ASTA

Tavern/Inn Roleplays

Teaming up to secure vast riches is a good one, but this increases the odds of backstabbing occurring.

From Stardust, To Stardust

Apollo26 said
Why wouldnt it work in space? not arguing ( way past arguing on here) just curious. Covering thermal and radar signatures will render you almost nonexistent to anything short of a visual compromise. Unless someone can pick up the latent radiation residue on your ship? Also would it be an instant detect if anything was broadcasted from a "stealthed" ship or detectable from the source? ( given that the source didn't move)

Because on a planet, aircraft, vehicles and even people equipped with adequate IR stealth systems can radiate their diminished heat signature into the surrounding medium so that they better blend in with everything else; environmental characteristics such as terrain and weather (storms/fog) must be taken into consideration as well. Stealth isn't about becoming completely and literally invisible, it's mostly about 'fitting in'--for lack of a better phrase or term.

This doesn't translate well into an environment like space, which is notorious in fiction and nonfiction alike for being exceedingly frigid in areas where a star is not present. This does not bode well for spacecraft trying to hide their heat signatures, because their multi-terrawatt/gigawatt engines and reactors will put out enough waste heat to make them visible from an entire planetary system or star system away; even if you're using a megawatt-range reactor or engine system, you'd still stick out like a sore thumb. When you activate something as simple and low-powered as a faint radio signal of a mere 20 watts, you can literally be detected from 18 billion kilometers away.

Acquiring visual confirmation of a starship in space is also not viable. Space is too dark and too large for that.

Trying to hide the radar signature of a starship displacing hundreds of thousands/millions of tons is more or less a pipe dream; bigger objects have bigger radar signatures.

Tv Tropes sheds some light on this topic as well.

Stealth in space, like FTL, is handwavium---though there are a number of things you can do to hide from someone in space, such as taking cover behind a planet or a very large asteroid or maintaining 'close' proximity to a star or other hot source.

Personally, I don't run stealth spacecraft, so the vul'kruun do not have them in any shape or form. With how their FTL and space tactics works, space stealth isn't required, and may even be a liability to a star crawler (large spaceship), star cutter (huge spaceship) or star mauler (titanic spaceship) due to these vessels being suited more for rapid assaults and delivering vicious, crippling blows to xeno population centers. Stealth systems would just get in the way of that. Plus, I have no idea how you'd hide an operating Orion drive; detonating nuclear bombs behind yourself isn't exactly something that you sweep under the rug.

From Stardust, To Stardust

“Open a channel with the enemy contact and tell them we are in need of assistance, encrypt a mayday signal in there too. Make sure to keep our position hidden, send it in a burst message and then lets use the compressed air thrusters to move us away from the source."

To honor the real-life workings of stealth technology (which wouldn't work in space, but special considerations can be made for the sake of roleplaying and fun), the second you broadcast a radio message or activate a maneuvering thruster while 'cloaked' is the moment you become visible to anything running active sensors. Compressed air maneuvering thrusters shouldn't register however, but I could be wrong.

Anime-Style "Mysterious Island" Type Role Play [With Dinosaurs!]

What is an anime-style roleplay exactly?

Is RPGuild dying?

Aeonumbra said
My only real point is be grateful for what you have, you could have a lot less, or not have had at all.

Except that saying doesn't work whatsoever in the context of an internet roleplaying forum like RPG, since there are numerous roleplaying sites across the internet that have active administrators, reliable coders and healthy communities---role-player.net and Iwaku just to name a few.

Presenting a forum to a specific user base is like trying to sell a product to a specific buyer demographic: 9/10, what you're selling isn't unique, and if your potential customers think your sale's pitch is sub-par and your product can't suit their needs, they're going to gobble up something superior. That's the boat RPG finds itself in at the moment--and it's going to progressively become worse.

My main gripe with RPG isn't the community, but with the exceedingly-annoying glitches (white screen glitch being a main one) that are suffered a perpetual state of wretched existence within the site's confines. Lack of basic forum features is another one.

Going to be honest, but if Mahz's workload is too much for him to handle, then he needs to hand the keys over to someone that's reliable. That or share the workload with someone.

No shame in taking the knee and requesting aid, mate.

Is RPGuild dying?

Jorick said
So, for those of you who seem confused about why people are upset with the current state of affairs on the Guild, here's a prime example of the problem:"I'm taking a week off to work on the Guild." - Mahz, October 28, on the rp_guild twitter accountIt's not just a matter of lack of features or lack of progress being made, it's largely a matter of empty promises. Due to how Mahz has decided to run the site everything hinges on him, and honestly he's not reliable for it. I am well aware that he has work and other obligations so he can't spend all his time on the Guild, but that doesn't really excuse the long track record of empty promises. Even back before Guildfall he made all sorts of promises about cool new features to come and then just never got around to it (anyone remember Roleplayer Cards?), so it's not like this is a new thing. Another great example of this happening is the numerous promises Mahz made to get a Contests section made on this iteration of the Guild. Brovo asked him to do it and Mahz said he'd get on it, then it never happened; I asked him to do it and he said it would be done within the month, then it never happened; after that at least one of the mods reminded him about the contests section when he popped into IRC and he said he'd make it soon, but it never happened; MDK tried to start a contest (after WOTM died due to being unable to function without a dedicated section) and asked for the section to be made and Mahz said he would do so, but again it never happened.That kind of thing is draining on one's confidence that Mahz will actually improve things, especially when it happens over and over and over alongside months of no work being done at all. I would probably be better for overall morale if he never promised anything and just said he'll do stuff whenever he can get around to it. Asking what you can do for the site is cool and all, but when the answer is "nothing, because Mahz refuses to do any of the numerous things that could improve the site without putting all the burden on his shoulders" then you're left there with all your good intentions in mind and nothing to show for it. I put up with it for a good 9 months, but then the site got to the point where it was a struggle to post anything for about a week before it full on broke and then the only response was apparently a server reset, which didn't actually solve the major lag problems. There comes a time when brand loyalty dies in the face of facts, and that time has come for a lot of us.I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, just laying it out there for you guys to understand. If you still enjoy the site despite its flaws, awesome, have fun with it, that's what it's all about. Those of us who can't deal with it will just move elsewhere, no worries. There doesn't need to be any fight between the happy and the dissatisfied Guild people. Just understand that for the dissatisfied side it's not a bunch of pointless whining, it's a legitimate complaint about how the site is run.

^

From Stardust, To Stardust

duck55223 said
In my opinion at least nukes become pretty outdated when you have shields.

The Tsar Bomb released approximately 240 petajoules of explosive energy upon being detonated, which is roughly 240 petawatts worth of power if the measurement units were flipped. Petawatt-range lasers exist today, but they're only active for picoseconds (one trillionth of a second) at a time, and therefore would make inadequate weapons despite the staggering amounts of power that they consume. Not enough dwell time; a weapons-grade petawatt laser with a dwell time measured in seconds would have me question what sort of unobtainable you've constructed such a beast from and how you've mastered heat sink technology to keep this weapon from melting itself with each firing.

If your shields can endure Tsar Bomb nuclear weapons at point-blank ranges with impunity, laser weaponry, particle weaponry, plasma weaponry, and railgun weaponry is completely useless against EU shielding.

The scout ships are the ones with the least amount of shielding, others have a lot more. And EMPs wouldn't as the shields are powered by magic so yeaaaaaaaaaaah.

There needs to be restrictions placed on magic, because this is ridiculous.

Apollo26 said
EMP? would fry shields or render the electronics that govern them useless by burning them out. For a scout ship that is a crazy amount of sheilding? So what are your line ships shielding like?

EMPs shouldn't be a viable weapon against a starship. You're traveling in an intergalactic spacecraft that must brave vast amounts of radiation and other hazards as it moves through the void; spacecraft and electronics can be hardened against EMPs by forgoing silicon-based electrical systems (fiber optic technology, vacuum tubes, analog systems), simply possessing thick hulls wrapped in dense materials or shielding their viable electronic systems using a faraday cage. There are also other factors at play when discussing the effectiveness of an EMP, such as environment and the inherent low effective range an EMP would have.

An EMP will disrupt a ship's sensors, however.

It's the bad part of allowing magic in scifi. Sad, but true.

This.

WilsonTurner said
Several nations so far, beingThe merfolk Alarai [small galactic standing]The superior-magic people of goodiness and perfection Iscandarians [small-medium galactic standing]The backwater humans [small galactic standing]The unseeing Valkians [small galactic standing]The pissed-off Septonians [small/maybe medium galactic standing]The proud Warrior race of Draconians [no standing at all; not yet introduced; Duck's archenemy in terms of races]The human-like Nouvellians, primitive as if they're in the 1800/1900s, currently in conference with VALKIAN, HUMAN, and ISCANDARIAN [small galactic standing]and uh...The kill-all Etherals [small/medium galactic standing]And the Hivemind [small galactic standing]Currently, the Iscandarians pissed off the Septonians by shooting at their shipwrecked peoples because they were scared and didn't want to talk to the army surrounding them, so them two are at war. The Valkians, Humans, and Iscandarians are all meeting upon Nouvelle, and conversing with their Queen. The Valkians currently have the highest relation with the Nouvellians. The Iscandarians declared war on Humanity for being too violent, and tried to take their homeworld by force. They were destroyed and beaten back by humanity and a couple of unseen allies. About half a dozen different nations are in orbit around Nouvelle. That's about it.

I hope Wilsonpai will notice me.

I assumed everyone's shields were that strong, and that use of shields would make nukes irrelevant in favor of otber weapons more capable of taking down shields.

If this were true, space combat wouldn't exist.

From Stardust, To Stardust

duck55223 said
Just a question ASTAWould you consider a closed system (system that does not accept outside signals) to be godmodding?

No, because a system that isn't accepting outside signals or commands actually can't be broken into from a point other than the victim machine itself (IIRC from a conversation I had with an online friend. Said friend is a freelance software developer, website coder and general IT geek).

Wireless hacking is rather dubious at best (which is something you see relatively often in science fiction) and, frankly, doesn't make much sense--unless you swing around sufficiently advanced technology.

Not every species is going to be network-heavy; they may even be devoid of an internet copycat. The risk of system intrusion can be reduced by installing independent computer systems, encryption defences or simply forgoing networks and purely-automated ship systems altogether; instilling a lock-out timer will also help, which can be triggered if an invalid password or access code is entered too many times.

But yeah I'd stay away from the whole "lol I hacked all your ships". It's gamey, weaksauce and flat-out powerplaying to be honest.

From Stardust, To Stardust

Honestly, I'd leave the hacking debates out of this roleplay. You can't calculate what it would take to actually break into a secure system using yield figures or actual physics; you'd need to be fairly knowledgeable in computer software and how computer security systems actually work, and that's borderline impossible to do with alien technology even if everyone is using some form of binary coding.

I can tell you how much damage a 500 MT vul'kruun shaped-nuclear charge (detonated 250 meters from the enemy starship) will do to a warship protected by 2,000 millimeters worth of a substance rated four times as durable/tough/heat resistant/dense/ect as, say, depleted uranium---but I can't tell you how effective your magical hacking nanites and hyper-advanced computer intrusion programs are against vul'kruun mechanical computers.

Of course we won't get into this much detail over yields and whatnot, but debating over hacking and all of that is a waste of time, energy and roleplaying potential.

On a side note: My faction doesn't possess universal language translators. Might make for some very awkward first contact scenarios.

From Stardust, To Stardust

duck55223 said
Not trueCome to Texas before you actually say shit about our slightly fucked up justice system.

'Slightly'.