AlienBastard

Give yourself a spaceship of the imagination!

Well, at least a couple people answered the question.

The Gods are Crazy

Schylerwalker said
So...so many nations to grind beneath my sandaled tread...I mean...gift the laurels of peace...

I say there need be more civilizations!

Space Battles, Space Warship design & Tactics

Orions arm is humanity under the yelm covered boot for ever and ever and ever.

Give yourself a spaceship of the imagination!

Where do you go with it?

Space Battles, Space Warship design & Tactics

Going .2c you deem near impossible, but a warp drive is A-okay? What about the exotic matter?

If exotic matter is okay, than perhaps one could send a craft capable of making a wormhole across the interstellar medium that links up to the one at home if it reaches its destination. Than you can hop in and go bask under a alien sun. Ergo, interstellar travel just became a lot more practical since you only need to reach destination once. Losing connection with a worm hole would suck hard though.

And I think from here on out i'm going to think about interplanetary scale space battle since there's too many unknowns with interstellar stuff to be all realistic.

Space Battles, Space Warship design & Tactics

Honestly man, all I see are challenges more than barriers. Barriers tend get broken anyhow and abiding by current science in a interstellar setting is silly to the point where even in this thread I think you're overdoing the whole realism thing and assuming the worst. For instance I thought interstellar space is so vast that you likely wouldn't hit a micrometer in the first place and even if its the ship causing the explosion I still believe it can be tanked because innovation.

I think you should tone it down to 80 or 90% hard sci-fi.

Where do you find your pictures and face-claims? (NOT anime)

Google image searching.

I type in things like "ugly alien face"

or "east european knight armor"

And search through that.

Space Battles, Space Warship design & Tactics

The skies raining ash for decades and perpetual global famine tends to not be so pretty.

How about a Alien Contact Space Opera RP?

Since eight people have shown interest, this RP will be made tomorrow.

Today I intend to outline events that could happen.

For now, have the culture and society sheet:

check it out

The GC’s Society

-The Grand Coalition's worlds comes from two waves of colonial expansion. The first wave coming just a few decades after the first jump engine was made, and the second wave happening not long after the interstellar civil war.

-Life in the grand coalition can vary heavily; there are a few colonies out there that are living hell to be on due to insurrectionism or being a runaway world, while others pretty much live in a bubble safe from the hostility of space. Generally it is said people living in the developing colonies tend to live the most interesting lives, often changing jobs.

-Stimulants are very common in the Grand Coalition; these stimulates are free for anyone to buy.

-The system used by the Grand Coalition economically has local scale capitalism on a single world, but if there is a world in need of resources from outside sources, the GC does not hesitate to take from the worlds with a surplus regardless of what the local government wants. [All in theory].

-The GC is ran from Earth directly, but due to the increased autonomy there is a trend towards decentralization with command from earth being generally provisional.

-The GC on the interstellar scale only has only one political party, the Humanist party. Other political parties found on local worlds generally have their officials assimilate into the humanist party when going interstellar.

-The state "religion" of the GC is basically humanist; they believe in the unity of humankind and the proliferation and prosperity of the human race through constant expansion in a infinite frontier.

-Local faiths tend to be superstitious. Religions like christianity and the such still exist however. The vast majority of people believe in the idea that humans have a spirit. It's even commonly accepted AIs would have spirits or souls too, which is why it's a crime to make a self aware AI since you'd be giving a work drone a soul.

-The GC is surprisingly conservative in many respects; much of the aspects of the GC that seem liberal to us today actually come from centuries ago and haven’t changed that much since, although there are some worlds that are very out there in what they see as socially fine.

-Marriage is much, much more secular. It's not even seen as "a union between man and wife", more "a social and economic union between two individuals through none-forceful means".

-People have freedom of what they can do job or talent wise, and can openly criticize the Grand Coalition's actions or even means of government. However, any talk of secession is monitored heavily since secessionists get the terrorist label.

-There are some colonies known as "runaway colonies" that tend to be invaded by the coalition when they get in the coalition's way. The coalition notably always wins- for these runaway colonies tend not to have outside support. As a result the remaining runaway colonies tend to be very isolationist and militarized.

-Culture varies a lot in the colonies due to all the mixing cultural back grounds.

-There is a universal language known as “Interstellar Dialect" people are generally expected to know, but local languages still thrive. In RP don’t fret about this since i’d rather people worry more about story than a fictional language.

-Space ships are called “Shuttles”. Names like Tactical Shuttle, Transport Shuttle, Mining Shuttle, Military Shuttle, Assault Shuttle and so on are how you make shuttle classes. Feel free to go crazy with the names of the shuttles though. [this is a loose thing- I won’t attack you for ignoring this].

-Military is streamlined into two classes; the planetary and stellar. Planetary militaries are for dealing with local issues while the stellar military is for dealing with well, space issues. I’m not a military junkie so i’m not going to try to imagine how it’s organized beyond probably being a rank system like how it has been since the dawn of civilization.

This is a outline of the culture and society of the coalition, and is pretty much a frame that has yet to be painted. I'm going to leave the finer points to other people and the IC. I will take out or modify this sheet based off reception like with the history sheets.

And anyone curious of BETA's ways; they're basically the "Men in Black" [not the movie] in SETI clothing.

Space Battles, Space Warship design & Tactics

Guess who just woke up?

Kadaeux said
Yeah, and current knowledge of what's possible doesn't include a way to alter human perception to make 45 years seem like only a week or two. Then there is the whole biological aging issue etc.

What makes you think those technologies can't ever be discovered? You're like a medieval person saying that there is no way humans will on average ever live more than the age of thirty or that a gun that shoots at a rapid fire rate is impossible.

And if each alien critter or plant cost enough to buy a country you'd get no buyers. And considering the cost of transporting them, you better have a country's budget.

A country's budget is a widely variable thing. If you mean like NK's budget, i'd say it's pretty plausible seeing that the cost of spaceships as a interstellar society keeps making them would go down.

Cars once were slow moving and expensive, look at how widely used they are now. Technology progresses, the impractical eventually can become practical. Interstellar space travel is no different, it's just that interstellar travel is so far off from now that the challenge only seems unsurmountable. But one day, there will be a way.

Maybe you could say i'm a fool for thinking other wise, but seeing that going by my sense of realistic thought that interstellar travel is likely something centuries away and that the third millennia may focus more on colonization/terraforming of the solar system [where many engineering problems you try your best to make seem impossible just because of "look at this big scary number I calculated!" get sorted out as i'm sure micrometeorites and radiation are both issues that just interplanetary travelers will encounter] before a manned interstellar travel mission to another colony is attempted.

And Seti's signals don't go nearly as far as most people seem to think. In fact, there are many who have given plenty of reason to suggest that Seti's broadcasts literally degrade beyond legibility not even half a lightyear from earth.

Where;s your source for that one? Since that would really suck, or maybe be the best thing ever since that means no one actually hears us which means no surprise alien attack that wipes out all of humanity.

But still, if current tech goes half a light year, a better refined beam could go 100x that distance since future space men have future space technology. A guy from the 1850's alone only had the telegram, nowadays you got the ability to call someone from India daily.

And yes, the timescale we currently operation on IS necessarily the timescale the future may. That is how time works. You cannot modify something to perceive time differently.

So you can't modify the human perception of time to align better with cosmic time scales?

I don't see why. And that's the problem with "100% hard sci-fi" since while you can make some suppositions on the futility of stealth or how spaceships move in space, there's no telling what technologies could be used in the future. It's like a man from the 1600's trying to guess what a rocket to the moon would be like. What clue would you have had of computers or spaces suits/pressurized air or chemical missiles or telephones?

I'd say predicting what is possible is silly, regardless of how much effort you try since you'll always be wrong. Even Kubrick was wrong, and he was trying to make the most scientifically accurate thing he could.

You're travelling at .2c for example (my constant example) at that velocity if you impact micrometeorite weight 100 grams it will release forty kilotons of energy (Actually your ship would since it's the one travelling at that speed.) Make it a kilogram and it'll be a 430 kiloton impact.

430 Kilotons are what some nukes can do, and I am certain that a nuke would do jack all to a spaceship capable of interstellar travel, let alone a micro meteorite. Isue being that you'd need to repair while on the fly, but that's a solvable problem by using regenerating hull.

There's also the possibility of shielding. We already use micrometeorite shields and i'm certain those can be developed that going as fast as 1/5th the speed of light can resist a good deal of micro meteorites. Not to mention, since space is mostly a void how much of a problem will this really even be?

A: There is not one single realistic rocket concept that is capable of accelerating to .1c or faster. Anyone that told you so should be shot for the betterment of the race.

So nuclear pulse ships unrealistic? Says who?

And even assuming there isn't, there is no reason why it's impossible to make a ship go that fast.

B: Decades of travel is a "vast" amount of time for a modern society. In mere decades we've gone from computers that required an entire building to computers in our pocket so powerful they could have run every single calculation those ancient computers did, simultaneously, without effort.The "Human Civilization" being a mote of dust in the grand scheme of things is beyond irrelevant.Beyond irrelevant. We're humans, we don't compare our travel times to universe-scale movements. We compare them to our relative point of view. Even some of our more macro-scale measurements are purely subject to human PoV. Light-Second, Light-Year. Year. Month. Day. Hour. etc are all based on human perspective.

The current rate things go is not how humans always went at. Once it was hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and gathering, the pace could very well slow down again.

And you're back into the realm of pure soft scifi. The point of hard Scifi is to discuss realistic knowns. Not postulate alternative theorems without any scientific basis in fact. If you want to go with that type of discussion I can simply declare my Interstellar Space Empire of 10 foot autonomous dicks and star-vaginas annihilates your empire instantly with a teleporting antimatter cat assault.

That's why soft sci-fi generally tries having internal consistency, in Dune as strange and bizarre things get the rules stay consistent.

Besides, trying to be hyper realistic about space battles beyond interplanetary age space flight I don't see as remotely possible. Too many unknowns.

It isn't a misnomer. 100% Hard Science fiction is "Science Fiction possible within the known realm of science and physics without excessive speculation into other fields." Eg: A novel written to be a realistic manned mission to mars is 100% hard Scifi.A novel written to be a realistic manned mission to mars, but with telepathic microscopic life already there, is 100% soft scifi.

You can't predict the future, let alone the technologies used so I see every other tech I claim could exist as purely plausible until proven other wise since sufficiently advanced tech would be in play.

Hell, hard sci-fi I thought was the implications of technologies on society, not about trying to be super accurate to the point where a story is impossible to write. All the famous hard sci-fi authors wrote about pretty crazy shit, and I think that concerning yourself too much with realism limits one's creativity far too much since there's far more unknowns than knowns. Realism in fiction generally is a style more than anything else. Even 2001: A Space Odyssey used its hard sci-fi humans as a way to make the aliens in the movie that far more god-like.

So the whole talk of realism in space battles is kinda silly the more I think about it since how the hell can you be realistic about something we have little to know idea about? Calcs and theories?

But at this point we've entered a wholly different topic.