Semi-OT: A General Tech Question Thread for me :)

[El_Phil]

To give at least one writer in ST credit they had worked a little that way, I remember something along the lines of Romulans swapping cloaks for Klingon engines. It is very tricky to make a sustained story where one side is massively out teched, ohh sure short stories or one offs (The B5 stuff in the EA-Minbari war for instance) but for a whole string of series its hard work.

The colonisation thing is still a bad argument, even if every habitable planet near us is colonised we be hard pressed to notice. While the signal from the 1936 Olympics was stupidly strong and sprayed everywhere to cover for poor tech, the signals from the 2004 Olympics probably would struggle to leave the solar system in any strengh, if at all. So SETI has to look for a relatively narrow window of signal, unless people start sending signals for you too look for. Even then needle in a haystack doesn't come close to describing the problem.

[Hunpecked]

Given a billion years of FTL "they" could colonize, explore, or stake out every planet in the known universe. If for some reason "they" only live nearby, perhaps they'd come over just to see what's causing all the radio pollution.

Being serious for a moment, it seems the Earth itself sends radio signals ten times stronger than Jupiter's and much stronger than humanity's:

http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF6/612.html

Assuming that a strong magnetic field is essential for life (deflecting all that ionized radiation), that alone might attract some attention.

Using current technology, a radio telescope at the distance of the star Vega would need to be about half the size of the mean Earth-Moon distance to pick up TV signals from Earth:

http://www.computing.edu.au/~bvk/ast.../HET608/essay/

Presumably it wouldn't require a single dish that size; a Very Long Baseline Interferometry setup of the proper size might do the trick. Military/scientific signals are more powerful, but probably too directional and/or intermittent to draw attention.

Of course given a billion years of research and a working FTL principle, all bets are off.

[Baron Munchausen]

El_Phil said:
To give at least one writer in ST credit they had worked a little that way, I remember something along the lines of Romulans swapping cloaks for Klingon engines. It is very tricky to make a sustained story where one side is massively out teched, ohh sure short stories or one offs (The B5 stuff in the EA-Minbari war for instance) but for a whole string of series its hard work.

The colonisation thing is still a bad argument, even if every habitable planet near us is colonised we be hard pressed to notice. While the signal from the 1936 Olympics was stupidly strong and sprayed everywhere to cover for poor tech, the signals from the 2004 Olympics probably would struggle to leave the solar system in any strengh, if at all. So SETI has to look for a relatively narrow window of signal, unless people start sending signals for you too look for. Even then needle in a haystack doesn't come close to describing the problem.

Assuming they are even using radio...

Who's to say if other species might develop on planets with different conditions where radio doesn't function so well and so isn't adopted as a widespread technology? And who's to say that the [/i]culture[/i] might not be different and they might not want to be found by -- or to find -- anyone else 'out there'?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Maybe they found us, and there's a folder somewhere labelled 'Another boring species that calls it's planet 'Dirt'. I am never getting out of this office. Man, I bet Harry in the next cubicle gets a promotion before me, and he picks his nostrils. Hint hint hint. Filled, year 348248249. Man, I'm old.'

[dogscoff]

Another cute FTL trick to explain away the "why aren't the skies crawling with advanced spaceships" question is the "everyone gets it at the same time" hypothesis. This may or may not be scientifically plausible (I bet you could crowbar it into semi-plausbility if you were really determined) but it fits very nicely into the SE4 universe. It goes something like this:

Literal FTL is impossible. Warp drives, gravity drives, hyperspace- it's all bunk. The only possiblity for FTL travel is a wormhole, but they require insane quantities of energy to create artificially, and few- if any- civilisations are lucky enough to get one within range of their home system.

Therefore, all the sentient species in the galaxy/ universe develop in isolation. Some are still swinging around in what pass for trees on their planets bashing one-another with rocks; others have fully exploited their homesystems, cruising along at the stagnant peak of their civilisations and are just now thinking about sending STL probes or colonisers to nearby systems; others are just at the chemical-rocket-powered dawn of their interplanetary era, blah blah blah.

Suddenly, one day, it all changes. Some mysterious event occurs. Perhaps an unbelievably ancient and advanced species on the other side of the galaxy has harnessed some unimaginably powerful energy source and started tinkering with artificial wormhole creation; perhaps some not-quite-so-advanced race found a natural wormhole and started screwing around with it; perhaps it was some as-yet unhypothesised natural cosmic phenomneomeneon that suddenly decided to take place all on its own. Maybe God, having collected enough insects, decides to stick them all in the same jar and see who gets eaten first. Who knows? All we know is that somewhere, a single event kick starts a galaxy-wide chain reaction. A network of wormholes (*cough*warp points*cough*) begins to spread across the galaxy. Wormholes are springing spontaneously into being, stretching out from gravity well (star system) to gravity well. Each system that is touched by this network spawns one or two or three more wormholes, creating an exponential expansion from the unknown point of origin. The whole thing happens quickly. One day, humanity is all on its own, minding its own business, busily mining the asteroid belt and bombing one another over who gets to stick a flag in Europa. Overnight, a big, blue, wierd, great wobbly thing appears in space just outside Pluto's orbit, and then a few days later more appear. Suddenly, the human race is just a few jumps away from other star systems and other races who, despite being at hugely varied levels of technological development, all find themselves at the dawn of FTL travel at almost precisely the same moment in the galaxy's history.

It's at about this point you either start up se4 and click "new game", or start writing.

And if you use that, I want a free copy of your book.

[Hunpecked]

Dogscoff is right about the need to synchronize FTL introduction in fictional universes such as SE IV. In fact, if you also make this FTL tech the basis for STL propulsion, weapons, "shields", communications, etc., then all intelligent races start at essentially the same tech level, whether they've been in space for a year or for a million years.

Of course, as others have pointed out, even at STL speeds some species should have already overrun our galaxy.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Is there a way to make a frequent random effect that makes warp points?

[Starhawk]

El_Phil said:
To give at least one writer in ST credit they had worked a little that way, I remember something along the lines of Romulans swapping cloaks for Klingon engines. It is very tricky to make a sustained story where one side is massively out teched, ohh sure short stories or one offs (The B5 stuff in the EA-Minbari war for instance) but for a whole string of series its hard work.

You can have different tech areas being superior yet still have a balanced scheme I mean for example if you have one race with excellent weaponry yet slow ships a race with inferior weaponry yet much faster ships could outmaneuver them and strafe and the like.

Now there are also areas like personal weapons, armor shields yadda yadda that could all be different yet have balanced out effects.

And it's much better then every race having the exact same power weapons and the exact same shield outputs lol

[Fyron]

narf poit chez BOOM said:
Is there a way to make a frequent random effect that makes warp points?

After a fashion. You can spam the Events.txt file with open warp point events and increase the frequency of events in Settings.txt. Note that you can only ever have one event per turn.

[Wolfman77]

I tried that with spatial anomallies once. Had about 200 events in the file but they only ocured every 10-20 turns. Is that one event per turn for every empire or all empires combined?