Question: would the Alliance's quantum entanglement communications work with such excellent bandwidth and low lag if they were being used over interstellar distances?
Also, how is the next update coming?
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Moderator: LadyTevar
The equipment might not be, but just having a few college-level textbooks on the science behind it would move the tentative plans for terraforming Duna forward by decades. And in any case they've got plans and documentation for the warp drive onboard and could spare a few spare parts for reverse-engineering, which they'd happily donate as a goodwill gesture to facilitate trade... Or at least that was the original intent.Simon_Jester wrote:However, terraforming equipment is probably less portable.
Good question. According to everything both parties thought they knew about their physical principles the answer is no, but the theory has yet to be put to the test, and in the present circumstances it would pay to keep an open mind about what is and isn't theoretically possible. I will however confirm that the link back to Kerbin wasn't noticeably worse when they tried it for the first time.Question: would the Alliance's quantum entanglement communications work with such excellent bandwidth and low lag if they were being used over interstellar distances?
It's coming along pretty well but isn't quite ready to post yet. I don't want to give a hard number in case I jinx myself, but it should only be a couple of days at most.Also, how is the next update coming?
A lot of Apollo astronauts were ex-military pilots, so it was pretty common. Bill could have been a pilot who was recruited to the KSP for his flying skills.Zaune wrote:Giving Bill a military background seemed like a good idea at the time but doesn't make a whole lot of sense in retrospect, artificial gravity being a huge shock seems a bit silly as well, and the last few paragraphs were rushed. It's not the worst thing I've ever written but it needs tightening up.
Simon_Jester wrote:"WHERE IS YOUR MISSILEGOD NOW!?"
Starglider wrote:* Simon stared coldly across the table at the student, who had just finnished explaining the link between the certainty of young earth creation and the divinely ordained supremacy of the white race. "I am updating my P values", Simon said through thinned lips, "to a direction and degree you will find... most unfavourable."
I did some of that in a thread in the SF section here.Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:Don't sweat it, and don't do a detailed postmortem now. Personally I wouldn't sweat converting it for downloadability either, not yet- it's just another frustration and distraction from making good fiction happen. Go back to the last bit that's solid and you have confidence in, and work forwards again from there.
What might help, because this really is quite an odd situation, is to sketch out both sides' positions first, what they know or think they know, what they want; in something this unusual, a little preparation would not go amiss.
Unfortunately, Kerbal laser technology isn't that great; they can shoot down an incoming missile pretty reliably but when it comes to offensive weapons they're dependent on good old-fashioned guns and missiles.In terms of the worst case scenario, for a basically- well, for a species for whom weapons are not a large part of their culture, let's weasel it at that, I'd expect a lot of lasers because they are so potentially, immensely useful for non- violent purpose. Long range LIDAR mapping and spectroscopy? Mining to serve ISRU? Communications, small craft- accelerating solar- sail remote probes on their way? Use the optics to recieve, as a telescope, as well as emit? Lots of uses for a distant probe. As well as if the worst comes to the worst.
(Laser weapons don't need long barrels, they need wide lenses- they would tend to look like optical devices, cameras, telescopes. A sufficiently paranoid Kerbal could 'film the ceremony' and leave the humans none the wiser that he had them covered with ravening death beams.)
Might go for the opposite, actually; the Kerbals got to take a big shortcut because they had a Negative Space Wedgie to poke with a stick, and they missed some intermediate steps because there's several holes in their understanding of the theory.And now a spanner in the works- yes, you more or less have to develop artificial gravity on the way to a working version of a drive that basically bends spacetime, but scaling the actual alkerbierre drive effect down to something as piddly as shipboard AG would be like gearing a 1000HP tank engine down to power a mechanical pencil.
If the humans went down a blind alley with artificial gravity research, managed to get a complicated, twitchy, low power application just right but in doing so headed in the wrong direction from the big prize, the Kerbals might be very relieved by that.
Hmm. I didn't know that. I could change the design, but it'd be easy enough to handwave as the early theorists getting some stuff wrong. That bears thinking on.Although- their ship is going to be very distinctive, although not obvious at first sight to the humans of the 'verse. The draft designs for alcubierre drive have structures associated with it that are as much a giveaway as the masts and rigging of a sailing ship or the pusher plate of an Orion; the field emitter that 'blows' the warp bubble has to be a fairly solid ring structure wider than the length of the main hull.
It's Kerbal Space Program, which is basically a spiritual successor to Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space. This should give you some idea.SMJB wrote:I have some suggestions.
The Alcubierre drive requires the existence of negative mass in order to work--which means exotic matter of some unknown description. I don't know much about this whole Kerbal Space Patrol thing (literally just what I've read here), but you mentioned a space anomaly called "the Kraken"--perhaps the kerbals could mine exotic matter from there?
That's pretty much what I'd got in mind for the Alliance's agenda. But the kerbals will have ideas of their own and aren't necessarily inclined to take orders from their hosts. They've been watching the news, where the fallout from the Miranda leaks is currently the lead item, and the local equivalent of the History Channel.This would have some rather interesting implications for the setting. Firstly, even if the Alliance gets schematics for an Alcubierre drive, they won't be able to build one. If they steal an Alcubierre drive, they'll have a grand total of one. Secondly, the Kerbals have something that it's absolutely worth sending an invasion fleet lightyears from home to gain control of. I know in your other thread you were talking about war between kerbals and humans. The kerbals are going to want to keep control of all the exotic matter even before they learn about the various dirty secrets of the Alliance (my impression is that there are limits on freedom of the press in the 'verse) because they are technologically advanced and clearly warlike to some extent, and the Alliance is going to resent this because it means the kerbals can hit them and they can't hit back. It might be worth it, from the Alliance's point of view, to get in a first strike at highly relativistic speeds and attempt to secure the Kraken now, while the kerbals have only one FTL ship (or what few they make in the next few years).
Now, my impression is that the Alliance is going to want to hide the existence of the kerbals from their people and try to trade slightly-outdated or mainly-harmless technology for exotic matter. The Alcubierre drive will have obvious military potential, and they don't want that info leaking to would-be rebels. I don't know a lot about the kebals, but I imagine the principles of capitalism alone will drive them to seek greater exposure (and potentially better deals) sooner or later.
Ironically, though, the kerbals have much less recent history of armed conflict; their last real war was decades ago and hardly any of their serving military personnel have ever seen combat.The thing to remember is that the Alliance is barely unified (they've only been so for six or seven years, and that at the barrel of a gun) while the kerbals aren't unified--there is a great deal of potential here for dealing across species lines.
I may work that into any sequels I decide to do, but Starfarer 1 definitely can't bring any other ships home with her unless they're either attached to a docking port or lashed to the hull with cable; they could probably expand the warp bubble by a few percent but the safety margin isn't that big.Back to the Alcubierre drive. They work by enclosing a bubble of space and warping the universe around it--who says the bubble has to contain only one ship? Or that the drive has to even be attached to a ship in the first place, rather than acting as an interstellar ferry? This last one has pros and cons--on the one hand, you won't be wasting reaction mass dragging it everywhere you go, but on the other hand, what if it falls into the wrong hands or you need to GTFO quick-like?
Was that supposed to not have sound?Zaune wrote:It's Kerbal Space Program, which is basically a spiritual successor to Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space. This should give you some idea.
If it's invisible, that just means it's so negatively massive that it bends light away from it, like a reverse-black hole.And the Deep Space Kraken thing is actually kind of an in-joke. The game engine really strains to cope with the biggest planet in the system, and can get really glitchy when ships are operating near it. Sometimes they'll just blow up, but one one occasion I saw a video where part of a ship got suddenly launched in a random direction at eight times the speed of light. And the germ of an idea was planted...
The kerbals must be rather civic-minded, then, because in the real world we can't even get the people behind an effort to get Saudi Arabia to stop child marriages. I can't imagine it'll be long before some brainless cultural relativist says they should "respect the culture of the Alliance", even without factoring in the fact that it's quite large and powerful. Of course, the people will have a hell of a lot more interest in the Alliance (because OMG ALIENS!!!) than the typical First Worlder has in Saudi Arabia, but still, it'd be a good idea to at least touch on these contrary sorts.That's pretty much what I'd got in mind for the Alliance's agenda. But the kerbals will have ideas of their own and aren't necessarily inclined to take orders from their hosts. They've been watching the news, where the fallout from the Miranda leaks is currently the lead item, and the local equivalent of the History Channel.
All this is going on in the public eye back on Kerbin, I might add. Clips from the intercepted TV broadcasts are getting played on the evening news, anthropologists are getting interviews in the papers; this is the story of the century. And all the usual suspects are working up a good head of righteous indignation about the many sins of the Alliance, both known and suspected, and demanding that Something Be Done.
There's still room for both sides to try to play the other's factions off against one another.Ironically, though, the kerbals have much less recent history of armed conflict; their last real war was decades ago and hardly any of their serving military personnel have ever seen combat.The thing to remember is that the Alliance is barely unified (they've only been so for six or seven years, and that at the barrel of a gun) while the kerbals aren't unified--there is a great deal of potential here for dealing across species lines.
Simon_Jester wrote:"WHERE IS YOUR MISSILEGOD NOW!?"
Starglider wrote:* Simon stared coldly across the table at the student, who had just finnished explaining the link between the certainty of young earth creation and the divinely ordained supremacy of the white race. "I am updating my P values", Simon said through thinned lips, "to a direction and degree you will find... most unfavourable."
That's probably for the best. But you still have to know how your FTL works, if for no other reason than to keep from tripping over your feet later.Zaune wrote:No it wasn't supposed to have no sound. And I'm actually planning on glossing over the science of exactly how the FTL drive works because I want to focus on the clash of cultures and ideologies.
Ah, yes. That's probably a pretty good model, actually, especially considering that we didn't end up actually doing all that much.And I was thinking more of the fuming and fulminating about the goings-on in Syria and how the West ought to be... Well, nobody really had a coherent idea what we should be doing, but it involved blowing shit up.
Simon_Jester wrote:"WHERE IS YOUR MISSILEGOD NOW!?"
Starglider wrote:* Simon stared coldly across the table at the student, who had just finnished explaining the link between the certainty of young earth creation and the divinely ordained supremacy of the white race. "I am updating my P values", Simon said through thinned lips, "to a direction and degree you will find... most unfavourable."
And some of the new parts:KSP Interstellar is a plugin for Kerbal Space Program, designed to encourage bootstrapping toward ever more advanced levels of technology as well as utilising In-Situ resources to expand the reach of Kerbal civilisation.
Players will first gain access to contemporary technologies that have not been widely applied to real space programs such as nuclear reactors, electrical generators and thermal rockets. By continuing down the tech tree and performing more research, these parts can be upgraded and later surpassed by novel new technologies such as fusion and even antimatter power.
We attempt to portray both the tremendous power of these technologies as well as their drawbacks, including the tremendous difficulty of obtaining resources like antimatter and the difficulties associated with storing it safely. The goal being to reward players who develop advanced infrastructure on other planets with new, novel and powerful technologies capable of helping Kerbals explore planets in new and exciting ways.
The principal goal of KSP Interstellar is to expand Kerbal Space Program with interesting technologies and to provide a logical and compelling technological progression beginning with technologies that could have been available in the 1970s/1980s, then technologies that could be available within the next few years, progressing to technologies that may not be available for many decades, all the way out to speculative technologies that are physically reasonably but may or may not ever be realisable in practise.
(emphasis mine)Current upgradeable parts and the Technologies which unlock upgrades (More soon!)
[Per Part] Alcubierre Drive: Standard Field Geometry ----> Advanced Field Geometry (Faster charging times and higher maximum speeds)
[Ultra-High Energy Physics] Antimatter Reactor: Solid/Liquid Core Reactor ----> Liquid/Plasma Core Reactor (3x power output)
[Per Part] Computer Core: Standard Mainframe ----> Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Core (Guaranteed to open the pod bay doors while within warranty period!)
...