Footfall vs RL

[MKSheppard]

Learn to read, you fucking idiot. Temperature is irrelevant and I already talked about energy in.

Right; so in D13 world, we won't spot a 100K object moving across our field of vision's background, which is coincidentally about 2.7K to 4K?

In fact; that image I linked to shows completely dead asteroids emitting no internal power being picked up solely due to solar irradance on their surfaces.

[MKSheppard]

Not in the real world, fucktard. Temperature is fucking irrelevant, get that through your stone head.

So I guess NASA using a 40 cm diameter telescope that looks in the 3, 5, 12, and 22 μm infrared bands to find 33,500 previously unknown asteroids didn't happen.

Damn, I guess NASA just took that $320 million USD and lit that money on fire, instead of using it to find objects warmer than 70-100K.

[MKSheppard]

I guess you just don't understand what the fuck you're talking about and are trying to hide behind irrelevant trivia.

No actually, it's you who's trying to hide behind irrevelant trivia and you don't have any idea what you're talking about

I bet you didn't know that temperature is unrelated to size. Any asteroid at a given distance from the sun will have similar temperatures.

Holy shit; thanks for stating the obvious! Next you'll lecture us on the magic of black-bodies.

Why didn't the telescope pick up little specs of dust? OMFG THEY ARE HOTTER THAN SPACE IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN SEEN

Because you know, specks of intersteller dust are way smaller than the diffraction limit of telescopes and show up as generalized 'noise'?

lol space doesn't even have a temperature btw but that's beside the point.

Actually, it does. You're showing your total scientific ignorance here.

2.7K is the temperature of the universe; and thus space. It's leftover energy from the Big Bang.

Size doesn't matter to temperature, but it does matter to energy out. Which is also what trips the detection thresholds.

Like radar antenna gain, IR sensor sensitivity is highly dependent on the size of the receiver.

We were able to detect 35,500 asteroids we didn't know about with a mere 40 cm diameter infrared telescope. I can't wait for 2014 and the JWST, which will have a 6.5 m diameter infrared telescope.

Best part is; the speed of light is 299,792 km/sec; so we'll be able to have a huge space based interferometric array at the Earth/Moon L4 Lagrange point with individual telescopes that dwarf JWST, compute trajectory data from the array, then beam it out to our squadrons, which can use their smaller telescopes in formation as a baseline to investigate targets of interest at the top of the list that came in that morning from US Space Command's HQ at Aldrin Base, well before any 10 km/sec spacecraft can get in firing range.

[MKSheppard]

Somewhere in Space - USS BUNKER HILL, CGS-52



"Sir, we just got the latest traj dump from Aldrin Base." announced Lieutenant Shroomatelli.

Captain Hackman didn't even bat an eye and continued to sip from his coffee. "Anything new since last update?"

Shroomatelli scanned the sheet of e-paper. "Ah, yessir. The Antrim array at E-M L-5 picked up a bunch of drive flares at 0630 UTC at Asteroid #231231F, a known Kork anchorage. Analysis of the flares show them to be of the same engine type and class found found on Kork 5102 class cutters."

"Right," muttered Hackman. "Load the data into the tac plot and update it. Those Kork rock rats've been trouble lately, and I don't like how the damn Korks have been following us since we broke moorings at Thatch Station with one of their cutters."

[Stofsk]

uh Adam, link posting fail; that link goes to some stupid page about hearts of iron in G&C.

[MKSheppard]

Don't want to believe me? Believe Mike Wong and others:
http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=13433

Darth Wong wrote:
In any case, the "stealth is useless in space" people are quite frankly full of shit.

Why thank you for posting a link to a thread from 2003 by me about Hearts of Iron getting patched again.

I didn't know you were such a fan of me that you had irrevelant threads I posted seven years ago about a random game on speed-dial.

[Junghalli]

I believe this is the thread D13 meant to link to.

[jollyreaper]

Just a thought regarding spotting a hot object in space: right now we aren't even 100% sure that there's not a brown dwarf hanging around in the Oort cloud, well within one light-year of the sun. The WISE mission took about 10 months to survey the whole sky, but that makes you wonder -- if everything we've got on Earth and in orbit couldn't easily detect a Jupiter-mass object radiating at ~600-2000K, and even a specialized mission devoted to that purpose still can't confirm yay or nay, then how easy is it going to be to pick out a spaceship with current technology?

More to the point, how likely are we to find something we're not looking for? For the sake of the argument, let's imagine there's a country out there that's never heard of attack subs. How likely is it they're going to discover one offshore when their ocean surveys tend to be about whale-watching and fisheries?

In the book the incoming alien ship was picked up as an anomaly in an astronomic survey. Back then they were using the flip screens, rotating two photographic plates back and forth and relying on the observer to pick up differences, the same way Pluto was found. Not sure if we've got computers doing that right now but I'd think so. Would the spaceship be swept up in the filters? What if there's a backlog of looking at the surveys? What if we're years behind? Fine for finding asteroids and the like but not so much for detecting incoming hostiles. If we don't even know we should be looking for them, we're not likely to even find them until they're on our doorstep.

The only real answer to this question, of course, is determining what tech the alien ship uses, it's mass and albedo and what sort of energy the drive is throwing out, then ask a current astronomer when they think someone would notice something like this coming in, especially when they're not even looking for it. Maybe they'll tell us it would stick out like a sore thumb even if it was past Pluto's orbit, maybe it wouldn't be noticed until it was passing lunar orbit. But my money is on it being more of a surprise.

[jollyreaper]

As for the whole "hard sci-fi vs soft sci-fi", I figured hard sci-fi basically meant any science fiction story without technology that overtly violates the laws of physics as we understand them now. Anything else is "soft", and the key factor is consistency - you might have no idea how your "black box" FTL technology works, but at least you're consistent on how it's depicted working.

I like hard and soft SF. What I can't stand is inconsistent SF. Star Trek is the prime example where the rules change from week to week. We can't beam through shields! Oh, wait, we can beam through shields. Look, here's a hard limit that drives the drama this week! And next week we find out there's no such limit. Transporters can reverse aging but we'll never see this brought up again. We'll just assume everyone forgot about the fountain of youth.

Writers have a hard enough time sticking to the rules of the real world, something we know exists and can be researched if they cared enough! When they start making up rules for their imaginary setting, it only gets worse.

[Metahive]

We can't beam through shields! Oh, wait, we can beam through shields.

Aside from special cases where the writers decided to wank a certain side out, like the Borg or the Dominion, beaming through shields has been consistently portrayed as being tied to knowing the frequency of the shields that have to be penetrated.

Transporters can reverse aging but we'll never see this brought up again. We'll just assume everyone forgot about the fountain of youth.

That happens twice actually, once when Dr Pulaski's original age is restored back to before she contracted an aging disease and when Picard, Guinan and Ro are turned into children, but yeah, the transporter are a particularly bothersome plot device since they aren't used in a consistent fashion. For the Federation we can presume certain ethical constraints against "transporter-immortality", for everyone else however, who knows.

Writers have a hard enough time sticking to the rules of the real world, something we know exists and can be researched if they cared enough! When they start making up rules for their imaginary setting, it only gets worse.

The problem for Star Trek writing is just that there's so much material and so many different writers. Combined with the sheer longevity of the franchise that all but guarantees inconsistencies to happen. At one point or another they should have hired people to write an official "bible".

[Samuel]

Transporters are a plot device to avoid the cost of having a shuttle land to get our heros to their destination. Like anti-gravity and the universal translator it should probably be ignored when it comes to one shot tricks (like being able to make a copy of a person).

[Connor MacLeod]

I believe this is the thread D13 meant to link to.

There are others where Stealth in space and such have been discussed in detail (most of which I believe Mike has commented on.

this one was the most recent and arguably most relevant.

These two are less directly related, but I think still interesting in some manner one two

[Connor MacLeod]

Ugh, I forgot about this one.

Ah, the writings of Isaac Kuo. I love it, he argues well and his approach is nice and fresh; he's brought up a lot of cool ideas over the last few years. Big evolution there too if you've been a long time reader.

I'm of mixed feelings about Issac TBH. I mean the guy is clearly as smart as hell, he puts a lot of thought and work into his ideas, and he still manages to think outside the box. He can even reach outside his own preferred view of SF and contrive with the best of them if asked. But there are certian attitudes of his that discomfort me and I can't agree with (see below.) I honestly tend to lean more towards being impressed by Luke Campbell, myself. Friendly, knowledgable (at least on his topic) an he can contrive too.. but not as.. absolute-sounding.

This evolution is one reason why I often make it a point to reply to Atomic Rockets links. AR is a starting point for a discussion, not an end point.

True. Sort of like a study aid rather than the textbook. Although TBH SFconsim and the Alt page are pretty much the same... the yahoo group (as I said above) is good for stimulating thinking and for testing yourself, but I dont know if I would ever want to "adopt" their stuff for certain. And I certainly dont want it going mainstream (profit = death of creativity.)

Now you're sounding like some folks I know. "First the scientists say the Earth is getting colder, now they go on about Global Warming. Hah!"

Sorry. I know I'm probably over-exaggerating Issac's stances again but that is kinda what bugs me. In some ways he's very flexible mentally but in other ways he can be very absolute. Then agian so can anyone else, and noone is perfect, even the smart folk. It's my recently-evolved distaste for sci fi "absolutes", especially ones originating from SFConsim. My feeling is that it shouldnt matter whether you invoke FTL, or you decide to stick to sTL, or even decide to stay in a single solar system. Or a single planet. Or even a single nation. Your SF Setting should go for internal consistency and suspend disbelief and be plausible enough that I can enjoy it.

It is a constant evolution, though I think it is two things coming: 1) old habits are slowly dying, and 2) more magic is scaled back.

I kinda think its more like "we're making new old habits" and "we're trying to be different by getting away from magic." - basically establishing a new trend. Whether this trend will last and how long, who can say. I do worry that the logical conclusion is sort of a sci fi "death"... I man how "realistic" can get before it stops being what we consider sci fi? How are we even going to DEFINE sci fi, for that matter? Should the definition change?

On the other hand, there are times the entire group seems to exist no more than to allow a bunch of men to argue over a topic they love. So there may be no resolution and maybe noone really cares

The old habits is the big one: so many of us "knew" one thing that it wasn't really questioned. (Some of which was a kind of backlash against older habits and some were still bias toward those same habits...) But then we questioned it and it was no longer so black and white.

True. I suppose once you get to the point of starting to question things and looking for yourself, the old habits seem silly. That was certainly true of me to an extent. Its kinda a sci fi "rite of passage" I suppose. I dont want to say "becoming more mature" because that sounds too fucking elitist.

Oh hell I've gone from no space fighters, no stealth to almost the complete opposite!

SAme thing happened with me and lasers.

[Connor MacLeod]

Yeah, even if you're going for hard science fiction there's a lot of room for interpretation, and it gets even better when you start factoring in stuff like politics (e.g. what if it's like Dune and certain technologies are artificially restricted?) and the shape of the setting (e.g. an interstellar setting vs one restricted to just one system can have pretty different dynamics).

Hardness is really not all that restrictive, especially if you're going for "can work without magitech" instead of "THIS IS THE REAL FUTURE ZOMG!"

Magictech and "more realistic/plausible" both have benefits and drawbacks. The latter has the benefit of being more firmly grounded in existing knowledge so we know it will work without problems or inconsistencies and whatnot. However it CAN be restrictive because you have to play within the limits of science (sci fi mass extinction type superweapons being successfully employed become harder to do and more limited in selection, and quite possibly impossible if you're being restrictive enough about propulsion/engine performace, for example.) It also forces you to really do the research (or have the right people with the right knowledge available) and that can add complexity or difficulty to the writing process (at the very least it will be time consuming, even if it doesn't affect the writing itself in any way.) There's also the dating problem. Something we may or may not think is possible now could be possible ten or twenty or a hundred years from now. (think lensman and the absence of any real automation or computers as we think of it. That's a real hard issue to explain IMHO.)

Magictech is a real can of worms when it comes to plausibility or consistency, because you run the risk of painting yourself into a corner story and logic wise if you use it too much (if you invent tech x to explain tech y, and then it turns out tech x can be used to enahnce or create tech z which can do such and such.. it could fuck with your suspension of disbelief and internal consistency.) On the other hand, magictech is alot more forgiving of one's knowledge and understanding, and you don't have to "explain" it the same way "harD" sci fi might need.

Firepower is a good example. Higher yields (lets say megaton or more) become problmeatic/impossible for "harder" tech simply because of issues like cooling an dsuch. But eve in sofer sci fi high yields can be problematic due to things like enviromental effects, recoil, fuel usage, etc. Reducing the yields eliminates alot of those problems, but it could limit you in the story depending on how you want to tell it (at the very least it will force you to seek a different means of doing it, which may or may not have implications elsewhere. It may even force you to abandon it entirely.) Magictech might handwave away certain issues depending on how you do it (remove cooling) but there are still going to be limits (recoil is going to be a problem regardless, for example, and that one is a complicated one to deal with that magictech cannot wholly ignore due to conservation of momentum and suchlike.)

That's kind of why I tend to view it as a matter of degree. Some people will be comfortable with a greater degree of "magic" and less "hardness", while others won't like that or feel comfortable with it and may wnat to go "harder". Both are fine, but neither is going to be intrinsically superior to the other simply by the degree alone. How they apply it ot the universe, how plausbile it seems and how internally consistent it is will determine which is ultimately better (ignoring personal taste in the mattter of course. someone who likes 'hard' sci fi may not like a 'softer' variety no matter how well written it is, because the magictech breaks their Suspension of disbelief totally.)

[Junghalli]

It also forces you to really do the research (or have the right people with the right knowledge available) and that can add complexity or difficulty to the writing process (at the very least it will be time consuming, even if it doesn't affect the writing itself in any way.)

I think a lot of that depends on how you treat the science in the story. If the tech and science is mostly background then all you really need to write hard SF is a basic understanding of principles and limits (lightspeed limit etc.).

There's also the dating problem. Something we may or may not think is possible now could be possible ten or twenty or a hundred years from now. (think lensman and the absence of any real automation or computers as we think of it. That's a real hard issue to explain IMHO.)

This is why I think trying to predict the real future is probably futile. A better standard is "plausible enough". And being liberal with your tech assumptions has its own problems. You mentioned how magitech can write you into a corner drama-wise, but very powerful hard SF tech can easily do the same thing. I encountered exactly this problem in my own writing efforts, when I was still trying to write what I thought was a plausible future. The tech was so powerful that it made a lot of the stories I might have told difficult or impossible. Mysteries and problems I might throw at the characters should be easily solveable just by throwing supertech at it. In the end I decided to go the Dune route and have the technology be artificially restricted by political factors, and all of a sudden it became much easier to have the kind of setting and stories I wanted, now that I wasn't constantly worrying about "but dude it's 500 years from now they really would probably just be able to do X".

Firepower is a good example.<snip>

I think that very often high firepower actually creates more problems than it solves, from a writers' perspective. Consider the popularity of energy/force "shields" in soft SF. What does this technology do, from a dramatic perspective? Why, it solves the problem of high firepower! You have ships shooting at each other with megaton/gigaton/whatever weapons - so they just hit the other ship and the other ship blows up. But that's boring*! It's much more exciting if the ship can take some hits and survive! Its visually more dramatic to have ships pounding away at each other! You can have damage, stuff flying around, wounded, damage control teams running around putting out fires and stuff! The ship can be crippled and you can have a great dramatic close-up of the Captain painfully conceeding defeat and giving the order for surrender or abandon ship! But that doesn't make any sense if the weapons are really powerful... so we invent this "shield", which magics away all the power of the enemy's weapons except what's conducive to drama!

* Not necessarily, but it does make you work a little harder to keep it interesting.

But I think this is really a problem most fiction brings upon itself unnecessarily. Just thinking about Star Wars and Star Trek, all the examples I can think of where high firepower is plot important are where they're going to mess up a planet - but you don't need battle weapons to be really powerful for that. You can find a suitable asteroid, chuck it at the planet - and this very conveniently is something that takes too long to be useful in a ship to ship fight! Or if that takes too long, you can have powerful magitech strategic weapons of some kind, but they're too unweildy to use against enemy warships.

You could say that travelling in space really fast should imply powerful weapons just because kinetics will be really dangerous because of relative velocities, but this isn't too hard to solve. Lasers are good enough that missile weapons are fairly useless, but they're still relatively weak because of power and cooling considerations - so ships shoot each other with lasers, but it takes a while for them to completely destroy each other this way.

Mind you, I get what you're saying generally, but I think this is one particular area where a lot of writers actually use magitech counterproductively for their own dramatic needs.

That's kind of why I tend to view it as a matter of degree. Some people will be comfortable with a greater degree of "magic" and less "hardness", while others won't like that or feel comfortable with it and may wnat to go "harder".

Yeah definitely. I'd say something like this is the right general idea, although one may disagree with some of the specifics.

[jollyreaper]

Magictech is a real can of worms when it comes to plausibility or consistency, because you run the risk of painting yourself into a corner story and logic wise

Galactica had a few head scratchers like that. The atmospheric jump, for example. Galactica jumps in, fires out fighters, jumps out. Wait a second, a battlestar can multi-jump? Can we think of any situations in past episodes where that would have been incredibly useful? Why haven't we ever seen it before? Right, the writers just thought of it. That's like R2D2's rocket thrusters. Wait a second, he has rocket thrusters? What happened between the prequels and the originals, did he forget he had them or something?

You'll find that same lack of attention to continuity in most television but non-scifi tends to keep that sort of thing limited to characterization. With scifi you'll have it in the characterization and the pseudo-science.