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I see you also found a nifty new avatar.
@Delphi That would be quite the interesting tutorial. It involves how much detail you want for land, right?
Wow that took a long time to read, but I'm glad I started at the beginning. I didn't know so much could be done with SketchUp. Now you've got another follower.
Some SketchUp tutorials would also be much appreciated. I've dabbled with it but had no idea it could do anything like this.
This post has been edited by Azier_Mordan : 21 March 2010 - 08:48 PM
Welcome to the cult!
Ephos is a barren rock, littered with dust, sand, and storms that regularly blow it around into terrifying giant storms that sweep the surface and abrade the landscape. This planet, once the beginning of an M-class world thick with vegetation and flourishing microorganisms, was the site of a cataclysmic nuclear accident in 2759 that devastated the ecosystem and sterilized the planet. During a patrol mission over Ephos, an Insight heavy cruiser, the Astralis, suffered a computer malfunction which engaged the ship's spatial impeller. Though no coordinates were entered, and the jump was not fully initiated, the ship was violently thrown out of position above the planet, and into the atmosphere. During the lethal descent, further attempts by the computer to activate the impeller destabilized the ship's drive core and released deadly amounts of radiation into the stratosphere, poisoning the air. When the ship finally crashed to the ground, it left a trail of debris covering several hundred kilometers and starting vegetation fires that swept across the entire northern hemisphere. In its final moments, the cruiser's nuclear core overloaded in a blast that carved a crater so deep it actually breached the crust and penetrated the planet's mantle. The carnage was immeasurable, and the fledgling ecosystem could not recover. Over the next thirty years, the vegetation withered and died, and any traces of animal life disappeared. Now, what used to be the beginning of a luscious world, is a ball of scarred rock, signed by humanity.
I can't decide whether the planet or the description is more beautiful...
You're doing an absolutely stellar job, Delphi! Keep it up.
A la Douglas Adams.
I'm noticing a theme of Humanity-induced catastrophes here. First the colony on Kiev IV, and then the planet Ephos. Both also involved nuclear technology. You wouldn't happen to be planning on coding accidents with the player's ship, would you? Something where the player goes bye-bye because their computer miscalculates and sends them into a star or something? Or maybe deadly bomb outfits to represent reactor overloads? Basically, are you planning on putting the player in situations where they die and can't do anything about it?
Similar to the cheap reactors in EVN except one can choose to not purchase cheap reactors.
No, don't worry. Your ship is safe, unless you make it unsafe. It's just the usual trial-and-error forward march of humanity's progress. At first, somebody thought that it might be a good idea to strap a faster-than-light engine onto a bomb, to better streamline conventional warfare. That didn't work out so well, and an accident cost hundreds of millions of lives. "Well then," they said, "we'll outlaw weapons of that nature, and start exploring and rebuilding instead." Then, one of their ships explodes and wipes out an entire planet's ecosystem. "We'll make the engines safer!" they proclaimed. Then the war with the outlying colonies became more severe, so they developed bigger engines, and bigger weapons. Though they successfully kicked the oil addiction of the 20th and 21st centuries, nuclear energy and all its perils took its place. Now, it's just a given that everything you touch will run on power generated by the splitting of atoms (or the fusing thereof), and the idea that such a bountiful source of energy should be outlawed due to a few billion lives lost is equivalent to heresy.
Really, it's a portmanteau of cool sci-fi technology (big guns and explosions, oh my!) and the modern oil economy.
@Delphi Heck, from what I've been noticing, it's not really trial-and-error anymore--it's more like trial-and-massacre-if-failure-occurs.
As our technology becomes more powerful, I think that will be the case. Oil has given us refinery explosions and car crashes. Nuclear technology gave us Chernobyl. Like Delphi said: it seems a logical step to strap an FTL engine to a bomb, until it goes wrong. New technology is often dangerous simply because we don't really think about the unthinkable until it happens.
Come to think of it, the events described by Delphi here are perfect for the 'Civilization-Ender' discussion mrxak started awhile back (and is still sort of posted in).
Chernobyl gave us generation IV nuclear reactors.
These reactors that are being designed and built today are so safe it's physically impossible for them to melt down, even if the operators attempted to cause a meltdown by removing all the control materials. (an experiment in China did this and the reactor shut itself down, without human intervention. (Admittedly this was a generation III+ reactor, but this is a step towards Gen. IV reactors))
Exactly my point. The technology becomes safer after a few disasters reveal design flaws that went unnoticed. Happens all the time. Cars are hundreds of times safer than they were fifty years ago. One reason an oil refinery hasn't been built in this country since the 70's is because of discoveries and subsequent legislation about the environmental and safety issues that they pose. It would cost too much to build a new one that is up to the new standards, so it just hasn't happened. Unfortunately, we're getting more and more to the point where our technology left unchecked can do a great deal more damage before safeties can be put in place to cover design issues with the first generations. We're good at learning from our mistakes. The problem is that a lot of people have to die for us to realize what's wrong, usually.
And it sounds like this government doesn't care about safety precautions, unless they become a public problem and have to be put in.
I'm not sure if by "this government" you're talking about the USA or the NDC, but you're right either way.
I was, in fact, referring to the NDC but now that I think about it most governments behave this way.
Regarding the scale of some of the accidents in the Delphi universe: it's not so much that the disasters have become worse, of the safety limitations have been reduced, it's mostly just that humanity in general is an ever-growing organism. If you are six feet tall and fall on your arm, breaking it, you've crippled about 25% of your total mobility. If you're four feet tall and break your arm, it's the same percentage of utility lost. When we have six billion people on Earth and one thousand die, it's a tragedy, but still just a small percentage. When Kiev IV exploded in the Delphi universe, and 300 billion were killed across hundreds of worlds, it was still less than half of humanity. When an NDC cruiser crashes on a world and destroys the entire ecosystem, it's still only 0.00001% of the galaxy that's been harmed. As humanity grows, its impact grows, but also its strength to recover. What is a tragedy to us now is just another unfortunate event for them.
This mentality is actually a key part of the Delphi story writing. The more people there are, the lower the price or the value of each individual. In such a world, then, what worth can one person have? What can you, a single human, do?
QUOTE (darthkev @ Mar 22 2010, 07:54 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
I did something like that in EVN:UGF as well. Since its about a thousand years after the end of the Rebel storyline, matter/antimatter reactors have become a mainstay of the biggest ships (rather than a rare Polaran military outfit); fusion similarly takes the place of fission. The cheap fusion reactor burns out; the cheap MAR loses containment and detonates, with understandably disastrous results.
The major disaster that partially led to the founding of the UGF was an AI-led robot rebellion that nearly destroyed the sentients of the Andromeda Galaxy. But as you pointed out, do we outlaw artificial intelligence? No, we just learn from our mistakes and move on.
This post has been edited by StarSword : 23 March 2010 - 09:32 PM
QUOTE (Delphi @ Mar 30 2008, 06:51 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
<snip>
For a while this ship struck me as familiar, but I couldn't quite place where I saw it before. Recently, though, as I was playing my copy of Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time, it hit me. Has anyone else here played that game? Do you remember the Valkyrie boss ships? Doesn't the 'hoover ship' above look like those Valkyrie ships?
For those of you who don't play R&C, I've added this video so you can see what I'm talking about. It's the big green ship you see not too far into the video.