01-29-2018, 10:59 AM | #21 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Ipswich, UK
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Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?
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You seem to assume that a culture or subculture can simply decide to boldly go and they boldly will. If a culture wants to go to the stars, they need a vehicle to go in. Who is paying for it? The reason that a culture wants to go to the stars may well be entirely ideological, but getting there costs money. Unless the said culture can develop interstellar travel entirely through their own resources, they need outside help. The outside help is going to want to be paid as R&D is usually very expensive. In 1869 many things were unknown that are known in the early 21st century, but you seem to be asking for responders to define physical principles unknown in the early 22nd century to enable star travel without using handwavium. If I could do so I would be working towards a Nobel prize or negotiating with DARPA, not writing on a game forum. As you do not know my motivations, your last comment comes perilously close to an ad hominem.
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01-29-2018, 11:28 AM | #22 | |
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Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?
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In the same way, we can envision the fusion pulse drives of THS as somewhat plausible in terms of physics, although we can't build them. But we lack a physically plausible explanation for fast interstellar travel.
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01-29-2018, 12:54 PM | #23 |
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?
Rocketry is basically applied Newtonian physics. 1869 is over a century past his death.
Traveling to the moon was silly "impossible" pre-Newton though. But saying that some particular form of now-superscience is realistic just, because people of the past didn't know something we now do is a rather bizarre stance to take. No one's going to arrest a GM that adds one or more superscience techs to their THS game. But there is a fundamental difference between technologies that don't exist but obey known laws of physics and those that don't obey them.
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01-29-2018, 03:31 PM | #24 |
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?
Try this idea. Since there's an almost religious commitment to the idea that only AIs can startravel, and in THS AIs can use exowombs and forced growth chambers to create bioroids, with fertility and any desired genotype in their gametes, why not have fanatics ( your choice of what they're fanatical about) send AIs out with the goal and equipment to recreate humanity around another star system in the ideological image of the fanatics in question. As this eliminates the need for humans to survive and interstellar journey, and as DNA can be built from scratch, that is to say viable DNA can be made from inorganic molecules in the THS setting, no lifeform need survive the journey either, only the passion to act and relatively small resources are needed.
As total memetic purity could be achieved in these new cultures, the societies formed could be very extreme.
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01-29-2018, 10:00 PM | #25 | ||
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?
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Yeah, liquefying gases was coming about, which means all that's left for manned rocketry is materials science enough to contain cold temperatures on a grand scale while being strong enough to stand up to multi-G accelerations and staggeringly high combustion temperatures in a sufficiently controlled way that the whole thing doesn't blow up in a fireball that kills the crew and everybody around. Realistically, everyone knows how hard it is to even make a small rocket fly in a controlled direction at a low altitude, so dreams of going to the Moon are utterly unrealistic. Yeah, some theoretical electromagnetic work had been done, but the notion of using that to communicate across hundreds of thousands of miles of vacuum is the stuff of empty fantasy, not reality. Nobody even knows how to make a receiver or transmitter for such things that wil work across a room, much less anything useful even on Earth. And of course the sheer scale of reactant necessary to make the journey, or even to achieve escape velocity, makes the entire project self-evidently absurd and economically inconceivable. I know I sound snarky, but this is something it's hard for moderns to get out minds around. The Saturn V was more superscientific, from the POV of 1869, than O'Neil Habitats or Daedadus probes are to us. We can't readily get into the mindset of the middle 1800s, the changes have been so enormous compared to the rate of change we're used to. From 1850 to 1950, the world changed more rapidly than it had had changed in all the history of the human race up until then, or then it has since. Internal combustion engines of the sort we use today in 2017 are superscience in their material strength, temperature tolerance, precision of engineering, reliability, controllability, they are easily as far out to someone in 1869 as relativistic drives are to us. The freaking land-line telephone was at the edge of realistic projection in 1869. It was theoretically possible to the science of the time, but its practicality remained highly doubtful. Air travel? Theoretically possible in 1869 physics, but of course it's unrealistic. The amount of power you'd have to pack into a small volume simply isn't practical or plausible, and what possible economic rationale could justify such fantastic expense? Things change. Sometimes very slowly, sometimes very fast. The slow change since 1950 makes it hard for us to get out minds around how much superscience emerged in the century before it. Quote:
The cars and planes that were used in supporting Apollo would be to the people of 1869 as the fusion pulse drives of THS are to us. The Saturn V would be an exercise in practical magic on multiple levels.
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01-30-2018, 02:10 AM | #26 | |
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: near London, UK
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Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?
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01-30-2018, 03:39 AM | #27 | |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?
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Nuclear power would be considered superscience in the days when conservation of mass was considered an unbreakable fundamental law of nature. Rocket travel by itself is perfectly within the Newtonian paradigm (even though now we know relativistic calculations are relevant for it). |
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01-30-2018, 04:11 AM | #28 | |
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?
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01-30-2018, 10:03 PM | #29 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?
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Yeah, rocketry is completely within the physics of 1869. But the necessary improvements in so many fields to make even simple sounding rockets would have looked seriously daunting at the time, much less Saturn 5s, which would have looked like utterly unrealistic daydreaming. Relativistic starships able to get across the Universe in one lifetime, ship time, are possible in theory, too, but would routinely be described as fantasy or superscience.
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01-30-2018, 10:46 PM | #30 |
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: Will the Space Colony children be the Startravelers?
Please tell me who on these forums, let alone this thread, has used superscience to mean merely hard but technically possible, because I can't remember one.
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