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Originally posted by Regulus:
We need a motive for exploration, and that has to be resource acquisition. Obviously, nobody is going to find oil in the asteroid belt, and I can't really think of any metal that's so precious we'd send an expedition all the way to outer space to collect it. (/B)
I disagree that the only reason exploration would happen is in search of resources. Our current models of living say we need to get more resources, but if there were a massive plague, huge war, or stringent population controls, the planet could sustain human populations for quite some time.
What about religion as a means of promoting exploration? Religion is a powerful motivator and can easily produce fanatics (as recent events have shown). A possible setup: "Today's signal is tomorrow's noise". The initial detection of extrasolar planets in the 1990s led to the establishment of two large, linked spaced-based telescopes that allowed resolution of earth sized planets orbiting other stars. Using spectral data, the space agencies were unable to discover any traces of extrasolar life. The elements of life, yes, but no life. In something close to despiration, the space agencies of earth scour the planets of the system. Europe, Titan, Mars...all baren. Throwing the net wider and wider ice chunks around Saturn are examined, comets landed upon, and even the debris in the ort cloud is examined. Nothing.
We truely were alone.
As a result, a new movement was born. Coming from the concept of Gaia, a new religion was created. The tenants were simple: Life was, indeed, sacred, and it must be protected at all costs. Earth was the only planet on which life existed. With the evolution of Mankind, the planet had reached sexual maturity and through Man, would spread life throughout the Galaxy.
The movement started small, but it recruited heavily, mainly among the rich, the disenchanted, those willing to risk everything just to get out there. The $ grew, and they began to acquire the technology to place their own vechicles, first into orbit, and then throughout the system.
That's the idea, anyway. It'd make for an interesting situation if they encountered alien life. Maybe an irrational reaction to it? It's not from the Mother (Earth/Gaia) and therefore must be destroyed. Could result in a massive schism, those that felt all life was sacred and worthy of spread, and those saying only life from Earth was "chosen".
I like the idea of a civil war erupting over the discovery of an non-terran based bacterium.
Alternately, if one could find a way to easily overcome the gravitywell, ordinary people would be building spacecraft in their garages.
-STH
------------------ "Christ, what if the terrorists' base of operations turns out to be Detroit? Would we declare war on the state of Michigan? I suppose we'd have to." -U.S. Sen. John McCain, misquoted in (url="http://"http://www.theonion.com")"The Onion"(/url)
Originally posted by seant: I like the idea of a civil war erupting over the discovery of an non-terran based bacterium.
Poetic. I like.
-reg
------------------ "Oh crap. I'm going to hell - I put the Bible next to Mein Kampf again." -Her Holiness, Pope Jenne "Kirby" Hubbs
Well, Reg, it looks like you were right. Excellent -- although there still arises the question of what happens if the player is jumping into the syst as it is "moving". However, I don't think it'll be as much of a problem as a result of this new feature.
------------------ "She said, 'Honey, you know I gave up cigarrettes for my new-year's resolution... but I didn't give up SMOKIN'!" -- The Blues Brothers, "I Don't Know" Bounty Plus, Final Battle and the Annotated Bibles idisk: andyg
Originally posted by WickedDyno: ...there still arises the question of what happens if the player is jumping into the syst as it is "moving".
With any luck, when you take off, you find yourself taking off from the newly visible sΛst instead of the one you landed in. It's hard to say without a build of Nova to tweak around in, however.
Side note - orbiting planets would make plotting hyperspace routes absolutely maddening. Imagine the systems shifting relative to eachother as you tried to move through them - mars might be one jump away when you accept the mission, but it might be moving just fast enough that it takes two or three jumps to get there.
You guys are making my upcoming plug-in sound really unoriginal. When it does come out, I would just like all of you to know that the whole idea behind it is my own, not influenced by other people's ideas.
------------------ You would have to be ignorant, derranged, demented, or dead to turn down the oppurtunity to fly an Azdara. (url="http://"http://www.saberstudios.f2s.com/") Saber Studios (/url)-Your source for original EV/O/N graphics. the Confederation Graphics Expansion Set: Coming soon
It's an old idea. Get over it.
If you do a learning about how hyperjumping works plug, you might want to do it in a different race. Everyone knowns our solar system, so there would be little thrill in seeing Jupiter for the first time. It is simply too predictable on what is going to happen. With a different race, you could make the solar system larger and slightly more complex ect.
------------------ Approving someone else's work is not the same as creating it yourself- Bill Watterson, Author of Calvin and Hobbes Silence is golden, till is screams- John Prine
Yeah, but we'd have to come up with a whole solar system from scratch. I'd rather be lazy and use the one I live in and know about already
Although it would certainly make some aspects easier... I don't know, how many of you would want to play a scenario in which humans didn't exist at all?
Of course, with EVN you could do it both ways with the character resource.
------------------
A small contribution- For the transition from interplanetary to interstellar travel, one could have matter transport devices invented at some point-either ones that can transfer to anywhere (developed in game), or ones that could only send to another "portal" (other ends of portals sent out years ago, just beginning to arrive at destination sysems, enabling interstellar travel). Or, you could set all the "sectors" within sol to have links to every single other one, making travel to anywhere in sol instantaneous, when interplanetary drive is developed.
Hope that was helpful, although it probably wasn't (don't kill the newbie!)
------------------ If at first you don't succeed, use more duct tape.
Originally posted by CrazyTom9: ** For the transition from interplanetary to interstellar travel...
Or, you could set all the "sectors" within sol to have links to every single other one, making travel to anywhere in sol instantaneous, when interplanetary drive is developed. **
What I had entertained for a while was a flower-like approach. If you go from system to system, you go to a main syst. Let's say you go from Sol to Centauri. From the Centauri syst you could them jump into a series of systs that radiate off the main one. Each of these hubs would be a planet in the system. If you're on a planet, you'd have to first go to the center of the hub and then jump to a distant system.
The problem with doing this in EVO was the limitation of systs. In Sol there are nine planets. If the average number of planets in any system was only 5 (which would allow for a max of 20 different spobs in each system sector (5 systs*4spobs/syst), you could have a max of 200 system sectors if there were no duplicates for visbits. That's a sizable universe, but not big enough for what I had in mind at the time.
Originally posted by seant: **That's a sizable universe, but not big enough for what I had in mind at the time. **
That's why I was thinking about the multiple jumps between systems approach. With this idea, what you could do is go with the instantaneous movement to other sectors approach (of course, sizing down on the number of stellars from the real solar system to be able to fit the max 16 jump links), but then, since the distance between star systems is so great compared to between planets, insert a whole lot of uninhabited, empty systems between star systems so that it takes multiple jumps to get there. To explain why you have to do this, just say that your hyperdrive engine heats up, so it can't run for too long and needs to revert to sublight travel every once in a while.
------------------ Mike Lee (Firebird)
The other solar systems could be only accessable via hypergates.
Every time people see me playing EV, they ask "so, like, jumping between systems for fifteen minutes can actually keep you entertained? You're weird." just because so much of the game is spent in between here and there, while not engaged in combat. Jumping through a series of ten systems to get from planet to planet would not help matters, methinks.
What would be nifty would be if we could specify fuel consumption on a per-link basis, but I doubt that's going to get implemented any time soon.
Originally posted by CrazyTom9:
**For the transition from interplanetary to interstellar travel...
Or, you could set all the "sectors" within sol to have links to every single other one, making travel to anywhere in sol instantaneous, when interplanetary drive is developed.**
I was ambiguous with this; I meant that they would only become linked to everything else when the faster, better, interstellar drive was developed, replacing the clunky old interplanetary drive which required stops between planets. By the way, a plug solely within sol could be less boring than you make it out to be; there are thousands of asteroids, some planet sized objects out of the plane of ecliptic, and who knows what out in the Oort cloud. If you stretch the definition of 'system' to the max it could be made quite interesting.