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Old 01-19-2012, 10:47 PM   #136
teh603
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Originally Posted by sabredog View Post
Babylon 5 handled this aspect well. Earthforce adopted PPG's (Phased Plasma Guns) sidearms and longarms for use in shipboard combat, because they have little or no penetration against hull
That's why I usually go for generic "blasters" of varying sizes, with anything man-portable being unable to penetrate ship armor and have difficulty with meaningful body armor. Explosives and poison gas are what you us against armored enemies, preferably explosives.

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I like the idea of such wormhole entry/exits or foldspace locations being to be sufficiently distant from a gravity well for safe operations. Military grade drives might be able to jump closer than a civilian grade drive equipped ship. If that was the case a ship would still need to use normal space drives to enter the star system proper/or engage in combat.

In regards to reversion to normal space from jumpspace, exiting to normal space at the same relative velocity a ship entered jumpspace would make sense.
I've just gone with a "five minute warning" rule with civilian and military ships arriving roughly the same distance from a planet. Its kinda justifiable as my hyperdrive is arcane technology that's only understood by one or two people in the galaxy at any given time, so you generally follow the blueprints and don't try to improve the things.

Fighting in hyperspace is pretty much impossible, and a very very very bad idea. There's something cthuloid about hyperspace, and while its more like the kind from Babylon 5 than that of Warhammer 40k, you still don't want to attract the attention of whatever nastyness lives in it.

After all, *something* has to fuse those ships together to make hulks...

*cue ominous pipe music*
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Old 01-19-2012, 11:02 PM   #137
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Fighting in hyperspace is pretty much impossible, and a very very very bad idea. There's something cthuloid about hyperspace, and while its more like the kind from Babylon 5 than that of Warhammer 40k, you still don't want to attract the attention of whatever nastyness lives in it.

After all, *something* has to fuse those ships together to make hulks...

*cue ominous pipe music*
The Emperor Protects
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Old 01-19-2012, 11:18 PM   #138
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Relative speeds haven't been too much thought... Or I haven't red anything yet...

Not sure what is speed difference between different star systems around galaxy.

Relative travel is also intresting, if it happens in huge scale. Have anyone considered the lifespan of ship in such enviroment, desing of ship might be millenias old while ship is still only few decades... Or the hyperspace communications and minor relative time differences. Where do you center time for example as everything is relative?
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Old 01-19-2012, 11:38 PM   #139
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I would not expect any FTL Starship to suffer from the effects of relativity (time dilation) during its service not ordinarily anyway.

Jump, warp or whatever drives "go around" the light speed limit. A starship would approach a jump point at 1g or whatever velocity, then use its jump engines. It would exit at the end of its jump at the same velocity. Momentum does not change and speed thus is relative at either end of the jump.

Even if a starship needed to accelerate at high speed for periods of time, relativity (time dilation) would normally not be an issue.

A lot of SF writers whose books involve star spanning empires use a "earth standard" for time, etc. Seems to work.
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Old 01-20-2012, 11:42 AM   #140
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On Star Trek: Deep Space 9, everything shuts down for the night shift, that's not realistic. For a seaport, it makes sense, there is a definite day and night there. But while you could synchronize the station's clock to the capitol of Bajor, the rest of the planet will be on its own schedule. And the ships will arrive when they arrive, with no concern about what shift the station is on.

It's the sort of error that comes from trying to apply a planet-bound model to a space station.
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Old 01-20-2012, 12:18 PM   #141
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The problem with weapons that do not penetrate interior ship walls is -- what are those walls made of and why can't an enemy boarding party wear armor or carry shields constructed of exactly that material? Sure, if your walls are some sort of condensed matter then I understand... except for the neutron star-ish mass your ship must have.
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Old 01-20-2012, 07:43 PM   #142
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Originally Posted by QuantumIguana View Post
On Star Trek: Deep Space 9, everything shuts down for the night shift, that's not realistic. For a seaport, it makes sense, there is a definite day and night there. But while you could synchronize the station's clock to the capitol of Bajor, the rest of the planet will be on its own schedule. And the ships will arrive when they arrive, with no concern about what shift the station is on.

It's the sort of error that comes from trying to apply a planet-bound model to a space station.
Human society still needs an aparrent day/night cycle, even if you're in the middle of space. As for ships arriving on their own time, sure you have a skeleton crew in flight control to make sure people don't crash into one another and the right ships go to the right platforms, but the unloading can wait until morning.

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The problem with weapons that do not penetrate interior ship walls is -- what are those walls made of and why can't an enemy boarding party wear armor or carry shields constructed of exactly that material? Sure, if your walls are some sort of condensed matter then I understand... except for the neutron star-ish mass your ship must have.
Thus my settings at least still issue hand grenades to boarding parties. Just don't use them too close to the hull.

Edit: Actually.... take a look at H. Beam Piper's sci-fi for using condensed matter shielding. Its handwavium (he called it calapsium) at best, but it has been done.
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Old 01-20-2012, 08:25 PM   #143
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Farscape lost me in the very first episode when our intrepid test pilot got sucked into an obviously alien spaceship, comes to rest on the flight deck, and immediately takes his helmet off and pops his cockpit open!

Shortly thereafter he calculates a slingshot orbit using chalk on the bridge deck! Oh my?
lol, oh it's definitely a show where you just have to forget any science you ever learned, that's for sure. Tell the truth, it took a few eps for me to look past all those plot holes and enjoy it for what it is.
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Old 01-21-2012, 10:47 AM   #144
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Some of the old-timers tried to avoid cliches. If you ever read Arthur C Clarke's "Earthlight" - what, early 1960s - he had a moonbase mining site firing bolts of molten rock no less at the ships overhead.

In typical Clarke fashion, though, that wasn't the point, just a side issue. The real issue was a spy on the moonbase transmitting information to the enemy. No hi-tech system then available explained how it happened, or who the spy was.

How: well, a telescope can work two ways: accepting faint signals of light coming in, and recording it on arcane electronic detectors;or by reversing the direction by using much the same arcane electronic equipent to send pulses of radiation through a telescope by old fashioned morse code, with the enemy moving into the (very wide) beam width at agreed times.

Still, the cliches can be fun.

Every bomb placed under a car MUST HAVE an ancient digital display counting down, or a red flashing LED - just so the average couch potato knows what is going on.

Also they are always exactly synchronised with the good guys' watches.

And they are always defused either 1 or 2 second from kaboomba. Never anything like 23 hours 18 minutes. Or even 10 minutes.
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Old 01-21-2012, 10:51 AM   #145
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I love how Galaxy Quest really made fun of a lot of these. For example the "bomb always stops at 1 second" one. The "hero" of the show disables the bomb with like a minute to go... but the clock keeps ticking till it gets to one, then stops. Then everyone in the room kind of shrugs and says "Thats right they always stop at 1."
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Old 01-21-2012, 01:31 PM   #146
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Aliens of a particular race tend to be interchangeable: All of them think and act (and look) alike.

Except when one of them decides to live and work with humans, in which case, they develop a personality all their own.
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Old 01-22-2012, 07:01 AM   #147
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*cue ominous pipe music*
I'll see your pipe music and raise you ominous Latin chanting.
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Old 01-22-2012, 07:03 AM   #148
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Aliens of a particular race tend to be interchangeable: All of them think and act (and look) alike.
How do you know that is not the case? How many non-terrestrial races have you met?

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Old 01-22-2012, 07:25 AM   #149
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And most aliens can eat same stuff and drink same stuff... Some has addressed this, but still, I believe there should be some issues...
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Old 01-22-2012, 07:29 AM   #150
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And most aliens can eat same stuff and drink same stuff... Some has addressed this, but still, I believe there should be some issues...

To be fair I would expect this to be true. Not because all nonterrestrial life eats/breaths/etc the same as we do, but because we would for the most part only interact with the subset that does. Logically we would not travel to a place like Jupiter to have tea with the natives. We might talk with them via some communications system, but in that case the eat/breath/etc stuff does not come in to play.
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