Nyrath
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Posts posted by Nyrath
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Re: Generation starships and their internal society structure
I read the book. But that's just a really badly designed AI.Ummmm, the problem is that it almost impossible to avoid a bad AI design in this case. It is easy to have an AI that sounds the alarm when the percentage of carbon monoxide in the crew's atmosphere rises above 100 ppm. It is almost impossible teach an AI the difference between "safe" and "stifling". (it is difficult to teach the difference to my wife, much less a computer)
Especially so if you are using a neural network or other "learning" type of AI. Blasted thing evolves. You'll wind up with a situation like in James P. Hogan's novel THE TWO FACES OF TOMORROW. Which, by the way, would make a great Star Hero scenario.
If you want to actually experiment with programming your own AI, I recommend the AI Game Programming Wisdom books. I've got them all, and they are solid gold.
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Re: Generation starships and their internal society structure
They are in a generation ship. Resources are limited and there is no junk food.They are in a generation ship. Jobs are either important to the survival of ship and passengers or they don't exist.
They are in a generation ship. Everyone knows everybody else, (and is related to everyone else unless they are using artificial insemination to refresh the gene pool.)
Again, I am not making myself clear.
Didn't you read the summary?
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Re: Long Distance Communication
Not necessarily. The ability to detect a phenomenon does not equate to the ability to broadcast with it.True. Here on Earth we can detect cosmic-ray photons that are far beyond our ability to generate.
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Re: Long Distance Communication
Or not. After all' date=' the chemical weapons we call WMDs don't come near to inflicting the death toll of nukes.[/quote']I'm sorry, I didn't make myself clear.
Yes, a tech base that includes FTL starships can create a WMD that will only kill a maximum of two people.
The point is, it is also possible for it to create a WMD that will eliminate all life on a planet.
Which means the first xenophobic race that produces FTL starships and planet-wreckers in a universe with no FTL detectors can and will (xenophobes, remember?) eliminate all other life in the entire galaxy in a couple of months.
This is the "one bad apple" scenario, where just one evil civilization can spoil a good time for everyone.
This is why military intelligence bases their scenarios upon the enemy's capabilities, not their intentions.
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Re: Generation starships and their internal society structure
A dictatorship is' date=' by its very nature, not benevolent.[/quote']http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictatorship
The benevolent dictatorship is a more modern version of enlightened absolutism[citation needed], being an undemocratic or authoritarian leader who exercises his or her political power for the benefit of the people rather than exclusively for his or her own self-interest or benefit, or for the benefit of only a small portion of the people. A benevolent dictator, for example, may focus government priorities on matters of public importance, such as healthcare, education, population control, or general city infrastructure. According to the Donella Meadows Archive former prime minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew was a benevolent dictator.[1] He or she may be committed to peaceful relations, rather than wars or invasions of other states, and may even allow for some democratic decision-making to exist, such as through public referendums.Alistair Cooke described Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency in the two years from his inauguration to Supreme Court's declaration that the National Recovery Administration was unconstitutional, as a benevolent dictatorship.
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Re: Generation starships and their internal society structure
What if you could program a computer to run the ship with no personal ambition' date=' just programed to maximize the safety, wellbeing, and moral of the passengers? Ultimate bread & circuses.[/quote']That can get nasty as well. You can wind up with a dystopian nanny-state. The benevolent computer will dictate your diet (because junk food and the like will shorten your lifespan), your job (you can't be a fireman, that's too dangerous!), and your relationships (you and his lady you've never met must be married right now, for your wellbeing).
And if you rebel against this, you are obviously an unwell individual, and must be psychologically re-programmed for your own good. Or lobotomized.
See the novels "With Folded Hands" and "The Mad Metropolis"
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Re: Dark galaxy crashing into the Milky Way
Somebody said that the (original) Battlestar Galactica was an attempt to adapt the movie Star Wars to TV, while Space 1999 was an attempt to adapt the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey to TV.
You may notice a certain similarity between Clavius base and Moonbase Alpha.
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Re: Long Distance Communication
...and even then a distress signal won't do much since it's dependent on sending a fast vessel to go summon help. Even a small craft could do immense damage if equipped with WMD.Especially since a WMD from a technology base that included FTL starships is probably a WMD that can incinerate an entire planet down to bedrock.
Agreed, unless sensors give you advanced warning enough to counter incursions with your defense fleets, you will not have any interstellar wars that last longer than about a minute or so. Dispatch a small craft with a planet-wrecker bomb to each of the enemy empire's planets and the war will be over about a minute after they arrive.
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Re: 7 Sci-Fi Series Ripe for Movie Reboots
Errr....Sorry to both "pick a nit" and derail the thread a bit but Major Matt and his team were toys of the 1960's.Thanks, I was having a senior moment there. I thought it was the 1960's when I was playing with Mattel's Man in Space, but my logical brain said it couldn't possibly have been that long ago.
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Re: Generation starships and their internal society structure
Humm... This could explain why Adolpj Hitler survived so much assassination attemps; people in the future will try to go back in time to try to eleminate him' date=' not realizing they already failed...[/quote']Though it might make some people think.
Check out this hysterical cartoon:
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Re: Generation starships and their internal society structure
Thank you. I know it's a tad of a tangent, but thank you for so succinctly describing the exact reason that I always choke on Time Travel fiction.You can't go back to 1935 and kill someone (Hey, you know the "classic example," but no one's going to accuse me of Godwin
). You _can't_. If you could, then you wouldn't, because he'd have been killed.To put in another way, if you had, in 2009, a time machine, and opted to use it to travel back in time to kill someone, the you have already failed, because you have already been there and tried. 1935 happened and the universe moved on. You were there, and you failed. Go ahead and read about him in history books, build a time machine--- just remember that you've already been there and it already didn't work, or you wouldn't have motive to do it in the first place.
If I understand you, you are arguing that the past is deterministic, which is more or less Consistency Protection.
But again, this is a thread hijack.
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Re: Generation starships and their internal society structure
Isn't there another way to look it around? I read once about this time travel paradox thing and two general possibilities were exposed as what would happen in such a case. The first possibility is the paradox as stated by Nyrath' date=' while the second didn't implied a paradox at all; if this second possibility is true, people moving back in time and destroying their now future possibilities to do so would now live (and act) in a parallel universe, a universe where they will not move back in time to do what they already did.[/quote']This thread is being hijacked for yet another tired re-hash of the "but maybe This will get around that meanie Einstein preventing me from having an FTL starship." The gory details are here
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3v.html#causality
If you read the link, you will see that there are four ways of avoiding time paradoxes: Parallel Universes, Consistency Protection, Restricted Space-Time Areas, and Special Frames. The latter three are examples of the Novikov self-consistency principle.
They all have problems.
You were talking about Parallel Universes.
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Re: Generation starships and their internal society structure
http://www.theculture.org/rich/sharpblue/archives/000089.htmlThat looks like it explains how a message ends up getting there before it left, according to theory.
He is using physics-speak. In physics, a "message" could be a radio message, an FTL starship, a bullet, or anything else capable of influencing the awareness of the observer.
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Re: Generation starships and their internal society structure
Oh' date=' is that really the only alternative? All or nothing?[/quote']Would you like your employer to calculate your salary in a universe where 1+1=2 only at random times?
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Re: Sky Scorcher 1 megaton air-to-air missile (1956)
sounds like we could have built it in 1970...And I thougth SLAM was the scariest of the designs...
Well, at least with Casaba howitzer, you were not troubled with the problem of disposing of the blasted thing. With SLAM (aka Project Pluto), the cruise missile would come home after completing its mission, hotter than a nuclear reactor core element. I think they planned to ditch it into the Marianas Trench or something like that. Which would make Greenpeace and Prince Namor very angry.
IIRC the Casaba howitzer concept was intended to make an Orion-drive spacecraft into a species of space-going battleship. According to George Dyson's book PROJECT ORION, President Kennedy was horrified at this and canceled the space battleship. The Casaba howitzer was further developed for the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars missile defence"), where it became even more classified.
Yes, we could have had this in 1970.
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Re: Star Goes Rogue in Untimely Collision
On another hand' date=' it seems we just witnessed the first use of a weapon of stellar destruction of some sort... Some alien nation must have bombed this enemy system with a new super weapon in order to stop a long and hard conflict... and ominate it's sector of the galaxy!
We're all doomed; how could we compete against such power??? Let's drink, as the end of humanity, as we knew it, is at hand...
[/quote']Except that the last surviving member of the alien race whose star was destroyed arrives on Earth. Before it dies, it gives your stable of players a map of a cosmic quest to the one superweapon capable of defeating the star-killers.
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Re: Long Distance Communication
I always liked the FTL com system from the novel "We all died at Breakaway Station."Oh, my. I managed to miss this novel. I'll have to get a copy now.
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Re: Generation starships and their internal society structure
They both are. Both fired, both hit, both died.How? In the first reference frame, B is dead before he pulls the trigger, so he does not fire, so A is not killed.
In the second frame, A is dead before he pulls the trigger, so he does not fire, so B is not killed.
So which one is dead?
How do you come back at 9:00am to begin with?By using your FTL drive.
Details here
http://www.theculture.org/rich/sharpblue/archives/000089.html
This is why violating causality is a Bad Thing. It is sort of like dividing by Zero in mathematics.
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Re: 7 Sci-Fi Series Ripe for Movie Reboots
Buck Rogers reboot? Nope. What I want is an actual movie or TV adaptation of the Buck Rogers comic strip (Gil Gerard was not Buck).Ah, Anthony Rogers crawls out of the rip-van-winkle cave to find people jumping around with intertron antigravity belts and using rocket guns on the Mongol repellor ray ships. I'd watch that.
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Re: Generation starships and their internal society structure
So' date=' if causality was violated one time, or if it were shown that causality COULD be violated, suddenly all science would stop working? Logical arguments which worked in the past would suddenly fail?[/quote']There are larger issues.
FTL with Relativity leads to causality violations. Consider a duel with tachyon pistols. Two duelists, A and B, are to stand back to back, then start out at 0.866 lightspeed for 8 seconds, turn, and fire. Tachyon pistol rounds move so fast, they are instantaneous for all practical purposes.
http://sheol.org/throopw/tachyon-pistols.html
According to one frame of reference, A's pistol kills B four seconds before B can fire.
According to another frame of reference, B's pistol kills A four seconds before A can fire.
So which one is dead?
Say you jump into the good FTL starship Sky Trash at 11:00 am, travel FTL in such a manner that you travel back in time to 9:00 where the younger Sky Trash is sitting on the launch pad, and use the laser cannon to blow the younger Sky Trash into itty bits.
Now, if the younger Sky Trash is destroyed, you could not have entered it at 11:00 to travel back in time to destroy it. So it could not have been destroyed.
But if it was not destroyed, you entered it at 11:00 and traveled back in time to destroy it. So it is destroyed.
Is Sky Trash destroyed or not?
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Re: Generation starships and their internal society structure
So' date=' if causality was violated one time, or if it were shown that causality COULD be violated, suddenly all science would stop working? Logical arguments which worked in the past would suddenly fail?[/quote']Yes.
You take a mathematical statement, and by using a mathematical proof, you demonstrate that it is necessarily true. The statement is now a theorem, and can be used to prove other mathematical statements.
Without causality, nothing can be proven. So suddenly all of the theorems vanish and with them everything that depended on them.
Everything that we called science is now nothing but coincidences which may or may not repeat.
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Re: Generation starships and their internal society structure
Do we really NEED causality? Can we just have a big fine for violating it or something?The trouble with getting rid of causality is that it is the basis of logic and science.
Put it this way: would you want to play a game of Star Hero if the rules were the same as Calvin Ball?
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Re: 7 Sci-Fi Series Ripe for Movie Reboots
As for the other roles--for Alan Carter' date=' Australia's Man In Space,[/quote']Fine. You can come here and help me clean my coffee from all over my monitor.
(for you young sprats, this is a very skillful joke based on a 1970's toy called Major Matt Mason)
repped.
). You _can't_. If you could, then you wouldn't, because he'd have been killed.
We're all doomed; how could we compete against such power??? Let's drink, as the end of humanity, as we knew it, is at hand...
[/quote']
A general question? What about Shields?
in Star Hero
Posted
Re: A general question? What about Shields?
If you look at the mechanism of the Renegade Legion shield, they would make more sense as a Damage Reduction modifier. But a DCV makes sense as well.