God forgot about that universal simulation app

[krakonfive]

I'm here to get help on a new universe I'm thinking up.
This is also my first post!

This universe is supposed to to combine the realism of a hard scifi setting with the fun of zooming around the solar system.

Simply put, the premise is that the universe is a vast simulation. Old and untended, it has started failing, cracks are appearing and now we can exploit it. Think of the Matrix and bring it up to a cosmic scale. Except there are no
machines or humans plugged in. This universe is just some forgotten background app running on god's laptop. Purpose? PAH! What purpose is there to run Mac OS on a Windows?

For this setting, I'll be using lots of computing terms. Military warships would be like overclocked rigs, pilots are more like hackers and programmers than naval officers. I think it would be interesting to combine this with a space
opera, especially if outside the reality manipulation, the technology is pretty much 100 years from now AD.

The reality manipulation is basically allowed by the concordance of two limitations of the simulation programming: faulty verification and limited calculation speed.
Faulty verifications leads to errors induced by humans being unnoticed or ignored. The smaller the perturbation the better of course, but FTL travel shouldn't be possible if the simulation checks what is happening correctly.
Limited calculation speed means the simulation isn't all powerful. Like in a game, it only renders what you can see. All those stars with no-one around to observe them? Guess what, the simulation isn't going to the trouble of rendering them, so if you ain't looking at something, it doesn't exist. The other consequence of this the aforementioned faulty verifications. The simulation saves power by only checking up on major errors.

The second way it saves computing power is by checking sectors occupied by observers more frequently. Observers are conscious beings (Humans) and devices with realtime input, like probes. By realtime, I'm lying. Anything outside of a number of sector widths (determined by concentration of observers) is only rendered when sending information).

In other words, a scientist on Pluto receiving information a telescope watching Andromeda only has a realtime display of a few hundred thousand km. The rest is sent in packets with a much lower frequency, fooling him. A scientist on Earth watching the Moon gets realtime observations for a few lightminutes before the information
sent to him is grouped into packets and reduced.
This is why the huge gaps of missing space have never been observed. We've never sent an observer beyond the realtime range generated by the human population!

Small errors are shouldn't exist, but if there are few observers, they are ignored. Remember, this is a crumbling structure trying to maintain a maximal amount of realtime rendering with dwingling resources...Small errors can however can accumulate and lead to a freeze or reset. In a freeze, the sector is secured and verified completely. Think of a disk scan. This means for a time no reality hacks are possible. A reset means the sector's memory is erased. You don't want that to happen. This is why space devouring viruses don't work, nor does trying to eliminate suns or move planets. Too big an error just leads to a reset.

Here's some frequently used reality manipulations or universe hacks or whatever term I'll make up for it:

Coordinate set:
The first and easiest hack. It was the first hack to be discovered because the files for each rendered cube of space had a title that changed according to its composition and had a large size difference between empty space and a space occupied by an observer.

There are four steps:
-Find your own cube and the file's title.
-Find the destination cube and that file's title. The destination has to exist, so it is within your realtime range.
-Swap the titles of the cubes
-Apply hacking software
Anything that was included within that cube gets moved to the destination cube and vice versa. That means you can not only move yourself, but move anything in your RR. An interesting tactic is to apply this swap to the cubes occupied by an opponent's spaceship. He can apply the opposite coordinate set and return to his position, but if he is unprepared, he is vulnerable for the time it takes him to find his new position and read the corresponding files. A good time for him to get hit by those railgun slugs you put him in the path of

This would have troublesome implications if you could replace a cube occupied by Earth's surface and its equivalent in orbit, but the observer rule means that Earth's population leads to a near perfect correction of all errors in that
space. Might be possible if you were the sole inhabitant of another solar system XD

The main use of CS (coordinate set) is to zoom around the universe. A spaceship can easily travel within its realtime radius by finding the titles of the spot it wants to reach, and replacing the cubes it wishes to occupy with the destination cubes. Instantaneous travel. There are limitations of course.

First off, why not select a destination, say, three light years away. Because of the rendering rule. A spot three light years away isn't being calculated at all, no-one is watching it, so it doesn't exist. This means it has no titled cubes
you can target and modify.

Secondly, a ship with more observers has a larger realtime radius, so it can find the title of cubes further and further away. The disadvantage is that more observers means the simulation allocated more computing power to verifying errors and countering hacks in that spot. A balance can be struck, but it is easier to simply repeat the operation twice than to carry twice the observers.

Realtime radius increases by an inverse sum to the number of observers, error verification can be said to be proportional to the power of the number of observers.One increases slowly and flattens out, the other increases very
quickly. The solution would be a one man crew repeating the cube swaps as fast as it can. On the other hand, a 500 crew battlestation wouldn't budge at all without resetting its sector.

How fast can you swap cubes? Several times a second. Despite the computing power of 100 years from now, there is a reason why the inhabitants of this simulated universe are just renaming files instead of opening them up and changing what's inside. The files are huge and have to be translated into a usable language (who
said God uses Windows and writes code in C++?)

I have yet to find a plausible way for my characters to access the universe's data and modify it, but let's just say they can, okay? Basically, large commercial ships have slow computers, so they can only jump once every few
seconds down to 2-3 times a second. To compensate, they have a larger crew for longer distances per jump.

Military ships on the other hand have processors of well...military grade. This is the reason I compared them to overclocked rigs. They can jump 8 to 10 times a second, so much faster than commercial ships. They
have 1 crew (faster core) or 2 crew (slower core). Other than that, they pretty much are rather boring. They are realistic in design, technology hasn't discovered magical heat bearing materials or a closed
fusion reactor. 1GW drives are the norm.

Combat revolves around dancing around your enemy and dealing damage as quickly as you can once you gain a favorable position. Since we can't think or determine our position manually 8 times a second, the pilot has to set up 'moves' and 'reactions'. The moves take anywhere between the simplest 3 jump pop in front of the enemy, to the side then facing his unarmored rear to the most complicated 30 jump ballets, playing with the opponent's probability operations and testing his reaction software.
Also you can catch your opponent and move him, pacing him in the path of weapons you launched or disrupting his move. The opponent has to choose whether to allocate his calculation cycles towards countering your tackles or making his own coordinate sets.


The ships are designed with this in mind. Forward armor is maximal, rear armor is null. Side armor is in between. The main weaponry is a huge laser, a railgun or missiles. The laser allows the attacker to shoot every time he pops up, doing damage over time and maybe killing a few sensors and crippling the enemy ship.

Since drive power is 1GW, lasers max out at 300MW average output. If the time between jumps is 0.125 seconds, not much damage can be dealt before the attacker has to change position (around 3MJ dumped every jump).
The railgun deals much much more damage. The only problem is that you have to time your jump and shoot close enough for the round to hit within those 0.125seconds, or position your enemy to hit those rounds, or even move the rounds themselves to intercept the enemy at a position you predicts he will appear in...cool for dogfights.

The missiles can be dropped at any time, but considering the drive technology of this universe, they aren't going to catch up with the defender any time soon. They are more of a pushing device. They deny certain zones where the defender can't pop up in anymore, giving the attacker more choices and vice versa.

The tactics are further complicated if the two ships run at different frequencies. The faster ship will win but a predictable jump rate will allow the slower defender to synchronize and get hits in every time the attacker pops up.
The attacker can slow down, losing his advantage, or speed up even more.

I see fights between unskilled pilots as a race to the highest frequency before the heatsinks can't take anymore (no water cooled processors in space, all u got are radiators and the heatsinks :] )

Of course, there are secondary issues. Repeating steps is faster than making a new completely random step. Fighting in deep space with huge realtime ranges is near impossible unless you freeze the area. Fighting between many combatants in a single sector can lead to area getting freezed and everyone stuck in their relative positions with slow drives and high relative speeds. They pass each other, hitting until one is dead or physically leaves the frozen sector and start jumping again.

So here I have it:
-Realistic technology in term of drives, weaponry and power levels.
-A rule-based universe...that isn't the rule of cool
-A great amount of freedom in terms of combat dynamics, tactics and allows the writer to, well, have intense combat scenes
-By tweaking the realtime radius I can get fighters closer or further to each other.

-Fixed the classic FTL drive problems of planet busting bombing runs, relativistic weapons and the losing party just running away. Planet busting runs don't work because any largely populated planet will have quite a huge realtime
radius with a much too good correction. For Earth, I'm thinking mars orbit as the safe zone...
Relativistic weapons don't work either because the jump just changes your position, not your velocity. And the drive technology requires a much too inefficient run up before jumping and maintaining your speed. Might work on small colonies, other wise, plain NO. Losing party can't run away from a fight. If they are defeated, you can cause the sector to freeze and trap them inside.

-Energy production. A fun space opera setting has huge energy available yet little of it on the spaceships. The problem with that is either the ground structures will beam their huge energy reserves to the spaceships or the spaceships themselves can use the same power source as the ground structures....
In this universe have both free energy, high energy space travel AND low energy space combat. Here's how
Coordinate swap high pressure gasses from the sun's heliosphere and stick them into an electromagnetic bottle with one opening. An MHD generator can harness the energy of the charged gasses flowing out.
This solar stations can then beam their energy to Earth or to spaceships very far away. These spaceships can therefore maintain low travel times while within the huge realtime radius made by the Terran population and other colonies.
When combat starts, the ships will have to rely on century old nuclear fission reactors because, well, you can't ride a huge laser beam while you're jumping around unpredictably 10 times at second...
And no, you can't just store the energy.

[UnintendedConsequenc]

I've toyed with this idea too, and have some notes.. Maybe I can fill in some bits too?


Here's what I got.

What if the mechanism for observation by a sapient being, is not because of something special about sapients, but because the sapient being requires a certain minimum amount of processing power.
We are assuming this SIMIverse is running on a powerful, likely quantum computer. Your space/time hacks happen when your SIMs develop their own quantum computers. The universes CPU requirements in that location just went up, and the universe resorted to approximations to conserve resources.

Some approximations based "hacks"
1. Overview. Equations become rule of thumb equations. Layers and layers of these add up to strange errors.
2. Resourting to newtonian vs relativity. Near light speed acceleration becomes F=MA. Fuel requirements drop for ultra high speeds. None Teleporting FTL is possible. FTL radio/light comms are possible. Timestamps in the sector use the system clock instead of relativity. You now have FTL point defence.
3. Compiling an entire mechanism into a black box. For instance the reactor no longer simulates coolant flow. The reactor becomes a simple fuel in-->Energy out equation.
4. Finite element analysis uses generic materials.
The materials no longer have real defects, just bland idealized common materials. However due to the "dumb" nature of the simulation, the "ideal" materials are based on whatever is common. One off innovations become nullified. If your enemys hull use a carbon armor matrix, the field is equalized because you manufactured 51% of the tonange of carbon armor matrix material in the sector; It's sitting in your warehouse and you deliberately made it complete crap.
5. "Angels" or "Agents" are created. Angels are detached sapient minds created to audit especially strange events going on in the sector with errors. Most of the time, the Angels "fix" the problem and dissipate. A very select few in the history of the SIMiverse have stuck around long enough to have their own opinions of things.
6. Instead of requiring ships to carry observers, your observer could be a quantum computer. It does not have to be sapient. It only has to drain a certain amount of SIMiverse CPU power. Many of these nonsapient quantum computers will run as many processes as possible to deliberatly tax the SIMIverse simulation ability in a sector.
7. One scary approximation, is that sapient humans will suddenly become simulation approximations like glorifed chatterboxes. Anyone performing a seeminly repetitious operation that only requires a modicum of thought could suddenly be "possessed" by the SIMiverse. Operations like walking, piloting in a non-combat style, reading a book, cooking from a recipe, working on an assembly line will be scarilly automatic. Whole populations of people will perform actions, but not remember what they were thinking at the time....because they weren't.
6. The entire sector could be slowed down. This only happens if the sector is far enough from other sectors, that it can prevent observers from noticing by manipulating the speed of communication between sectors. A hack using this, might to freeze your enemy in time while you reposition. You can preserve somethings from harm too.
7. No more randomness. Randomness goes away. The random variable generators revert so using the SIMiverse system random variable generator. Strange things start syncing up. Brownian motion all goes in the same direction, heating or cooling material. Predators move in perfect sync with school of fish. Quantum operations are affected. Your SIMs quantum computer architecture will hopefully acount for this, or suddenly your miracle machine is a glorified TI-84. Quantum crypto becomes trivial to break(?). Gene mutations become identical. I'm sure someone could have fun with this.

Instead of having a standard size sectorm let your SIMs define the size of the SIMiverse sector by their scope of observation.
This allows for some very interesting bits.
You can make perfect armor, by having a bloated quantum computer observe a small bit of quantum between two layers of armor. When the layers are disrupted during an attack, the bloated quantum computer instantly changes state to something that causes the SIMiverse to freeze the time between the layers. The enemy weapons are unable to breach the hull. Of course this also means that if the bloated quantum computer, or the sensor it uses to observe the quantum thin section between the armor plates, is disrupted.....ALL of the enemy weapons breach the armor at once.

Large populaton centers become islands in this world. Due to the large amount if sapients, industry, and activity dragging on the SIMiverse CPU, the area actually runs slower than the rest of space around it.
We find that the speed of light around a population center is slowed substantially to hide this. Even within a populated area, light speed might be slowed. Message speed between observer and source will always seem like light speed.

The inerface for teleportation, will be a very powerful low level hack yet. The quantum computers that performs this hack will not be performing just any sort of math, but have to create a detailed simulation too. When the quantum computer simulates the situation detailed enough, it will bloat the SIMiverse resource requirements in the observed sector in a very special way. The SIMiverse will sync up the SIMs computer simulation with the "real" thing. The SIMiverse programmers accidently left it a two way sync.
Your hack, will be to suddenly swap the areas being observed, causing the SIMiverse areas themselves to swap.

This can also get rather scary, as once you swap two sectors, you might be able to continue to manipulate things in those sectors. As long as you don't draw an audit, you can perform impossible tasks.
1. If you teleport swap a sector that was frozen in time, you can replace the non-thinking people in that sector with seeminly identical puppets for a duration. Your puppets might revert back to their normal selves, but you might also replace their normal selves with minds more aggreeable to your causes. Pollitical leaders will never let their locations be known or they risk being observed, and replaced in the blink of an eye. Identity will be based on a deep brain scan, not on biometric data.
2. You can use this technology to copy items. Instead of swapping between occupied and empty space, you only change the state of one observing computer.
3. If you only observe from one direction, you can copy an objects light. This results in the ultimate stealth and chamoflage technology. Your warship copies and swaps the image of empty space from its far side, to the other side facing the enemy. The enemy only receives the light of empty space. A ship may also disguise itseld as a duplicate of a more innocent ship. Your battlestar gives off the light of a fuel hauler.
4. instead of just swapping light, you are also swapping gravity. Suddenly, in one direction of a small observed area, gravity from mass becomes more or less intense. These disguises can be detected by carefully observing disruptions in gravity waves, but S/N becomes a make or break for your early warning system.

[ryacko]

is this FTL timecube?

[krakonfive]

is this FTL timecube?

What?

Timecube: Nutjob theory on how the author can keep his 10k dollars by defying logic.

This thread: Creating a rule-based setting conductive to interesting fictional combat in space.

I think ryacko is more on the defying logic/random senseless spam side of things...But hey, he was the first to answer my thread!

[UnintendedConsequenc]

second

[krakonfive]

First off, thank you so much for answering. Lots of fresh ideas here ! I'll try and address them.

Remember, my objective isn't some grimdark universe where entire populations are erased or mindwiped...let's make it lighter in tone, mkay ?

What if the mechanism for observation by a sapient being, is not because of something special about sapients, but because the sapient being requires a certain minimum amount of processing power.
We are assuming this SIMIverse is running on a powerful, likely quantum computer. Your space/time hacks happen when your SIMs develop their own quantum computers. The universes CPU requirements in that location just went up, and the universe resorted to approximations to conserve resources.

Good explanation for the importance of observers! So a place with lots of SIMI (inhabitants of the SIMIverse ) take a toll on the simulation's resources, making it slack off elsewhere...nice. However, let's cut down on the quantum this quantum that. I don't want this to be yet another scifi setting that replaces magic with quantum. If this God-programmer created this simulation, what says the hardware used for this simulation abides the same quantic laws as the simulation? Look at minecraft. The PC it runs on abides to completely different laws than those in the game. Would a minecraft inhabitant extrapolate from his own laws and say that he is living in a simulation based upon a continent wide redstone circuit?

Some approximations based "hacks"
1. Overview. Equations become rule of thumb equations. Layers and layers of these add up to strange errors.

Maybe, but since this is hard to integrate into a space combat story, it probably won't be mentioned. Or we could have a scene where two mathematicians lament about how their entire knowledge isn't certain anymore

2. Resourting to newtonian vs relativity. Near light speed acceleration becomes F=MA. Fuel requirements drop for ultra high speeds. None Teleporting FTL is possible. FTL radio/light comms are possible. Timestamps in the sector use the system clock instead of relativity. You now have FTL point defence.

Local timestamps sounds like a logical way to handle relativity in this universe. I don't however like the idea of physical FTL. Moving within a cube at lightspeed or more defeats all safeguards against fun-killing hyperspace bombing runs and realistic 1GW drives.
Here's an additional countermeasure: Lightspeed is a reference for maximal computing speed in an area. Its like saying the simulation cannot render something that fast, so it stops at lightspeed. Its like having a 3GHz CPU. It can do calculations slower than three billion times a second, but not more.
FTL comms would have to use cube file renaming. Presumably adding a message to a cube's file is done much faster than changing its coordinates, but there would still be the realtime radius limit.
Hey! Maybe comms are light enough to be latched onto the title of a low res cube, the cubes that exist further than the realtime limit but don't hold any complicated information. That way ships will have the equivalent of a telegram. Within the RR, we'd have high bandwidth communications with zero delay, outside we'd be limited to telegram like messaging. Even further, the cubes really aren't rendered...

3. Compiling an entire mechanism into a black box. For instance the reactor no longer simulates coolant flow. The reactor becomes a simple fuel in-->Energy out equation.

No SIMI looking means there's nothing to look at. So yeah, blackbox mechanisms. Wait. Does that mean planetary insides, the stars we see, the fusion going inside the sun is just...our imagination? Think of the shock this discovery made!

4. Finite element analysis uses generic materials.
The materials no longer have real defects, just bland idealized common materials. However due to the "dumb" nature of the simulation, the "ideal" materials are based on whatever is common. One off innovations become nullified. If your enemys hull use a carbon armor matrix, the field is equalized because you manufactured 51% of the tonange of carbon armor matrix material in the sector; It's sitting in your warehouse and you deliberately made it complete crap.

While each sector could be assigned a generalized concentration of materials...I don't think this would be a good idea. Here's three reasons:
-The simulation can increase or decrease the materials in a sector without any additional tax in terms of resources. After all, unless they're being observed directly or subjected to an observed influence (a SIMI shooting carbon matrix or steel armor expects different results), they don't exist.
-This whole simulation thing is supposed to be a relatively recent discovery. The story is set 100 years into an alternate future. The discovery happens today. You'd think such a major fact such as uniform materials can't be left undiscovered for so long....how has the SIMverse fooled our nuclear physics researchers for so long?
-And: What a cheap way to find. Hoard all the carbon in the sector and the enemy's ships have nor armor. We need tense combat scenes, not mining strategies!

5. "Angels" or "Agents" are created. Angels are detached sapient minds created to audit especially strange events going on in the sector with errors. Most of the time, the Angels "fix" the problem and dissipate. A very select few in the history of the SIMiverse have stuck around long enough to have their own opinions of things.

Yes and no. For the first part, I really want to keep the simverse's abandoned feeling, like an old sandbox game.
But yes later. Once SIMIs start to accumulate errors on a galactic scale, God will notice. HE can then choose to terminate his pet project, or continue the fun by introducing an alien race composed of supertechnology haxxors. These will 'clean' the simulation of unwanted pests such as humans and their tinkering. Fair fight, no? But yes, the idea of agents hindering human efforts of expansion is a nice idea. Kind of They Are Amongst Us.

6. Instead of requiring ships to carry observers, your observer could be a quantum computer. It does not have to be sapient. It only has to drain a certain amount of SIMiverse CPU power. Many of these nonsapient quantum computers will run as many processes as possible to deliberatly tax the SIMIverse simulation ability in a sector.

Less quantum, more human pilots!
The whole point of hacking the universe is to draw as little attention as possible. What you are looking for here is Interceptors. They freeze a sector deliberately by accumulating as many errors as possible and then attack the usually small and weak Jumpship with their powerful cruiser. An easier way to freeze a sector is try and move a huge mass or a large number of SIMI at once. After all, a usual dogfight lasting several minutes can produce tens of thousand of jumps...for just two combattants. We don't want that little number of 'errors' freezing a sector and ending the fun!

7. One scary approximation, is that sapient humans will suddenly become simulation approximations like glorifed chatterboxes. Anyone performing a seeminly repetitious operation that only requires a modicum of thought could suddenly be "possessed" by the SIMiverse. Operations like walking, piloting in a non-combat style, reading a book, cooking from a recipe, working on an assembly line will be scarilly automatic. Whole populations of people will perform actions, but not remember what they were thinking at the time....because they weren't.

Great idea...for a horror story. What's the point of a SIMI if he can be simplified like anything else? Let's assume the simulation isn't stressed to the point of skipping actual SIMI, mkay?

6. The entire sector could be slowed down. This only happens if the sector is far enough from other sectors, that it can prevent observers from noticing by manipulating the speed of communication between sectors. A hack using this, might to freeze your enemy in time while you reposition. You can preserve somethings from harm too.

A superb idea that will be perfectly integrated into the setting! The slower light speed thing also ties into the lower clock speed mentioned above!
The homeworld could be running slow, so century long hacking projects*(see later) outside their realtime radius could take only months to come back...On the scale of sectors, I don't think this effect should be noticeable, and not to the point of stopping time for a SIMI...while being observed by another SIMI. Maybe I should add huge time differences as one of the major errors that lead to a reset.

[krakonfive]

7. No more randomness. Randomness goes away. The random variable generators revert so using the SIMiverse system random variable generator. Strange things start syncing up. Brownian motion all goes in the same direction, heating or cooling material. Predators move in perfect sync with school of fish. Quantum operations are affected. Your SIMs quantum computer architecture will hopefully acount for this, or suddenly your miracle machine is a glorified TI-84. Quantum crypto becomes trivial to break(?). Gene mutations become identical. I'm sure someone could have fun with this.

The horrors!
On one hand I want this to be true so as to provide an easy explanation as to why scientists started inquiring into the universe-is-a-simulation theory. Here, the probabilistic evidence showed that it was unlikely that we're living inside a simulation. Maybe in the simverse the calculations gave different results...
On the other hand, jumping around an enemy at 10 times a second forcibly includes a probabilistic factor. What are the chances he pops up in this cube in 4, 5, 10 jumps? Should I make a railgun round intersect that cube in 0.5, 0.6 or 1.6 seconds? If battles drag on and randomness is eliminated, the opponent can just shoot at calculated positions and always hit you.

Instead of having a standard size sectorm let your SIMs define the size of the SIMiverse sector by their scope of observation.

Varying realtime radius is complicated enough, now you want to move around cube and sector sizes?! Too hard for the writer to calculate (me) and I'll make this universe look like fitting the story rather than vice versa....

You can make perfect armor, by having a bloated quantum computer observe a small bit of quantum between two layers of armor. When the layers are disrupted during an attack, the bloated quantum computer instantly changes state to something that causes the SIMiverse to freeze the time between the layers. The enemy weapons are unable to breach the hull. Of course this also means that if the bloated quantum computer, or the sensor it uses to observe the quantum thin section between the armor plates, is disrupted.....ALL of the enemy weapons breach the armor at once.

Time freeze on command? Ouch. That's another fun-killing game breaker.

Large populaton centers become islands in this world. Due to the large amount if sapients, industry, and activity dragging on the SIMiverse CPU, the area actually runs slower than the rest of space around it.
We find that the speed of light around a population center is slowed substantially to hide this. Even within a populated area, light speed might be slowed. Message speed between observer and source will always seem like light speed.

You mentioned it earlier and I found it a great idea.

The inerface for teleportation, will be a very powerful low level hack yet. The quantum computers that performs this hack will not be performing just any sort of math, but have to create a detailed simulation too. When the quantum computer simulates the situation detailed enough, it will bloat the SIMiverse resource requirements in the observed sector in a very special way. The SIMiverse will sync up the SIMs computer simulation with the "real" thing. The SIMiverse programmers accidently left it a two way sync.
Your hack, will be to suddenly swap the areas being observed, causing the SIMiverse areas themselves to swap.

In my head I had the idea of a high density power source pulsing at a certain frequency. This constitutes the 'get me out of here' signal for a programmer playing his own game. Could be compared as reverting to developer mode.
But I prefer your idea. Causing the universe to sync up with your calculations sounds more realistic...

This can also get rather scary, as once you swap two sectors, you might be able to continue to manipulate things in those sectors. As long as you don't draw an audit, you can perform impossible tasks.
1. If you teleport swap a sector that was frozen in time, you can replace the non-thinking people in that sector with seeminly identical puppets for a duration. Your puppets might revert back to their normal selves, but you might also replace their normal selves with minds more aggreeable to your causes. Pollitical leaders will never let their locations be known or they risk being observed, and replaced in the blink of an eye. Identity will be based on a deep brain scan, not on biometric data.
2. You can use this technology to copy items. Instead of swapping between occupied and empty space, you only change the state of one observing computer.
3. If you only observe from one direction, you can copy an objects light. This results in the ultimate stealth and chamoflage technology. Your warship copies and swaps the image of empty space from its far side, to the other side facing the enemy. The enemy only receives the light of empty space. A ship may also disguise itseld as a duplicate of a more innocent ship. Your battlestar gives off the light of a fuel hauler.
4. instead of just swapping light, you are also swapping gravity. Suddenly, in one direction of a small observed area, gravity from mass becomes more or less intense. These disguises can be detected by carefully observing disruptions in gravity waves, but S/N becomes a make or break for your early warning system.

Here comes in one of the premises of this setting: The SIMI still don't know much about what they are seeing when they read the cube titles. Opening the files and trying to extract the information is like the most advanced research of that time. How can you select to swap only gravity when you don't even know which line of code governs it?
So on one side we have knowledge limitations. The SIMI haven't yet mastered hacking their universe.
On the other side, I think the simulation would be rather strict on these things. Changing the physical properties of a sector could constitute a rather serious hack requiring immediate resetting. Not something a scientist valuing his life would attempt...

On the detection, yes, stealth work that way. However, I'd like to add a second consideration. While you might move the cube holding the information about you out of the way of enemy sensors...the light would still be travelling in the same direction. You can swap cubes but you cannot rotate them. In this case, to avoid detection, you would be moving your light cone to the sides of your actual position. They would however still provide a general direction as to where you may be arriving.

But then again, at FTL speeds, your ship is going to arrive before your light cone

Projects:
Huge hacks have to be done further away from the homeworlds and other population areas. One huge hack I can think of is duplicating matter. Imaging taking an asteroid rich in metals outside of the safe RR of a colony then duplicating it and combing back with TWO huge metal rich asteroids. A great eceonomy booster, right?
Not a perfect solution.
First, you have to move the asteroid using the weak realistic fission drives out of the realtime radius. For a large object, this might require moving an asteroid out to Jupiter orbit.
Second, a large object takes up a lot of cubes that you have to swap simultaneously every jump. This means moving heavy ships is slower than moving lighter small ships which have to swap only a few cubes. This means that even after you leave the RR, you can only move slowly in space.
Third, duplicating a large object can leave quite a trace. Most often, it causes a freeze. This means the rock again has to be physically transported outside of the frozen sector.
Finally, the simulation would realistically prioritize freeze scans in SIMI rich sectors rather than in the middle of nowhere. This means a frozen sector in deep space will stay frozen for a veeeery long time. I'm thinking years here, depending on the distance from the nearest SIMI concentration.

Why blabber on this? Because I have invented a justification for an economy and created conflict in one fell swoop!
The economy revolves around the duplicating companies, the physical transportation of these rocks and the sector dealers that sell free sectors and buy frozen sectors as future investment. No more whining about how this is a post-singularity society that can have everything it wants because it can just duplicate stuff.

The conflict? Imagine Earth wih its huge demand and huge realtime radius. The free sectors will be used up very rapidly, forcing duplicators to travel further and further until it is not possible to do so anymore. What will they do? Set up in in a neighbouring colony's solar system.
Except they will use up all the free sectors and leave the colony with nothing but frozen space for years! WAR!

[UnintendedConsequenc]

The horrors!
On one hand I want this to be true so as to provide an easy explanation as to why scientists started inquiring into the universe-is-a-simulation theory.

It's a natural question. You don't have to write a special reason.

Here, the probabilistic evidence showed that it was unlikely that we're living inside a simulation. Maybe in the simverse the calculations gave different results...

I'm aware of experiment designs, but no actual experiments have been performed. We don't actually have any results "here".

On the other hand, jumping around an enemy at 10 times a second forcibly includes a probabilistic factor. What are the chances he pops up in this cube in 4, 5, 10 jumps? Should I make a railgun round intersect that cube in 0.5, 0.6 or 1.6 seconds? If battles drag on and randomness is eliminated, the opponent can just shoot at calculated positions and always hit you.

That was the inspiration. I have an old snippet of a story about a point defence CIWS cannon using this to provide perfect defence until the bullets run out.

IRT (In responce to ) "Instead of having a standard size sectorm let your SIMs define the size of the SIMiverse sector by their scope of observation"

Varying realtime radius is complicated enough, now you want to move around cube and sector sizes?! Too hard for the writer to calculate (me) and I'll make this universe look like fitting the story rather than vice versa....

Your calculations will actually be easier. By computing the volume of a light cone, you'll save yourself from lots of repeat linear equations to fill up the same area with volume pixels. After that, you just assign a detection probablity. (and if you're hacking probability, your equaion is simply 100%)

IRT "You can make perfect armor, by having a bloated quantum computer observe a small bit of quantum between two layers of armor. When the layers are disrupted during an attack, the bloated quantum computer instantly changes state to something that causes the SIMiverse to freeze the time between the layers. The enemy weapons are unable to breach the hull. Of course this also means that if the bloated quantum computer, or the sensor it uses to observe the quantum thin section between the armor plates, is disrupted.....ALL of the enemy weapons breach the armor at once."

Time freeze on command? Ouch. That's another fun-killing game breaker.

You still have to understand, that should something happen to your bloated observer, its power supply, or even just the sensors, ALL that energy is going to be released AT ONCE. Watch the armored ship get utterly vaporized. You have essentially a ticking bomb to deal with. In my original story, the ship could move, but instead of haveing a few atoms thick of a stray bullet the deal with, the crew had to deal with intense radiation, emp and a moving shockwave from anti matter triggered nuclear strike trapped in the walls. The ships armor skin had to be carefully removed like a sheith and allowed to detonate from a safe distance. The armor required a laser databus with some quantum wiggly bits to maintain the safe distance. However, a stray bit of debris fuzzed the connection for a moment, and all it took to collapse the wave was the moment. The ship novad.

IRT "Large populaton centers become islands in this world. Due to the large amount if sapients, industry, and activity dragging on the SIMiverse CPU, the area actually runs slower than the rest of space around it.
We find that the speed of light around a population center is slowed substantially to hide this. Even within a populated area, light speed might be slowed. Message speed between observer and source will always seem like light speed."

You mentioned it earlier and I found it a great idea.

Thanks.

IRT "The inerface for teleportation, will be a very powerful low level hack yet. The quantum computers that performs this hack will not be performing just any sort of math, but have to create a detailed simulation too. When the quantum computer simulates the situation detailed enough, it will bloat the SIMiverse resource requirements in the observed sector in a very special way. The SIMiverse will sync up the SIMs computer simulation with the "real" thing. The SIMiverse programmers accidently left it a two way sync.
Your hack, will be to suddenly swap the areas being observed, causing the SIMiverse areas themselves to swap."

Thanks also. The teleportation hack may also require a bit of tomfoolery preceding it. Perhaps running an intence CPU process that causes errors, but just for a moment. The SIMIverse quickly compensates, and in doing so, confuses the sim within a sim for the ligitimate one. If you don't want the scary bit, you can have an unusable drawback. The simulation only needs to run during a short moment to fudge the results. However the computer running the sim within a sim is trapped in an island of slow time. Any object being teleported is going to be severley slowed during the super accurate snapshot, and address swaps. An external observer (God like one who doesn't collapse the wave and ruin it) would see a dog walking, and then a dog frozen in place for a minute. The computer that has calculated the snapshot is slowed to a crawl, and will take several minutes just to swap the addresses. Suddenly the dog pops out of existance, and is somewhere else.

In my head I had the idea of a high density power source pulsing at a certain frequency. This constitutes the 'get me out of here' signal for a programmer playing his own game. Could be compared as reverting to developer mode.
But I prefer your idea. Causing the universe to sync up with your calculations sounds more realistic...

I'm not sure it's realistic, so much as it is realistic that any god we would have, would be lazy or sloppy.

IRT "This can also get rather scary,blah blah blah read it above if you want the rest.--UC"

Here comes in one of the premises of this setting: The SIMI still don't know much about what they are seeing when they read the cube titles. Opening the files and trying to extract the information is like the most advanced research of that time. How can you select to swap only gravity when you don't even know which line of code governs it?

They treat it like a black box. Two balls, One heavy, ones light. You suddenly swap them, and you'll have measurable gravity wave.
So, how do you swap the radiated energy without swapping the actual objects? Simple (not reall), you wait for the "light" (or gravity, or teen ankst) to travel a distance between the source, and the targeted observer. However, in this instance, the observer was looking awy for a moment, or the distance is simply far enough that light lag does it for them.
During that moment, you calculating though your Uber magic computer box, a perfect simulation of that wave of light and information. Your computer copied it, and swapped it with something else. Perhaps even a saved file. The faked information wave is now traveling towards the observer. When it arrives at the target, the target sees a cute little pony, instead of your death armada.
But only for an instant. An infinitesimally short instant. Because your wave of information is only a quantum slice thin.

However, IF you know the exposure time of the CCD or bolometer that will see your death armada, and IF you know that the sensor won't be looking to hard. And IF you are willing to tax a computer to run that slow. Only then will this work...for that particular sensor, at that particular moment. It's a super expensive one trick pony.

So on one side we have knowledge limitations. The SIMI haven't yet mastered hacking their universe.
On the other side, I think the simulation would be rather strict on these things. Changing the physical properties of a sector could constitute a rather serious hack requiring immediate resetting. Not something a scientist valuing his life would attempt...

On the detection, yes, stealth work that way. However, I'd like to add a second consideration. While you might move the cube holding the information about you out of the way of enemy sensors...the light would still be travelling in the same direction. You can swap cubes but you cannot rotate them. In this case, to avoid detection, you would be moving your light cone to the sides of your actual position. They would however still provide a general direction as to where you may be arriving.

But then again, at FTL speeds, your ship is going to arrive before your light cone

I've elaborated above. The stealth option is a heavily computationally intensive boondoggle of a one trick pony. Your simulating computer that is doing it, is also slowed in time severly, and the time it takes to simulate, fake or swap, will only be worth it for very few scenarios. If a detection platform is looking from a different angle, it won't work. Then again, your ships are instant FTL, so it won't be useful anyhow. It's mostly going to be useful in hiding stationary objects for a set amount of time. For instance you might be building your death armada in a shipyard. During the build (cut, copy, paste, cut, copy, paste, carpel tunnel, ouch) your armada could be discovered by a passing enemy probe with a telescope CCD. Even if the probe copies itself, it cannot search the whole universe instantly. You'll have a certain amount of time to build.

Projects:
Huge hacks have to be done further away from the homeworlds and other population areas. One huge hack I can think of is duplicating matter. Imaging taking an asteroid rich in metals outside of the safe RR of a colony then duplicating it and combing back with TWO huge metal rich asteroids. A great eceonomy booster, right?
Not a perfect solution.
First, you have to move the asteroid using the weak realistic fission drives out of the realtime radius. For a large object, this might require moving an asteroid out to Jupiter orbit.
Second, a large object takes up a lot of cubes that you have to swap simultaneously every jump. This means moving heavy ships is slower than moving lighter small ships which have to swap only a few cubes. This means that even after you leave the RR, you can only move slowly in space.
Third, duplicating a large object can leave quite a trace. Most often, it causes a freeze. This means the rock again has to be physically transported outside of the frozen sector.
Finally, the simulation would realistically prioritize freeze scans in SIMI rich sectors rather than in the middle of nowhere. This means a frozen sector in deep space will stay frozen for a veeeery long time. I'm thinking years here, depending on the distance from the nearest SIMI concentration.

Just to let you know, you don't need to limit yourself to fission. Much of your copypasta economy can be powered by coppied antimatter. If you can harness decaying microsingularities, you can use those too. Just a few teaspoons of antimatter are enough to give you pulse fusion. That will give you reasonable travel times around a solar system.
For very special applications, you might allow pure matter/antimatter engines. These will be rare, as why bother when you have safe instant FTL, and good pulse fusion. Most of the applications are probably military at this point. The most common military application is going to be ultra high speed rocket engines for observation drones. Blanket an area with observers to prevent unwanted FTL teleports within.

Oh, and big ass bombs of course.....

This stuff will be heavily regulated, but it won't be perfect. Much of your space coast guards job will be to observe all over the place to prevent illegal mass production of anti matter. It's a big universe though......Lots of light lag.

Why blabber on this? Because I have invented a justification for an economy and created conflict in one fell swoop!
The economy revolves around the duplicating companies, the physical transportation of these rocks and the sector dealers that sell free sectors and buy frozen sectors as future investment. No more whining about how this is a post-singularity society that can have everything it wants because it can just duplicate stuff.

The conflict? Imagine Earth wih its huge demand and huge realtime radius. The free sectors will be used up very rapidly, forcing duplicators to travel further and further until it is not possible to do so anymore. What will they do? Set up in in a neighbouring colony's solar system.
Except they will use up all the free sectors and leave the colony with nothing but frozen space for years! WAR!

You'll be able to screw up your competition by just putting one brains worth of observer on their factory floor.
Unobserved sectors only last for a little while. The farther away a sector, the more valuable it is. However, they still need local sectors near the customer to transport their goods. There is no way around this. Very interesting scarcity. Manufacters (duplicators) will actually have to bid against each other for a time slot with which to make their goods appear.

Also, anyone traveling to a heavily observed area, is essentially copying and pasting themselves. They too will need to bid against others. The cost of travel via teleporting FTL with this method is litterally balanced against the cost of purchasing pure gold or even antimatter. If you are too slow to leave the unobserved area, people will get very very pissy. You'll be billed every millisecond you take too long.

Most duplicated items will probably be fed through the duplicating area at very very high speed to keep costs down. I can imagine that the goos will be sped up by accelerating them along a looong series of coils. It will FTL, and them decelerated along another series of coils at the target sight. The energy gained from decelerating the object can also be a product.

Though you will have FTL that is instant, and oddly enough, able to cross the ENTIRE universe. If you actually want to go anywhere interesting, with people, you'll have to wait in a queue or a holding pattern. Passengers might freeze themselves in time until ready. Budget passengers might wait years for an opening. Still faster than STL, but not exactly the Kessel run.

[ryacko]

is this FTL timecube?

What?

Timecube: Nutjob theory on how the author can keep his 10k dollars by defying logic.

This thread: Creating a rule-based setting conductive to interesting fictional combat in space.

I think ryacko is more on the defying logic/random senseless spam side of things...But hey, he was the first to answer my thread!

Timecube: nutjob theory on how the author was driven mad by a math textbook written by Cthulhu.

I think there is a major problem with hacking the universe, and this is quite apparent when playing video games.
You might crash the program, in fact it may have happened many times without anyone but the autosave feature noticing.

Why would the rules of the universe allow for people to figure out that they live in a simulation?

[krakonfive]

I'm aware of experiment designs, but no actual experiments have been performed. We don't actually have any results "here".

Oh.

That was the inspiration. I have an old snippet of a story about a point defence CIWS cannon using this to provide perfect defence until the bullets run out.

Well we want to avoid that, no? How about probability bias on a cosmic scale (for scientists to discover) but nearly perfect on a local scale (for combat to be be battle of wits and tactics rather than hitting the shoot button once your number of jumps exceeds a certain number).

Your calculations will actually be easier. By computing the volume of a light cone, you'll save yourself from lots of repeat linear equations to fill up the same area with volume pixels. After that, you just assign a detection probablity. (and if you're hacking probability, your equaion is simply 100%)

Simpler as in realtime radius volume divided by number of cubes the ship occupies. That's the chance of a detected enemy being within the realtime radius once he's detected...only, this will be useful within a well corrected sector where the ships can't jump.
I'm thinking this still has utility in deep space, considering that you can still modify the less rendered cubes outside your realtime range. The combined volume would be so huge that the chance of hitting you, if detected or not, is tiny.

You still have to understand, that should something happen to your bloated observer, its power supply, or even just the sensors, ALL that energy is going to be released AT ONCE. Watch the armored ship get utterly vaporized. You have essentially a ticking bomb to deal with. In my original story, the ship could move, but instead of haveing a few atoms thick of a stray bullet the deal with, the crew had to deal with intense radiation, emp and a moving shockwave from anti matter triggered nuclear strike trapped in the walls. The ships armor skin had to be carefully removed like a sheith and allowed to detonate from a safe distance. The armor required a laser databus with some quantum wiggly bits to maintain the safe distance. However, a stray bit of debris fuzzed the connection for a moment, and all it took to collapse the wave was the moment. The ship novad.


Interesting story plot. Its essentially an answer to the question asked to most settings that handwave their ship's durability with 'shields': Where does the energy go?
In this combat-oriented setting though, adding extra complications just slows down the story. If you had to deal with energy-filled shields at the end of every battle...if you had to choose between jumping and using your time freeze to strengthen your shields...I'd rather freezing time be made more difficult. As I said earlier, this simulation has difficulties but isn't at the brink of collapsing.
Also, if time could be frozen as easily, I'd have a time travel story...

Thanks also. The teleportation hack may also require a bit of tomfoolery preceding it. Perhaps running an intence CPU process that causes errors, but just for a moment. The SIMIverse quickly compensates, and in doing so, confuses the sim within a sim for the ligitimate one. If you don't want the scary bit, you can have an unusable drawback. The simulation only needs to run during a short moment to fudge the results. However the computer running the sim within a sim is trapped in an island of slow time. Any object being teleported is going to be severley slowed during the super accurate snapshot, and address swaps. An external observer (God like one who doesn't collapse the wave and ruin it) would see a dog walking, and then a dog frozen in place for a minute. The computer that has calculated the snapshot is slowed to a crawl, and will take several minutes just to swap the addresses. Suddenly the dog pops out of existance, and is somewhere else.

So you're adding the extra component of the selected cubes being slowed down so that the processor can read it and rewrite it.
I think it is a good idea, and would plausibly added....but in an opposite direction. Instead of a useful tool the SIMI can manipulate time with, it would be a hindrance. Since manipulating time itself is a big no-no (causes resets and is easily verified by the simulation: is the cube's timestamp the same as that of the sector it is in?) we could say that a processor that take TOO LONG to read and rewrite a cube's title wouldn't work. The window of time the simulation pays attention to the hacker would close before the swap is made. If it is tried too many times, well, that's a regular freeze over there.


I'm not sure it's realistic, so much as it is realistic that any god we would have, would be lazy or sloppy.

Blasphemy!

They treat it like a black box. Two balls, One heavy, ones light. You suddenly swap them, and you'll have measurable gravity wave.
So, how do you swap the radiated energy without swapping the actual objects? Simple (not reall), you wait for the "light" (or gravity, or teen ankst) to travel a distance between the source, and the targeted observer. However, in this instance, the observer was looking awy for a moment, or the distance is simply far enough that light lag does it for them.
During that moment, you calculating though your Uber magic computer box, a perfect simulation of that wave of light and information. Your computer copied it, and swapped it with something else. Perhaps even a saved file. The faked information wave is now traveling towards the observer. When it arrives at the target, the target sees a cute little pony, instead of your death armada.
But only for an instant. An infinitesimally short instant. Because your wave of information is only a quantum slice thin.

Great way of applying gravity control but I see three problems:
-You need to know how to simulate light and gravity exactly like the universe you are sitting in...using the simulation's own code. This is far far away from our beginner hackers that find it difficult to just rename files and that cause resets every time they try and open a folder and change something.
-If you aren't looking at something, how do you know that it will behave as you predict it will?
-Considering that the computers we'd use for hacking are millions, billions if not trillions of times slower than those processing power allocated to a single sector, how do you sync your simulation with the SIMIverse?

Just to let you know, you don't need to limit yourself to fission. Much of your copypasta economy can be powered by coppied antimatter. If you can harness decaying microsingularities, you can use those too. Just a few teaspoons of antimatter are enough to give you pulse fusion. That will give you reasonable travel times around a solar system.

Copypasta economy lol.
First off, duplicating requires you to swap a cube with TWO other cubes and hope there's an overwrite at the destination. This means maximal efficiency is for duplication of a maximal number of cubes considering the low return (there isn't always an overwrite at destination, meaning you need more swaps). So unless you have several cubes of antimatter at your disposal....

For very special applications, you might allow pure matter/antimatter engines. These will be rare, as why bother when you have safe instant FTL, and good pulse fusion. Most of the applications are probably military at this point. The most common military application is going to be ultra high speed rocket engines for observation drones. Blanket an area with observers to prevent unwanted FTL teleports within.

Special applications seem to be moving huge rocks outside or Realtime ranges or to move a spaceship standed in a frozen sector quickly away from danger.

[krakonfive]

Oh, and big ass bombs of course.....

Naturally

This stuff will be heavily regulated, but it won't be perfect. Much of your space coast guards job will be to observe all over the place to prevent illegal mass production of anti matter. It's a big universe though......Lots of light lag.

If you can swap the antimatter bombs with dumb interceptors, then allow the bomb to hit the interceptors, they don't seem very effective, especially if you can only produce a few of them. On the other hand, a billion kinetic kill projectiles accelerated near the sun then jumped into orbit seem a bit more dangerous.
Actually, think about it, nations wouldn't have easy to intercept nuclear arsenals, but waves of kinetic swarms constantly being jumped between low and high orbit near a star. They fall from high orbit (no horizontal velocity) to low orbit, gaining up to 100km/s per fall. The process is repeated until they reach a deadly 1Mm/s or more. If they are needed, they are transported to the orbit or the vicinity of the target.



You'll be able to screw up your competition by just putting one brains worth of observer on their factory floor.
Unobserved sectors only last for a little while. The farther away a sector, the more valuable it is. However, they still need local sectors near the customer to transport their goods. There is no way around this. Very interesting scarcity. Manufacters (duplicators) will actually have to bid against each other for a time slot with which to make their goods appear.

Factory floor? You mean onboard the ship transporting the rock. Going from one observer to two roughly doubles the correction rate, so duplication efficiency plummets.
In-universe this would be considered piracy.

For the sector uses, consider a grid composed of large squares bordered by multiple smaller squares.
The large squares are the areas used for duplication. They are frequently frozen at a regular rate. This is the 'land' we are fighting over. It has to be big to spread out the stress of errors created by a duplication. The duplicating ship moves around this area, trying a double swap of all its cubes, taking the duplicates as profit. The sector is tried to duplicate in is frozen. It moves to the next sector and repeats. It repeats until everything it can reach using physical drives is frozen.

To move in and out of the duplication areas, you use the borders. The borders are reserved for coordinate swaps meant for transport only. Since a simple displacement carries much less error stress than duplication, these bordering lanes can be used nearly constantly. These can be blocked during an economic shutdown of an offending colony.

And as you said, the further the sector the more valuable it is. This is because correction rate is lower, and realtime range is longer so more volume is available for duplication/freezing.
However, they are harder to reach and the larger volumes mean the duplication speed is bottlenecked by your physical speed. Also, they take longer to go to and back. Even worse, the processing power allocated to those sectors is lower, so freezes are longer (up to years!). I think they will be reserved for high value duplications, such as rare metals or ship construction (yes, if you can move high tech spaceships around you should be able to duplicate them too...get back to that later). These sectors would be bought for low value (frozen for years...) but sold for high value (the whole high-tech industry relies on these sectors freeing up).

Sectors near a planet will have low duplication value (small, slow duplication freezes and less return on duplication) but will have short freezes and are much easier to reach. These will have a constant value since they are used often.


Also, anyone traveling to a heavily observed area, is essentially copying and pasting themselves. They too will need to bid against others. The cost of travel via teleporting FTL with this method is litterally balanced against the cost of purchasing pure gold or even antimatter. If you are too slow to leave the unobserved area, people will get very very pissy. You'll be billed every millisecond you take too long.

Milliseconds maybe not since the furthest sectors take years to leave a frozen state. A nearby sector can take a few minutes but there is a minimal value to the freeze duration on the order of 2-3 minutes. Since this economy is based on the abundance of material being held back by the extraction and transformation processes, the time issue will be back home, in the factories, not on the side of the duplicators.

Most duplicated items will probably be fed through the duplicating area at very very high speed to keep costs down. I can imagine that the goos will be sped up by accelerating them along a looong series of coils. It will FTL, and them decelerated along another series of coils at the target sight. The energy gained from decelerating the object can also be a product.

The target sight normally has no structure built up on it. Maybe along the lanes around the duplicating areas but not inside the duplicating area. You'd be wasting precious cubes and maintenance means there's a SIMI stopping the duplication process. So ships will be accelerated back home with beamed power or long coild or whatever, but they stop and return under their own power.

Though you will have FTL that is instant, and oddly enough, able to cross the ENTIRE universe. If you actually want to go anywhere interesting, with people, you'll have to wait in a queue or a holding pattern. Passengers might freeze themselves in time until ready. Budget passengers might wait years for an opening. Still faster than STL, but not exactly the Kessel run.

1)The designation of protected lanes only used for transportation would solve the problem of waiting times
2)You can travel as long as you have a power supply for hacking and a working life support loop
3)Freeze themselves in time is not something I want possible. I think the closest thing to time travel here is living in a densely populated area while you send out a duplication mission. The duplication mission can take a year but with the slowed down clocks in your area, it's only take half a year in subjective time.
Two population centers could be separated by a month of FTL jumping but their subjective time means that a traveller would leave today, travel for a month and arrive two weeks later


Duplicating high technology:
It is possible yes, but you need both many cubes full of the tech you need duplicating and the time to transport them to a high quality sector. For the first you'll need a complete industrial base, for the second, a working space economy. That will reduce the duplication process from broken gimmick to just hard.

[krakonfive]

What?! No editing options and all the bolded text just dissapeared

This is sad.

I hope you can separate what I wrote from the quotations.
That lack of an edititing option is irking me!

[Imperial528]

There's a few minute window for editing, actually, so make sure to read your posts over once you post them. Limitless editing was removed because people abused it to change their arguments.

[gigabytelord]

There's a few minute window for editing, actually, so make sure to read your posts over once you post them. Limitless editing was removed because people abused it to change their arguments.

There is also a preview button that you can use to ensure that your post is going up the way you wanted it to, I use it quite frequently, although I almost always find a way to screw up my grammar regardless.

[UnintendedConsequenc]

There's a few minute window for editing, actually, so make sure to read your posts over once you post them. Limitless editing was removed because people abused it to change their arguments.

What, no timestamped edit history?

Hmm. You'd would think the easier solution is to kick out people who dishonestly change things.
I get a sense that there is a spirit of vigilantism around here that would be more than happy to earn kudos exposing people who do that.
They'd add victory tallies to their profiles....

Must drive Authors crazy in the writing forums.

[Imperial528]

Oh, I believe edits are time stamped, but only the most recent and there is no history. So unless a mod was on when it happened it becomes hard to prove that the edit was that serious. Furthermore, there's a rule against "playing mod", or trying to enforce the rules without actually being a mod. IIRC the most you can do is call someone out on a rule violation, and if they keep it up bring it to the attention of a mod.

[Terralthra]

Also, not every forum has the same restrictions in place on editing. Debate forums are more strict than non-debate forums, for example.

Also, PHPBB has a function for quoting. Using bold, when a better option exists, is poor form.

[krakonfive]

Also, not every forum has the same restrictions in place on editing. Debate forums are more strict than non-debate forums, for example.

Also, PHPBB has a function for quoting. Using bold, when a better option exists, is poor form.

I can quote and multiquote and split quotes and insert quotes, its just that it takes so much time to add all those 'quote' and '/quote' tags!

Its simply easier to select the text you are referencing and just bold it...

[krakonfive]

Okay then
[UPDATE]

The bolded parts work now.

[EDIT]

I can now edit.

PS: Your thoughts on the setting please?

[krakonfive]

Aaaaand /close.
Really, is a setting only interesting when the number of explosions and clear cut tropes abuse falls under 100/paragraph?