ajackson

Re: Looking for a technobabble Term

Do you know something I don't know about the intentions of the people involved?

I have the ability to read. The purpose of the mission is technology acquisition, not knowledge of ancient civilization.

Re: Looking for a technobabble Term

I'm writing an adventure that involves an expedition to an abandoned outpost of a galactic civilization. Their mission is to find the remnants of that civilization and then reverse-engineer their technology from what they find. What do you call their discipline' date=' and what are its ethical implications?[/quote']

Given that the intent is profit rather than academic knowledge, we call that discipline 'looting'. Ethical implications depends on whether 'legitimate' owners exist.

Re: Solar Systems Like Ours in the Minority

Maybe those system without gas giants have smaller rocky planets that we just can't see.

The problem is more those systems with gas giants that are either within the life zone, or inside the life zone; modeling strongly suggests that the presence of an inner system gas giant makes rocky planets in the life zone vanishingly unlikely.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

I believe that may be the right answer' date=' I'm just unclear why it would be. What's unique about the wormhole?[/quote']

Nothing much. In general, if you have two events occurring outside of one another's light-cones, observers in different reference frames will disagree on the order in which those events occur.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

From the frame of reference of the train car, the two beams meet at the wormhole itself, right? (Assuming the interior of the wormhole is a trivial length.) Because in that frame of reference, the two beams strike the ends of the car simultaneously, and the wormhole mouths are at the ends.

 

From the platform, though, the rear-facing beam hits its wormhole mouth before the front-facing beam. Do the beams therefore collide somewhere in the front half of the car?

I am quite uncertain how your experiment is supposed to be structured, but all observers will agree where the beams collide, they will just disagree on the length of time it takes to pass through the wormhole.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

Here's a question for the group: Make a wormhole. Put one mouth at one end of the train car and the other mouth at the other end. Run the experiment. Where do the two beams of light meet?

Well, if the wormhole isn't involved in the experiment, it has no effect. If we assume the wormhole is involved (i.e. we have a single generator and send one beam through the wormhole), travel through the wormhole is instant with respect to the reference frame of the wormhole. Since the wormholes are in the train and moving at the same speed as the train, that is the same as the reference frame of the train, and the two beams of light meet in the middle of the car (all observers will agree on where they meet, though many observers will claim that transit through the wormhole took non-zero and possibly negative time).

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

What I've been trying to dig down to' date=' and asking the wrong question in some posts, is whether the train car is moving or stationary with regard to the motion of the photons from the flash.[/quote']

Depends what reference frame you're answering the question in.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

Question: if wormholes would really work this way' date=' and it's theoretically possible to do this, does that mean that we are already living in a universe where causality is only a convenient general guideline?[/quote']

Well, if we knew of a way to create traversible wormholes (all solutions I'm aware of involve negative energy densities, and as far as we know negative energy densities are not actually possible), maybe. There are arguments that a wormhole network with a closed timelike curve would collapse in on itself due to virtual particle formation.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

I should point out that String Theory is the new combination of GR and Quantum Theory. But even so - travelling at relatavistic speeds falls under GR not QT' date=' whereas Entanglement is definitely QT. So the question is best answered in String Theory which covers both.[/quote']

Doesn't matter; standard QM says that entanglement cannot carry data. Incidentally, there's no theory that lets you have GR, FTL travel, and causality (i.e. no time travel); the least disruptive solution is usually to discard GR by adding a privileged reference frame, in which case your FTL comms will not result in messages from the future.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

Thanks! I'm strongly leaning towards traversable wormholes as the special effect for FTL travel in this campaign' date=' so perhaps I should also look at a variation of that for FTL communications as well[/quote']

Why bother? You can just use conventional communications methods through your transport wormholes.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

Okay, the physics-savvy answer is that instantaneous communication is a nonsensical concept within the framework of general relativity, because simultaneity is not well-defined under GR, and in any case entangled particles cannot be used to transmit data. Thus, the answer cannot be clearly defined. If you have an option that actually allows data transport (for example, the two ends of a wormhole), the answer is yes, it sends messages to/from the future.

Re: First Known Binary Star Is Discovered to Be a Triplet, Quadruplet, Quintuplet, Se

years/decades to Mizar from Alcor.

More than that. The separation is at least a quarter of a light year; with current tech we're talking millennia.

Re: Another Way to Destroy a Planet: the Strange Matter Bomb

In short' date=' it would probably have to be artificially induced.[/quote']

What happens when a cosmic ray hits atmosphere? A collision. Strangelets wouldn't be present in cosmic rays, but they would be generated by cosmic rays impacting the earth.

Re: Another Way to Destroy a Planet: the Strange Matter Bomb

Yes' date=' we can be reasonably certain this doesn't occur naturally...[/quote']

No, we can be reasonably sure that strangelets are not stable under the conditions present on Earth, because they would be formed by cosmic rays (we can't quite rule out strange stars, but they're nearly indistinguishable from neutron stars and form under the same conditions, so we don't much care). Thus, manufacturing of strangelets isn't useful.

Re: Another Way to Destroy a Planet: the Strange Matter Bomb

If this were a real threat, strangelets generated by random cosmic rays would have already converted the Earth to a chunk of strange matter.

Re: Quantum Propulsion Machine May Lead To Propulsion Without Change In Mass

Photon drive, most likely. Pretty much anything that looks like a reactionless drive actually either doesn't do anything, or functions like a photon drive (in which case it also doesn't do anything unless you have an incredibly sensitive detector).

Re: Weapon Speeds and Casting Times

You can also just muck with the basic rules: eliminate the speed stat, and make speed a feature of powers. This doesn't work well with the speed chart (since the rules for changing spd score are messy), but it can work with variants. For example:

Racetrack System: create a 'racetrack' with some large number of boxes and a marker for each character (including NPCs). When you take an action, move your marker forward by a number of boxes equal to the cost of that action, and proceed to the next character. The next character is determined by track position: the person furthest back on the track always gets the initiative (for tied characters, a tiebreaking system is needed). The current segment (for time purposes) is equal to the position of the person furthest back on the track; when the last character moves past an end of turn marker, everyone gets an end-of-turn recovery. A character may choose to delay, in which case simply remove the counter from the track; when a delaying character wants to act, he simply puts it back on the track at the current segment. A normal attack costs 4 segments; +1/4 for 3 segments, +1/2 for 2 segments, +1 for 1 segment; this does apply to DC calculations. This means you can give a fast weapon a lower segment cost, but it will also then require more strength to increase its damage by +1DC.

Re: Alas, no more Independent!

Now' date=' in Champs games, not having independent for your brick's Ancient Arcane Battle Armor that grants all his powers is going to be a bit of a problem...[/quote']

By which you mean 'improves the game balance enormously?'. There's no way I'd allow Independent on that; it's just an indestructible (and thus unique) focus.

Re: BOOM Table vs HERO

325 average damage on a single hit. I'd say that in order to get the effect you describe, I'd want twice the actual BODY of the target in a single hit.

 

~162 BODY for Earth? Still sounds WAY too low, if a person has as much as 20.

Actually, it's only 93 body on a single hit, that was 93d6 normal, not 93d6 killing. I'd give the earth 10 Body and ~80DC damage negation, on a logarithmic scale the line between undamaged and total destruction is fairly small (note that the Hero system is not designed for realism, and doesn't do it very well).

My approach is this: with a STR 10' date=' I assume a character is roughly able to lift 100kg to 1 meter height under terrestrial gravity, creating a change in potential energy of roughly 10^3 joules.[/quote']

That overstates the kinetic energy of a punch (2d6) by a factor of 20-50. It's also single target damage, which should generally be around 5-10 dice higher than explosions (see realism comment above).

The first thing that occurs to me is that nukes are probably "overrated" in Hero system under this--they should probably be in the range of 12 to 16 d6 KA rather than 20d6.

If a kilogram of TNT is 8d6N, which is ballpark correct, a ton should be 18d6N, a kiloton 28d6N, a megaton 38d6N, and the normal range of nukes should be around 33-40d6N (11-13d6K). Of course, this may seem unduly un-scary (see realism).

When you consider that such a person can take a punch from the Hulk and live in the comics' date=' not really. Humans (certain humans) are just real tough and/or lucky in comic books and action movies and that's represented by the system.[/quote']

Basically, named characters are real tough and/or lucky in comic books.

Re: BOOM Table vs HERO

Usefully, you can convert from powers of 10 to powers of 2 fairly easily; it's roughly division by 0.3. Thus, 10^6J is roughly 5 DC, 10^9J is 15, 10^12J is 25, 10^15J is 35, 10^18J is 45, 10^21J is 55, 10^24J is 65, 10^27J is 75, 10^30J is 85, etc. Complete destruction of the earth, moving pieces to infinity, should be 93d6.

Re: Considering an Alt with Munitions.

And after that it's not as good? Or am I reading to much into your statement?

Regen is never a bad defense, but it doesn't scale up as fast as damage, while LR actually scales up faster than damage. In general, you want both healing and mitigation, and there are more sources for healing than sources for mitigation.

Re: Considering an Alt with Munitions.

Does Lightning Reflexes stack well with anything? For example' date=' if you got Lightning Reflexes and Regeneration would they go well together?[/quote']

You only get one passive slot, and both LR and Regen go in the passive slot. I will say that Regen will be easiest at least through level 20.

Re: Considering an Alt with Munitions.

I'd be interested on hearing people's thoughts on a good defence power for a munitions toon. Wanna keep my character in the land of the living as much as possible after all.

If you're a traditional dex/ego build, lightning reflexes. Alternately, just slot Quarry and your defense is 'kill them before they kill me'.

Re: Considering an Alt with Munitions.

I've retconned out of 2GM on my munitions toon (when AR is on cooldown, I use gatling), but I may pick it up again later as a way to build stacks of enraged (I'll have to test whether enraged stacks are worth it).

Re: Abilities Discussion

I use bind macros to make my power sustain until broken by something (out of energy, duration exceeded, action taken which cancels the power). For example, if the power is in slot 5, you'd use '/bind 5 PowerTrayExec 1 4'.