2014 STGOD OOC Commentary Thread 1

[Simon_Jester]

RE: Fin:

Since Phongn isn't playing, I guess the "knows stuff about accelerators" hat passes to me...

I'd actually recommend a ring supercollider, because it has a very plausible origin story within the context of the UOCSR, a nation which has long has respectable technologists, but (I gather) has trouble mustering the very best. The historical LHC was built in the tunnels of CERN's old Large Electron-Positron Collider, using superior magnet technology to what was available when the LEP was built in the '80s.

The UOCSR might have done something similar- built a huge set of collider tunnels, concluded that they weren't doing as much science with it as they'd hoped, and then scrapped the actual collider in order to build a better one with some degree of collaboration.

On the other hand, if you want something that's under construction right now, a powerful linear lepton collider might actually be a great idea. Linear colliders for protons or ions really don't make a lot of sense.

Final note: it really isn't very likely that several LHC-class supercollider rings will exist on Tellus. The main limiting factor on the data such a machine can gather is its own power and precision; getting better results requires a qualitatively superior machine. Having five times as much data all of the same kind is less valuable than having one set of data from the best possible machine.

So building four clones of the LHC, and running all five machines at once, wouldn't give us five times as much scientific knowledge as one LHC. And it would result in a lot of dilution and duplication of effort. Instead, at this level it honestly makes more sense to (essentially) build one huge high-energy collider in the whole world and have all the greatest scientific talent gather there.

There are plenty of niches for other, smaller accelerators- but what you won't see is six different countries all building LHC clones. Whoever builds the first such machine, or who has built the biggest, will draw the lion's share of attention and interest from the high energy physics community.

[Thus, a vastly disproportionate number of high energy physicsts go to Europe and to Switzerland to do their work; had the SSC been built in the US, Texas would have likely wound up the high energy physics capital of the world for the same reasons]
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RE: Own post in Story thread:

Little news piece that ties into something I'm doing later. The best comparison I can come up with for Cloud Palace 3 is that it's a cross between the American Manned Orbiting Laboratory concept, the Soviet Salyut 4 and 5, and Salyut 6. At the moment it lacks the docking infrastructure to perform the Soviets' excellent long-term habitation work, but there is a design to fit it with a suitable docking module assembly in orbit.

In other news, the Umerian Star Boat capsule is very possibly the worst one in widespread use in the world today. It's functional enough, but it has a two man crew, a... truly unique method of landing, and it may be the only active manned capsule design with a hole cut in the heat shield so you can climb out into the docking port. You do NOT want to open that door during reentry.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Eh. If I vaguely remember reading, a linear collider's advantage is precision, but the a circular collider can better scale the energy levels. Both operate very differently if I recall, one utilizing a long RF cavity (such as SLAC), while the other is literally rings of accelerator rings.

The UOCSR has enough tech to build them, along with the Niobium resource etc., but costs for operating and building a collider starts to be astronomical when one wants to scale beyond a certain energy level, i.e. TeV. If we want something closer to the original SuperCollider, the costs for that will likely run up into the tune of a few hundred billion. Also, there is a need for a huge amount of computing resource that is required to churn through several terabytes to petabytes of data.

Having several nations contribute to one such collider will probably be a lot more economical instead of having one country go gunho and build one huge one on its own dough... Never mind the need for at least two detectors to corroborate the results.

[Beowulf]

In other news, the Umerian Star Boat capsule is very possibly the worst one in widespread use in the world today. It's functional enough, but it has a two man crew, a... truly unique method of landing, and it may be the only active manned capsule design with a hole cut in the heat shield so you can climb out into the docking port. You do NOT want to open that door during reentry.

Sounds like Gemini-B, with a Rogallo wing for final descent? I'd be surprised if that door could be opened during re-entry. Should open outward, and the aerodynamic forces would keep it shut.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Fin: Orion would be interested in such a scientific collaboration. After all, we have no beef with the UOCSR, and our opinion on Communism is basically "meh, if it works for them." And we love technology and fancy science.

[Simon_Jester]

Sounds like Gemini-B, with a Rogallo wing for final descent? I'd be surprised if that door could be opened during re-entry. Should open outward, and the aerodynamic forces would keep it shut.

It is, it can't, it does, and I'm being silly. It's just that there would predictably be Cracked.com articles and so on about how batshit insane and ridiculous the thing is. Because there's a hole in the heat shield. It's just the kind of thing it takes some effort to get over, like having a window on a submarine.

Eh. If I vaguely remember reading, a linear collider's advantage is precision, but the a circular collider can better scale the energy levels. Both operate very differently if I recall, one utilizing a long RF cavity (such as SLAC), while the other is literally rings of accelerator rings.

I'm not sure I'd say that's the advantage of a linear collider.

Also, there are RF cavities built into the ring of accelerator parts that is the beamline in a circular collider.

However, the basic issue is that with electron/positron colliders, you are sharply limited because the particles' being so lightweight means higher energy losses due to synchrotron radiation. Synchrotron radiation losses are much worse on a circular accelerator, so high energy lepton colliders pretty much have to be linear accelerators. Protons and ions, which are more massive, work best in a circular accelerator that gives them (many orders of magnitude) more distance to get up to speed.

The UOCSR has enough tech to build them, along with the Niobium resource etc., but costs for operating and building a collider starts to be astronomical when one wants to scale beyond a certain energy level, i.e. TeV. If we want something closer to the original SuperCollider, the costs for that will likely run up into the tune of a few hundred billion. Also, there is a need for a huge amount of computing resource that is required to churn through several terabytes to petabytes of data.

The LHC cost on the close order of ten billion, even when excavating the tunnels is factored in. All available estimates on the cost of the larger SSC design (including the ones that got the project shut down for costing too much) have it capping out at around, I don't know, twenty to fifty billion in today's money? With fifty billion being a very pessimistic estimate, and definitely including costs of operation for a long experimental run.

Having several nations contribute to one such collider will probably be a lot more economical instead of having one country go gunho and build one huge one on its own dough... Never mind the need for at least two detectors to corroborate the results.

You are correct about the "several nations" part. Not so sure about the "corroborate" part; at the moment there are no facilities on Earth that can readily corroborate LHC results. It'll become completely hopeless after the soon-planned upgrade of the LHC. And it's debatable whether it's worth spending the money to build a second machine that can't outperform it.

[Siege]

Helix Industries and Coldstream Delta would be interested in discussing investment in a collider.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

You are correct about the "several nations" part. Not so sure about the "corroborate" part; at the moment there are no facilities on Earth that can readily corroborate LHC results. It'll become completely hopeless after the soon-planned upgrade of the LHC. And it's debatable whether it's worth spending the money to build a second machine that can't outperform it.

Technically, the point of having two detector experiments, CMS and ATLAS, was meant to corroborate the results so that the detector readings weren't a mere fluke. With regard to the Higgs discovery, it was CMS that found the particle first, followed by ATLAS. In fact, they pretty much waited for ATLAS to corroborate the result before they gave absolute certainty that the Higgs particle was truly discovered.

Technically, I foresee a possibility that one could use a pulsed laser to excite ions since a focused pulsed laser beam can have an E-field far greater than any known RF cavity. The only issue i suppose is the difficulty in aligning all the pulses with the ions...

[Simon_Jester]

Helix Industries and Coldstream Delta would be interested in discussing investment in a collider.

It'd be an odd thing for a corporation to get heavily involved except as a contractor, but when talking about large colliders, the things you really, really need are cheap tunnel boring and most bodaciously excellent number-crunching software.

Technically, the point of having two detector experiments, CMS and ATLAS, was meant to corroborate the results so that the detector readings weren't a mere fluke. With regard to the Higgs discovery, it was CMS that found the particle first, followed by ATLAS. In fact, they pretty much waited for ATLAS to corroborate the result before they gave absolute certainty that the Higgs particle was truly discovered.

Well, those are two detectors on the same accelerator, not two entirely different accelerators. My point was that buying two whole different accelerators on this level is a bad idea. They're individually too expensive, and unlike, say, space stations, there are very very few advantages to controlling your own rather than sharing the data from someone else's.

Helix Industries and Coldstream Delta would be interested in discussing investment in a collider.

It'd be an odd thing for a corporation to get heavily involved except as a contractor, but when talking about large colliders, the things you really, really need are cheap tunnel boring and most bodaciously excellent number-crunching software.

At least, assuming basically normal high-energy physics in the SDNW6verse, which is not a given in my opinion. So maybe it's all about making thirteen magic antiprotons to destroy the Vatican for all I know.

Technically, I foresee a possibility that one could use a pulsed laser to excite ions since a focused pulsed laser beam can have an E-field far greater than any known RF cavity. The only issue i suppose is the difficulty in aligning all the pulses with the ions...

Laser acceleration is definitely a thing, but it's still so bleeding edge that I don't see it working for research accelerator beamlines before, oh, 2025-2030 at least.

In other words, Coldstream Delta is prototyping it, probably.

[Siege]

Helix owns half of San Dorado's biggest university and Coldstream Delta invests tons of money in obscure science projects. If they have to plunk down a billion or two to ensure access to the bleeding edge of science on the off chance they might get better processors out of it a decade from now they wouldn't bat an eye.

Come to think of it, if there's even a small chance the fundamental science might help refine its predictive models Axum would be interested too. These are after all the people who look for patterns in cosmic background radiation and conduct experimental prognostication based on the positions of remote galactic clusters.

[Simon_Jester]

Hm. Fin, Siege, I don't think we ever quite resolved the Umerians' role in this. Dr. Mahogany suggested that the Umerian government could help make this more of a "working with the Lothali government, such as it is" and less of a "totally ignoring the Lothali government," since the Umerians were already organizing a longer-term operation that was intended to be more 'to stay' and less 'smash and grab the captured ships.'

Should I be thinking in terms of the Umerians accelerating the tempo of their planning so that they can operate simultaneously with the UOCSR fleet and its mercenary buddies?

[Siege]

As far as I'm concerned our discussion at the conference boiled down to the fact that you're welcome to assist but we're going in with or without Umerian help, so that if you wanted in you had to ramp up your operational tempo.

We are not in communications with whatever passes for the Lothali government, because if it can't stop pirates on its soil from hijacking foreign vessels then it's not worth talking to for the purposes of this operation. Also purely OOC I've done enough talking for a while and I'm not seeing anything happening, so here's something happening.

[Simon_Jester]

Ah. For some odd reason, I'd sort of assumed Dr. Mahogany's offer was being taken up on by default. If it's not, I'll bear that in mind, and I think the Umerians won't be participating until later for a few reasons of their own. Not to their advantage.

[On a similar note, I think it'd be best if we take the antiterrorism conference and just decide among ourselves OOC what happened. Writing three days of high-level negotiations would have gotten dull in any event. As to the terrorist attack, I don't think anybody actually wanted to write the Olympus Has Fallen story badly enough to justify putting it into the timeline... or it would have actually been shown happening.]

[Eternal_Freedom]

Yeah, I'm gonna say agree the conference result OOC and write off the Olympus Has Fallen stuff. It sounded like a fun idea, but realizing this would give me two major terrorist incidents on my soil in four months has put me off it considerably.

Since it's my conference in my nation, I'm vetoing the terror attack stuff, subject to mod approval.

[Siege]

I have no issue with that.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, two major terrorist attacks in four months is bad but not completely beyond the norm... Also, frankly, if it's happening to the Orion royal palace, then the real target is likely the Orion monarchy itself, not the conference.

But there are plenty of artistic reasons not to unnecessarily stretch things out. The conference could reasonably have gone for a second round of negotiations but nobody really seemed to want to write them even as we prepositioned ourselves for them. And frankly, if anyone really wanted to have fun with terrorist commandos storming the hotel/palace/whatever, we'd have already done it or found a way TO do it.

I'll save my image of a mentat government aide getting into a gunfight for later...

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

Objection. I'm pretty much in the same position as Force Lord and other people who'd like to be more active but can't for various reasons. I had the whole thing hammered out, but life got in the way. Repeatedly.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, the problem the rest of us have is that if it takes you three, four, or possibly five or more weeks to post the opening of the attack, and you neglect to tell the rest of us about it...

I mean, what are we supposed to do? It's bad STGOD practice to postpone an entire major inter-player storyline for four weeks while someone gets their shit together.

Look what happened in SDNW4 with the aftermath/endgame of the MEH war. Things started to drag out until many of us got bored and wandered away from the game entirely rather than finding something more interesting to do. There was a bit of poking around with preexisting storylines people wanted to finish, and a few cool ideas that we tried to implement in the final months... but honestly the thing went stale.

I think that the "okay, everyone wait for the Olympus Has Fallen incident" vibe did a lot to choke off what had previously been a quite active IC discussion of politics and terrorism at the conference, because we knew something big was supposed to happen... and then it never did.

So basically, if you're sitting on something for weeks because you can't find the time to finish it, tell us. Ask for collaboration. Maybe a co-author can get you unstuck or something.

But if we find ourselves waiting four weeks for the outcome of an event that's supposed to happen the very next day, people are going to want to move on.

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

If you wanted Olympus to fall, now it is. Ball's now in your court.

[Simon_Jester]

I suspect there will be a great moderatorial kerfluffle, given what Eternal_Freedom just said.

However, I am standing aside from that for the moment and asking only one question. Is Tatsuya physically accompanying the Fusoan delegation at any public gatherings during the first day of the conference, prior to the attacks?

Because petit-perception is a lovely thing.

[Siege]

As far as I'm concerned this is between Shinn and E_F. E_F has made his preferences known, if he wants to accomodate Shinn that's great but ultimately it's up to him to decide what goes and what does not in his nation. Certainly I'm sympathetic to his concerns regarding how Orion will look afterward so frankly at minimum I expect another nation/player to assume culpability for the attack in a way that means the Kingdom of Orion could not reasonably have foreseen or prevented the attack.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Jesus fucking Christ on a motherfucking pogo stick.

You see me veto it, you see Siege agree, and you post the damn thing without mentioning the much wider activity it includes. Spree shootings? Car bombs? And you guy managed this with two fucking months notice?

Right. At 2100 I will post my response, which will amount to the SAS securing the conference and the delegates (having been pre-positioned just in case, paranoia is an art form after all) and the 4th Airborne Division preparing for a combat jump into Paradise City to remove the insurgents.

And given that this is being orchestrated by someone working for the Fuso government, there may well be military reprisals as well, possibly war.

Unless we come to an agreement before 2100, that will be my response. Does Fuso want a war? Because my Navy has itchy trigger fingers at this point.

[madd0ct0r]

I still think someone in Orion's secret service is happy to allow these attacks to go through for the gain in power.

My god! I've turned into an alt-world troother!

[Eternal_Freedom]

I still think someone in Orion's secret service is happy to allow these attacks to go through for the gain in power.

My god! I've turned into an alt-world troother!

Hey, The Service might be ruthless and bloodthirsty...but they do not target Orion citizens or territory, or close allies (Underwood, Arcadia, Rheinland etc). Nor do they allow such attacks if they know of them.

[Eternal_Freedom]

As a follow-up:

Shinn, I will acknowledge the attack happens. The Orion security forces, the SAS and the 4th Airborne will utterly crush said attack and save the conference. Captives will be taken and interrogated and Fuso will be held responsible, either for culpability in the attack or for not noticing this guy's plans.

Options will be discussed for reprisals or a full-scale counterattack to this potential act of war.

The guards will not act as dumb as they do in Olympus Has Fallen. They will not charge out into the open for a firefight. The insurgents will die and the Palace will not fall.

That is as far as I am willing to acknowledge the storyline.

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

To keep going with the Olympus Has Fallen schtick, holding Fuso's government responsible for Tatsuya's plan is like holding the South Korean government responsible for allowing Kang Yeonsak to infiltrate as far as he did. Even when the dust clears and captives get taken and interrogated, how can Orion be able to trace everything back to Tatsuya? Hell, how can they even prove that Tatsuya was acting under orders from the Fusoan government?

Also, while Tatsuya's been set up as the mastermind of this particular attack, who's to say that he's not merely carrying out the plans of an even greater power? Remember when the Shinra Republic captured that Nipponese fugitive? Conspiracies within conspiracies, and Ostrheinland's at the heart of it all.