinked into the biocomputer mainframe. Even with data and samples from the Dewin to work with, the Perfectionist and Sinvat-hoc scientists had trouble creating an artificial Navigator, and neither the experimental biocomputer nor the sythoid is capable of functioning as a Navigator alone.

     

    As noted, the PCs (and crew if any) don't know any of the truth of this, and as far as they know they've rescued a kidnapped young woman and salvaged some strange technology. And that's when the fun really begins...

     

    PS: The PCs are told that the young woman's name is "Anna". On the hybernation chamber, the readout says "Anesidora". :sneaky:

  12. Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

     

    The question I'm asking has nothing to do with limited experience or brain evolution or common sense or intuition or anything of the sort.

     

    Does the light, itself, physically hit the ends of the train car at the same time, or not? Pick one.

     

    I'm not asking what someone on the platform would see, I'm not asking what someone on the train would see. I'm asking about what the light does.

  14. Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

     

    Well, actually, you can. The whole basis of Relativity is that the only constant is the speed of light. Everything else folows from that. Whether you're moving at a snail's pace or at .99C, you will still see light moving at lightspeed. Since the only way that can work mathematically is if the speed of passage of time changes with (meaningful) changes in your velocity, you get time dilation effects. And redshifts in light coming from distant galaxies that are moving away from us at large fractions of C.

     

    Your intuitions about constancy (an "objective" universe) are based on a brain which evolved in a single frame of reference, where nothing ever moved at more than an incredibly tiny fraction of the speed of light, so relativity effects were negligible. Questions of simultaneity don't arise because everyone and everything on earth is in the same frame of reference. Newton's laws of gravity aren't exactly right, but they're close enough to right to be useful, just like our intuitions about simultaneity and the like are good enough for a single frame of reference. But when you start working with velocities and forces at the levels Relativity is concerned with...they're not.

     

    However much it offends one's sense of reality, Relativity works. There are real-world, practical problems that can only be adequately addressed if Relativity is taken into effect (the timing of GPS satellite signals, for one). Even if Relativity is eventually superceded by another theory, that theory will have to explain everything Relativity explained, just like Relativity had to adequately cover Newtonian physics (and answered some of hte questions Newton's theory couldn't, like the known but inexplicable issues with Mercury's orbit around the sun).

     

    The universe IS objective--but some of the standards we take for granted on a daily basis (simultaneity, constant rate of time, etc.) aren't, in fact, actually fixed. They can change, based on other criteria. (It's kind of like having a Platonic yardstick that is always exactly a yard long...unless forces beyond anything we could ever hope to apply are applied, in which case it will stretch or contract. For all practical purposes that yardstick is always exactly a yard long. Under the ight circumstances, however, it isn't.)

     

    Fine, fine. I'm not saying anything about the GPS signals or any other experiements. Obviously, there's a lot of confirmation there.

     

    But the idea that the light in the train thought experiment can actually, physically strike the ends of the train car both simultaneously and at different times is nonsense.

  15. Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

     

    That's right' date=' it's a different experiment. (And I never said otherwise.) However, it stands as a demonstration of relativity, as observers in different reference frames will see the same phenomenon in different ways. And both sets of measurements will be equally valid.[/quote']

     

    How is Doppler shift a demonstration of relativity? It's a demonstration that the wave (or wave-like phenomenon) appears compressed or stretched by the motion of the source and/or the "observer", not a demontration of Special or General Relativity. Not all things that are relative are part of Relativity.

  18. "Tightening the Curve" on damage

    in HERO System Discussion

    Posted

    Re: "Tightening the Curve" on damage

     

    By my calculations, the odds of getting 12 BOD on 6d6 are less than 1 in 46,000.

     

    Is that unlikely enough for you?

     

    The odds of getting that same 12 BOD with a 2d6 Killing Attack are 1 in 36.

     

    Lucius Alexander

     

    The palindromedary checked the math

     

    Thanks.

     

    OK... I don't do odds enough to always recall the correct math, I was waffling back and forth between 6*6, and 6^6, as I was posting that. Good to know.

     

    Yeah, 1 in 46656 is rare enough for me.

  20. Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

     

    As part of forgoing the urge to stat up everything, I've decided to play the AI/remote NPC out based purely on the special effect for now. If it becomes necessary to stat it up for some reason, I'll have to come back to it.

     

     

    Meanwhile, with the first session coming up, I only have the two players, as the others were all too busy in the coming months to make the sessions on a regular basis.

     

    One is playing a somewhat-noir PI, who is a former member of the space forces military police of his homeworld and has a bioenhanced sense of smell. The other is playing a burned-out former prodigy with a prodigious gift for navigating otherspace, who sees otherspace in mathematical terms from what the player has told me.

     

    I'm working on getting them into a story arc and together in the first session. For possible plot seeds so far, I have the following, some of them shamelessly "inspired by" other sources in fiction:

     

    • A special delivery to the private world or station of an eccentric, wealthy person -- unknown to them, they have a stowaway who is trying to find and kill said person.
    • A job to sneak onto a quarantined planet and recover something, and then get out without being detected, or at least without their ship being IDed.
    • A job to find someone's "missing relative", but their employer is actually someone seeking to do the missing person harm.
    • A job to rescue someone's teenage child from some fringe group, only they're not told the kid went willingly.
    • Trying to recover an artifact that only a highly skilled navigator or other "touched" person can open/access.
    • Hired to do something in the territory of one government that their another government can't be directly linked with.
    • Somehow discovering that one faction of the "robot horde" (former slaves of the now-shattered Propiet "warrior species") is kidnapping Navigators to use as the cores of "otherspace navigation biocomputers"

     

    Neither of them has much at all in the way of engineering/advanced technical skills, so I'm hoping to hook them up with a particular NPC along the way, as well, who might be almost more trouble than she's worth. I have to do one more solo character creation session with each of them, but I'm pretty sure the burned-out navigator is going to have a ship of his own.

     

    Any ideas or thoughts?

  23. "Tightening the Curve" on damage

    in HERO System Discussion

    Posted

    Re: "Tightening the Curve" on damage

     

    If you want to normalize the damage of Killing Attacks, how about doing just that -"Normalize" the damage?

     

    Instead of a 2d6 Killing, make it 6d6 Normal.

     

    Now the BOD damage ranges from 0 to 12, but will tend to cluster a lot more around the average.

     

    Lucius Alexander

     

    Looking for an average palindromedary

     

    If it's done as normal damage, then the character's non-resistant PD and ED apply. Trying to think of how that will affect things.

  24. "Tightening the Curve" on damage

    in HERO System Discussion

    Posted

    Re: "Tightening the Curve" on damage

     

    Mostly defenses with effects based limitations on when they apply.

     

    One example is on the character sheet I posted in the thread about character sheets being one column in 12 point type ("Hard Bitten").

     

    I'm not sure how much I can post without giving away the books for free...

     

    Other examples are:

     

    cinematic safety, which is hefty damage reduction that applies only when doing crazy insane cinematic stunts

    tough as nails, which is damage reduction based on CON rolls

    nobody could survive that, large amounts of luck dice only to avoid certain death and requiring a tortuous cinematic explanation for why the character isn't toast

     

    "Lets first damage through, applies last" -- means that at least 1 BODY gets through, and the Def from the talent applies after all other defenses?

  25. "Tightening the Curve" on damage

    in HERO System Discussion

    Posted

    Re: "Tightening the Curve" on damage

     

    The simplest way is to use hit locations and some talents and armor. When you are operating with under 8DCs on average a little bit of defense can go a long way' date=' esp. if the talents are constructed properly. Both DC and Pulp Hero have some good options to reduce lethality for headlining protagonists and antagonists. I think this is probably the best approach. Another would be to implement standard effects beyond X-DC and use hit locations, but this is still more random than the talent method.[/quote']

     

    Armor is a given in the setting. Fabrics exist that could give completely normal-seeming clothing 3 rPD/rED.

     

    I don't have DC or Pulp. What sort of talents are you thinking of, and how do the address, say, the 2-12 result on a 2d6 RKA?

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