Jump to content

austenandrews

HERO Member
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    19,589

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    3

 Content Type 

Posts posted by austenandrews

  5. "Neat" Pictures

    in Non-Gaming Discussion

    Posted

    Re: "Neat" Pictures

     

    I'm putting this here because this is perhaps the neatest thing I've seen in quite some time.

     

    This right here is the American Dream as it should be. Invention, entrepreneurship, and a desire to succeed. When you get to the page, you'll notice that there is a donation button to get him to college. Awesome, watch the video!

     

    http://cainesarcade.com/

    D'awww! That's adorable.

  7. Human bird wings

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: Human bird wings

     

    There have been some freaky big pterosaurs that flew' date=' which proves that it's at least plausible.[/quote']

    Apparently some people have doubts that the biggest ones actually flew.

  9. Human bird wings

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: Human bird wings

     

    Right, my question is whether there's some kind of theoretical hard size limit above which flapping wings can't work at all, based on air density or whatever. Or is it all a proverbial "matter of engineering."

  12. Brainstorm: Artificially Slowed Time

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: Brainstorm: Artificially Slowed Time

     

    The photo- and gravitysensors still measure everything in real time. What you would see is the "averaged" picture for a longer time period. So unless the star is pulsing' date=' it would just look normal.[/quote']

    Right, I was mainly referring to very dim objects. Cameras and high-powered telescopes use longer exposures to gather more data, correct? Is there any reason that wouldn't apply? But yeah, ordinary illumination would be handled as normal. Your computer and your brain would compensate for the data flow rate, same as usual.

     

    There is the matter of how computer-enhanced android senses would differ from normal ones. Again there are narrative considerations - the experience of the characters can't be so wildly different from normal that it takes tons of explanation for the audience to follow. Though I doubt seeing in unusual parts of the spectrum, for instance, would be any special narrative burden.

     

    Hmm, though it does occur to me that low-frequency wavelengths would seem higher-frequency. Not that slow time would affect colors or whatever - as you say, it's just more snapshots averaged over a longer time - but I wonder if some lower frequencies might have more usefulness? Same wavelength, higher frequency. Weird! Probably nothing useful there, but we're brainstorming.

     

    When gravity is 1 G, then goes up to 12 G for a second, then goes back to 1 G one of two things happen:

    - Either the system isn't desigend to show that and shows 12 G for a real second - so your slow time eye won't see the change at all.

    - It's designed to show the average over the slowed perception frame: it would show 1.03 G for 1 percieved second (the average over your "perception period").*

    Right, I get you. My point was that a constant 1G would look something like a constant 360G based on the velocities involved. If you were watching the Earth, it would zoom around the sun in a day. But again, that's a fairly trivial effect. Mostly computers would do the watching and you'd play it back at whatever speed you wanted. I doubt many celestial objects visible out the window of the starship would move fast enough to notice a difference even at 360x speed. (If it was 360,000,000x speed, I guess you could see the stars shifting in relation to each other.)

     

    A normal time blinking light would propably look like a "half dimmed" light. Half the time it's on, half the time it's off. The average between off and on is "half on". A light blinking for you in slow time would propably have the stay on a lot longer, the be off for longer (so your eye can discern both phases).

    In fact I'm thinking, as an energy-saving measure, that "light" inside the ship comes in low-frequency flashes. One flash per real second would be 360 flashes per slow second - too fast for the eye/brain to notice a flicker (under non-computer-enhanced conditions). So if a character operates in real-time while the rest of the ship is in slow time, he only sees his surroundings in brief flashes. Which sounds nicely creepy to me.

     

    In terms of engineering, that might be less energy efficient than a very low constant illumination. If the difference isn't tremendous, though, operating in ambient strobe lighting might be cool enough to handwave it.

  13. Human bird wings

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: Human bird wings

     

    I'm no aeronautical engineer' date=' so my opinion here isn't worth much, but I don't see why the basic idea is fundamentally unworkable. We know that we can build working ornithopters, and we know that something light enough to be backpackable can support a human in flight (hang gliders). I'm sure there's a large number of difficulties with the concept, but I don't feel brave enough to say that it can't be done.[/quote']

    I wonder if you could design a hang glider with a gentle flapping capability for gaining altitude once you're already soaring? Doesn't seem very farfetched.

     

    I think the trick would be scaling the power source. A man-size weight plus the weight of the wings will need a huge wing surface area. The power needed to flap wings that large would probably require enough equipment to double that weight. If we cut that down drastically - say some streamlined magnetic driver with power beamed from an external laser - would it be workable? There were 200-lb. pteranodons, as I recall, but I don't know if or how well they actually flew.

  15. History of Space Opera, aka Finally an io9 article that doesn't suck.

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: History of Space Opera, aka Finally an io9 article that doesn't suck.

     

    I dunno, personally I think "space opera" has come to describe a loose collection of tropes, much like "pulp." I wouldn't hesitate to call the movie Enemy Mine space opera, for example, even though its scope is ultimately very small. Or Alien:Resurrection, if more of it involved space.

     

    But, semantics. No biggie.

  16. Brainstorm: Artificially Slowed Time

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: Brainstorm: Artificially Slowed Time

     

    Internal forces don't change the momentum of the total system. So as long as the engines aren't firing, it wouldn't matter whether people moved around inside a rotating ship or not.

     

    That said, people moving around inside will in general change the orientation of the ship. And that, in turn, could change the thrust vector of any engine mounted in the ship. Still, measuring the angular motion at any instant* is pretty easy, just track stars for a time. So then you could figure out the orientation and rotation of the ship, sound an alarm that engines were firing and have all aboard strap themselves down, do the burn, and go back to normal ops. The asterisk by "instant" means an interval of some time ... probably several hours, tops ... is needed to measure the rotation rates, but that interval is very short compared to the duration of the trip.

    Angular momentum is calculated based on the center of gravity, right? So moving around a spinning ship would make it wobble, even though the system travels at a constant velocity and angular momentum. I guess you're right; you'd have to fire the engines to maintain constant gravity and orientation. And since that would change the actual angular momentum, eventually you'd have to counter-fire them to keep the whole system in line. Man, centrifugal gravity is a pain!

     

    On the other hand, if your engine is firing and accelerating the ship continuously, then you already have a source of "gravity" from that.

    Who's got the fuel for that? :D

     

    I once ran a pulp space opera game that did the whole accelerate-flip-decelerate thing for artificial gravity. The physics made sense though the fuel numbers were complete nonsense, of course. I guess they're nonsense with almost all interstellar science fiction, when you break it down. In this slow-time setting, I'd love it if the energy numbers could be in the same ballpark, or at least the same county, as reality. (I suspect running a supercomputer for a thousand years will by itself make this impossible, but if I rubber-science that part, maybe it's not an impossible dream.)

  17. Brainstorm: Artificially Slowed Time

    in Star Hero

    Posted

    Re: Brainstorm: Artificially Slowed Time

     

    I assume that navigation / astrogation would be handled via the ship's computer' date=' which would automatically correct / compensate for this in the data it presents. However, if they ever need to "go manual", any readings taken of the outside universe would be skewed. For example, objects would seem to hurtle past the ship at a MUCH higher speed than they really are and, when one tosses in relativistic effects (or apparent lack thereof) as well, it can get rather weird trying to keep track of that stuff.[/quote']

    I'm operating on a couple of assumptions. Let me know if you see any problems:

     

    - Computers already operate at a speed that makes humans look like they're standing still. They make decisions far too fast for a 360x speedup to make much difference. If the computer fails, a person's manual options would probably be extremely limited to begin with. ("If your computer fails, your best option is to pray to whatever god has the shortest name!") That said, an interstellar voyage will mostly be "ballistic." You're basically riding a bullet to your destination. So it's not as if someone needs to man the tiller day and night. Mostly it'll be a matter of monitoring the spacetime ahead of you to make sure you're not going to hurtle into something. Actually firing the engines would very much be an emergency situation, or a maneuver planned real-time decades or centuries in advance.

     

    - In interstellar space there's hardly any chance of interacting with something, so the risk of an external emergency is low. If an object comes "near," the relative velocities will probably be so ridiculously high that speeding them up by a factor of 360 wouldn't necessarily matter much.

     

    - Many, if not most, emergency events are already too fast for humans to handle in real-time. Explosions, short-circuits, impacts from external bodies; it's not as if slowing down by 360x will make these events seem much faster. What it will do is to turn certain events that are objectively slow into quick or instant events. If something catches fire, for instance, in real-time a crewmember might grab an extinguisher and put it out before too much damage is done. In slow time, an ordinary fire would seem more like an explosion. If it takes half an hour for the whole ship's interior to burn to a crisp, it would feel like five seconds. Whoosh, it spreads like the walls are made of flash paper. God forbid a crewmember catches fire - if it took as long as thirty seconds to burn him to death, subjectively he'd be insta-fried. Another good reason not to have an atmosphere in the ship! Pretty much everything needs to be fireproof (probably a requirement on any long-term spaceship, slowed down or not). Stray sparks become much more dangerous. Hmmm, how might static electricity build up in such an environment?

     

    - If there is an emergency, the computer will "thaw time" as quickly as possible. This will be a matter of warming up the android bodies and their environment. I'm not sure how long this will take, but it surely needs to be long enough for dramatic effect. :D Any thoughts?

     

    .... Hmm, yeah, it could be weird all right - considering that light-speed would SEEM to be 360 times faster than it should be. A number of corrections would be needed before any manual readings make sense. If, for some reason, the people do not realize that they have been "slowed", then it could get really REALLY weird from their points of view.

    Conveniently it makes distances seem shorter. If you send a probe a light-year ahead of you, it only takes two days to send it a command and receive a response.

     

    I guess it also makes everything seem brighter. A one-second exposure to the faint light of a distant object would actually gather six minutes worth of photons. Objects that move or change too slow for the naked eye to detect would be obvious to someone in slow time.

     

    And it would make the gravity of celestial objects look 360 times stronger, and their physical properties seem much more robust. Though one presumes the crew would rely on computers for such distant observations. (I wouldn't recommend flying in slow time too deep in a large object's gravity well.)

     

    Another thought is that these android bodies may not necessarily have to be humanoid-shaped. There may be very good psychological reasons for doing so, but for activities that (for example) involve scrambling around the ship's exterior and/or in zero-g, something arthropod shaped (spider, crab, insect) might be better. The 'Eclipse Phase' rpg includes a wide selection of such bodies for characters to link with or download their minds into.

     

    Alternatively, the android bodies might be humanoid, but be modularized so they can be configured for specific tasks or situations. For example, if going into zero-g, being able to swap out the body's feet for graspers would make a lot of sense. Or swapping out one or more fingers for some kind of tool (Cyberpunk 2020 has a few ideas here).

    I'm aiming for humanoid bodies, so the characters and environment aren't too alien to tell a story. Some technobabble about the brain in suspended animation needing to exercise the proper neural pathways for arms and legs and whatnot, lest you thaw out at your destination a millennium later and not be able to control your real body. But I would like to have some cool android features humans don't, because hey, robot bodies! Skin that sticks to surfaces at will would be handy in zero-g. Tool-fingers could be nifty.

  18. "Neat" Pictures

    in Non-Gaming Discussion

    Posted

    Re: "Neat" Pictures

     

    The one I saw had an old man bringing the waitstaff at his favorite diner a lottery ticket every week, meant to be split among everyone. When it hit, the waitress holding it kept all the money for herself. Didn't even give the old man a cut. Sheesh.

  24. "Neat" Pictures

    in Non-Gaming Discussion

    Posted

    Re: "Neat" Pictures

     

    Osmia Avosetta are solitary bees that build their nests by biting petals off of flowers' date=' flying them back one by one, and gluing them together often using nectar as glue. Each nest is a papermache work of art that houses a single bee egg.[/quote']

     

    Can I keep one as a pet? Can I can I?

×
×
  • Create New...