[safisher]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

What really baffles me is that there's always someone who's willing to fight to the death to suggest that perhaps there's an element of truth to things like Star Trek (with its nadion beams and its psychic and surprisingly humanoid aliens), and the hill they want to die on is stealth in space.

Actually, I'm not fighting to the death. I'm simply suggesting that there is some justification for being a little optimistic about there being the possibility. And the reason for that is because scientists are often wrong. Dead wrong in fact. The future is indeterminate, and using 2015 as the metric for 2315 or 3715 is more than a little conceited, it's lacking in vision.

Why does it matter? Real space combat will look nothing like what you see in "adventure games." It will feature radiators, it will not feature stealth, there won't be any gravity, they probably won't even happen on "ships" at all, and the cute bridge bunny certainly won't wear a skirt.

There is no way to know if that is true. In fact, if Alcubierre is right, it might look very different from that. Futurists are notoriously wrong. We need only look at past predictions of the future to realize that.

But does it matter that it's not real? You know that elves aren't real either, right? Do you run into fantasy threads and argue that perhaps one of our cousin races actually managed to survive into the early dark ages and that's the origin of the "elf" myth? Does that even need to be said to justify a fantasy game featuring elves?

Please don't be patronizing. And the reason why it matters it because all the "experts" like to run into threads like this and act like they, and only they (with their special secret knowledge) can determine exactly what the future will be.

I like hard sci-fi, so I spend a lot of time on places like Atomic Rockets and I read up on orbital mechanics and I watch things like Moon.

I think Atomic Rockets started out with the intent of trying to explain basic rocketry and such, which I enjoyed. There's plenty of use for education. It's now mostly the abode of small brains and fatbeards reciting their high school physic instructors.

I also like wild and wooly space opera: I love to play FTL or Master of Orion, and I think DS9 is the best Star Trek and I'm baffled and disappointed that Netflix managed to lose Farscape. But I don't need the first to justify the second.

No one needs science fiction to justify hard sci fi, but we'd be foolish -- and in fact many people are -- to not realize that art inspires science. That is fact. In addition, the greater degree of confidence in such and law, the more likelihood that it will be proven erroneous in some way, or that exceptions exist. That's the operation of normal science. Why so-called science experts can;t understand that is beyond me. Really? You can't imagine how stealth in space could work? How droll. Thank God Einstein and Newton and Hawking had more imagination than that.